Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 2 Sept 2025Large, gingery loaf of bread
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1857In order to make expensive wheat flour go further, Victorian bakers added things to it of varying edibility. While potato, corn, and pea flour were used, so was ground up plaster of paris, chalk dust, and a powder called alum. Alum made the flour very white, but is also toxic in large quantities.
This loaf, made only with wholesome, edible ingredients, would have been on the fancier side of a bakery’s offerings with the addition of lots and lots of powdered ginger. This bread really surprised me, as it tastes like a normal loaf of bread at first, but then the heat and the flavor of the ginger comes through afterwards.
Ginger Loaf, or Rolls.
Mix intimately two ounces of good powdered ginger, — called in the shops prepared ginger, — and a little salt, with two pounds of flour, and make it into a firm but perfectly light dough with German or brewer’s yeast, [and 1 pint milk] in the usual manner; [to rise one hour or until quite light: to be kneaded down and left again to rise until light]. Bake it either in one loaf, or divide it into six or eight small ones.
The proportion of ginger can be much increased if desired; but the bread should not then be habitually eaten for a long continuance, as the excess of any stimulating condiment is often in many ways injurious.
— The English Bread-Book by Eliza Acton, 1857
March 3, 2026
The Deadly Job of a Victorian Baker
March 2, 2026
QotD: King Stephen and “the anarchy”
Picture the scene: it is a dark night in late November. A cross-channel ferry is about to set sail for England. A posh young man, a boy really, boards the ship with his posh mates. They’re not short of money and before long they’re seriously drunk. Some of the other passengers disembark. They hadn’t signed-up for a booze cruise — and, what’s more, the young men are carrying knives. Well, I say “knives” — what I actually mean is swords.
At this point, I ought to mention that the year is 1120; the young man is William Adelin, heir to the throne of England; and the “ferry” is the infamous White Ship.
Anyway, back to the story: the wine keeps flowing and, before long, the crew are drunk too. Not far out of port, the ship hits a submerged rock and rapidly sinks.
In all, hundreds are drowned — and yet that is just the start of the tragedy.
William’s father, King Henry I, had gone to great lengths to proclaim an heir. As the son of William the Conqueror, he knew just how messy succession could get. He had himself inherited the throne from his brother, William Rufus. This second William had died of a chest complaint — specifically, an arrow in the lungs (the result of a hunting “accident”). Henry was determined that his son would inherit the throne without mishap — and so carefully prepared the ground for a smooth transfer. Indeed, the name “Adelin” signified that the third William was the heir apparent.
The sinking of the White Ship left Henry with one remaining legitimate heir, his daughter Matilda. She was a formidable character, also known as Empress Maud (by virtue of her first marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor). She was, nevertheless, a woman — a big problem in an age when monarchs were expected to lead their men in battle. When Henry died in 1135, Maud’s cousin — Stephen of Blois — seized the throne. This was widely welcomed by the English nobility, but Maud wasn’t giving up easily, and she had powerful allies. Her second husband was Geoffrey, Count of Anjou; her illegitimate half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, was a wealthy baron; and her uncle was King David I of Scotland.
Stephen was assailed on all sides — by Geoffrey in Normandy, by Robert in England, by invading Scots and rebellious Welshmen. The civil war (if that’s what you can call this multi-sided free-for-all) dragged on for almost 20 years. There weren’t many set-piece battles, but there was lots of looting and pillaging in which countless nameless peasants perished.
In the end it was the death of another heir — Stephen’s son, Eustace — that opened the way to peace. The war-weary king agreed that Maud’s son (the future Henry II) would succeed him. And thus “The Anarchy” came to end: two decades of pointless devastation — and all because some young fool got pissed on a boat.
Peter Franklin, “Why Boris needs an heir apparent”, UnHerd, 2020-08-17.
March 1, 2026
The American Revolutionaries – when you don’t want a king, but you do want someone king-ish
On Substack Notes, John Carter shared this post by Theophilus Chilton, saying:
Fascinating. The American founders were explicitly trying to revive a stronger form of monarchical executive authority with the presidency, as a deliberate corrective to the relatively powerless Crown of the British Constitution, which had been effectively neutered by the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy.
Along similar lines, the American Bill of Rights was in most ways simply a restatement of the ancient rights of Englishmen.
So, of course, I had to go read the post:
Too “kingly” but also not “kingly” enough for America’s Founding Fathers.
King George III in his Coronation robes.
Oil painting by Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) circa 1761-1762. From the Royal Collection (RCIN 405307) via Wikimedia Commons.
Recently, I’ve been reading an interesting book about 18th century political philosophy entitled The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. In this work the author, Eric Nelson, guides the reader through the various aspects of the great inter-whiggish debates that roiled the American colonies prior to independence, and which then continued afterwards. One of the main premises is that a major faction within this debate — and indeed the one which ended up prevailing in the end — understood the relationship between colonies and mother country to be founded upon the king of Britain’s personal proprietorship over the colonies. This Patriot position was opposed by the Loyalist position which saw the colonies as existing under the laws and rule of Parliament.
Now this might seem strange to generations of Americans who grew up learning in school that the American revolutionaries fought against the great tyrant King George III who was set upon grinding the American colonies under his bootheel of oppression. That view would be quite surprising to many of the participants on the Patriot side, many of whom actually appealed to King George, both publicly and in private correspondence, to exercise kingly prerogative and overturn the various duties, laws, and taxes which Parliament had laid upon the colonies. This, indeed, was the crux of the Patriot argument, which is that because the colonies were originally founded under the personal demesne of the British King, they remained so even despite the temporary abolishment of the monarchy after the execution of Charles I in 1649. In the interregnum between that and the Glorious Revolution and restoration of a stable monarchy that was accepted by all classes as legitimate in 1688, Parliament had illegitimately usurped authority over the colonies. Because it was Parliament which was laying the Intolerable Acts and all the other complaints which the Americans had, it was Parliament against whom they wished to be protected.
