Quotulatiousness

May 29, 2026

Progressives, suddenly – “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

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

Apologies to Mel Brooks for hijacking that line from Blazing Saddles. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, signs of panic from the media and media-adjacent progressive ranks as they realize Silicon Valley is an existential threat to their media monopoly:

    Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound

    One aside on the Blair conversation

    I’m absolutely gobsmacked at the level of hostility to “tech bros” and the belief that we can just insulate ourselves from AI and technology

    Like listening to weavers on the spinning Jenny or Hanson cab drivers on the advent of the motor car

Look this isn’t complicated.

The left hates you because they’re (correctly) worried AI is going to replace the “work” they do for their comfortable professional-managerial class sinecures, while at the same time they are (correctly) concerned that AI generated video will completely neutralize the remaining cultural influence they wield via their control of entertainment media.

The right (correctly) views you with suspicion and contempt because you already replaced white men with H1Bindians, which hurt us economically, and also enshittified the Internet, which was further enshittified due to your perfidious collaboration with leftists during the peak of the Great Awokening’s censorship and deplatforming push.

Despite your years of service to them, the left wants to immolate your headless corpses on funeral pyres built from your burning data centres, merely because you MIGHT be a threat to them in the near future.

Despite your record of pusillanimity, the right — some of us — are willing to work with you. That is a godsend for you, because we are literally your only defence right now.

But we have conditions, and those conditions are not negotiable.

May 28, 2026

“Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred”

Filed under: Europe, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This is the natural end result of “hate speech” laws, as a court in Belgium clearly states in the finding quoted here:

These two paragraphs of my verdict are crucial for everyone to read and understand.

“Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” 1⃣

“For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law.” 2⃣

This means you can go to jail for “inciting hatred” even if your statements were 100% factual (see 1⃣) and even if you did NOT incite concrete acts of hate (see 2⃣).

The benchmark of “inciting hatred” , a crime punishable by prison, is thus “saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group“. This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.

The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn’t care 1⃣. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter 2⃣, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone COULD be incited to “a general attitude of disapproval“, this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.

I’m telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it’s already too late. You will NEVER be able to beat these laws in court. You have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.

May 27, 2026

Tim Hortons now pretends they’re going to stop abusing the TFW program, maybe

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There are few Canadian companies who’ve done more to trash their own reputation than Tim Hortons over the last decade or so. What used to be everyone’s coffee chain of choice, through breathtaking abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker scheme and other shady employment practices, has now become one of the most detested companies in the land. Everyone I’ve talked to seems to have their own Tim Hortons anecdotes, and none of them are complimentary to the firm or its largely non-Canadian workforce. Last week, Dunkin’ Donuts announced that they would be re-entering the Canadian market and suddenly Tim Hortons claims they’ll be hiring a whole bunch of Canadian workers to staff their restaurants:

“Tim Hortons Drive Thru” by baekken is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

If you believe yesterday’s announcement that Tim Hortons plans to dial back its use (and clear abuse) of the Temporary Foreign Worker Programme (TFWP) to hire “10,000 people locally” out of the goodness of its heart, I have a below-sea-level basement apartment to sell you in Richmond, B.C.’s peat-based Delta soil.

Let’s start with the obvious: If those 10,000 positions suddenly exist now, they never should have been outsourced to begin with. And yet, Tim Hortons spent the better part of a decade lobbying the Canadian federal government to increase and maintain workforce percentage caps that directly impacted thousands of positions, and influenced the entirety of the Canadian labour market.

Rather than ever lobbying for a specific number of individuals (because, again, they didn’t have an actual need when the market was showing a perpetual 20+ percent youth unemployment rate), Tim Hortons and its parent company, Restaurant Brands International Inc., instead lobbied to manipulate the overall percentage (or cap) of TFWs allowed per restaurant. During supposed “pandemic-era shortages”, they successfully massaged wilful dupes in government to increase that cap, allowing up to 30 percent of a restaurant’s workforce to consist of TFWs.

When the federal government finally cut the cap back down to 10 percent to curb immigration numbers, Tim Hortons heavily lobbied through 2024 and late 2025 to raise the limit back to 20 percent or 30 percent. Up until yesterday, they argued that rural and remote franchises continued to face severe labour shortages.

What they actually face is competition from Dunkin’ Donuts, with the popular American coffee chain set to break ground on its first Canadian locations in 2026, under a plan to aggressively expand to 600-700 locations nationwide.

If one were to charitably take Tim’s sudden shift in labour strategy at face value, this framing of yesterday’s announcement from the Globe and Mail might be enough to let bygones be bygones.

    Tim Hortons was one of the biggest proponents of the TFWP, a controversial immigration stream that expanded in popularity during the pandemic and came to symbolise some of the failings of the Trudeau-era immigration strategy.

    Restaurant Brands International Inc., Tim Hortons’ parent company, is also pledging to stop lobbying the federal government to expand the TFWP, citing the high youth unemployment rate.

