Quotulatiousness

May 9, 2026

Starmer thinks local elections’ message is for Labour to move faster on their progressive agenda

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — who many commentators have for months been describing as a “dead man walking” — somehow manages to find an interpretation for the Labour Party’s disastrous local election results, and thinks voters just sent a message that he needs to move faster and more vigorously to implement their vision. That’s certainly a take.

Nigel Farage is certainly enjoying the outcome:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Hurrah for the Tealshirts! Nigel Farage emerged from Havering Town Hall looking smug even by his standards. For years, he has been written off, denied the respect — and peerage — he feels he deserves, forced to scrape by on gifts from well-wishers, and now he was showing them all, wreaking havoc on both Labour and Conservatives.

Nothing could hold the party back, not the endless terrible comments from Reform candidates who for some reason believe Farage agrees with them, not even a huge bribery scandal involving the party leader in Wales. Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster!

Elsewhere, people were gloomier. James Cleverly explained to the BBC that winning elections isn’t the goal of politics. The Conservatives aren’t interested in here today, gone tomorrow popularity, it turns out. They just want to govern well. Which leaves a couple of questions about the last decade and a half.

David Lammy told anyone who would listen that you don’t change pilot mid-flight. Better, he didn’t add, to wait until the plane has hit the ground.

The real show of the morning was the confrontation on the BBC between Cleverly’s colleague Vicky Atkins and their former fellow Tory, Robert Jenrick. Atkins and Jenrick have a long friendship going back to the time when he was the anti-Farage candidate in Newark in 2014, through the time he was an anti-Brexit MP supporting David Cameron, his days in Theresa May’s government, his early backing of Boris Johnson, his years in the Cabinet, all the way to his realisation this year that he’d never believed any of the things he’d been telling the voters.

“Robert and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since I supported his leadership campaign,” Atkins announced, and the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for a bumpy ride. “I’m surprised that he’s so quick to can all of the work that he did when he was in government.”

Next to her, Jenrick looked like a man who has arrived at a school parents evening to discover that his ex-wife got there first and has been filling people in on the reason she cut the crotches out of all his suits. But Atkins was just getting started. “Nobody should believe the snake oil salesmen,” she said. Jenrick had accused the Tories of messing things up. “Rob was part of the team that made those mistakes.”

Jenrick made another bid to get the conversation back on track. “The question is about honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. You could have used Atkins’ expression at that moment to freeze lava.

At the time of this Daily Mail report from James Tapfield and David Wilcock, the demands from Labour MPs for Starmer to resign hadn’t quite reached the “red alert” level yet:

Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail

Keir Starmer is desperately fighting to subdue a Labour revolt tonight after a local elections bloodbath saw the party routed on English councils, and destroyed in Wales and Scotland.

Loyalist ministers and MPs have been deployed in a frantic bid to prop up the PM, after a series of backbenchers broke cover to demand his resignation.

So far no Cabinet ministers have publicly joined the mutiny – a moment that many believe would be the final nail in Sir Keir’s coffin.

Rachel Reeves and David Lammy were among those backing Sir Keir – but there has been an ominous lack of vocal support from Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. London Mayor Sadiq Khan released a statement saying the results in the capital were ‘bitterly disappointing’ and the threat to the party is ‘existential’ – without mentioning the PM.

The civil war reignited this evening after Labour’s Welsh leader, Baroness Morgan, humiliatingly lost her own seat as the party’s tally of the 96 Senedd members was slashed to just nine. In a jibe at the PM, she said the Government nationally must ‘change course’.

Until yesterday Labour held nearly half the seats at the Welsh Parliament, and has never failed to top an election in the country – regarded as its birthplace.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also conceded defeat at Holyrood, saying they had ‘lost the argument’ and pointing the finger at Sir Keir.

Meanwhile, the Greens have dealt a hammer blow by taking the mayoralty in deep-red bastion Hackney, as well as Lewisham – signposting more misery to come in London. The Labour leader in Camden – Sir Keir’s own council – has been defeated by Zack Polanski’s candidate.

Even some Labour stalwarts are reading the tea leaves correctly:

May 8, 2026

How Hitler Wasted Germany’s Deadliest Weapon – Nazi Rearmament 01 – U-Boat Type VIIC

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 7 May 2026

Early in World War II, German U-boats came dangerously close to starving Britain into submission. The Type VII submarine — especially the VIIC — became the backbone of the Kriegsmarine‘s Atlantic campaign, sinking thousands of Allied ships and threatening to win the Battle of the Atlantic.