But these Patriots were pining after a situation which no longer existed. In point of fact, the British kings since the Glorious Revolution had left whatever prerogative powers they might still have had unused. So it was with George III, who rejected the American colonists’ calls for him to intervene, knowing that doing so would have provoked a constitutional crisis in Britain which he would not have won. As a result, the American colonists chose to make their final break with the British monarchy and throw in their lot for independence, buttressed by Thomas Paine’s fleetingly persuasive but ultimately ineffectual pamphlet Common Sense.
However, after independence, the colonists were faced with providing their own governance. Initially, this was attempted under the Articles of Confederation, as well as their state constitutions, all of which were very whiggish in principle. They were also inadequate to the task. As every student who took high school civics knows, the solution to this was the Constitution of 1789.
Typically, students are taught that the new Constitution was designed to strengthen the ability of the federal government to handle the various issues that applied to the confederation of states as a whole. What we don’t generally hear, however, is that much of this included strengthening the roles and powers of the president to include several areas of prerogative powers which exceeded even the powers then available to the kings of Britain. The stock view of the Constitution is that it “was created to prevent anyone from getting too much power!” The actuality is that the Constitution was crafted, in part, to expand presidential power and create what was viewed at the time as a literally monarchical chief executive. Opponents of this described the proposed executive as “the foetus of monarchy”. Supporters often defended it on the basis that parliaments and congresses, if left unchecked by a strong executive whose interest was drawn from the body of the whole people, would themselves become the greatest threats to the liberties of the people.
The Founders who proposed this enhancement of the executive didn’t do this in a vacuum. Indeed, they had a century and a half of history about this very subject to draw from first-hand. Fresh in the collective mind of every Englishmen, both in the home country and in the colonies, were the English Civil Wars of the previous century. Beginning with the revolt of the parliamentarian army in 1642 through the regicide of Charles I in 1649, the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the attempted restoration of the House of Stuart under James II, until the final deposition of James and his replacement with William, Prince of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Englishmen had a long series of examples from which to draw various conclusions.
So yes, they could see the parliamentarian excesses that took place during the Protectorate. Current in the collective national mind were the overreaches (whether real or imagined) of Parliament both during the interregnum and in the century since the acquisition of the throne by the House of Hanover. As noted above, among these overreaches, at least as viewed by many in the American colonies, was parliamentary interference in the affairs of the colonies, viewed as transgressions into the rightful domain of the king’s purview. Hence, by a strange twist, the Loyalists who opposed American independence before and during the Revolution were generally the more whiggish of the two sides, throwing in their lot with the parliamentary oligarchies. The Patriots, on the other hand, were desperately trying to get the king to reassert his royal prerogatives and intervene by reasserting his perceived rights to directly rule the colonies, something of a modified “high/low vs. the middle” type of scenario.
Demythologizing the Windrush story
The Empire Windrush was a British ship that brought the first batch of many, many Caribbean people to Britain in 1948. This has been hailed as the foundation of a modern, multicultural Britain by many pop historians and, weirdly, also the moral equivalent of the Jim Crow era of US racial relations. It’s a Two-fer, allowing progressives to celebrate the multicultural aspects and also to declaim and performatively protest against the racist aspects. Celina101 discusses the Windrush myths:
HMT Empire Windrush in harbour. Originally launched as the Hamburg Süd line’s Monte Rosa in 1930, seized for use as a British troopship in 1947 after WW2. She was lost after an engine room explosion and catastrophic fire in 1954 and sank in the Mediterranean.
In June 1948 the HMT Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury carrying over 800 Caribbean passengers. Today this moment is often hailed beginning of modern multicultural Britain, the founding “origin story” of a tolerant, diverse cosmopolitan nation. Yet a deep dive into the archives shows a very different picture. The British Nationality Act of 1948 (passed just weeks after Windrush set sail) did create a universal status (“Citizen of the UK and Colonies”) that legally allowed colonial subjects to live in Britain. But as one colonial minister emphasised, this was meant to reaffirm an older imperial principle, that a subject could declare Civis Britannicus sum (“I am a British citizen”) regardless of colour and was not expected to trigger mass non-white immigration.1 In fact, Attlee’s government and senior civil servants were privately anxious about non-white migration, seeing Windrush as an “incursion” to be managed. Contemporary cabinet papers and correspondence reveal that Windrush was essentially an accident of imperial law and circumstance.
Imperial Citizenship and the 1948 Act
The post-war British state’s conception of citizenship was still shaped by empire. In theory, as Lord Palmerston had put it, every British subject “in whatever land he may be” could count on England’s protection.2 The 1948 British Nationality Act (BNA) codified this idea by creating two categories: Citizens of the UK & Colonies (CUKC) for the “non white” Commonwealth and Citizens of Independent Commonwealth Countries (CICC) for the white Dominions. As a Home Office historian notes, the Act was largely a reaction to Canada’s new Citizenship Act and was intended to preserve loyalty to the Crown and the Commonwealth.3 In practice, BNA 1948 did not fundamentally alter migration rules: colonial subjects remained British subjects with the right to enter the UK, as they had before. Critics at the time even pointed out that this laid the groundwork for subjects of a newly independent non-white India, Pakistan and African colonies to become CUKCs, but that eventuality was not central to the legislators’ intent.4 As David Olusoga and others have observed, no one in 1948 “imagined that black and brown people from Asia, Africa and the West Indies would use their rights under this act to come and settle in Britain”. The law was conceived primarily for white Commonwealth citizens like the populations of Canada and Australia, with the assumption that the British Empire’s non-white subjects, without the resources or need would not make the journey.5 In short, the legal framework of imperial citizenship was nominally open, but the political expectation was that few colonials would exercise the right to relocate.