But the devil, they say, is in the details; in this instance, in the lack thereof. That “10,000 people locally” includes foreign students, and TFWs already in the country, with both groups still on active and expired permits in the millions.

And that’s just the start: graduates on Post-Graduation Work Permits (PGWP), and individuals under the International Mobility Program (IMP) do not require a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA). Meaning a single restaurant could be staffed almost 100% by temporary visa holders, but if those employees are international students or PGWP holders, Tim’s corporate metrics classify them as “local hires”, not TFWs.

That also means Tim’s supposed “cap” on TFWs was never an inherently honest number.

Corporate cynicism is nothing new, but Tim Hortons’ hiring practices have effectively replaced tens of thousands of part time jobs for Canadian teens with full- and part-time jobs for foreign students, temporary foreign workers, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, visa-overstayers, and any other kind of cheap and exploitable employee who can be depended upon to meekly accept whatever working conditions are on offer with minimal chance of anyone appealing to health inspectors or federal regulators. Very convenient for Tim Hortons and their franchisees. Not very Canadian, but very convenient.

Update: Perhaps another reason that Tim Hortons is backing away from the TFW designation is that the government has given them an even easier way to hire foreign workers:

Mark Carney is lying to you.

In the first 90 days of 2026, Canada issued 292,855 work permits, smashing the full-year target of 220k–230k.

247,895 under IMP (International Mobility Program)

44,960 under TFWP

Why employers love the IMP:

It’s a much cheaper, faster, and easier alternative to the TFWP.

Key Financial & Practical Benefits of IMP (vs TFWP):

No LMIA required → Saves $770+ per worker (no $1,000 LMIA fee)

No mandatory job advertising to Canadians

Much faster processing (weeks vs months)

Lower compliance costs — only $230 employer fee
Fewer obligations around housing, wages, and recruitment

More flexible permits for workers (easier to retain staff)

This is exactly why companies like Tim Hortons and many in hospitality/retail have shifted heavily to IMP workers. It’s faster, cheaper, and bypasses most of the strict labour market tests required under the TFWP.

That would seem to explain Tim Hortons’ sudden change of heart rather more than the risk of increased competition by a revived Dunkin’ Donuts expansion.

May 23, 2026

The inevitable collapse of Rhodesia

Filed under: Africa, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Celina outlines the key reasons Rhodesia was never likely to avoid the collapse of its ruling class regardless of outside pressures or embargoes:

Rhodesia as a country vanished in 1980, yet it has returned online in fragments, whether that be restored bush-war footage on YouTube, memorial websites, photographs of men in army short-shorts holding their rifles or a growing online group of conservative influencers speaking about the destruction of Western civilisation.

I believe Rhodesia continues to remain intriguing to people because it condensed several modern traumas into one: decolonisation, the collapse of settler sovereignty, the Cold War, guerrilla war, sanctions, and the spectacle of a militarily capable state losing politically. It survives in the imagination because it appears, to admirers and enemies alike, as an unusually concentrated test of whether a highly organised White minority can hold a country once history, demographics, and international legitimacy have begun to run against it.

The case of Rhodesia is more haunting the closer one looks. Rhodesia was not a failed state in the crude sense, like many African nations. It had an efficient bureaucracy, a productive commercial economy, a coherent White political class, and security forces widely regarded as formidable. Yet its doom lay not principally in incompetence, but in structure.

“Demographics are destiny” is often used as a slogan. In Rhodesia it was a structural fact. At the moment of Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, about 230,000 Whites governed a total African population of roughly 4.2 million, meaning the ruling minority amounted to about 5 percent of the whole. The state was trying to preserve European political control without ever having become a European-majority society. That was the original wound.

Rhodesian officials understood the problem clearly. From the early colonial period, administrators and settler pressure groups openly pursued the creation of a “white man’s country”, publicising opportunities in Britain and South Africa, subsidising immigration, distributing land, and hoping to expand the European population fast enough to secure political permanence. Some settlers stated the logic bluntly: the only satisfactory final solution would be for Europeans to outnumber Africans. But even in the high-settlement decades, the project never came close to achieving that outcome.

By the 1960s the imbalance had become impossible to ignore. Josiah Brownell’s book The Collapse of Rhodesia: Population Demographics and the Politics of Race showed how deeply Rhodesian politics became organised around the fear of “racial swamping”. The 1969 census reported 228,040 whites, around 15,000 fewer than previously estimated, and opponents of the government attacked the drift in ratios from 17.5 Africans per European in 1962 to about 22 to 1 in 1969. More devastating still, that same census showed a net increase of only 7,000 whites since 1962, against a net increase of roughly 980,000 Africans.

Nor was immigration the easy answer. Between 1955 and 1979, Rhodesia received 255,692 immigrants but lost 246,047 emigrants. On average, about 4.6 percent of the white population arrived each year and 4.1 percent left. That is a staggering level of population churn for a community already too small to feel secure. It meant that Rhodesia was not only numerically weak; it was socially and psychologically fragile, dependent on a white population that was transient.

