In 1911, the two English women recounted their experience in a book, An Adventure, using the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book immediately caused a sensation. Among those who were gripped by their time-travelling tale was a young J.R.R. Tolkien. So was Tolkien’s friend, fantasy writer C.S. Lewis, whose later book about time travel, The Dark Tower, referred to “the ladies of the Trianon”. At the turn of the century in England, there was great interest in the paranormal. Leading proponents included the eccentric occultist Aleister Crowley, author of The Book of Lies. It was an era when fascination with spiritualism created a culture of credulity in the face of fantastic fictions and clever hoaxes.
One of the most famous hoaxes of that era was the so-called Cottingley Fairies. Two girls in Yorkshire, cousins Elise Wright and Frances Griffith, took a series of five photos in 1917 showing themselves near a stream in the presence of tiny fairy-like creatures. Elsie’s father Arthur Wright, an amateur photographer, never doubted that the photos were fabricated. But the girl’s mother Polly was more credulous. The pictures became public when Polly Wright attended a lecture on “fairy life” at a Theosophical Society meeting in Bradford. They were quickly circulated among the group’s adherents, who found the photographed fairies consistent with their theosophical beliefs. The extraordinary images soon came to the attention of the famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an ardent spiritualist who was writing an article on fairies for the Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was convinced the fairies were real. His article was published under the headline Fairies Photographed, describing the Cottingley Fairies as an “epoch-making event”.
“The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life,” wrote Conan Doyle. “Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message supported by physical facts which has already been put before it.” In 1922, Conan Doyle followed up with a book, The Coming of the Fairies, in which he announced that proof of fairy existence was a blow to cold Victorian science, which “would have left the world hard and clean and bare, like a landscape in the moon”. He added: “There is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing things that are invisible to others.”
Conan Doyle was wrong of course. Like many other spiritualists at the time, he’d been taken in. The photos were fake. The two girls Elsie and Frances both lived into their 80s. Toward the end of their lives in the 1980s, they admitted that they’d fabricated the fairy photos using paper cutouts.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
September 8, 2025
QotD: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
September 7, 2025
The BEF and the German Sichelschnitt of May, 1940
Dr. Robert Lyman rebuts the common-since-the-1950s adulation of the Wehrmacht‘s attacks of May-June, 1940 through the Low Countries that drove the British Expeditionary Force off the continent and destroyed the flower of the French army prior to the surrender of France in June:
Detail from the West Point Military Atlas map of the “Campaign in the West, Disposition and Opposing Forces, 1940”
Full map.
The world has largely remembered Sichelschnitt as a brilliant German operation of war, but it was one that was fundamentally enabled by Allied ineptitude. Indeed, Blitzkrieg wasn’t particularly new, innovative or even a warfighting doctrine. It is best described, in the context of France 1940, as an event. It was simply the way that the Wehrmacht exerted its tactical and operational superiority over its more pedestrian enemies in 1940. In fact, it was the 1940 extension of what the German Army had first demonstrated in Flanders in March 1918, this time with tanks and Stukas. It was the Panzerwaffe (“tank force”) – combined with a tactical air force – which in 1940 would create the breakthrough that Ludendorff had been unable to achieve in 1918. Where it was applied, by Army Group A, it concentrated fast-moving armoured vanguards co-ordinated with tactical air power, such as 400 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, to so overwhelm the enemy in both time and space that they were unable to respond quickly enough to the changing and challenging battlefield. In 1940 the panzer came into its own, the sound of clattering tracks on French cobblestones a new feature in the sound of battle and a key element in how France remembers its defeat in 1940.
It wasn’t the type of tank in the German inventory which mattered, but the way in which these tanks were employed. Only about 10 per cent of the army comprised tanks, the remainder relying on horse and wagons and the raw, painful feet of the marching infantry. Of the 2,539 tanks the Wehrmacht deployed in 1940, only 916, or 36 per cent were battleworthy, the remainder being clattering tin cans with machine guns (the obsolete Panzer Mark Is and Mark IIs). The only modern tanks were 683 Panzer Mark IIIs and Czech T38 tanks armed with a 37mm gun, and 278 of the larger Mark IVs with a short 75mm gun. But it was enough. The German operational strategy was to use this mass of armour not to fight a large confrontational tank battle, but to achieve breakthrough and breakout, bursting through the enemy’s linear defences. It was surprise and shock action that so discomforted the Allies, who had lazily and, given what we know of British failure to understand 1918, ignorantly assumed that the war would progress against a 1914 rather than a 1918 pattern. The armoured vanguard would surge through the outer skin of the enemy defences, concentrating heavy effort in one place, before driving hard into the heart of enemy territory. With an enemy intent on fighting a linear battle, the rear areas, behind this outer crust, would be weakly defended and full of rear-echelon, administrative and supply troops managing the lines of communication up to the front, not expecting to have to fight. It was by driving hard and fast behind the enemy front line, breaking the cycle of Allied battlefield decision-making, that Blitzkrieg was to achieve its psychological effect.