[…]
Inventing the Myth: Windrush in National Memory
How, then, did Windrush attain the status of a proud national genesis myth? Over the ensuing decades the episode was reimagined and commemorated in ways that the original participants surely did not anticipate. As historian Simon Peplow notes, “the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948 has been cemented as a mythical central symbol for immigration in histories of modern Britain”.6 Newspaper narratives and politics in the 21st century cast the Windrush as the symbolic genesis of multicultural Britain. For example, literature and media (like Andrea Levy’s Small Island, 2004) linked the founding of a “shared history” to 1948, treating the Windrush landing as the first wave of a mass migration that made Britain what it is today.7 Over time this narrative was bolstered by public ceremonies: 50th- and 60th-anniversary events, the 1998 renaming of Brixton’s Windrush Square, and in 2018 the formal creation of a national Windrush Day (22 June) to “pay tribute” to the generation. Politicians and curriculum materials alike have repeated the line that Windrush marked the inception of modern Britain’s diversity.8
This retrospective framing treats the Windrush episode as a foundational myth, an origin story, and invoked to legitimise contemporary values of tolerance and diversity. In this constructed memory, loyal Caribbean war veterans returned to Mother Country to rebuild Britain, and British society (in hindsight) embraced them with open arms. Newsreel footage from 1948, often screened today, reinforces this sentimental image, the smiling Windrush passengers, calypso music, and patriotic commentary suggest an organised welcome.9 The reality was much, much more ambivalent.
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal/the-historical-roots-of-the-windrush-scandal-independent-research-report-accessible#about-this-report
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/24/the-unwanted-the-secret-windrush-files-review-who-could-feel-proud-of-britain-after-this
- https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/139720/1/WRAP-1997-Windrush-newspapers-Peplow-2020.pdf#:~:text=Abstract%3A%20The%20arrival%20of%20the,the%20manufactured%20centrality%20of%20this
- Ibid
- Ibid
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/windrush-story-not-a-rosy-one-even-before-ship-arrived
February 28, 2026
The by-election in the British riding of Gorton and Denton
A few surprises in the outcome, although the expected winner — the Green Party — did manage to pick up the seat by pandering harder than anyone else for the Muslim vote (according to multiple sources). And, as Francis Turner points out, this may be a problem:
The Gorton and Denton by-election has happened, and as I predicted, Labour came third.
Though more people voted Labour than I expected (25% actual vs 10-15% prediction) and sadly not enough people were convinced to vote Reform so the Greens won. But, while turnout was lower than one might have hoped, there’s a real humdinger of an allegation that makes the Green victory very iffy.
Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.
Family voting is not a term I’ve heard of before, but it is the situation where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting. And obviously cases where one voter oversees the votes of more than one other person as well.
Democracy Volunteers, the organization making the allegation, is a reputable decade plus old organization and not a partisan one.
Democracy Volunteers is run by Dr John Ault, a former Liberal Democrat politician who has observed elections in countries including Britain, Sweden, Norway and Finland.
They give more detail on their webpage
2023 saw the enactment of the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made the practice of family voting more clearly a breach of the secret ballot, making it more enforceable by staff in polling stations. Signage is now available to discourage the practice. Signage was only seen in 45% of the polling stations observed.
The observer team saw family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations observed, some 32 cases in total, nine cases in one polling station alone. The team observed a sample of 545 voters casting their vote – meaning 12% of those voters observed either caused or were affected by family voting.
Commenting John Ault, Director of Democracy Volunteers said;
“Today we have seen concerningly high levels of family voting in Gorton and Denton. Based on our assessment of today’s observations, we have seen the highest levels of family voting at any election in our 10 year history of observing elections in the UK.”
“We rarely issue a report on the night of an election, but the data we have collected today on family voting, when compared to other recent by-elections, is extremely high.”
“In the other recent Westminster parliamentary by-election in Runcorn and Helsby we saw family voting in 12% of polling stations, affecting 1% of voters. In Gorton and Denton, we observed family voting in 68% of polling stations, affecting 12% of those voters observed.”
[…]
The team also saw a number of voters taking photographs of their ballot papers and one voter being authorised to vote despite them already having been marked as voted earlier in the day.
What they do not say, unfortunately, is which polling stations they observed this in. We can guess. In fact the Torygraph reports that Reform has explicitly made the obvious accusation:
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, said allegations of family voting raised “serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas”.
I would imagine such things are happening all over the Anglosphere with the large increase in Muslim voters in recent years — many of whom may be voting for the first time, depending on their national origin. In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West considers the evolution of the UK Green Party from granola-eating no-nukes freaks into a consciously sectarian party aiming to leverage the rising Muslim vote:
A good pub quiz question in the year 2050 will go something like this: “True or false, the ‘green’ in the ‘Green Party’ originally referred to the environment”. By this point, the etymological origins of Britain’s sectional Islamic party will be as obscure as the relationship between British Conservatives and 17th century Irish bandits.