May 16, 2026

Canada’s imaginary “immigration consensus”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

An informative post from earlier this year, showing how the much-talked-about “immigration consensus” was never any more than an expression of Laurentian Elite luxury belief:

Ever since immigration became a hot issue, it has become fashionable to say that “Trudeau broke Canada’s immigration consensus”. But this “consensus” was based on a false narrative that is easily disproved with data.

UNHEARD VOICES

Until about 10 years ago, I had also believed that there was an “immigration consensus” in Canada. But once my life in Canada had settled down enough for me to have the mental space to dabble in public debates online, I came across an opposing view. An Indian immigrant who was then working as editor for an English language community newspaper in the GTA wrote often about opinion polls showing a fairly high level of opposition to high immigration. His name is Pradip Rodrigues. I corresponded with him via email, and later we became friends.

What struck me at the time was that the lone voice talking about these polls was himself an immigrant. Some years later, I came across an article in [the] Vancouver Sun by journalist Douglas Todd, saying that Indo-Canadians in the Vancouver region were unhappy with the large influx of international students [from] India. Given how much value the Progressives (which category most of the MSM is a part of) put on “lived experience”, the reporting by Pradip and Mr. Todd should have attracted urgent attention.

But because the mess being created by excessive immigration hadn’t reached crisis levels by then, these voices went unheard. At best, they were preaching to the choir, and at worst, they were accused of racism (or, in the case of Pradip, “internalized racism”). Smart people see beforehand the problems that are coming and take steps to avert them. People of average intelligence attend to problems after they have occurred. Fools keep denying that problems have occurred, and it always takes a full-blown crisis to get them to accept that they have a problem on their hands – at which point they segue effortlessly to blaming others for the problems. We see this in many policy areas in Canada, and immigration is one of the most salient examples of this shortcoming in Canadian society.

RAISON D’ETRE

No politician will ever tire of saying that “Canada needs immigration to boost our economy”. An ancillary statement is that “immigrants pay taxes that support Canada’s social programs”. But as I showed in my article “Immigration Does NOT Increase Prosperity“, the inflation-adjusted compounded average growth rate (CAGR) in per capita GDP fell by a precipitous 84% between 1970 and 2021, ending up at an anemic 0.67% in the decade ending in 2021:

Clearly, the capacity of Canadians – long-time residents and newcomers alike – to “boost Canada’s economy” and “pay (more) taxes that support the social programs” has been eroded almost to zero. It is worth pondering how, in spite of clear signs evidenced by data, the exact opposite narrative could prevail over such a long period, and how so many people subscribed to it. This is as if Abraham Lincoln’s sage statement that “You can fool some people all the time, or all the people for some time, but not all the people all the time” was held in abeyance in Canada from 1970 onwards – or is that the case?

Not all of the people, but enough of the boomer generation who were raised with the constant drumbeat of propaganda from the Liberals — Canada’s “Natural Governing Party”, as they liked to refer to themselves — and now that most of them are comfortably retired, they seen no reason to rock the boat, even when their own children and grandchildren tell them how bad Canada has become since their prime.

May 12, 2026

First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:

Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.

The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.

Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.

Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!

Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.

It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:

    The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.

And that is the point. He goes on:

    The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …

    Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.

Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”

Something something hoist, something something petard

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

The Liberal party, both federally and provincially, have been massive fans of immigration for decades. Any kind of restriction on foreigners being allowed into the country was seen as tantamount to treason, in Liberal eyes. This resulted in a lot of votes for Liberal candidates in election after election, as most immigrants associated their welcome in Canada with the party most associated with pro-immigration policies. On the weekend, this happy little virtuous circle suddenly broke in the Toronto-area provincial riding of Scarborough Southwest, and the party is left wondering what is going on:

AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier

There is a particular flavour of humiliation reserved for the courtier who discovers, too late, that the rules he wrote for everyone else now apply to him. On Saturday afternoon in Scarborough Southwest, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith tasted it. The former federal Minister of Housing, the man Mark Carney himself had blessed to retain his Beaches–East York seat while parachuting into a provincial nomination as a launchpad for the Ontario Liberal leadership, lost. He lost to a man named Ahsanul Hafiz, a Bangladeshi immigrant who had arrived as an international student two decades ago, who had been forced during the campaign to answer for old social media posts of himself posing with firearms and calling for the death penalty of a Bangladeshi politician. Hafiz won not because he was a more accomplished man, not because he had a deeper grasp of public policy, not because he carried the gravitas of a former Crown minister of the Dominion. He won because he could deliver more bodies to a high school gymnasium on a Saturday afternoon than the Oxford-trained lawyer with the cabinet pedigree could.

This is the open secret of Liberal politics in Canada in the year 2026. The white Liberal cannot win his own nomination battles anymore. Not on the merits. Not on the organisation. Not on the strength of his name or the depth of his rolodex. He can only win when the party machinery he himself built bends the rules in his favour, locks the gate behind him, and quietly disqualifies the rivals who would otherwise eat him alive. When the machinery fails, as it failed in Scarborough Southwest, the result is what we saw on the weekend: the dauphin of the Carney court, the heir presumptive, sent home with a participation ribbon and a press release about how concerned he is of the democratic process.

