Word In Your Ear
Published 20 Dec 2024The 17 year-old Al Stewart played electric guitar in a dance band in Bournemouth in 1963. When he borrowed an acoustic and sang “Masters Of War” in the break, he heard the sweet sound of applause. The next night he played three Dylan songs and sensed which way the wind was blowing. He talks here about moving to London, playing at Bunjies and becoming the compere at Les Cousins as his now 60-year career began to lift off. And about his Farewell Tour which kicks off in the UK in October 2025, a combination of songs and story-telling coloured by two great heroes, Peter Ustinov and Alistair Cooke.
This cracking exchange steers by way of Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Helen of Troy, Stalin, Hitler and the Battle of Moscow, the Weeley Festival of 1971, the three songs he always plays, the young Cat Stevens and what he told Paul Simon he should do with the just-composed “Homeward Bound”.
January 26, 2026
How Al Stewart struck gold, the folk boom and a flat-share with Paul Simon
January 24, 2026
Britain’s Amelia phenomenon
On his Substack, Fergus Mason talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia:
Amelia, the new queen of the British right.
Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along — even if it does make some serious points, too.
A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game — called Pathways — is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration”.
As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection — there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting — which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not — and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:
[…]
Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit user commented, “Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the ‘racist’? Do they understand how the internet works?”
Well, they certainly do now.
The Daily Telegraph published an article about Pathways on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. […]
There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.
January 17, 2026
Shout Out UK – “… embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf”
At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter looks at the most amazing political own-goal I’ve encountered in a long, long time:
Somewhere in the suffocating fog of the unhappy and restless Yookay, a minor functionary of the government’s behavioural shaping bureaucracy is staring at her computer screen in appalled alarm at the horror she’s accidentally helped to summon from the churning depths of the Immaterium.
Shout Out UK, which describes its mission as “countering disinformation through political and media literacy”, released a “visual novel” called Pathways, subtitled “navigating the Internet, gaming, and extremism”. The game itself is of course terrible, a ham-fisted “teaching aid” intended to remind British teenagers that even innocuous and entirely peaceful activities – downloading memes, speaking your mind, watching videos, researching things for yourself, attending rallies – will complicate their lives if they draw the concerned and empathetic eye of the managerial state, which after all just wants what’s best for them.
Prevent, if you haven’t heard of them, are a group of government-funded busybodies whose remit is to prevent extremism via early intervention, catching impressionable youth before they can be radicalized. The organization was nominally started to deal with Islamic terrorists, but in recent years it has focused on the “right-wing extremism” of the native British to the exclusion of all else. The Southport butcher Axel Rudakubana, for instance, was referred to Prevent multiple times for his open glorification of white genocide, which Prevent ignored completely.
The player can choose either a male or female character, both of whom are amusingly and awkwardly referred to with they/them pronouns, with grammatical abominations such as “Charlie decided to look for themselves” sprinkled throughout. The character is then placed in a series of scenarios and made to choose between good and bad options: downloading extremist content or telling an adult; agreeing with a classmate that ethnic minorities are being shown favouritism at the expense of native youth vs clapping back at her unconscionable bigotry; watching a video and reading more about the subject or ignoring it; accepting or refusing an invitation to join a secret group chat; attending an anti-immigration rally or staying home. If you make the bad choice, a little “extremism meter” goes into the red.
[…]
If you want to play the game for yourself, your best bet is probably to download the archived version of the Government Approved Goth Girl Dating Simulator. I was able to play it a week ago, but since then it gets stuck on the loading screen, which at first I thought was because they’d taken it offline, but is probably just because Shout Out UK has gotten DDOSed by an entirely unexpected surge of interest in their execrable product (or maybe it’s just that the Shout Out UK website has a dead link on its page, as after poking around a bit on their website I was able to find one that works). Alternatively, you can find most of the screenshots archived here.