A key milestone, our mid-century quiz regular will inform his teammates, was the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in which the Greens stood neck and neck in a three-way race with Labour and Reform.
Eagle-eyed observers these past weeks will have noted how the once environment-focused party have been pitching at particular sections of “the community”, with campaign leaflets featuring candidate Hannah Spencer wearing a red and black keffiyeh while posing in front of a mosque.
Written in Urdu, the pamphlet calls for voters to: “Push the falling walls one more time. Labour must be punished for Gaza. Reform must be defeated and Green must be voted for. Vote for the Green Party for a strong Muslims voice.” Then it adds, in English, “Stop Islamophobia. Stop Reform.”
There was also an Urdu-language video linking Reform Party candidate Matt Goodwin and leader Nigel Farage with Donald Trump and ICE deportation raids. The video then cuts to Gaza, before showing Keir Starmer beside India’s Narendra Modi. Subtle stuff.
The video states in Urdu: “A cruel politician can win if we don’t vote Green to stop the Reforms … Workers, cleaners, drivers, mothers – it’s us who keep this area running. But the politicians are not working for us … The Reforms want to break up our communities. They want to deport families who have lived here for years, and they want to tax people born abroad even more. They give air to Islamophobia, and they put our safety and dignity at risk.”
[…]
Britain’s Green Party has historically been a thing of amusement to many, a bunch of harmless hippies and Quakers with wacky beliefs; at the time of their first breakthrough in the early 1990s their most high-profile figure was David Icke, then seen as an amusing crank with interests in new age mysticism and alternative medicine.
As traditional politics fractured, the Greens came to fill the space inhabited by high-education, low-income graduates, the group who most favour redistributive economics and highly progressive social policies. Yet political parties have no souls, as such, being merely vote-seeking businesses, and they go where the market is — and now they find the lowest hanging fruit in appealing to sectarian interests.
If decades of generous immigration policies have created constituencies where people vote along religious lines, and are more comfortable with the national language of Pakistan than English, there is nothing to stop someone appealing to that market. It’s within the rules of democracy, if not the spirit.
Gorton and Denton is among the increasing number of constituencies in which a candidate can win by appealing overtly to the Islamic vote; “Gaza independents” won 5 seats in 2024 and could win 10 or 12 by 2029 and 20 or 30 by the election that follows; after that, the ceiling is limited by high levels of segregation. This could be good news for the Green Party, if that’s the path they want to go down, and they certainly don’t seem to shy away from the prospect.
Polanski has welcomed the endorsement of the Muslim Vote, an organisation which instructs people how to cast their ballot along religious lines, even if adding the caveat that people should vote as individuals. In February he told PoliticsHome that “I think any organisation that wants to back the Green Party because they align with our values is something that I applaud and welcome”.
February 27, 2026
The British Are Coming! – British Fighter Aces – WW2 Gallery 09
World War Two
Published 26 Feb 2026In this gallery special, we examine five of Britain’s leading fighter aces: Archie McKellar, James MacLachlan, Robert Stanford Tuck, John Braham, and James Edgar Johnson. From the Battle of Britain to night fighting, Intruder missions, and offensive sweeps over occupied Europe, their careers reflect the RAF’s transformation from desperate air defense to sustained air superiority.
These pilots did more than accumulate victory claims. Their experiences illuminate the evolution of air combat, showing how individual skill, technology, and strategy intersected in the broader history of the Second World War.
Which of these careers best captures the changing nature of air power in World War Two?
(more…)
February 26, 2026
QotD: “Naming of Parts” by Henry Reed
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have the naming of parts.Henry Reed, 1942.
February 25, 2026
“Allyness” in the British military
I suspect anyone who has spent time in uniform out in the field (peacetime or wartime) would recognize these traits, but so far as I know only the British army and Royal Marines have a specific term for it:
(British troops in Afghanistan, 2008, looking very ‘ally’)
Photo and caption from Combat Threads
Professor Andrew Groves is one of the few true academic experts on menswear. In fact, it was his work as the Director of the Westminster Menswear Archive that inspired me to pursue my Costume Studies MA. Recently, he has started a weekly Substack that is well worth checking out. Last week, he wrote an essay on “Ally“, a British military slang term. What exactly “Ally” is can be hard to nail down, as it has no comparable terms in the US military or civilian cultures. Broadly, it can be described as a language of visual signifiers that denote a soldier as “having been there”, or at the very least, wanting to come across that way, usually by modifying pieces of kit, or wearing it in a particular fashion.
As Groves puts it, “The quiet discipline of looking ready. It is a system that emerges precisely when regulation lags and consequences move faster than command … Allyness was awarded horizontally, not issued from above. It was recognition from peers who knew what to look for.” Groves continues:
That recognition lived in detail, but it was never a checklist. Allyness was built through small, cumulative acts, field-smart adjustments passed down through units, not rulebooks: cutting down webbing to reduce snagging, taping over buckles to kill shine, shaping berets tight to the temple, sewing in map pockets, blacking out brass, marking kit discreetly. None of this was required. All of it mattered, because it signalled experience rather than purchase.