The democratic process. We shall return to that phrase, because it has done a great deal of work for the Liberal Party of Canada these past sixty years, and it deserves the close inspection of an honest mind.

The Scarborough Lesson

Consider the bare arithmetic of what happened. Erskine-Smith is, by every measure the Laurentian establishment recognises, the kind of man the Liberal Party manufactures for leadership. Queen’s University, then Oxford for the BCL. A successful federal MP since 2015. A cabinet minister under both Trudeau and Carney. The blessing of the Prime Minister himself to remain a sitting federal MP while contesting a provincial nomination, an arrangement of breathtaking entitlement that would have been denied to anyone of lesser standing. He had every advantage the system can confer on a chosen son.

And yet the Bangladeshi grocer down the street had more votes.

Three thousand five hundred members were on the final voting list. The Bangladeshi community of Scarborough Southwest, organised through its mosques, its community associations, its weekly newspaper the Weekly Bangla Mail, its television station NRB TV, had decided some time ago that this riding belonged to them. Doly Begum, the former NDP MPP turned federal Liberal, had won the by-election three weeks earlier as the first Bangladeshi-Canadian elected to Parliament. The provincial nomination was the next obvious prize. Three of the four candidates running were of Bangladeshi origin. The fourth was Erskine-Smith.

You can imagine the scene at the high school. The folding tables, the volunteer scrutineers, families arriving in groups of six and eight, elderly grandmothers helped to their seats by grandsons. And against this, the dispersed and atomised liberal professionals of the riding, the kind of people who attend brunches in the Beaches and write earnest letters to the Toronto Star about housing policy. There was no contest. The grandmothers won. They will always win. They were always going to win. Anyone who has spent five minutes thinking honestly about what mass non-European immigration into a Westminster system actually means could have told you so.

This is not a scandal, it is not foreign interference. It is not even when properly understood, a failure of the Liberal Party. It is what democracy looks like when you transplant a foreign communal politics into a parliamentary system that was built for atomised individuals voting their conscience as Englishmen. The system the Liberals constructed across two generations, the system of mass importation without integration, of multiculturalism as official ideology, of the ethnic vote as the quiet hydraulic engine of every Liberal majority, has finally arrived at its terminal stage. The body has now grown larger than the head, and the head has noticed.

At Without Diminishment, Dakota Jeffery-Petts, who once worked as a volunteer on Erskine-Smith’s 2015 campaign, writes:

In Canada, the nomination process remains a glaring national security loophole. These contests are treated as private club matters rather than public democratic exercises. They lack the oversight of a neutral authority. This creates a low-cost, and at times entirely cost-free, environment providing a high-reward entry point for foreign interference.

All you need to do is speak sweet lies to members and constituents. In doing so, you create a motivated interest group that can effectively hand-pick a representative in a safe seat, bypassing the general electorate entirely.

When 3,580 memberships appear overnight in a single riding, we must ask: whose interests are being served? Are they Canadian interests, or diaspora interests?

The primary duty of an elected official, after all, is to the national and public interest. But when a candidate’s mandate is derived from a narrow, diaspora-specific recruitment drive, often centred on grievances or political movements from the old country, that candidate becomes a delegate for a foreign interest rather than a representative of Ontario and the Ontarians in that riding.

The result illustrates the danger of fragmented national and local loyalties.

Multiculturalism, when left without a strong framework of national identity, allows for the importation of foreign conflicts into our legislative halls. We are seeing the rise of a political class that views a seat in a Canadian legislature as a platform for foreign advocacy, rather than a tool for national or provincial governance.

This capture of our nomination process by diaspora activism is the ultimate sign of a hollowed-out democracy. If the gates to our legislatures are guarded by whoever can mobilise the largest bloc of unintegrated interests, then the concept of a Canadian mandate becomes meaningless.

We are effectively outsourcing our leadership selection to the highest bidder, or to the most aggressive foreign-aligned organiser. The decision by the Ontario Liberal Party to allow this surge, and the subsequent defeat of one of the more prominent politicians in the province, shows a party that has lost its way.

By prioritising raw numbers over the quality and loyalty of its candidates, the Ontario Liberals have signalled that they are comfortable being a vessel for proxies acting on behalf of foreign interests, despite the hardships facing so many Ontarians.

May 10, 2026

The state of Britain – “Where did it all go wrong?”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Reposted from Samizdata with Patrick Crozier’s kind permission. Parallels to the same period of history here in Canada or in Australia or New Zealand should be fully evident to my fellow former colonials:

The Britain of the mid-19th Century was the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. It had a mighty empire, a mighty navy, it had wiped out the slave trade and it was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, the greatest improvement in living standards in history. And now, as I write, it is hanging on by a thread: divided, debt-ridden and weak.

So, where did it all go wrong? Here – in reverse chronological order – is my list of the key dates:

2008. Reaction to the Financial Crisis.
Had the banks just been allowed to go bust and the banking regulation that reduced their numbers abolished we would not be looking at 20 lost years.