Had it not been for one unfortunate creative choice made by the development team, no one would have taken any notice of Pathways. It would have been one of countless cringe-inducing training aids churned out by regime-adjacent quangos cashing in on the flood of taxpayer lucre sluicing through the DEI-and-disinformation industry. But for some reason, which can be explained only by a calamitous failure on the part of Shout Out UK to develop an accurate theory of mind for their target audience, the creators of Pathways decided that it would be a great idea to cast the awful bigot leading the protagonist step by step to his ideological doom in the form of a cute alt girl, thereby sending the message that embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf.
Update, 18 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.
December 29, 2025
What Are Sugar Plums? How to make real Victorian sugar plums
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 10 Dec 2024Purple, green, yellow, red, blue, and white hard candies with cherry centers
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1865Sugar plums go hand-in-hand with Christmas, but what exactly are they? There are recipes out there for a confection made of dried fruit and nuts that’s rolled into balls, but true Victorian sugar plums were a kind of candy made up of layers of hardened sugar syrup and gum arabic surrounding a fruit or nut core. They were pretty much the same thing as Jordan almonds.
You won’t find many recipes for them in Victorian-era cookbooks because no one really made them at home. The specialized equipment and labor involved meant that most people bought them from a confectioner, and I can see why.
Making these was a three-day endeavor for me, and I had to get a panning machine attachment for my stand mixer, and gum arabic, which I surprisingly didn’t already have in my pantry. They’re a nice sweet treat, but really more trouble than they’re worth to make at home.
Cherry Sugar-Plums. Set preserved cherries on a sieve in the stove. When they are partly dry, mix them with pounded sugar, and rub them over a sieve; dry them again, and proceed as with barberry sugar-plums.
Barberry Sugar-Plums. Take perfectly ripe barberries, stem them, dry them in a stove, and add the gum and sugar in the swinging basin. To accomplish this, after being heated in the stove, give them a coating of one part sugar, and one part gum arabic; and, when thoroughly moistened, powder with sifted sugar. Dry the coating in a stove; add a second on the next day, so as to completely cover the fruit; then thicken, and finish like the verdun sugar-plums. The fruit must be coated away from the fire. They are colored like the rose sugar-plums, and pearled like the lemon.
— The Art of Confectionery, 1865
December 28, 2025
QotD: The Middle Ages saw rebellions but no revolutions
At some point in this space, we discussed the difference between a rebellion and a revolution. Drawing on Michael Walzer’s key work The Revolution of the Saints, I argued that a true revolution requires ideology, as it’s an attempt to fundamentally change society’s structure.
Therefore there were no revolutions in the Middle Ages or the Ancient World, only rebellions — even a nasty series of civil wars like The Wars of the Roses were merely bloody attempts to replace one set of rulers with another, without comment on the underlying structure. A medieval usurpation couldn’t help but raise questions about “political theory” in the broadest sense — how can God’s anointed monarch be overthrown? — but medieval usurpers understood this: They always presented the new boss as the true, legitimate king by blood. I forget how e.g. Henry IV did it — Wiki’s not clear — but he did, shoehorning himself into the royal succession somehow.
Combine that with Henry’s obvious competence, Richard II’s manifest in-competence, and Henry’s brilliant manipulation of the rituals of kingship, and that was good enough; his strong pimp hand took care of the rest. Henry IV was a legitimate king because he acted like a legitimate king.
A revolution, by contrast, aims to change fundamental social relations. That’s why medieval peasant rebellions always failed. Wat Tyler had as many, and as legitimate, gripes against Richard II as Henry Bolingbroke did, but unlike Henry’s, Tyler’s gripes couldn’t really be addressed by a change of leadership — they were structural. 200 years later, and the rebels were now revolutionaries, willing to give structural change a go.
Severian, “¡Viva la Revolución!”, Founding Questions, 2025-02-27.
December 19, 2025
The strange rebirth of English patriotism
In The Conservative Woman, Niall McCrae discusses what he calls “a new crusade” as the downtrodden English rediscover — or in many cases, discover for the first time — patriotic feelings for their nation, and earn the scorn and contempt of the ruling class and their media fart-catchers:
“Union Jacks and crosses of St George” by Ben Sutherland is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
A wave of patriotism swept across England last summer. Flags were tied to lampposts up and down the country, but while these displays had wide public support, the intelligentsia were troubled, particularly as the colours were often flown in areas of cultural diversity or on roads passing hotels accommodating illegal immigrants. This suggested provocation, rather than the use of national flags to celebrate sporting success.