In contrast the Allies remained concerned about retaining the integrity of their defensive lines. The diaries of Major General Henry Pownall, for instance, are replete with concerns as the days spun past about the widening frontages on one defensive line or another. British concern was misplaced. It was to spread the ever-decreasing butter of the British infantry across ever-widening stretches of French and Belgian bread, without realising that the Germans were concerned not with rolling up a front line, but with driving hard to the rear. By so doing they would take risks with their flanks, but the discombobulatory effect on the enemy was considered to far outweigh any worry about the risk of counter- attack from an increasingly battered and disorganised enemy. Of course this operational concept was risky, but the risks taken were carefully calculated given what the German General Staff knew about British and French tactical doctrine, or the lack of it.
These German tactics were psychologically disconcerting for those not trained to expect them. As was demonstrated on the Meuse, artillery would batter a position in co-ordination with armoured columns bypassing fixed defences and attacking those it needed to clear from the flanks and the rear. The infantry accompanying the advancing armour – Panzergrenadiers (mechanised infantry) – arrived in tandem with the Stukas, which could drop their bombs from a screaming dive. Each Stuka seemed to those at the receiving end to be diving directly at them, personally. For untrained troops it was a terrifying experience. The panzers would sweep on while the truck-borne infantry would turn up to deal with survivors of this storm of fire and movement. By this time, of course, the disorientated French and British would now consider themselves cut off, behind their front line, with no prospect of being relieved. Surrender or a disorganised escape to the rear would seem to be a more sensible option than the forlorn hope of continued resistance when the surrounding fields were dotted with the grey-green uniforms and coal-scuttle helmets of their enemy. The psychological effect of Blitzkrieg was considerable. This wasn’t how their fathers had told them war was fought. How did the Germans manage to discomfort them on the battlefield so comprehensively? Were they inadequate soldiers, unable to meet the standards of campaigning set by the previous generation? Or was it that their tactics were simply not able to cope with the shock of a comprehensive assault by German infantry, armour and air power all descending on them at once? This was the battlefield that the British had entirely dominated, by virtue of their tactical innovations, in 1918. It was now Germany’s turn, a direct result of the failure of the British Army to develop its doctrine and approaches to warfighting at the end of the Great War. Brave men in 1940 did their duty, but against a battle-winning concept of their enemy, they were out-thought rather than out-fought. And critically, when an army thinks it is beaten, it is indeed beaten.
September 6, 2025
New Evidence on the loss of HMS Hood!
Drachinifel
Published 5 Sept 2025Today we take a look at a heretofore unpublished account from a sailor who saw the destruction of HMS Hood, and take a look at what this might tell us about the incident.
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Unique British Crankfire .58 Morse Manual Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Apr 2025This is a really interesting piece with a mostly unknown origin. It was manufactured in the UK (the barrel was deemed Enfield-made by former Royal Armouries curator Herb Woodend) and is chambered for the .58 Morse centerfire cartridge. The date of production is unknown. It uses a gravity-feed magazine and fires via hand crank. Turning the crank cycles the bolt forward and back, not completely unlike a Maxim gun but without the automatic operation. It came out of a small Canadian museum in the 1950s, but its provenance before that is unknown.
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September 5, 2025
BBC’s new King and Conqueror series
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank discusses the BBC’s latest attempt to recast British history in a way more pleasing to, as the Critical Drinker would say, “modern audiences”:
If you care about truth, beauty or goodness, I have bad news for you: the BBC has just created a historical drama set in the Middle Ages. Yes, this is the arrival of King and Conqueror, which depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. The raw matter of the historical record is incredibly promising: ferocious royal intrigues, hagiographical piety, civil and not so civil war, and all the strange poetics and ceremony of French and Anglo-Saxon courtly life. The culture that gave us Lincoln Cathedral and the culture that gave us Sutton Hoo, should be reason alone for the most spectacular of costumes, battles and speeches.