1997. Opening the borders.
Allowing the establishment of hostile communities in your country is not a good idea.

1987. Leaving the NHS untouched.
By 1987, the Thatcher government had privatised just about everything. Only the NHS and education were left. And they flunked it. Mind you it would probably have been electoral suicide.

1969. Failure to defeat the IRA.
If you reward terrorism you get more of it.
[NR: Canada did defeat the FLQ‘s campaign of terrorism and murder … and then basically conceded everything short of full independence that the FLQ had demanded. This is a classic example of winning the war but losing the peace.]

1965. Race Relations Act.
Keir Starmer is wrong. Britain does not have a “proud tradition of free speech”. But it did have some free speech. This act along with various successors outlawed some forms of speech. Those successors progressively outlawed freedom of association which might have gone a long way to taking the sting out of the Integration Crisis.
[NR: Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech seems ever more relevant to the daily lives of everyone in the west …]

1964. Abolition of the Death Penalty.
I appreciate libertarians tended to be divided on this issue. We may have a lot to say about what the law should be but very little about what should happen when it is broken. But if you are going to end a long-standing tradition it had better work. It didn’t.
[NR: I used to be fully against capital punishment. I’m much less doctrinaire about it now. Some people cannot be rehabilitated, and capital punishment is a better solution than life in prison.]

1963. Robbins Committee.
This led to the subsidisation of higher education and the subsidisation of student living costs. Where you get subsidy you get communism.
[NR: Universities have always been hotbeds of progressive thought. From the 1920s onward, they’ve been taken over by ideologues who want to utterly destroy western civilization … and we’ve been handing them ever more money to indoctrinate our young in their beliefs.]

c.1948. Ending of the right to defend oneself with a firearm.
I got this from the late Brian Micklethwait but I haven’t been able to confirm it. Brian’s point was that if you couldn’t use guns to defend yourself there was very little point in having one and so it became easy for the state to ban them.
[NR: Canada is in the middle of yet another spasm of anti-gun hysteria triggered (you saw what I did there) by events in the United States. There are hopeful signs that Canadian gun owners may yet indulge in peaceful civil disobedience over the the latest attempts to disarm us.]

1948. Nationalisation of rail.
Along with coal, steel and many others along the way. Losses, strikes, decline, waste, unemployment.
[NR: Patrick and I began communicating a few years ago when I asked him for additional information about both the 1920s forced consolidation of British railway companies into the “Big Four” and the subsequent full nationalization into British Railways. We clearly agree that this was, whatever its intentions, a bad move for both the railway companies and the nation at large.]

1947. Town & Country Planning Act.
Pretty much stopped building anywhere where people might want to live. A huge contributor to putting home ownership out of the reach of millions.
[NR: I heard much more about the zoning issue from American libertarians, but the Town and Country Planning Act was a major leap in bringing government regulation into everyday life in Britain.]

1931. Abandoning the Gold Standard.
Inflation and boom and bust became the order of the day.
[NR: In retrospect, this may have been Winston Churchill’s biggest blunder: putting Britain back on the Gold standard at the pre-WW1 rate of exchange.]

1920s. Abolition of the Poor Law.
I mean to write about this one day but TL;DR while the Poor Law had many shortcomings it did at least keep people alive while keeping the costs down.
[NR: Orwell’s eloquent writing about the plight of the poor between the wars illustrate a lot of the negatives for the jobless poor of the interwar era. Far be it from me to claim Orwell was wrong … but he didn’t show the entire picture.]

1922. Creation of the BBC.
A monopoly communist propaganda organisation using the most powerful media then in existence which non-communists were forced to pay for. What could go wrong?
[NR: The BBC was for a long time constrained in its advocacy for socialist ends, but they kicked off the traces at some point. Canadians will be more familiar with the power of state-sponsored media now that the Canadian government will be paying one-third of the salaries of all the mainstream print and broadcast media outlets … and the media have already transformed into sad parodies of Nazi German or North Korean state media.]

1920. Beginning of the War on Drugs.
Other than the crime and changes to the drugs themselves (making them more dangerous than ever), the persistent failure of the War on Drugs gave the state the excuse for ever greater assaults on civil liberties.

1918. Universal Adult Male Franchise.
This meant that people could vote themselves other people’s money. It very quickly led to the replacement of the (not very) Liberal Party by the (not-at-all liberal) Labour Party. Mind you, it should be pointed out that a lot of the damage was done well before.

1910. People’s Budget et al.
In introducing the state pension, a state GP service and unemployment benefit this laid the foundations of the Welfare State that is currently doing such a good job of bankrupting the country.

1910. Payment of MPs.
I put this one in tentatively. I would like to say it meant Members of Parliament no longer had to have made something of themselves but given that a large number of them came from rich families that is not quite true.

1906. Taff Vale Judgement.
This effectively put trade unions above the law leading to endless strikes, uncompetitiveness, industrial decline and unemployment.
[NR: This was an understandable concession when unions were all in the private sector. Now that the plurality, if not outright majority of union members are government workers …]

1890s. Death Duties.
Bit by bit this destroyed the aristocracy by forcing a fire sale every time the head of the household died. [And that did what exactly, Patrick? Summat! It did summat!]