Politicians and Guardian commentators were careful not to appear too negative, but they emphasised unity and inclusion over nationalistic fervour. The Union Jack was preferable to the St George’s Cross, because they associated the latter more with the far right (this is not accurate, as groups such as the National Front and BNP rallied under the Union Jack).
The Union Jack (properly termed “flag” as a jack is hoisted at sea), comprises the crosses of St George, St Andrew and St Patrick. It is perhaps the most impressive flag in the world, a classic design of great cultural impact. How globalists, the EU and Islamists would like to banish it!
The “Unite the Kingdom” march led by Tommy Robinson in September, which brought a million people to the streets of London, was a marvellous spectacle of patriotism. For the counter-Jihad movement, conflict in the Middle East is regarded as an existential struggle against militant Islam. Israeli flags are often waved towards pro-Palestine marchers, and the London rally gave several Zionists a platform at Whitehall. However, the vast majority of marchers were there for one country only – their own. This was truly a British event, with a roughly equal mix of Union and St George flags, alongside some Welsh dragons and Scottish saltires, and Irish tricolours too.
Significantly, there was another symbol prominently at the London march: the Christian cross. A poignant moment was at the ramparts of Westminster Bridge, where a fearless young man mounted the head of the stone lion and from that precarious pedestal raised in one hand the flag of St George, and in the other a wooden cross. (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOpagGvkQk9/)
I first observed the resurgence of Christian faith at the huge protests against the Covid-19 regime. Several marchers bore crosses, or placards asserting the power of God over earthly evil. The Book of Revelation was quoted, and when the “vaccine” was launched it was cast as the “Mark of the Beast”.
Socially unacceptable they may have been, but now St George and Christian crosses are regularly appearing together in gatherings for patriotic or traditional causes. In his book Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of Flags (2017), Tim Marshall observed that “with the rise of Islam in Europe, these symbols are likely to be increasingly used by the far right to try to define the continent as what they think it is, and in opposition to what they think it is not”. You can’t get a book released by a mainstream publisher without expressing such approved outlook, but Marshall is making the mistake of blaming patriots for the devaluing of their national flag; it is surely the subversive ideology of the progressive left that has taught generations that national pride is regressive and bigoted. Meanwhile “woke” warriors are not shy of waving the Pride rainbow, transgender stripes and the flag of Palestine. And the likes of Hope Not Hate had no complaint about huge fascist-style marches awash in the blue and yellow stars of the EU.
December 17, 2025
History of Britain X: King Arthur, History or Myth?
Thersites the Historian
Published 7 Aug 2025In this lecture, I discuss the historicity (or lack thereof) of the Arthurian myth.
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December 6, 2025
QotD: King Henry wants a divorce
In 1532, then, Parliament presented the King with the Supplication Against the Ordinaries. “Ordinaries” means “members of a religious order” — basically, the Supplication is everyone’s beefs with the Church. You can read the list at the Wiki link, but they all boil down to this: The Church was effectively a state-within-the-State, operating a different system of law, taxation, etc. And that’s what praemunire means, too — “a 14th-century law that prohibited the assertion or maintenance of papal jurisdiction, or any other foreign jurisdiction or claim of supremacy in England, against the supremacy of the monarch”. By accusing Wolsey of it, Henry VIII was saying that he, Wolsey, was ultimately working for the Church, not the King … which is kinda what you’d expect from a Cardinal, no?
That’s the problem.
Long story short, by 1532 the state-within-the-State that was the Church was blocking the upward mobility of new men like Thomas Cromwell.1 There was an entire secular education system; it was cranking out talented, ambitious men; in short, there was an “overproduction of elites”, since there were limited spaces in the nobility and the Church and they were all already occupied by either bluebloods, or guys like Wolsey who had jumped on the gravy train much earlier.