But anyone hoping for a moving epic or a gripping thriller would be equally disappointed, as the brainless BBC tramples cheerfully into a sordid pastiche even more gormless than Game of Thrones (which at least had a decent budget). Future King of England Harold Godwinson (played by James Norton) is introduced to audiences uttering the admittedly pretty Anglo-Saxon phrase “it’s a fucking massacre”, in the manner of someone commenting on an especially brutal 3-nil football match.
I could induce miserable groaning from readers at this point by listing every meta-level historical inaccuracy from the almost entirely fictitious events of the coronation, to the succession of geographical and biographical distortions that rain down on viewers like so many 11th century arrows, to the inexplicable but inevitable (it’s the BBC) presence of black Anglo-Saxons. But none of these departures from the historical record are inherently unforgivable and might in theory be justified in the name of telling a compelling story.
What is truly egregious is not the fictionalisation of details, but the outright misrepresentation of the morals, manners and minds of medieval man. If the past really was a foreign country, then the BBC would be rightly besieged by those outraged at the bigoted, hate-filled and slanderous portrayal of that alien nation in this drama. Edward the Confessor, a man who has been quite literally beatified, is depicted beating his own mother to death. Duke William of Normandy, is shown murdering a man in broad daylight for setting a captured enemy free. Later on, when the enemy — rebellious vassal Guy of Burgundy — is recaptured, he is personally tortured by William’s wife Matilda.
The modern imagination has rendered these figures, and the times they lived in, as more brutal than they truly were. Even the famously ruthless William, who grew up dodging assassins and facing down rebellious barons, is not the thuggish hard man the series would present. The historical accounts suggest that he was a strict adherent to chivalric custom and a deeply pious man. In the real world, William banishes Guy then declares the “peace of God” in Normandy, bringing an end to violence and retribution for the crimes of the past decades. King Edward, who is presented as a snivelling, cowardly mother’s boy, was by every contemporary account a heroic, forceful and gregarious ruler, one who had his mother exiled, and certainly not murdered.
September 4, 2025
They can’t catch actual criminals, but they are quite capable of arresting social media users
Andrew Doyle hopes that the farcical performance by British police in sending five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan as he stepped off the plane will be a tipping point:
How many more controversies will it take? The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport has become an international news story because it so self-evidently tyrannical. The stress of the ordeal raised his blood pressure to an alarming degree and he was rushed to hospital. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Graham is now suing the Metropolitan Police. You can donate to his crowdfunder here.
It is reassuring to see that some action is being taken against such chilling state overreach, but when will our politicians follow suit? Many of us have been warning about this ongoing assault on liberty for many years, and at every watershed moment we’ve been led to believe that something will be done. Then, inevitably, the “blob” is activated and swallows up any potential for progress in its viscous and undulating folds.
So when Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, complains that the police are acting on unclear laws, and that the responsibility for the maltreatment of the likes of Graham lies with those in power, he’s overlooking the impact of the activist middlemen. Let’s not forget that the Home Office has twice instructed the College of Policing to stop the recording of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs) and has been ignored. Or that the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said the solution to the complaints about NCHIs might be to rename them. As though the public’s concerns about this brazen authoritarianism might be assuaged with a touch of rebranding.
Rowley’s buck-passing is likewise inadequate. He claimed that Graham’s arrest was necessary because officers “had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed”, which is palpably untrue. He said: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position”. He also made clear that police would continue to behave in this way “unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified”.
But this is precisely the problem. At present, a quango called the College of Policing trains officers in England and Wales. In my article for UnHerd about Graham’s arrest (which you can read here) I make the case that the College of Policing has become woefully unfit for purpose due to activist capture. For a long time, agitators within the system have reinterpreted and fudged the actual law in favour of what they would like it to be. This has led to some police acting in potentially criminal ways. Most egregiously, there is clear evidence of systemic bias against gender-critical individuals within the police force, and a reluctance to apply identical standards to trans activists who routinely post threats of death and rape and are rarely investigated for it.
In the wake of the Linehan arrest, Tom Knighton wonders why the US isn’t treating the UK as it would any other tyranny where free speech and other civil liberties are denied to the people on a whim or a suspicion:
The United States has a history of dealing with tyrannical governments, who oppose tyrannical governments we like even less. We worked with Saddam Hussein, for example, because he was at war with Iran.