While the origins of “ally” definitely had roots in field-wise functionality and competence (the widespread adoption of Bundeswehr boots by British Paras or the “norgi” baselayer adopted by RM Commandos come to mind), by the time the GWOT generation were forming their own sense of “allyness”, much had devolved to style. I am going to quote from Simon Akam’s wonderful book The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11, on the evolution of “ally” in the 21st Century:
“Ally” is rifle magazines taped together — it draws inspiration from films as well as finding exhibition through the same medium. Ally is beards. Ally is non-regulation scarves and shemagh cloths. Ally is belts of 7.62mm link machine-gun ammunition draped over shirtless muscled torsos. Ally is liberal use of sniper tape on bits of kit, scrim netting pulled taut over the issued helmet, or “hero sleeves” — sleeves rolled only halfway up the forearm. A strong influence, ironically given the outcome of that conflict, is Vietnam … Of course, the two quantities of violence and ally are entwined. Fighting is ally. It seeps into Iraq, too: Major Stuart Nicholson, a Fusiliers officer serving on an exchange post with the Anglians in Basra in 2006, sees one sub-unit who keep one set of totemic combats [field uniform] to wear every time they go out on patrol, regardless of how dirty and disgusting they become. Nicholson catches one of this crew deliberately driving a Warrior armoured vehicle over a helmet cover to make it look already battered.
Later in the book, Akam recounts the “ally” origins of the British Army’s adoption of a Crye designed variant MultiCam (named Operation Peacock). The need for a new camouflage pattern was practical: British troops in Afghanistan found their DPM uniforms coming up short, and it was also based on seeing American SOF using MultiCam. I think that best illustrates the push and pull of what makes something “ally”. Some “allyness” traits can be seen as battlewise modifications to equipment, like taping down loose straps or added helmet scrim to help break up the silhouette, while others can be affectations that soldiers think look cool. And often, a bit of both.
Like anything to do with the infantry, of course, it can be taken too far and rather than improving effectiveness in the field, it can lead in very unwelcome directions:
These kinds of regulation-flouting practices can be interpreted as signs of a breakdown in unit discipline, which, in turn, can lead to more serious issues. It isn’t exactly “broken windows” theory for military units, but it also kind of is. It’s why, when Akam tells a story of an American officer who visited a British base in Afghanistan in 2006 and remarked that the British soldiers “look like our army at the end of Vietnam”, It was not meant as a compliment. Elsewhere, the desire to be “ally” led to armored vehicles flying English flags (despite its local connotations to the Crusades being an issue) and SS decals on other vehicles. “Allyness” can be a sign of the unit culture going rogue.
The result was a crackdown on the excesses of “allyness”. As Akam writes, “the ally clampdown is also a knee-jerk response to a realisation that something had got out of control. Some elements of ally survive, in particular the Paras’ interest in taping up bits of their gear. That is harder to stamp down on.”
February 24, 2026
QotD: The! Exclamation! Mark!
To the grammatically sane, reading the exclamation mark in its proper mode, the modern world appears increasingly deranged, authored seemingly by caffeinated twelve-year-olds. The delirium jumps at you in emails, on billboards, from the end of every other sentence.
The exclamation mark — the name a dead giveaway — means to exclaim. To cry out or speak suddenly or excitedly, as from surprise, delight, horror, etc. That line and dot seize your attention. Help! Now, it seizes your last nerve. Stop! If everything is exclamatory, then nothing is.
To the cynic, the exclamation mark is a hypodermic needle spiking foreign joy into the bloodstream of language. With each excitable email, I wonder, is this person in need of urgent medical attention? Or have they overdosed on Adderall?
Christopher Gage, “Against Enthusiasm”, Oxford Sour, 2025-11-21.
February 23, 2026
QotD: Faith, Hope, and Charity defended Malta
France has collapsed, Hitler is eating Europe alive, and Mussolini doesn’t want to miss out. He wants birthday cake without bringing a present.
Poor show
So he looks at a map and asks the Italian Air Force:
“Who can we bomb that’s really close?”
Answer: Malta, 49 miles away.
The Italians begin their great wartime contribution by flying at 14,000 feet and dropping bombs with the accuracy of a man throwing darts after fourteen pints. Half land in the sea, a few hit fields.
But accuracy wasn’t the point. They just wanted to show Berlin they were “in the war”.
For the Maltese, who had never seen modern bombing, even bad Italian bombing was terrifying.
And unfortunately for them, this was only the warm-up act.
Maynard’s Defence: Faith, Hope and Charity
Air Commodore Foster Maynard is given the job of defending Malta with basically nothing.
He had been promised four fighter squadrons.
Zero have arrived. Typical early war British brilliance.
His only aircraft were some slow, ancient Fairey Swordfish.
Great for torpedoing ships, hopeless for intercepting bombers.
These were the famous “Stringbags”. We will hear from them later on.
Then like an archaeologist opening a cursed tomb the British discover 18 Gloster Gladiators in crates on the island. They were meant for HMS Glorious and HMS Eagle.
What followed was peak British wartime admin:
- Maynard asks the Navy to release some Gladiators.
- He gets permission.
- The ground crew assemble several.
- THEN the Navy says “No actually, stop, pack them back up.”
- THEN the decision gets reversed again.
- So they unpack them, reassemble them … again.
After all this faffing, three Gladiators emerge ready to fight.
Next problem: no fighter pilots.
Big problem I feel, anyway …
Maynard asks for volunteers. Eight bomber men step forward, either heroic or mildly insane.
Problem solved.
A journalist on the island, Harry Kirk, watching these three lonely biplanes scramble day after day, nicknames them Faith, Hope and Charity after his mother’s brooch.
The names stick. The legend begins.
On 21 June 1940 Pilot Officer George Burges shoots down a Savoia-Marchetti bomber over Valletta, the island’s first air victory.
The Maltese take it as a sign from God.
(It wasn’t, but let them have the moment.)
“MALTA: PART 1, Foreboding”, WWII Matters, 2025-11-17.