But despite its devastating effectiveness, the U-boat war ultimately failed — and not just because of Allied countermeasures.

In this documentary, Spartacus Olsson breaks down how Adolf Hitler’s strategic miscalculations, competing naval doctrines, and direct interference undermined Germany’s most effective naval weapon. From the clandestine development of submarines after the Treaty of Versailles, through Admiral Karl Dönitz’s vision of a tonnage war, to the catastrophic losses of German submariners, this episode examines how Nazi rearmament translated into wartime reality — and failure.

Featuring detailed analysis of Type VII design, production, deployment, and combat performance, this video reveals how industrial limitations, political priorities, and technological shifts turned a war-winning weapon into a death trap.

This standalone episode complements the Death of Democracy series by showing what Hitler actually did with Germany’s rearmament- and why it fell short.

May 7, 2026

Tu-144 Concordeski – Speed, Spies and Failure

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Russia, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

HardThrasher
Published 4 May 2026

In great secrecy, in 1963 the USSR set about making aviation history with the world’s first Supersonic Transport (SST). In 1968, five months before Concorde, the Tu-144 became the first passenger jet to break the sound barrier. But it was a white elephant that crashed on multiple occasions, killed hundreds and flew for just a matter of months after over a decade of development. It was, perhaps the first of a string of failures that brought down the Soviet Union.

00:00 – 11:06 – Introduction and Background
11:07 – 23:10 – The Decision is made to build
23:10 – 35:31 – And then it got worse — how everything fell apart
35:32 – 39:10 – The En Crashening — From First Flight to Constant Crashes
39:11 – 48:49 – Enter the KGB — What role did spies play
49:22 – End – Like, Subscribe, Join the Patreon
(more…)

May 5, 2026

Restore Britain’s proposal for illegal migrant detention centres

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the Restore Britain Substack, the party lays out its proposal for locating detention centres for illegal migrants, in response to Nigel Farage’s vindictive desire to punish voters in constituencies that “voted the wrong way”:

Reform want to vindictively target Brits in potential Green constituencies to make a point and house illegals next to them — that is their choice. But I don’t believe that we have time for this petty nonsense.

A Restore Britain Government will not abandon residents of those constituencies who have a Green MP elected on 25% of the vote. That is not fair, and more importantly — it is not efficient.

Restore Britain will focus on solving the problem, in the most ruthlessly efficient manner possible. Objective number one is quite clear — remove the illegal migrant population.

That is not going to be completed through vengeful gimmicks.

We won’t punish hardworking British men and women because their neighbours voted Green.

We need a serious, systematic approach utilising the current state apparatus at first in order to rapidly scale our removal capabilities — our deportation paper goes into great detail about how to achieve this.

This an incredibly complicated task. Removing two million plus illegal migrants will not be done overnight. It will not be done through deliberately choosing less efficient options to take revenge on constituencies who did not vote for us. We don’t have time for this petty nonsense.

It is a mammoth challenge — it would be one of the biggest state policy implementations ever.

We would construct detention facilities where they are most efficient, most secure, and most practical to operate — not based on shitty political point-scoring, but on what actually works and on what actually will remove these illegals on a timescale the British people expect.

Because the aim is clear.

To detain, process and remove those who have entered this country illegally, and to do so at scale. Millions will go.

May 4, 2026

Public housing perpetuates the poverty it was supposed to cure

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, John Wills explains that public housing organizations, like any organization with perverse incentives, will never solve the problem of providing enough housing for those who cannot afford it:

Homes Fit for Heroes – Dagenham
“These are typical examples of the housing on the Becontree Estate. Initially 25000 homes were built by the London County Council between 1921 and 1934. These homes fit for the heroes of WW1 had all mod cons gas, water and electricity with inside toilets and bathrooms. A further 2000 homes were built before WW2. The Becontree estate was the biggest council estate in the world.”
Image and description from geograph.uk. Photo by Glyn Baker – CC BY SA 2.0

There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent serious time inside a housing association, when the institutional logic becomes impossible to ignore.

Perhaps you are sitting in a meeting, reviewing the organisation’s performance: voids are down, rent arrears are within tolerance, development pipeline is healthy and the regulator is satisfied. By every measure the sector uses to evaluate itself, things are going well.

Outside the window, however, the waiting list has not reduced. The families in temporary accommodation are the same families (or families very much like them), who were there five years ago. In short, the problem the organisation was created to solve is precisely as large as it was when the meeting began.