But this was an artificial bottleneck. The Tudor state had plenty of room to expand; they needed far more educated bureaucrats than the old system was capable of supplying. The old system needed to go, on order to make room for the new, and in many ways that’s what the Reformation was: A brushfire, clearing off the deadwood. A political and administrative brushfire, disguised as a theological dispute. It’s no accident that the most Reformed polities — late Tudor England, the Netherlands, the Schmalkaldic League — were the most politically and economically efficient ones, too.
And by Reforming the Church, the brushfire could extend to the rest of the depraved, decadent, moribund, fake-and-gay culture. The Renaissance is obsessive about the old, but it is, obviously, something very very new. People raised in the Late Medieval world were emotionally incapable of a total break with the past — I don’t think any culture really is, but a culture as hidebound as the Middle Ages certainly isn’t. But so long as they could find some warrant for change in the Classical past (and being the inventive types they were, they’d always find such a warrant), they could purge the culture, root and branch, in the guise of “returning ad fontes“.
Severian, “Reformation II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-08.
- This is where the analogy breaks down, because Late Medieval men were not Postmodern men — Cromwell was actually loyal to Wolsey almost to his, Cromwell’s, literal death. Men had honor back then. It also speaks to the kind of man Wolsey must’ve been, to have inspired the loyalty of a guy like Cromwell despite it all. Cromwell was a ruthless motherfucker, even by Tudor England’s Olympic-class standards; he’d stab his own mother if he found it politically necessary; but he still stayed loyal to his man even when it looked like that would cost him his life.
November 25, 2025
QotD: British Socialism in the 1930s
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
November 24, 2025
What is Spotted Dick?
Boiled pudding with plenty of currants and a simple butter and brown sugar sauce
City/Region: England
Time Period: 1854While the name “spotted dick” makes us giggle today, its likely origins are just an amusing circumstance of language evolution. The Old English word for dough is dāg (sounds very similar to dog), which probably led to a version of the word that sounds like dick. Funnily enough, another name for spotted dick is spotted dog. So in all likelihood, the name is a holdover from Old English meaning spotted dough.
Whatever you call it, this boiled pudding is really good. It’s sweet, but not too sweet, with an almost crumbly texture and is very moist. The butter and brown sugar sauce isn’t necessary for it to be tasty, but it’s so easy and delicious that I highly recommend making it.
Spotted Dick.
Put three-quarters of a pound of flour into a basin, half a pound of beef suet, half ditto of currants, two ounces of sugar, a little cinnamon, mix with two eggs and two gills of milk; boil in either mould or cloth for one hour and a half; serve with melted butter, and a little sugar over.
— A Shilling Cookery for the People by Alexis Soyer, 1854
November 18, 2025
QotD: Echoes of the Thirty Years’ War
The analogy only extends so far, of course. Hillaire Belloc has argued that the dissolution of the monasteries in England kicked out one of the three legs supporting English culture — by putting all that land and money under the State’s direct control (that “Tudor revolution in government” again), the State and the Economy are inextricably merged. It’s proto-fascism (recall that The Servile State was written in 1912). Not only is this true, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Back in 1912, the Church was still alive as a cultural force. The Media was still at least somewhat capitalist — in competition for eyeballs — and in many cases led The Opposition, which also still existed as a cultural force.
Nowadays, of course, not only are the State and the Economy indistinguishable, they’re also indistinguishable from The Media. There IS no “opposition”; whatever anemic resistance to The State is stage managed like pro wrestling. Real dissidents are in the positions of recusants in Tudor England, except that the Church, instead of sending priests to minister to us in secret, is sending battalions of Inquisitors to help hunt us down.
In short, there’s no entry point for a new “Reformation”. As bad as the Period of the Wars of Religion was, gifted leaders had structural ways to achieve their objectives and keep the peace. Henry of Navarre could proclaim that “Paris is worth a mass”; Cardinal Richelieu could proclaim raison d’etat; the old Peace of Augsburg system — cuius regio; eius religio — could work well enough with a prince who understood his people and chose not to push too hard. “Separation of Church and State” wasn’t articulated as a formal political principle until the 19th century (and only there because it was badly misconstrued), but as a practical solution to politico-cultural problems it works just fine …
… provided you’ve got the structures in place to handle it, and we don’t. The Church, the State, the Economy, the Media, Academia, Technology … who can say where the one ends and the other begins? It’s all Poz, and there’s no aspect of our lives that the Poz doesn’t touch, because instead of separate and often competing socio-governmental structures, they’ve all merged. They’re ALL Poz.
Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.
November 13, 2025
QotD: Anarchists
When I was younger and, perhaps, more spunky, I used to read Proudhon and Kropotkin. These were all very well, but the systemizing tendency had infected both. Utopianism also muddled their thinking. Without going back to Zeno of Cilium, let me just say that the posterior tradition in recommending anarchy was more subtle and arch. (Read the Antigone, for instance. Today it’s just the brand name for a Givenchy bag.) Anarchy was an inheritance from Greece and even Rome. It could never have been reduced to an election manifesto.
It is interesting that the first English use of the term, anarchisme, dates back to Henry VIII. Those resisting his Divorce and Reformation were taken to be anarchists. Nobly they defended the ancient liturgical order, in such spontaneous actions as the Pilgrimage of Grace.
Prominent anarchists of our modern age have, at their best (or worst, depending on one’s point-of-view), had dodgy ideological affiliations, but a real appreciation for economy of means. One thinks of e.g. Gavrilo Princip, the ingenious Serbian, able to ignite a Great War with a few gunshots, and bring down the Austro-Hungarian Empire almost as an aside. Or a certain Osama bin Laden, able to drag a superpower into pointless foreign wars, with very limited means. I do not approve of either gentleman, please note, but their efficiency was astounding.
David Warren, “Anarchia”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-09.
November 6, 2025
QotD: The Reformation
It’s easy to get lost in this stuff — I had a long bit about Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the Supplication Against the Ordinaries, the Annates Bill, and so on here — but the upshot is, pulling the Church down in England revealed the massive scale of its corruption. I want to say that the Annates Bill alone doubled the King’s revenue, and the dissolution of the monasteries (well underway in Cardinal Wolsey’s time, incidentally) unlocked unimaginable wealth. But it also fatally undermined the regime, because now an attack on the existing Church structure was also an attack on the King … and vice versa.
What you got, in short, was a total social conflagration. The “Reformation” wasn’t really about theology. Nothing Luther said was particularly new. Jan Huss and John Wyclif said basically the same things 100 years earlier; hell, St. Augustine said them 1000 years before. There’s still an irreconcilable “Protestant” strain in Catholicism now — Cornelius Jansen was just a Catholic Luther, and in a lot of ways a much better one; he was declared a heretic because reasons, and “because reasons” was good enough in Jansen’s time (the very nastiest phase of the Thirty Years’ War), but since he’s just quoting St. Augustine …
The point is, the undeniable rottenness of the Catholic Church made it a convenient whipping boy for any conceivable beef against society as a whole. Because it wasn’t just the Church that was too decadent, depraved, and corrupt to go on — it was the entirety of Late Medieval society. Again, stop me if this sounds familiar, but Late Medieval society looks a lot like spoiled, histrionic children playing dress up. They look like kings, and they act like kings (popes, bishops, etc.), but it’s obvious it’s just an act — they know they’re supposed to do these things (put on tournaments, hold jubilees, preach sermons, fight wars, etc.) but they have no idea why.
Severian, “Reformation”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-07.
October 27, 2025
“The Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet”
In The Conservative Woman, Daniel Jupp considers the recent schism in the Church of England, which has left the original church shorn of the vast majority of Anglican worshippers across the globe:
“Canterbury Cathedral aerial image” by John D Fielding is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
Today, though, the English Church is broken. The Anglican Communion, which encompassed all the places across the world touched by English exploration, discovery, trade and power, where English Christian missionaries often led the way, has witnessed a devastating schism. At the start of this month Dame Sarah Mullally was appointed the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. As is tradition, the appointment was approved by the Prime Minister and the King, but the nomination came from the Church.