February 22, 2026
Britain’s recovery after a punishing existential war against a colossal European tyrant
The American Tribune considers how war-exhausted Britain staged a brilliant recovery after the decades of war against Republican and then Imperial France culminating in the exile of Napoleon to a remote island in the south Atlantic:
The grinding war is finally over after what feels like decades of bitter conflict on an inconceivably large scale. The entire world had become a battlefield in which the British had fought desperately to keep their imperial possessions secure in the face of vast hordes of enemies of all sorts, with the Navy and Army strained to the breaking point as battalions launched expeditionary raids and grinding, years-long campaigns everywhere from the steamy Orient to the Mediterranean, the bitter cold of the North to the coast and shores of Northern Africa.
Truth be told, victory, though it came in the end, had strained everything nearly to the breaking point. High taxes had driven the landed element to the breaking point. The necessity of convoys, of relying on domestic agriculture, of keeping the empire intact from an island the size of Michigan … had strained the British people and British society to the breaking point. Class tensions were high, taxes were already ruinously high, and to many elements, rich and poor alike, victory hardly seemed worth the immense cost in gold and blood.
And that was before considering the debt. The ruinous, mountainous, inconceivable debt. Well over 200% of GDP, it would later be calculated … and not at the negative interest rates of modernity either. Over 200% of GDP priced in real, somewhat gold-backed currency, with those who bought it demanding a real return. Ruinous, it was, ruinous! For this final conflict had been preceded not by many long years of peace, but by a similarly large, long conflict that had also involved campaigns across every corner of the earth, mutinous colonials, immense expense, and heavy taxation.
So victory had come. The war against an immense continental hegemon had been won, the international order was stabilized to the liking of and in accord with the ideology of the political elite, and the empire kept together in a hugely expanded state. But the cost had been high. Perhaps the cost had been ruinous …
I am, of course, describing Britain circa 1815, after its final victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. What followed was its century atop Olympus, the century where it ruled a quarter of the Earth’s surface, dominated all the sea lanes, was the world’s reserve currency, and became the world’s financial capital. Despite the expense, the defeat of Napoleon did not bring ruin, but success on an unimaginably immense scale.
What happened? Why did the Britain that defeated Napoleon become the hugely successful nation of the Victorian Age, but the Britain that followed the defeat of Hitler became a wrecked backwater, a miserable shell of its former self? The post-war debt load was similar. The human cost had been higher, but not remarkably so, particularly if the immigration outflows of the 19th century are considered.1 The logistical strains were similar, the social strains similar, and the fractious politics of the wars similar.
But the Britain of the 19th century became the hegemon of note, whereas that of the 20th century became essentially irrelevant. Mindset makes all the difference in the world, as I’ll show in this article, along with why this matters for Americans.
Britain after Napoleon
It is important to note that Britain’s immense imperial and economic success after the defeat of Napoleon was no sure thing. Yes, unlike much of Europe, it hadn’t been ravaged by invading armies. But it had lost its best colonies in the disastrous rebellion that followed the immensely expensive Seven Years’ War, a world war in all but name. It was staggering under a ruinous mountain of debt that could scarcely have been imagined earlier in the century: the national debt stood at somewhere around 210% of GDP, after post-war deflation had been accounted for, with somewhere around 10% of national GDP going just toward paying the interest on that debt.
Perhaps, worse, the population was restive. During the war, farmers and landlords had been pushed into embarking on extremely expensive schemes to drain and enclose land, schemes costing millions of dollars per thousand acres in today’s money; while that worked tolerably well during the war itself, as grain prices remained high, the expense and the cost of the debt used to achieve it was a crushing burden after the end of the war meant renewed trade and a fall in grain prices. That expense and the pain caused by it meant that not only were the farmers and the landlords struggling to make ends meet, but they had little left to pay agricultural laborers, who had their wages cut as a result, putting that bottom rung of the social ladder in an immensely precarious and dire economic position.
Much the same situation played out in the nascent industrial sector, where the end of war meant falling prices for finished goods and thus both lower profits and lower wages, angering industrialists and workers alike. As food remained expensive compared to wages, this meant major unrest, too. Thus, other than perhaps some financiers who were doing well off the debt, particularly given post-war deflation, most segments of society were unhappy at how the government was being run.
A high debt load that could only be maintained with high taxes, a highly restive and discontented population, and an economy-punishing bout of deflation are not the stuff of which great empires are typically made.
But the British figured it out, and did so without massive inflation, government default, or authoritarian societal repression.
- This is noted by AJP Taylor in his The First World War and Its Aftermath
February 20, 2026
Reform UK falters, but Restore Britain rises to challenge it
Since the last general election in Britain, the rising power has been Reform UK under the unsteady leadership of Nigel Farage. A right-wing alternative to the horrifically incompetent Conservative Party, led by the man who kept the fires burning for Brexit? Seems like an obvious winner over the sagging Labour Party under Keir Starmer who just had to be less incompetent than the Conservatives but couldn’t manage even that low bar. But all was not well with Reform UK, despite being likely winners of the next election, and a lot of it comes down to Nigel Farage’s weaknesses. He seems incapable of dealing with strong personalities in his own party and seems to see any disagreement as a form of betrayal. One of the men he exiled from the party has now raised his own banner to much acclaim from the people who once were strong Farage supporters:
On Friday, Rupert Lowe, the independent Member of Parliament formerly of Reform UK, launched his own political party named Restore Britain. At the time of writing, the announcement video has amassed upwards of 30 million views on X, with many of the Western world’s most popular right-wing social media accounts — from Raw Egg Nationalist to Wall Street Mav — cheering him on.