1875. Trade Union Act.
This allowed picketting or the intimidation of non-striking workers by trade unionists. I have to thank Paul Marks for bringing this one to my attention.

1870. Forster Act.
This established state education along with all that went along with it such as indoctrination, poor quality education and the opportunity costs involved in children not being able to earn money or learn a trade.

1845. Banking Act.
This began the extension of the Bank of England’s monopoly to the whole of the country.

Anything I’ve missed?

May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

May 7, 2026

Pay no attention to the Laurentian Elite behind the curtain!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canada before Confederation was largely run by the Family Compact, an informal oligarchy of wealthy and influential families who had a virtual monopoly on social advancement, political appointments, and the justice system. As kids we were all told in school that this all withered away and now we live in a wonderfully meritocratic society (that’s also a genocidal racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic dystopia, but those are later lessons after the land acknowledgements). They didn’t fade away, of course, and the behind-the-scenes power brokers are still there, still wielding informal but widespread control over the government and the economy. We just call them the Laurentian Elite, so that’s totally different than the bad old Family Compact, eh?

The Laurentians very effectively keep themselves out of the public eye. Most Canadians don’t even know this class exists. So, they are in that sense a shadowy cabal.

Of course Canadians want prosperity and whatever. Everyone does. Of course they think this is the purpose of the government. Of course the government’s messaging is largely around economics.

The government’s actual activities, however, are immensely economically destructive. This is because of their religious fanaticism. Canadians believe in “peace, order, and good government”. The Laurentians believe in multiculturalism, mass immigration, gender woo, and climate change. They just lie about these things being good for the economy. It’s now obvious that they are very bad for the economy, and yet, they continue, so.

The gimmigration restrictions are a joke. The government is continuing to hand out PRs and passports like Halloween candy, and turd worlders are continuing to grab them like the black kids who think the whole basket is all just for them. It is allowing TFWs to flood the asylum system, which it uses as a back door to keep them in the country. The numbers they publish are a bullshit accounting game, but even if they’re to be believed, letting in hundreds of thousands of new PRs every year isn’t a reduction from anything but the truly insane spike in 2022-24.

The housing market is fucked, yes, but I’m skeptical this is because immigration has been “reduced”. It’s more likely that a decade of zero economic growth, rapid inflation, even more rapid asset inflation, shit jobs, and high taxes means that no one can afford the overpriced housing, so no one buys it. The shoebox condos they threw up all over Toronto are a contributing factor: no one wants to spend $500,000 on a 500 square foot condo, so no one does. Investors can’t afford to sell for less, so they sit on them. Developers look at tens of thousands of units of unsold inventory, and refuse to start new projects. Whole system is seized up because of many years of malinvestment, not because the government has meaningfully reduced the invasion.

You say that Canadians will go back to Laurentian rule once the excesses are curbed. That presumes Laurentian rule slackened for even a moment, and that the Laurentians have any intention of curbing their excesses. Neither of these are true. They are doubling down on everything. Destroying Canada — as one element in the destruction of Western civilization — is a religious imperative for them. Nor was their power ever threatened, because it is propped up by brainwashed parasitic client groups — boomers, women, immigrants — that now comprise the bulk of the country.

The “pivot” was about two weeks of campaign rhetoric, during which a fast-talking globalist banker gave the boomers a reach-around about “British and French heritage”, which dazzled the affection-starved senile coots because it was the first time they’d heard something nice about themselves in a generation. Since then there’s been no rollback in DEI. No rollback in gender woo. No rollback in net zero. No rollback in Internet censorship. To the contrary, it has been full steam ahead on every single one of their hateful programs.

No revolution? You’re probably right, although the Freedom Convoy suggests that there are possibilities. Nevertheless the most likely scenario is that Canada devolves into Argentina Del Norte, its bones picked by vultures posing as patriots, kept in power by the most mind-raped boomers on planet Earth.

I do not think this is a good thing, obviously. I love my country very much. I suppose the reason for my vehemence on this matter is that I do not see any future for Canada with the Laurentians remaining in charge. We cannot work with them. They aren’t going to change. They aren’t going to slow down. They need to be removed, prosecuted for high treason, their assets seized, their oligopolies nationalized, and many of them sent to the gallows. Absent this, Canada is doomed.

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 1, 2026

Spain joins the awkward squad

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Conservative Woman, Bepi Pezzulli outlines a few ways that the Spanish government is moving in quite different directions than their NATO allies and fellow EU members:

Torre del Oro (Tower of Gold) – Calle Almirante Lobo, Seville – Spanish flag” by ell brown is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wants the privileges of alliance without the duties of one. Madrid remains in Nato, hosts critical American military infrastructure, and speaks the language of Atlantic solidarity – but only when convenient. On the central strategic questions of the age – Russia, Israel, and the wider Western posture in the Mediterranean – it increasingly behaves like a spoiler. What is troubling is that Spain is not merely posturing: it is rewriting its entire conception of statecraft, treating alliance as a shield, hostility as leverage, and strategic ambiguity as a governing doctrine.