Despite these demonstrable facts, nobody in the meeting thinks this is strange. Nobody considers the organisation a failure. The metrics are, after all, fine.

I spent a decade working at a senior level in housing associations. I left as I became disillusioned with a model that has evolved to measure everything except the thing that matters.

The founding logic was sound enough: postwar Britain faced a housing crisis that was specific, urgent and — crucially — finite. Tens of thousands of homes had been destroyed or damaged, men had died in enormous numbers, and a baby boom was placing acute pressure on stock that was already inadequate before the war started. Social Housing was therefore a rational response to a bounded problem: build homes, house people and alleviate a crisis that would, in time and as a result of the initial centralised effort, resolve itself. You might also apply the same logic to slum clearance a decade later: deplorable housing stock needed replacing, and the state needed a mechanism to do it. The model remained defensible so long as everyone understood that success meant crossing a defined finish line.

However, nobody thought to define that finish line. The problem here is that once you remove the time horizon from an organisation tasked with solving a problem, the organisation’s survival becomes contingent on the problem’s persistence, not its resolution. This is not a conspiracy and it requires no bad actors, nor even a conscious decision to perpetuate matters. It is simply what institutions do when the incentives are wrong. As a thought-experiment, imagine that the eradication of smallpox had been incentivised not by the goal of total global elimination, but instead by vaccines administered, clinics built or healthcare workers employed. What would the probability be of us continuing to battle smallpox into the 21st Century? I cannot be certain, but suspect it would be considerably higher than nil.

The regulatory framework for social housing has compounded the error rather than correcting it. Regulators, quite reasonably, dislike hoarded capital. A registered social landlord (RSL) sitting on large reserves and doing nothing with them is, from a regulator’s perspective, a problem to be solved. The solution the sector has converged on is growth — more stock acquired, more homes built, larger balance sheets, bigger organisations and more services and people employed to deliver them. The key metric of a healthy RSL is therefore its size: which is to say, the scale of the problem it exists to address. (To test this proposition, ask someone in housing to describe their organisation. The chances are the first words out of their mouth will be the number of homes they manage). An organisation genuinely succeeding in its mission — one that is housing fewer people because fewer people in its area of operations need housing — under the current framework would look like a failure. It would be encouraged to merge with a larger, more “successful” neighbour, which is to say one that has accumulated more evidence of unresolved housing need.

Gentleman’s Relish (Patum Peperium) – Weird Stuff In A (Sort Of A) Can #142

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atomic Shrimp
Published 16 Aug 2020

Here’s something I have been meaning to feature on the channel for a little while — it’s a savoury anchovy paste that has been in continuous production in England since 1828 — the Georgian Era.

For more information about this product, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlem…

The music for the spoon segment is called “Forever Yours” by Wayne Jones – from the YouTube Audio Library

May 3, 2026

Useful intellectual idiot case study: Malcolm Caldwell

Filed under: Asia, Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Occasionally, Substack suggests a writer or a particular post that its algorithm deems likely to be of interest to me. This post from a few weeks ago by Mark Manson definitely fit the bill. He ranges over a variety of cases starring intellectuals suddenly discovering reality, starting with a particular British useful idiot’s collision with reality:

On December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.

Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.

Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.

Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.

Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London … for the Vietcong.

So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.

Bones recovered from the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime killed nearly 2 million people in less than five years.
Image from Mark Manson.

But the truth was that Pol Pot was as insane as he was cruel. And it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Upon taking power, Pol Pot nationalized the all land, kicked out or killed all foreigners, and began a sweeping genocide against the educated class. In the four years Pol Pot was in power, it’s estimated that he was responsible for the death of more than 20% of the country’s population.

But when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.

Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.

Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.

May 2, 2026

Making Real English Toffee from 1881

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 Dec 2025

Rich, sweet pieces of Victorian Era toffee

City/Region: Everton, England
Time Period: 1881

Around Christmas, my house is full of candy and baked goods, and for me, toffee is one of the quintessential Christmas treats. Possibly invented by Molly Bushell in 1753 in Everton, just outside of Liverpool, toffee can be hard like the recipe we’re making here or of a softer, chewier variety.

While either option is delicious, this recipe is specifically for the hard style of Everton toffee. It’s a really simple recipe (the hardest part is waiting for it to come up to temperature), and is such a rich, decadent treat. The lemon extract adds a layer of acidic complexity to the toffee, but it doesn’t taste of lemon.