Critics of Lowe argue that few outside of the culture war circles on X have heard of him, but these claims don’t track — Lowe has over 250,000 followers more on Facebook than he does on X, and has stated that he reaches “far more people on Facebook than X”. Still, while Lowe’s popularity has dramatically increased in the short year-and-a-half following his election to Parliament, he does not carry the same name recognition as Nigel Farage, let alone the latter’s proven experience of winning elections, as recent Reform victories have demonstrated, and contentious campaigns, being a key figure in the pro-Brexit campaign.
Restore Britain has the potential to be both very positive and hugely detrimental to Britain’s political future. Lowe’s announcement video was a masterclass in giving his admirers exactly what they want: decisive language promising a rebirth of a pre-Blair Britain, with fewer foreign nationals, fewer people on benefits, and more money to go round. The sober nature of the message was appealing — Lowe made it clear that the challenge facing the party, and the country, is not an easy one, but nor is it insurmountable. With stronger language than we have heard from Reform, Lowe promised to remove all people who arrived in Britain illegally, along with legal foreign nationals who do not meaningfully contribute to society.
Policy proposals like this — from a brand-new party with very little in the way of a party infrastructure as yet — do not have to be fully fleshed out to grab hold of the public imagination. What is likely is that it pushes the Overton window even farther rightward, and we begin hearing traditional centre-right figures like Kemi Badenoch (as she is centre-right in the political landscape of 2026) parroting some of the same points. With much of the online right rallying behind Lowe, we may begin to see a surge in the early stages of the posting to policy pipeline, whereby anonymous meme accounts — the modern politician’s crowdsourced spin doctor — churns out a large volume of pro-Lowe content, driving the narrative as others strive to keep up.
Lowe’s party may inadvertently help Reform, though, this by helping solve one of the main problems it has faced: attracting too many nutcases. Restore is positioning itself further to the right than Reform — and while this is no bad thing in and of itself, it will likely mean that those who believe in the most extreme solutions see Restore as the closest party to what they believe.
In UnHerd, Rob Lownie calls the movement “Lowe’s Powellite revolution”:
Rupert Lowe’s official portrait by Laurie Noble, 10 July, 2024 via Wikimedia Commons
Rupert Lowe deals in the politics of return: illegal immigrants are going back, and so is Britain. The Great Yarmouth MP, formerly of Reform UK, has now launched Restore Britain as a new political party, and on Wednesday evening claimed that it had passed 70,000 members. The launch announcement was marked with a stirring video of Lowe in his farmer’s get-up, as well as a series of semi-ironic nationalist compilations presumably made by Restore’s Zoomer footsoldiers. In one of these, among nostalgic nods to Geoff Hurst and Zulu, 1997 is invoked as the year when everything started to go wrong. Speaking over grainy images of a lost Britain, Lowe sums up his political outlook: “I think the state is bad, and I think the individual is good.
One area where the state has undoubtedly failed, in Lowe’s eyes, is on the matter of immigration. While Reform has pledged to deport all illegal immigrants, Restore wants to go further. Lowe has promised to scrap the asylum system entirely, also stating last week that “legal immigration will almost come to a complete halt”. The goal is not just to halt migrant influxes but to reverse them. “Net zero immigration is weak, weak, weak. It is insufficient and it is too late,” he said in the speech with which he launched the party. “The barbarians are already in the gates.”
The remedy, Lowe warns, will be “incredibly painful”: a characteristically abrasive verdict. It is one thing to criticise quangos, and quite another to say that “we must crush parasitic Britain”. And as for the dissonance between government and individual? “The state has definitively become the enemy of the people.”
In his doom-laden pronouncements, Lowe resembles no British political figure so closely as Enoch Powell, whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech has led a radioactive afterlife in the national consciousness. For Powell, Britain’s willingness to take in tens of thousands of immigrants rendered it “a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre”. And compare Lowe’s talk of necessary pain to that 1968 call for an “extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take”. For better or worse, Powell presaged contemporary debates over migration and nationhood. The challenge, as Keir Starmer found out with his more milquetoast “island of strangers” line, is to acknowledge voters’ frustrations without sounding like him.
Powell has been a political lodestar of sorts for Nigel Farage, Lowe’s bête noire and former boss who suspended him last year over dubious accusations of bullying. The Reform leader recalled being “dazzled”, as a schoolboy in the Eighties, listening to the former Tory MP speak. Last year, he insisted that Powell was fundamentally right about the scale of “community change” in the country.
On The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters, Carl Benjamin interviews Rupert Lowe:
QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”
Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.
Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.
[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.
And,
Interpreting his moods.
At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.
Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.
Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.
One more time:
All of it unpaid,
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.
And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.
The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.
As I said, worth pondering.
But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:
According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.
Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.
And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.
The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.
Some men have started opening up more, which is good.
Ah, a glimmer of hope.
But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.
So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.
David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.
February 19, 2026
Too many “conservatives” today are just slower-speed liberals
Most self-described conservatives in politics are not particularly inclined to “conserve” anything, as Spaceman Spiff points out, they’re pretty much onboard with the liberal vision they just want it to be fractionally slower or infinitesimally not-quite-as-liberal as the liberals. They are the ineffectual, neutered, tame opposition:
Modern conservatism is not conserving our world. Mainstream conservatives seem to have no interest in the real issues affecting us.
At best they merely wish to slow down our decline. At worst, they are fully on board with the destruction.
When they do act or speak they often pick a safe version of a sensitive issue.
In Britain there is lots of talk of illegal immigration and how the state mishandles it. None about ruinous volumes of legal immigration, almost one million per year, and what it is doing to the country.