When Washington needed alignment, Sánchez offered obstruction. When Israel faced existential war, Madrid offered moral lectures. When the West sought energy discipline against Moscow, Spain found room for Russian gas. All while preserving the old imperial obsession with Gibraltar and extracting advantages from London over the Rock.

Spain has discovered the pleasures of consequence-free hostility. That needs to end.

Anti-Americanism with diplomatic immunity

Sánchez has carefully cultivated the old European left’s anti-American reflexes: Nato when subsidised, moral neutrality when sacrifice is required. His government publicly resisted support for American military operations linked to Iran escalation and signalled clear reluctance to facilitate use of Spanish bases such as Rota and Morón for operations that might implicate Madrid politically. The message was unmistakable: American security guarantees are welcome but strategic co-operation is negotiable. The rhetoric matched the policy. “No to war” was not merely a slogan for domestic consumption. Sánchez is deliberately positioning Spain as the righteous dissenter against Washington’s harder strategic line.

At the same time, Spain maintained substantial imports of Russian gas well into the European sanctions era. While pipeline politics consumed Brussels, Madrid benefited from a convenient moral distinction: condemning Moscow loudly while continuing commercial accommodation where useful. The formal sanctions architecture left open some loopholes, and Spain was happy to live inside them.

An ally that profits from ambiguity while others bear the strategic burden is not an ally in the full sense. As US War Secretary Pete Hegseth noted, “An alliance cannot be ironclad if in reality or perception it is seen as one-sided”.

From criticism of Israel to open diplomatic hostility

On Israel, Sánchez has moved beyond criticism into active diplomatic confrontation. Recognition of Palestine was presented as humanitarian principle. In practice, it rewarded maximalism at the worst possible moment. Madrid helped transform October 7 from a terrorist massacre demanding strategic clarity into another European seminar on Israeli restraint. Spain became one of the loudest governmental amplifiers of the anti-Zionist campaign in Western Europe. Ministers normalised rhetoric that blurred the distinction between criticism of Israeli policy and systematic delegitimisation of the Jewish state itself. Arms restrictions followed. Then diplomatic actions. Symbolism became policy.

Gibraltar: Madrid’s imperial nostalgia

Spain’s sanctimony would be easier to tolerate if it were not paired with its own colonial fixation. For decades, Madrid has pursued sovereignty claims over Gibraltar with theological persistence. Brexit offered a fresh opening. With Brussels behind it, Spain extracted a remarkably favourable negotiating posture over the future relationship of the Rock with both the European Union and the United Kingdom. London, in the hands of the most Europhile government in recent history, conceded far more than many British voters imagined when they heard the word “sovereignty”. Spain never abandoned the long game. It simply learned to play it through institutions until a weaker opponent appeared. Madrid insists Gibraltar is unfinished history. Fair enough: is it not time then to conclude the same about Ceuta and Melilla?

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 21, 2026

Hungary in the news

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

Theodore Dalrymple considers the recent change in government as Victor Orbán was replaced by Péter Magyar, who had been an Orbán supporter until the last few years:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out of office after 16 years in power. One of the complaints often heard in such democracies is that “they are all the same”, they being members of the political class of whatever political party.

But there is benefit in a change of government personnel irrespective of all else, for those who remain too long in power come to think of that power as their right, and the citizenry as their servants rather than of themselves as servants of the citizenry.

The recent removal from power by election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary after so long as prime minister (and his full acceptance of the defeat, despite accusations that he was like an authoritarian dictator) was perfectly normal. He had been replaced by a man who is no fire-eating radical, Péter Magyar, a young man who was, until comparatively recently, a supporter of the leader he has replaced.

The electorate, according to polls, was concerned about the state of the economy and the level of corruption in the country. Governments that come into power promising to eradicate corruption often reveal themselves to be no different in this respect from the last: the fruits of corruption are distributed to different people, that is all.

The new prime minister differs greatly from the old in two attitudes: firstly, to the war in Ukraine and secondly to the European Union. Unlike Mr. Orbán, he is no friend of Vladimir Putin’s; and unlike Mr. Orbán, he is more likely to do the Union’s bidding in order to gain access to the latter’s funds. One important question is whether he will be forced to change Hungary’s attitude to mass immigration, opposition to which was a source not only of Mr. Orbán’s conflict with the Union, but of his long domestic popularity.

His policy was regarded as xenophobic, but this was an unjustified slur. Xenophobia is a hatred or fear of foreigners as such, ex officio, and on my visits to Hungary I found none of this. I met, for example, a Kurdish physiotherapist well integrated into Hungary, and a Moroccan academic likewise, who did not complain of personal antagonism to them. Other foreign residents whom I met did not complain of it either. A desire to protect a small country from the effects of mass immigration that have been seen in Sweden (a country of similar size of population), for example, is not xenophobia: it might on the contrary be regarded as both prudent and as a manifestation of love of one’s country. It is part of the malign legacy of Hitler and the Nazis that love of one’s country is now felt by many European intellectuals to be inherently vicious and aggressive. But love of one’s country is not the same as hatred of everyone else’s, though it is true that patriotism can sometimes degenerate into such hatred.