Feel free to dress yours up by adding some nuts to the dish before you pour the toffee over it, or sprinkle some chocolate chips over the toffee while it’s still hot so that they melt.

    Everton Toffee.
    Put one pound of brown sugar and one tea-cupful of cold water into a pan well rubbed with good fresh butter. Set it over a slow fire, and boil until the sugar has become a smooth, thick syrup, then stir into it half a pound of butter, and boil for half an hour. When sufficiently boiled, it may be tested by dropping some on a plate, and if it dries hard and can easily be removed, the toffee is ready for flavouring. For this purpose, add twenty or thirty drops of essence of lemon. Pour the toffee into a wide well-buttered dish. If liked, vinegar may be substituted for the water, then the lemon may be omitted.
    — Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, England, 1881

(more…)

April 30, 2026

Where did Dovetails come from?

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 29 Apr 2026

All my plans!: https://www.rexkrueger.com/
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The History of BROWN SAUCE: HP Sauce, A1 Sauce, OK Sauce and Chef Sauce

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tweedy Misc
Published 7 Nov 2025

Have you ever wondered how British “brown sauce” came about? What is it made from? Who invented it? When was it invented? Which brown sauce is the oldest? When did we start calling it “brown sauce”?

In this video we look into what exactly brown sauce is (and isn’t), we look into ingredients of a number of iconic brands (and some supermarket own brands) and explore the history of the five brown sauces which defined the category: A1 Sauce, OK Sauce, HP Sauce, Daddies Favourite Sauce and Chef Sauce.

Some links to Wikipedia etc in case it helps figure out what this is all about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_s…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.1._Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daddies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Sauce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chef_Br…

If you’re finding the wobbling bottles are a problem for you, here’s a version of the video without any wobbling: • History of Brown Sauce (No Wobbling!)

This video was made using Davinci Resolve 20, with a lot of the still images made using Canva.

Chapters:

0:00 Introduction
0:16 What is brown sauce?
2:33 Supermarket own brand brown sauces
4:02 History of brown sauce
4:48 A1 Sauce
10:49 OK Sauce
15:31 HP Sauce
17:06 Daddies Favourite Sauce
19:06 Chef Sauce
23:50 Conclusion

April 25, 2026

QotD: Goethe, the lost German master

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This was the atmosphere in which I discovered Germany. It was a minor act of defiance to choose German instead of Latin for O-level, but with hindsight I was extremely fortunate to have the choice. There were two German teachers in my grammar school of just 600 pupils. Today, even the best state schools seldom offer the subject; not one of our four children has had the opportunity that I had to study German language and, especially, literature up to the high standard that was then expected at A-level.

Today, the texts are almost all recent and appear to be chosen partly with the film of the book in mind. In particular, Goethe has disappeared from the syllabus, presumably because the language is considered too archaic. Yet I recall the immense pleasure and satisfaction of mastering a Goethe play — Egmont. The story of the dashing Dutchman and his martial defiance of the sinister Duke of Alba, the courage of his beloved, Klärchen, who fantasises in song about how wonderful it would be to be a man and fight the Spaniards — “ein Glück sondergleichen ein Mannsbild zu sein“. Somehow I even obtained an LP of Beethoven’s incidental music for Egmont: seldom heard apart from the overture, but brilliantly evoking the grandeur of the drama.

Like Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, Goethe belongs not just to German literature, but to world literature, Weltliteratur — a term he coined. I am told that even in German Gymnasien, Goethe is little studied now. He is certainly a rare bird in English schools — or even universities. It is tragic that educated people, including students of literature, so seldom encounter the greatest of Germans even in translation. We might get on better with Germany if we did.

Daniel Johnson, “How I discovered Germany”, The Critic, 2020-08-02.

April 24, 2026

Britain’s Green Party … not your weird cousin’s old Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Green Party have been more of a punchline than a party for decades in British politics, but the Green Party of today shares only a name with its earlier incarnations (the old UK party is now split into three separate Green Parties for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Now, it’s become a significant threat to the Labour Party thanks to its unlikely fusion of socialist and green policies with strong support from Britain’s growing Muslim community:

The Green Party is a growing force in British politics. In February, they gained the Parliamentary constituency of Gorton and Denton in a by-election — a supposedly “safe” seat for the Labour Party. Local elections in May see them set to make big gains — perhaps sweeping to power in several town halls in London, perhaps including Camden, where Sir Keir Starmer is one of the local MPs. Opinion polls often show them roughly level with Labour and the Conservatives.