Pushback against climate policy falters on the speed of changes, not the underlying fraud of climate science itself.
No conservative will honestly discuss the plummeting happiness of women recorded across the West and yet there it is, writ large in antidepressant prescriptions and social media videos. It may have multiple causes, but feminism cannot be challenged so they say nothing lest they are reprimanded by the sisterhood.
Everything real is forbidden. It is all an act.
Like the left, those on the right are increasingly unable to face reality which means they can never course correct. They are trapped within a self-referencing culdesac designed to maintain their position in someone else’s hierarchy. That is why they have become so ineffective and appear to do very little except moan about the pace of change while they say nothing about the changes themselves.
We sense the conservatives do wish to conserve things but they are inexplicably mesmerized by the opinion of their enemies. They seek reassurance and applause from people who view them as evil.
This makes no sense to ordinary people.
Thinking like the enemy
The problem with modern conservatives is they are animated by underlying drives that cannot create a conservative or traditional society. They have adopted the thinking patterns associated with the progressive left while still using the language of conservatism.
The left is traditionally defined by a series of interrelated traits that manifest in much of what they agitate for.
- A desire for centralization;
- A notable external locus of control;
- Seeking approval from the group.
Central control systems feature prominently in all left-wing schemes. From local councils to national governments, those who gravitate to the left often want to create centralized decision-making bodies to manage society. Institutions, government departments, NGOs and even charities all feature, but only when they act as the controlling authority in some field of interest.
Related to this is a clear external locus of control visible in individuals and their decisions. There is a relief others make the key decisions, so people actively seek out direction from an established authority. This ensures minimal resistance to the many centralized schemes we see emerge.
Acting solo creates discomfort. An older formulation understood this as the rejection of responsibility. Today it often manifests as an obsession with experts making key decisions for us all, partly to mask individual cowardice. People making their own decisions in life are derided as naive or dangerous.
During Covid decision makers became hysterical at the very idea we would reject the advice of experts and perform our own research despite the issue being medical and therefore dangerous.
A related phenomenon characteristic of many leftists is the need for approval, often from a group. Not just others making decisions but a dependency on confirmation and endorsement to ensure thinking and behaviour follows an established norm. This is the antithesis of original thinking or bold action; it is how adolescents often behave.
In today’s world this deep urge is reflected most in the social media landscape of harvesting attention and likes. Every fledgling narcissistic applause-seeking trait is given full expression in the endless search for approval from strangers. Whole sections of society seem lost to impulses we once understood as immature and dysfunctional.
Update: Not long after I queued this item for publication, a Canadian example popped up in the news, as yet another rock-ribbed “conservative” suddenly realized that electing a Liberal was what his constituents actually wanted when they inexplicably voted for him as a Conservative candidate in the last federal election.
Edmonton Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux has crossed the floor to the governing Liberals.
“I am honoured to welcome Matt Jeneroux to our caucus as the newest member of Canada’s new government,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a post on X.
“I am grateful to Matt and his family that he will continue his service as a strong voice for Edmonton Riverbend in Parliament.”
Carney said Jeneroux, who has represented the riding of Edmonton Riverbend since 2015, will take on a new role as special advisor on economic and security partnership for the Liberals.
Jeneroux is the third Conservative to join the Liberals, after colleagues Michael Ma and Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor late last year.
A Liberal source says Jeneroux first met Carney back in November, which was the first of at least two conversations, with talks between Carney’s office and Jeneroux continuing since. That source added that it has been a “long journey” to Wednesday’s announcement.
d’Entremont crossed the floor to join the Liberals in November, which unleashed a wave of speculation as to who might be next, with Jeneroux’s name heavily floated. Jeneroux then announced his plans to resign from the Conservative caucus, citing family reasons. Since then, he has not voted with the Conservatives and did not attend the party’s recent convention in Calgary in late January.
After Carney’s announcement, the prime minister updated his daily itinerary, adding a stop in Edmonton to meet with Jeneroux before attending events in British Columbia.
“Matt brings a wealth of experience in Parliament, despite his young demeanor,” said Carney, while sitting next to Jeneroux.
The MP from Edmonton welcomed the prime minister and laid out the reasons for why he had reversed his decision to resign.
“I had announced my resignation back in November, largely due to family reasons, but quite simply, couldn’t sit on the sidelines after seeing what the prime minister’s ambitious agenda he was undertaking across the country and across the world,” he said.
“Quite honestly, it was the speech in Davos where you took everything head on,” he added.
Jeneroux said it felt disingenuous and “quite simply wrong” to sit on the sidelines.
Hotchkiss Model 1886 3-pounder Quick Firing Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Sept 2025Small fast boats with torpedos (or other explosives) have always been a threat to large warships. One of the weapons the British Royal Navy adopted to counter that threat was the Hotchkiss Model 1886 “Quick Fire” gun. This meant that it was a breech-loaded gun that used self-contained cartridge ammunition, instead of separate powder bags and projectiles. Mounted on a recoil-adsorbing soft mount with a wide range of movement and steep depression angle, guns like this could fire at small mobile torpedo boats that a capital ship’s main armament couldn’t handle.
This particular model is a 47mm bore, or 3-pounder as described in British service. It uses a vertically-traveling breech block, and more than 3,000 or them were acquired by the British. Two of them were employed as part of the Falkland Islands coastal defenses at one time. This example is one of two brought down from Gibraltar fairly recently and refurbished for ceremonial use on the Islands. Thanks to the FIDF for setting it up on its mount so I could film it for you!
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