Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2026

Heightening tensions in the Indian Ocean

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Fergus Mason updates us on what’s happening around the UK/US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean:

Diego Garcia

One of the great mysteries of Keir Starmer’s government is why he’s so determined to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles away and has never owned them. Even now, as he desperately fights for his political survival, Starmer is pushing ahead with plans to give away the strategic archipelago then pay tens of billions of pounds to lease back one of the islands. It’s an odd thing to be so focused on — but whether his compulsion to surrender the islands is driven by corruption or naivete, it’s sending out signals of weakness. And those signals are being noticed.

The Maldives Makes A Grab

Last Thursday the Republic of Maldives announced that it had rejected the UN International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea’s ruling on its maritime boundaries, and sent an armed boat to carry out a “special surveillance operation” in the northern part of the Chagos island’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The Chagos EEZ is claimed by Mauritius, but of course actually belongs to Britain until Starmer’s surrender deal is approved by Parliament. However, the Maldivian government has now decided to make its own claim on the area — and it’s very publicly doing something about it. The “coast guard vessel” CGS Dharumavantha — a former Turkish Navy fast attack craft — is now operating in the area, along with drones from the Maldives National Defence Force Air Corps.

Of course, the Maldives has no real claim to the Chagos islands or any part of their waters. The country — a tiny group of islands southwest of Sri Lanka, with a land area of just 115 square miles — was a British crown colony from 1796 to 1953, and a British protectorate until 1965. Like Mauritius, it has never owned the Chagos Islands. However, it’s just 300 miles away from them, much closer than Mauritius. It appears that its leader, President Mohamed Muizzi, has decided that if the key British territory is up for grabs the Maldives should be the ones to grab it. It’s true the Maldives doesn’t have much of a navy, but then Mauritius doesn’t have much of a navy either and is a lot further away. If the Maldives can seize control over part of the extremely valuable Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), and even possibly some of the northern islands, there isn’t a lot Mauritius can do about it.

Why would the Maldives be so keen to seize part of the Chagos EEZ? That one’s simple. Under British protection, the Chagos MPA (which is the largest marine nature reserve in the entire world) has been officially off limits to commercial fishing since 2010 but, in practice, has barely been fished at all since 1968. This makes it a unique and potentially lucrative resource in the Indian Ocean region, which has seen its ecosystems devastated by destructive fishing methods. The wealth of the MPA is the main reason Mauritius wants the Chagos islands. Its own coastal waters have been blighted by overfishing, including the destruction of coral reefs by explosives and bleach injection, and now it wants to plunder the MPA. The Maldives is also busily engaged in destroying its own fish stocks (fishing is the country’s largest industry and employs half the population) and is desperate for new waters to pillage. They don’t just want access for their own boats, either. Like Mauritius, the Maldives under Muizzi’s rule is an increasingly close ally of China.

The Scourge Of The Seas

China has the world’s largest fishing fleet, and it’s not even close. Over 44% of all commercial fishing is carried out by Chinese boats — and they’re notorious for flouting international law. Chinese boats regularly change their names and disable their satellite tracking systems to conceal their identity, then fish illegally in other countries’ waters. They violate quotas, catch protected species and strip whole swathes of ocean clean of any life much larger than plankton with massive, indiscriminate drift nets. Chinese fishing boats have also been implicated in people trafficking, drug smuggling and acting as spying and covert action platforms for the Chinese navy.

If either Mauritius or the Maldives gain control of the Chagos MPA it’s a certainty they will immediately give Chinese boats access, and this priceless nature reserve will rapidly be trawled and drift-netted into a barren, lifeless wasteland. From China’s point of view, of course, it doesn’t matter which of their lackeys takes over the Chagos islands as long as one of them does, so don’t expect them to step in to help Mauritius. They don’t care who they get the fishing rights from.

January 21, 2026

“It is a deal so bad that only Keir Starmer could have negotiated it”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Fraser Myers says that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fully deserves to be humiliated over his give-it-all-away negotiations for the Chagos Islands, which includes the strategic naval base at Diego Garcia:

In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.

With the assistance of the brightest and best of the UK Foreign Office, the Labour government agreed to an arrangement that would hand over territory containing an Anglo-American military base to an unfriendly country, condemn its former inhabitants to permanent exile, and pay tens of billions of pounds for the pleasure.

I’m talking, of course, about Chagos (officially, the British Indian Ocean Territory), which has briefly caught the attention of the world’s most powerful man. This morning, amid a flurry of Truth Social posts about his designs on Greenland, US president Donald Trump’s gaze briefly alighted on this small, tropical archipelago on the other side of the planet. And he did not hold back in his criticism of Britain’s plans: “Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia [the largest of the Chagos Islands], the site of a vital US Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER”, he wrote. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY”.