This is quite a change from previous decades when they were indulged as eccentrics on the political fringe. The Green Party (or the Ecology Party, as it was earlier named) were the sandal-wearing, muesli-munching environmentalists who wanted to go back to nature. They opposed economic growth — but their supporters tended to be affluent enough that they could afford to do so. Its leader was the aristocrat Sir Jonathon Porritt.

They were the breed George Orwell was thinking of when he wrote: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England”.

Great fun. But there was a darker side to the quackery then and now. A totalitarian mentality which, as Orwell also vividly described, proves horrific when it prevails.

Increasingly, the Green Party has shifted its focus away from the environment. In the few towns and cities where it has gained power locally, such as in Bristol and Brighton, it has proved ineffective at practical work in this respect. Typical behaviour would be to pass a motion declaring a “climate emergency” but then perform lamentably when it comes to recycling or tree planting or any of the relevant matters they have the power to deal with.

There was always a distortion in its supposed concern for sustainability in that it was really an excuse to denounce capitalism. The Property and Environment Research Center, a US think tank which champions free-market environmentalism, has shown a more enlightened approach. Their work has included a comparison of privately-owned and state-owned forests. Another applies property rights to marine assets. But the role of property rights as a means of good stewardship of our planet is dismissed by the Green Party out of hand.

In any case, much of the campaigning by the Green Party now is on non-green issues. Its leadership talks a lot about foreign policy and a broader economic pitch focusing on class war rhetoric and an extreme programme of state control. Taxing the rich is always seen as the panacea, despite the reality that many entrepreneurs are already fleeing the United Kingdom due to its hostile fiscal environment.

Its Manifesto for the last election two years ago proposed a Wealth Tax, a pensions tax, and a big increase in Capital Gains Tax. A £90 billion carbon tax would have closed down much of British industry, which was probably the idea.

April 23, 2026

They put out propaganda because it works

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, History, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I often find myself commenting on social media posts that the Canadian government’s direct subsidies to most of the mainstream media in Canada has created one of the most effective propaganda machines since 1930s Germany. “eLbOwS uP!” They keep doing it because it clearly is working fantastically well on a large enough share of Canadian voters that the polls (which may or may not be biased) keep touting that Dear Leader Carney and the Natural Governing Party are ever more popular. And most of the people consuming the propaganda message have their preferences re-inforced and the cycle starts again.

At Cracking Defence, Matthew Palmer discusses wartime propaganda during the 20th century, emphasizing that it’s the use to which it is put rather than the mechanism itself that has a moral value:

Propaganda is an absolute favourite subject of mine — probably not surprising considering that one of my roles in the military was psychological operations.1 Despite its very negative connotations thanks to the work of interwar writers like Frederick Ponsonby,2 propaganda really should be seen as a neutral term, perhaps best defined as “the deliberate attempt to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way”.3 Nor does it need to be state-driven; propaganda can come be generated from below as much as being driven top-down from the state or elites.

Some of the best propaganda comes out of wartime, and the First and Second World Wars were absolute goldmines. I also have a particular weakness for propaganda drawn up in early modernist and art deco styles, for which the first half of the 20th century was the high watermark. As such, here are a few of my all-time favourites for your delectation.4

Women of Britain Say — Go!

Women of Britain Say ‘Go!’
Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/14592

A true classic that has reverbrated through the ages. Despite First World War propaganda having the reputation of being crudely jingoistic, much of it was in fact consciously aware of the pain and sacrifice being endured by the warring population, and did not try to hide it. This one acknowledges the sacrifice undertaken by the women and children left behind, while the background reminds the viewer of the green and pleasant land of ‘old England’ that they are fighting for.

[…]

Canadiens, Suivez l’Exemple de Dollard des Ormeaux

Canadiens, Suivez l’Exemple de Dollard des Ormeaux [Canadians, Follow the Example of Dollard des Ormeaux] a depiction of Adam Dollard resisting an attack by Iroquois tribesmen. Dollard’s dead comrades lie at his feet.
Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/31027

I find this one intriguing, not because I think it is actually a brilliant poster but for what it tells you about historical context and how propaganda was often tailored explicitly for local sensibilities. While Canadian support for the Allies in the First World War was generally fierce, the major exception was Quebec, which saw relatively poor levels of recruitment for overseas service. As such, propaganda aimed at Quebecois often tapped deeply into local traditions, in this case the (extremely dodgy!) myth of Adam Dollard, venerated in the period as a Catholic martyr who died defending Quebec from native Iroquois.5

[…]

Together

Image courtesy of the IWM.