But we never stopped pretending these weren’t tyrants.
So, it’s time we start treating the UK just the same.
The latest incident was a well-known comedian from the UK being arrested over a couple of jokes.
Something odd happened before I even boarded the flight in Arizona. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.
The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.
… and then, a follow up to that one.
When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists” The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.
While the officers were kind, they still arrested him. They arrested him because he made some jokes. He spent time in a jail cell, was interviewed by detectives, and was treated like a criminal because he made some jokes.
They waited for him at the airport with five officers, something that would be a clear indication to others that he was truly dangerous, over some jokes.
The first one wasn’t a great joke, really, but that wasn’t the issue. This wasn’t that it wasn’t as funny as it should have been, but that it was made at all.
Net Zero targets and Britain’s ever-declining car industry
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jake Scott charts the decline of the British auto manufacturing centres and the government’s allegiance to its Net Zero programs:
Custom image by FEE
Britain was once a giant of car manufacturing. In the 1950s, we were the second-largest producer in the world and the biggest exporter. Coventry, Birmingham, and Oxford built not just cars, but the reputation of an industrial nation; to this day, it is a source of great pride that Jaguar–Land Rover, a global automotive icon, still stands between Coventry and Birmingham. By the 1970s, we were producing more than 1.6 million vehicles a year.
Today? We have fallen back to 1950s levels. Last year, Britain built fewer than half our peak output—800,000 cars, and the lowest outside the pandemic since 1954. Half a year later, by mid-2025, production has slumped a further 12%. The country that once led the automotive revolution is now struggling to stay afloat, and fighting to remain relevant.
This is why the news that BMW will end car production at Oxford’s Mini plant, shifting work to China, is so damning, bringing this decline into sharp focus. The Mini is not only a classic British car; Alec Issigonis’s original design made it an international icon. For decades, the Mini has been the bridge between British design flair and foreign investment. Its departure leaves 1,500 jobs at risk at a time when the government is desperate to fuel growth and convince a wavering consumer market that there is no tension between industrial production and Net Zero goals.
It’s a bitter reminder that we in Britain have been here before: letting an industrial crown jewel slip away.
The usual explanations will be offered: global competition, exchange rates, supply chains. All true, in the midst of a global trade war that is heating up and damaging major British exports. But such a diagnosis is incomplete. The truth is that Britain’s car industry is being squeezed by a mix of geopolitical realignment and government missteps.
The car industry has become the frontline of a new trade war. Washington has already moved aggressively to shield its own firms: the Inflation Reduction Act offers vast subsidies for US-made EVs and batteries, an unapologetic attempt to onshore production, and something that became a flashpoint of tension in Trump’s negotiation with the EU in the latest trade deal. On the production side, the Act has poured billions into US manufacturing: investment in EV and battery plants hit around $11 billion per quarter in 2024.
Ripples have been sent across the world in the US’s wake: Europe, faced with a flood of cheap Chinese EVs, has imposed tariffs of up to 35% after an anti-subsidy investigation. Talks have even turned to a system of minimum import prices instead of tariffs. Unsurprisingly, China has threatened retaliation against European luxury marques, while experts warn the tariffs may slow the EU’s green transition by raising prices.
This is no longer a free market: cars are treated as strategic assets, the 21st-century equivalent of shipbuilding or steel. Whoever controls the supply chains, particularly for EV batteries and the mining of lithium, controls not only the future of the industry but an important lever of national power.
The results are visible. In July 2025, Tesla’s UK sales collapsed nearly 60%, while Chinese giant BYD’s deliveries quadrupled. Europe responded by talking up new tariffs. Britain did nothing. In this asymmetric contest, our market risks becoming a showroom for foreign producers — subsidizing both sides of the trade war without defending our own.
QotD: The development of the “halftrack” during the interwar period
What drove the differences in tank development between countries were differences between how each of those countries imagined using their tanks, that is differences in tank doctrine. Now we should be clear here that there were some fundamental commonalities between the major schools of tank thinking: in just about all cases tanks were supposed to support infantry in the offensive by providing armor and direct fire support, including knocking out enemy tanks. Where doctrine differed is exactly how that would be accomplished: France’s doctrine of “Methodical Battle” generally envisaged tanks moving at the speed of mostly foot infantry and being distributed fairly evenly throughout primarily infantry formations. That led to tanks that were fairly slow with limited range but heavily armored, often with just a one-man turret (which was a terrible idea, but the doctrine reasoned you wouldn’t need more in a slow-moving combat environment). Of course this worked poorly in the event.