Whether Anglican Christians worldwide approved doesn’t seem to have been considered. Based on multiple past fissures between the part of the Church active in the United Kingdom and the (much larger) Anglican communities globally which had each time been papered over, it may be that the hierarchy in England assumed that the same would happen again.
If so, they were wrong.
The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (also known as Gafcon) represent the Anglican faith in Africa. Their response was to declare publicly that they would no longer send delegates to Church meetings in the United Kingdom, no longer consider the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals or a seat of authority to which they deferred, and no longer consider themselves in the same communion as the Bishops and clergy of the Church of England within England. Perhaps even more tellingly, they asserted that they were the true Anglican communion, more loyal to the instructions of the Bible and Anglican interpretation of those than priests in England. There’s a subtle but powerful distinction there – they were saying not that they had broken away from an Anglican vision of Biblical instruction and Christian identity but that the Church in England had done so.
African Anglicans now assert that they are the true Anglicans, and that the organisation within the UK is not. And in terms of the number of people who follow their message, they are right to assert this.
In losing the African churches and the global, more conservative branch of Anglicanism, the Church of England has lost 80 per cent of Anglicans on the planet.
Imagine a company that lost 80 per cent of its customers. Or a political party that lost 80 per cent of its voters. Or a nation state that lost 80 per cent of its territory. These would in each case be recognised as unmitigated disasters.
Now imagine this following a previous disaster, which was the end of Justin Welby’s period as Archbishop over a scandal based on not being firm enough and honest enough about paedophile cases in the clergy. One would think the Church might be looking for a non-controversial appointment intended to restore moral trust immediately and defuse criticism.
They did not do this. Knowing the much more conservative and traditionalist stance held by the majority of Anglicans, they chose not to listen to those people, and did something it knew to be passionately opposed by them.
There is an intense irony here that gets to the heart of the self-inflicted problems of the Church of England today. Sarah Mullally has been very clear on the kind of Church she believes in – she’s a supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and activism, she has strongly backed asylum and migration, she is a self-declared feminist, and she is both politically and it seems religiously progressive. As Bishop of London, she boasted about representing a diverse and multicultural city, and put her experience in handling diversity as one of the key qualifications and evidence of positive experience she could bring to being the Archbishop of Canterbury.
This was an intensely reality-averse selling-point. London’s slightly lower trend on the relentless decline of Christian faith and attendance compared with the UK as a whole is based not on Mullally’s competence and persuasion. It is based on traditionalist, conservative-minded members of the African Anglican communion in London being more likely to go into a church.
And these people hate woke attitudes and politics.
Update, 28 October: 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.
October 9, 2025
Enoch Powell: The Father of Brexit?
The Rest Is History
Published 6 Oct 2025Who was Enoch Powell, the deeply controversial British conservative politician? Why is he the father of Brexit, and possibly even Reform? And, how did he come to make his inflammatory “Rivers of Blood speech”, in 1968?
00:00 Intro
00:23 Hive
01:46 Introducing Enoch Powell
07:41 A very peculiar childhood
09:19 The least clubbable man in Cambridge
13:30 War years
14:48 An imperial dream thwarted
17:02 An eccentric MP
23:26 The anti-American
24:53 Immigration in post-war Britain
31:09 Smethwick 1964: campaign, slogan, shock result
33:34 Uber
34:14 Mid-60s Britain
35:59 Powell pivots to immigration
41:44 English identity in Powell’s mind (“united people in an island home”)
44:12 Politics & ambition: differentiating from Heath
45:03 The role of US race riots in Powell’s evolving opinions
46:24 Kenyan Asians crisis; Labour’s response
49:47 Race Relations Bill setup: Powell prepares the speech
50:59 The “Rivers of Blood” speech
56:07 Immediate fallout: sacking, friends’ reactions
57:42 Public opinion divides
1:00:04 His legacy
1:04:02 Was Powell racist?
1:08:12 Long-term legacy: why politicians avoided the topicJoin Dominic and Tom as they discuss Enoch Powell — one of the most incendiary and contentious figures in all of British political history — and his enduring shadow today.
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