One can of course criticise the imperialism inherent in this poster, but I think it still works exceptionally well as a bold call for unity between the different nations of the British Empire. It shows how British propagandists took pains to highlight the Second World War as a global conflict against fascism.

  1. A job which, if I do say so myself, I was pretty bloody good at.
  2. Ponsonby wrote Falsehood in Wartime in which ironically he basically made up stories about British propagandists in a book supposedly about manufactured atrocity propaganda!
  3. Phillip Taylor, Munitions of the mind: A history of propaganda (Manchester University Press, 2013).
  4. I’m only going to present Allied propaganda. Because, frankly, fuck fascism.
  5. The story of Dollard is mostly myth, and he was more likely an idiot fur-trapper who got himself killed through stupidity.

April 20, 2026

QotD: The quality of evidence problem for historians

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, Quotations, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The major problem isn’t with quantity of evidence, it’s quality of evidence. More fundamentally, it’s a question of the very nature of evidence. As far as I understand it — which is “not very” — contemporary accounts of the Battle of Crecy seem wildly implausible, even by medieval standards. And that’s the first indicator of the problem right there: By medieval standards. Medieval numbers, as we’ve noted probably ad nauseam, are Rachel Maddowesque — they’re there to augment The Narrative, nothing more. “We were opposed by fifty thousand Saracens” thus can mean anything from “bad guys as far as the eye could see” to “it just wasn’t our day, so we ran”.

And yet, you can’t entirely discount them, either. Crecy (along with of course Agincourt) is supposed to be the triumph of the English longbow, and that’s the thing: We’ve reconstructed English longbows, and put them through all kinds of trials. The results, as I understand it — which, again, ain’t much — were highly variable. A very strong, well-fed, highly trained longbowman, firing an ideally constructed and maintained bow under optimal conditions, really can put X number of arrows up a flea’s ass at Y range in Z time.

Or they could miss the broad side of a barn at twenty feet, depending.

So: What was the weather like in Northern France on 26 August 1346? That’s not an idle question. Rather, it’s the central question. Assume perfect shooting conditions, and you’ve got a far, far different picture of the battle than if you assume poor ones. And if that seems to be giving too much credit to the weather, watch a few baseball games — you’ll quickly discover that quite often, the difference between a home run and a long out is just a few percentage points of relative humidity.

Ultimately it comes down to judgment. More importantly, it’s a judgment on how any particular event fits into the larger argument you’re trying to make. In a way, then, the details really don’t matter very much on their own — the mechanics of how the English won are almost irrelevant, except insofar as they feed into an analysis of why they won. Why did the French king attack uphill, in the mud? Was he stupid? Overconfident? Did he feel he had to, because of political problems inside his host? Did he have faulty information? Did he have accurate information, but just made a bad call?

That’s the art of History, and why, despite what the Peter Turchin (and Karl Marx) crowd keeps insisting, it will always be an art, not a science. We can have a high degree of confidence, most times, in what happened — there really was a battle at Crecy, and the English really did win it. It’s the why that is susceptible to radical reinterpretation.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-17.

April 19, 2026

QotD: The (only?) man who didn’t fear Margaret Thatcher

Filed under: Britain, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The late John Hoskyns, head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit from 1979-1982, was the last person on earth to be afraid of the Iron Lady. In the summer of 1981, he sent her a memo entitled “Your political survival”, which addressed her in terms other men would have flinched from. “You lack management competence,” he wrote, tearing into her style of leadership. “You break every rule of good man-management … you bully your weaker colleagues … You criticise colleagues in front of each other … You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.”

Thatcher reacted with cold fury, but Hoskyns was unabashed. Another story tells of his arriving for a meeting with the PM only to be intercepted by Ian Gow, her personal secretary. “Our girl is tired,” said Gow, trying to bar his path. “I’m tired too,” muttered Hoskyns. “It goes with the bloody job. I’m going in.”

Such irreverence to the “Great She-Elephant”, “She who must be obeyed”, “Attila the Hen” is rare enough, but this isn’t the main thing to remember Hoskyns for. Far more interesting – and relevant to now – is the work he did with fellow conservative Norman Strauss in the mid-1970s to diagnose the exact sources of Britain’s economic malaise, and come up with clear policies about how the country could haul itself out of it.

Robin Ashenden, “Thatcher’s ‘Wiring Diagram’ and why we need it once again”, The Critic, 2020-08-25.

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