More successful maneuver warfare doctrines recognized that the tank needed infantry to perform its intended function (it has to have infantry to support) but that tanks could now move fast enough and coordinate well enough (with radios) that any supporting arms like infantry or artillery needed to move a lot faster than walking speed to keep up. Both German “maneuver warfare” (Bewegungskrieg) and Soviet “Deep Operations” (or “Deep Battle”) doctrine saw the value in concentrating their tanks into powerful striking formations that could punch hard and move fast. But tanks alone are very vulnerable and in any event to attack effectively they need things like artillery support or anti-air protection. So it was necessary to find ways to allow those arms to keep up with the tanks (and indeed, a “Panzer divsion” is not only or even mostly made up of tanks!).
At the most basic level, one could simply put the infantry on trucks or other converted unarmored civilian vehicles, making “motorized” infantry, but […] part of the design of tanks is to allow them to go places that conventional civilian vehicles designed for roads cannot and in any event an unarmored truck is a large, vulnerable tempting target on the battlefield.
The result is the steady emergence of what are sometimes jokingly called “battle taxis” – specialized armored vehicles designed to allow the infantry to keep up with the tanks so that they can continue to be mutually supporting, while being more off-road capable and less vulnerable than a truck. In WWII, these sorts of vehicles were often “half-tracks” – semi-armored, open-topped vehicles with tires on the front wheels and tracks for the back wheels, though the British “Universal Carrier” was fully tracked. Crucially, while these half-tracks might mount a heavy machine gun for defense, providing fire support was not their job; being open-topped made them particularly vulnerable to air-bursting shells and while they were less vulnerable to fire than a truck, they weren’t invulnerable by any means. The intended use was to deposit infantry at the edge of the combat area, which they’d then move through on foot, not to drive straight through the fight.
The particular vulnerability of the open-top design led to the emergence of fully-enclosed armored personnel carriers almost immediately after WWII in the form of vehicles like the M75 Armored Infantry Vehicle (though the later M113 APC was eventually to be far more common) and the Soviet BTRs (“Bronetransporter” or “armored transport”), beginning with the BTR-40; Soviet BTRs tended to be wheeled whereas American APCs tend to be tracked, something that also goes for their IFVs (discussed below). These vehicles often look to a journalist or the lay observer like a tank, but they do not function like tanks. The M113 APC, for instance, has just about 1.7 inches of aluminum-alloy armor, compared to the almost four inches of much heavier steel armor on the contemporary M60 “Patton” tank. So while these vehicles are armored, they are not intended to stick in the fight and are vulnerable to much lighter munitions than contemporary tank would be.
At the same time, it wasn’t just the infantry that needed to be able to keep up: these powerful striking units (German Panzer divisions, Soviet mechanized corps or US armored divisions, etc.) needed to be able to also bring their heavy weaponry with them. At the start of WWII, artillery, anti-tank guns and anti-air artillery remained almost entirely “towed” artillery – that is, it was pulled into position by a truck (or frequently in this period still by horses) and emplaced (“unlimbered”) to be fired. Such systems couldn’t really keep up with the tanks they needed to support and so we see those weapons also get mechanized into self-propelled artillery and anti-air (and for some armies, tank destroyers, although the tank eventually usurps this role entirely).
Self-propelled platforms proved to have another advantage that became a lot more important over time: they could fire and then immediately reposition. Whereas a conventional howitzer has to be towed into position, unlimbered, set up, loaded, fired, then limbered again before it can move, something like the M7 Priest can drive itself into position, fire almost immediately and then immediately move. This maneuver, called “shoot-and-scoot” (or, more boringly, “fire-and-displace”) enables artillery to avoid counter-battery fire (when an army tries to shut down enemy artillery by returning fire with its own artillery). As artillery got more accurate and especially with the advent of anti-artillery radars, being able to shoot-and-scoot became essential.
Now while self-propelled platforms were tracked (indeed, often using the same chassis as the tanks they supported), they’re not tanks. They’re designed primarily for indirect fire (there is, of course, a sidebar to be written here on German “assault guns” – Sturmgeschütz – and their awkward place in this typology, but let’s keep it simple), that is firing at a high arc from long range where the shell practically falls on the target and thus are expected to be operating well behind the lines. Consequently, their armor is generally much thinner because they’re not designed to be tanks, but to play the same role that towed artillery (or anti-air, or rocket artillery, etc.) would have, only with more mobility.