The European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is contradictory. It regards ethnic and cultural diversity as good in themselves, as if what existed before was lacking some important ingredient that such diversity will automatically bring.

April 17, 2026

Hungary in the news

Filed under: Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The way the mainstream media reacted to the recent Hungarian election results, you’d think it was the 2020s equivalent to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Outgoing leader Viktor Orbán has been portrayed as Hungary’s Trump when he hasn’t been discussed as Hungary’s Mussolini. His successor, Péter Magyar is largely unknown outside Hungary where he had been a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party before leaving to join his current party, Tisza. In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith provides some useful background on the state of politics in Hungary today:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tisza — the name being a portmanteau of the Hungarian words tisztelet (respect) and szabadság (freedom), and a reference to the nation’s second largest river — was founded in 2020 and registered in 2022. It was a very marginal conservative party with policies like “raise the minimum pension” and “stop migration”.

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the party fielded no candidates at all.

Tisza became a major force in Hungarian elections when Péter Magyar joined the party. Magyar, who has a legal background, had been a member of Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz. More significantly, he had been married to the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, from 2006 to 2023.

In 2024, Varga resigned, along with Hungarian president Katalin Novák, after both were exposed as having signed a pardon for a convicted paedophile who had been a director of a state-run children’s home. Magyar resigned from Fidesz, accusing Orbán of “hiding behind women’s skirts”.

“For a long time I believed in an idea, a national, sovereign, civic Hungary,” wrote Magyar in a much-quoted statement, “But in recent years, I have slowly and finally realized that all of this is really just a political product.”

Magyar became a ferocious critic of alleged government corruption. His ex-wife responded to his anti-Orbán activities by accusing him of domestic abuse. Magyar denied this. Undaunted, he led various anti-government demonstrations, which attracted tens of thousands of Hungarians. He was also chosen to lead Tisza.

Magyar has profited from good timing. He is also a photogenic man who has performed well on social media. His politics are more mysterious. He has called himself a “critical pro-European and a conservative liberal”.

He is not the sort of liberal that anti-Orbán Westerners might want him to be. While he has said that he will “move away from the current, uncritically friendly approach towards Russia”, he has also said that it will take time to stop buying Russian fuel, and he has criticised the Ukrainian approach to Hungarian minorities. He has sometimes tried to outflank Orbán on sovereignty, saying that Fidesz have brought in too many guest workers, and even questionably saying that migrants have been stealing ducks from Hungarian ponds. Still, it remains to be seen if the pro-EU Magyar will maintain his more right-wing opinions or be swept along by European orthodoxy — not least when he has emphasised the importance of unlocking EU funds.

At The Sceptic, James Alexander says that the situation is more complicated than a split between Orbán and what he terms “the Roral Response”:

President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025.
Official White House photo by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons.

What is the Orbán-Roral Divide? It is the Manichaean yin-yang binary of the simplistic political imagination, which supposes that, on one side, we have Orbán, Putin, Trump etc., and that, on the other side, we have von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer, Carney, Zelensky and of course the man after whom I name the category: Rory Stewart.

It has some truth in it, but it is bewildering when we see the binary exalted as if it is the only truth of politics. The downfall of Orbán illustrates this almost perfectly.

The subject today is Orbán Developments. And the Roral Response.

News.

As you all know, Orbán, after 16 years of power, fell in the recent election.

  • Viktor Orbán = Fidezs = 37.8% = 55 seats
  • Peter Magyar = Tisza = 53.6% = 138 seats

“Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,” quoth King Lear.

Orbán lost.

Now, I like Orbán, symbolically. I don’t know about actually: never studied him. I read one of his speeches once, and it read as more intelligent than any equivalent political speech. I have one thing in common with him, which is that he was present at the funeral of Norman Stone. Anyhow, like him or loathe him, we have to be philosophical. And we have to respect him, even if he is an Oxford man.

  • Oxford: Obsessed with power. Corrupt. Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Viktor Orbán etc.
  • Cambridge: Lord Acton: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So let us look at what people say. The amusing thing is that people immediately editorialise. Twitter, X, Whatyouwill.com, turns everyone into William Rees-Mogg. Look at all these Editors.

Here is Ferenc Horcher, a very important Hungarian scholar:

    Time to face reality: the Hungarian electorate ousted the ruling power. The electoral system Fidesz introduced gave its opponent a two-thirds majority. Orbán established a one-man rule, tailored the campaign to himself, he is responsible for the defeat, he has to resign.

That’s grim talk from a conservative. So here on the jolly side is Sam Moyn, a very important Yale Law School professor:

    Yay for Hungary. What if the answer to illiberalism is democracy?

Ho hum. I sigh a bit over the innocence of making a contrast between illiberalism and democracy, as if liberalism = democracy.

(more…)

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