So by the end of WWII, we have both tanks of various weight-classes, along with a number of tank-like objects (APCs, self-propelled artillery and anti-air) which are not tanks but are instead meant to allow their various arms to keep up with the tanks as part of a combined arms package.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
September 3, 2025
Dad’s Army caricatures capture life in Britain today
At The Daily Skeptic, Guy de la Bédoyère wonders why everything in modern Britain emulates an episode of the 70s sitcom Dad’s Army:
Dad’s Army, a BBC sitcom that ran from 1968 to 1977, starring Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring, John Le Mesurier as Sergeant Wilson, and Clive Dunn as Lance Corporal Jones.
There are plenty of natural laws, but here’s one unique to Britain:
Every organisation, committee, scenario, initiative and government-backed and corporate project in Britain will inevitably degenerate into a scene from Dad’s Army.
That of course is the celebrated sitcom Dad’s Army, based on the world of Britain’s Home Guard in the Second World War, which ran for nine series in the 1970s. Every character is caricature, and sometimes not even as much as that.
Just think about it. Captain Mainwaring, the prickly bank manager and obsessed with status – the ultimate incompetent management figure, forever frustrated by his own paltry military service in the Great War and now strutting around like a dumpy cockerel as commanding officer of the platoon.
Sgt Wilson, a complacent, dozy and lazy member of the establishment, effortlessly imbued with a sense of privilege and world-weary detachment. Persistently given to undermining Mainwaring.
Lance-Corporal Jones, the panic-stricken jobsworth stifling initiative at every turn and floundering haplessly around to demolish every project with his matchless ability to overcomplicate anything and everything. He has a special skill for wasting inordinate amounts of time with ludicrously impenetrable explanations, usually based on fantasy.
Private Frazer, the miserable doom-laden pessimist and undertaker, forever raining down scorn and stirring up opposition and discontent in the ranks, his own ambitions in the platoon thwarted.
Private Walker, the skiving skimmer who dodged regular military service. Forever on the take but essentially harmless and even with some good characteristics.
Private Godfrey, the embodiment of the well-intentioned but largely hopeless pensioner whose presence relies usually on everyone else. Constantly called away to relieve himself.
Private Pike, the idiotic mummy’s body excused military service. Today he would have a certificate excusing him from any form of employment for anxiety, ADHD and anything else his mother or the system could come up with.
Then there’s the ARP Warden Hodges, whose sole purpose in life is feuding with Mainwaring, finding fault with the platoon’s men and triumphantly announcing their infractions. Hodges is the confrontational and dispute-loving trade union leader to Mainwaring’s shambolic management. His only mission in life is to create conflict and throw his weight about.
To these we can add various other characters, all comic figures (like the vicar and the verger) but essential props that amplify the authenticity.
The reason the sitcom lasted so long is very simple. Every single organisation in Britain is in home to some of or all these personality types, whether it’s the parish council, a local arts society, a corporation or the government.
Almost every problem the Home Guard platoon is confronted with results in bickering, chaos and wasted time, based mostly on posturing, obstinacy, incompetence, obsession with status and a lack of foresight, common sense and lateral thought. If the outcome is a good one, it’s invariably the result of chance.
Sounds familiar? It doesn’t matter what you think about the boats, climate change, the welfare state or the NHS. Every one of Britain’s current problems is being dealt with as if each was an episode of Dad’s Army.
Update, 5 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
QotD: The distance between NHS PR and NHS reality
It wasn’t difficult to promote such historiography by using horror stories from the past, stories which were perfectly plausible because almost any conceivable system will give rise to such stories. If, per impossibile, a new system were to replace the NHS, it would not be difficult to justify it by reference to horror stories, whether or not the new system was better. A war of anecdotes, while always gratifying to the human mind, is not the way to decide important questions such as the superiority or inferiority of a system of health care. Only anecdotes that also illustrate statistical trends or truths are valuable in such a context.
The statistics are not favourable to the NHS, at least if one chooses reasonable standards of comparison, namely other European countries. The results are not disastrous, but they are not good either. The NHS has failed even in its egalitarian goal: the gap between the health of the richest and poorest in society has only grown under its dispensation. And yet the belief in its levelling effect persists.
The propaganda in favour of the NHS has been so successful that it now accords with the sentiments of the population, a triumph that no communist regime achieved despite herculean efforts at indoctrination. The triumph has been achieved without compulsion or violence and ought to be an interesting case for political scientists who study the successful inculcation of political mythology. Of course, the danger of such a study would be that it might induce doubt or cynicism about other political mythologies, and we all need such mythologies to live by.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Worshipping the NHS”, New English Review, 2020-05-07.
September 1, 2025
“Britain … has been reduced to a two-letter abbreviation … ‘Yoo-Kay’, and bearing a sad resemblance to ‘Yukky'”
Back when I first set up the blog, it was clear that certain countries would be mentioned frequently enough to merit having their own categories … Canada, obviously, the United States, our gigantic neighbour, and Britain. As I was born in England nearly 65 years ago, events in the old country still have a resonance for me, but I preferred to call the union “Britain” rather than its formal name of “United Kingdom” — and I try to use the proper names of “England”, “Scotland”, “Wales” and “Ireland” as tags when historically appropriate. I don’t regret that decision at all:
“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
The current national flag-waving by the English is hugely gratifying for those of us who feel that our beloved country has been sidelined for too long.
Along with that visible symbol of English patriotism, may I make another plea – for I don’t want to live in an abbreviated country!
That country used to be called Britain, now usually described as “the UK” – and we see “Great Britain” even less.
Britain, the very name of which resonates with history, and of which I am very proud, has been reduced to a two-letter abbreviation – ugly-looking when written, and something akin to a cheerleader’s chant when spoken: “Yoo-Kay”, and bearing a sad resemblance to “Yukky”.
Almost every country in the world has a “real” name that helps its residents feel a sense of identity. But “I live in the UK”? It has a horribly soulless feel about it, like something a faceless quango has drawn up on the spur of the moment – certainly not a name rich in tradition that has been carried down the millennia.
It was not always so. This reduction of the title of our glorious islands has happened insidiously over the past two or three decades without most folk noticing it. One has only to glance through old newspapers and magazines, or listen to old broadcasts on radio and TV, to notice that 30 years ago the term ‘UK’ was rarely used.
It is ironic that our national broadcaster, the BBC, has ‘British’ enshrined in its very name, yet that organisation is among the worst offenders, almost always preferring ‘UK’ over ‘Britain’ or ‘British’!
How has this happened? There are perhaps many reasons; but the most obvious has been the use of .uk as the terminator in website addresses. If .gb had been the standard, as originally proposed, things may now be quite different.
One of the odd things about all this is that foreigners mostly still use the term ‘Britain’ rather than ‘the UK’ – putting us to shame.
Some may ask: ‘Why does this matter?’
It matters greatly, for the very word ‘Britain’ conveys the feeling of being connected to ancient history. It’s a name with centuries of glorious tradition behind it, a history which we should never be ashamed of proclaiming.
And what about England? Perhaps even worse than the reduction of our islands to an abbreviation is the widespread lack of recognition for my homeland, England.
Update, 2 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Who Killed Pakistan’s First Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan? – W2W 42
TimeGhost History
Published 31 Aug 2025October 1951: Pakistan’s first Prime Minister is gunned down on stage, and the world is left asking — who ordered his death? Was it the British, the Americans, or his own allies in Pakistan? Dive deep into a tangled web of espionage, conspiracy, and Cold War politics as we follow the murder mystery that set the course for South Asia’s future.
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August 31, 2025
Andrew Doyle’s The End of Woke
In The Critic, Titania McGrath reviews The End of Woke, and nobody should be surprised that it isn’t a rave review, although there is some raving:
Renowned grifter Andrew Doyle has written another “book” called The End of Woke. It’s the most repugnant piece of tripe ever to reach the printing press. It’s ignorant, ill-formed and offensive in the extreme. I have absolutely no intention of reading it.
Not content with his previous fascist manual Free Speech and Why It Matters, Doyle in his new book challenges ideological dogma on both the left and the right. It is laughable that he believes that anyone would be interested in such an approach. Imagine being so insecure in your belief-system that you would be open to persuasion and debate.
Doyle is a reactionary monster with a sub-zero IQ, one who is so unenlightened that he does not seem to realise that “liberal values” and “free speech” are Nazi dog-whistles. Having skim-read the blurb of The End of Woke, I’ve gleaned that Doyle supports outmoded and frankly immature notions such as “tolerance” and “liberty”. And he has a head like a cube (see above).
It was to be expected that bigots would approve of this book. The “comedian” Jimmy Carr called it “thought-provoking and entertaining”. The white male author Michael Shermer said it was “a magisterial read”. And that evil cisgender demon Julie Bindel wrote in The Critic that it was “the best work yet by the creator of genius parody Titania McGrath”.
QotD: The “working” world
In other words, at least a fifth of our working time is spent doing nothing, or rather nothing productive. Most people are incapable of doing nothing, in the strict sense that a meditator does nothing. Moreover, much of their activity may not merely be unproductive but positively counterproductive, in so far as most people at work feel obliged to do something, and by far the easiest thing for them to do with their superfluous time is to obstruct others, to have unnecessary meetings and so forth.
If taken seriously, not only offices, but millions of journeys to offices, would become unnecessary, pollution would decline and leisure time would increase. This latter would be a disaster, since most people do not know what to do with themselves as it is. It is for this reason that work is not arranged as efficiently as possible, but its productive aspect is diluted by myriad unnecessary tasks — unnecessary, that is, from the narrow point of view of production. Except in the factories of the East, where production is all, a great deal of work is designed to keep us occupied while we produce nothing. It ameliorates boredom and prevents the bad behaviour in which boredom results.
Anthony Daniels, “The Pleasant Embrace of Fear”, Quadrant, 2020-05-06.
August 30, 2025
Flagging hopes
The English have been told by the transnational elites who happen to use London as one of their bases of operations that pride in the nation is, at best, old fashioned and at worst, racist/sexist/homophobic hate embodied. You could easily imagine Keir Starmer quoting Justin Trudeau that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada England” [and consequently that] “makes us the first post-national state”. I’m certain that’s very close to Starmer’s actual views, but it’s very far from the views of a lot of ordinary English people:
Suddenly flagging has become a big thing in England. Out of nowhere a social media driven grassroots movement of flaggers has emerged. Throughout England groups of newly emerging activist are hanging flag on lamp posts and painting red crosses on roundabouts.
Even in my sleepy town of Faversham, Kent the English flag of St. George could be seen one pole after another waving in the wind. One flagger tells me that “we want to make sure that our town becomes proud of its national heritage”. Another tells me, “raising the flag helps make us feel at home”,
There is little doubt the people supporting Operation Raise the Colours are not just in the business of confining their activities to one-off stunts. At the very least this grass roots movement is determined to challenge the nation’s local councils to value the English flag of St George and to cease being hostile to the flying of the Union Jack.
The movement of flaggers took off in Birmingham. Probably this movement would not have gained such prominence if it hadn’t been for the reaction of Birmingham’s Labour dominated Local Council to the sight of England’s flag flying of the city’s lamp post. The Council reacted by ordering the removal of the flags on the ground that they put the lives of pedestrians and motorists “at risk” despite being up to 25ft off the ground! It was evident to all that this Council applied a different standard of judgment in relation to the Palestinian flag, which are flown all over the City.
Birmingham’s flaggers, who call themselves the “Weoley Warriors” stated that their goal was to “show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements”. One local resident, Mrs Owens, a former police officer told the media; “I think there will be trouble, even riots if they take them down”. She added: “We are sick of having to apologise for being British. The flags have had such a positive impact on the community – people love them. There is nothing political about it.”
There is little doubt that Mrs Owens message has resonated with wide sections of the public. Supporters of the movement indicated that they were fed up with the situation where local councils were happy to fly the Palestinian and LGBTQ flags but not that of their nation. The movement of flaggers quickly spread from Birmingham to towns and cities throughout England. “Let’s bring back patriotism once and for all”, stated the Facebook page of Operation Raise the Colours, It urged members to post images of the assorted national flags of the four British nations “being raised around our great towns and cities”. In response groups individuals decided to form groups who took it upon themselves go out and do what they call “flagging” around their town.
There is also no doubt that the flaggers have provoked a hostile reaction from large sections of the British Elite, who regard the flaggers with contempt and never use an opportunity to issue warnings about the threat post by far-right conspirators lurking in the background. This alarmist rection was personified by Nick Ireland, the Liberal Democrat leader of Dorset Council who insisted that some residents found the sudden appearance St George’s and union flags “intimidating”. He added that it was “naïve” to suggest that these emblems had not been “hijacked” by some far-right groups.