Trump’s reaction has widely been described as a major about-turn. But, in truth, his team has veered all over the place on the Chagos question. In October 2024, when Starmer initially agreed to hand over the islands, Marco Rubio, then still a US senator for Florida, reportedly warned that this would allow “Communist China” to spy on the US Navy, given Mauritius’s alliance with China. Yet in February 2025, when Starmer visited the Oval Office, the US president said he was “inclined to go along with” the UK’s proposals. And by May, when the deal was signed between the British and Mauritian governments, Rubio, by now US secretary of state, welcomed it. He claimed that Trump himself had “expressed his support for this monumental achievement”, hailing the deal that would cede sovereignty to Mauritius, while Diego Garcia would be leased to Britain for the next 99 years.

Of course, Trump’s motivation for bashing Starmer’s deal now has little to do with the Chagos Islands themselves. The real prize for the US president is in a different hemisphere entirely, as he freely admits. In a bizarre non-sequitur, the US president’s Truth Social post goes on to say that the Chagos deal is “another in a very long line of reasons why Greenland has to be acquired” by the US. This smackdown over Chagos, this attempt to humiliate Starmer and Britain on the global stage, is clearly part of Trump’s broader pressure campaign against the European powers, in his bid to seize Greenland for the US.

Nevertheless, it really should not have taken Trump’s intervention to put the brakes on the dreadful Chagos deal. Whichever way you spin it, this arrangement has never been in Britain’s national interest, nor the interests of the Chagossians who call the islands their home. It poses a risk to Western security interests, handing sovereignty over a territory, where almost 400 UK and US troops and 2,000 contractors are based, to a country that’s allied to China. The cost of leasing back Diego Garcia from Mauritius is also eye-watering. Although the Labour government tried to present the cost as just £3.4 billion, the true figure is believed to be 10 times as much, at around £34.7 billion.

So what on Earth possessed Starmer to sign up to such a risible deal? What leverage was a tiny island like Mauritius able to gain over Britain?

January 16, 2026

Rapidly declining democracy in the home of the “Mother of Parliaments”

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

As I’ve mentioned before, it sometimes seems that Australia, Britain, and Canada are in a three-way race to de-democratize themselves as fast as they possibly can. Here’s the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s essay on the return of liberal authoritarianism:

“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a “hybrid democracy” by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!

What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.

Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining “the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence”, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having “total contempt for democracy”.

Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.

As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, “is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.”

This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but “non-crime hate incidents“, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.

When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of “democratic backsliding” usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal “strongmen” we read about, just not a very effective one.

There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as “stealth authoritarianism”, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.

Credit: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago

By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat “hate” as well as “misinformation”. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok “deepfake” feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.

As for the British state’s definition of “hate”, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.

It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that “If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.”

Update, 17 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.

January 14, 2026

The Chagos Islands and the military base on Diego Garcia

Filed under: Britain, Government, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The British government is engaged on a fantastic quest to subordinate the Chagos Islanders to a new foreign colonial government a thousand miles away who have never had any connection other than an earlier colonial convenience relationship. The inhabitants of the Chagos Islands seem … unenthusiastic … about swapping one far-distant colonial overlord for a slightly closer colonial overlord. In the “outside the paywall” section of this post, Nigel Biggar explains why he’s fighting against this transfer in the House of Lords:

In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia, affectionately known to its friends as “Dodge” and civilized people will defer things on the island to Provisional Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.

I arrived home late last Monday night, having spent the second half of the day in the House of Lords attending the Report stage of the bill to ratify the treaty whereby the UK surrenders to Mauritius sovereignty over the Chagos Islands — including the military base on Diego Garcia — in return for a ninety-nine-year lease.

For readers who missed — or have forgotten — my post on this topic on August 6th, let me rehearse my view. Located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the military base is important for extending the global reach of British and US forces. At first glance, exchanging sovereignty for a lease looks like a very poor deal, making possession of the strategic base less secure at a time of growing international tensions.

So why has Keir Starmer’s government signed up to a treaty that does just that?

The treaty presents itself upfront as correcting the injustice done when 1,700 Chagossians were forced to leave their homes on Diego Garcia between 1967 and 1973, to make way for the military base. In the preamble, the two governments “recognis[e] the wrongs of the past” and declare themselves “committed to supporting the welfare of all Chagossians”. Yet the process that produced the treaty does not bear this out. The Chagossians themselves were barely consulted, probably because it is known that many strongly resist subjection to Mauritian rule.

Diego Garcia

Moreover, the treaty binds the Mauritian government to do little for them. Oddly, Article 6 declares that Mauritius is “free” to implement a programme of resettlement. However, if, as Article 1 states, Mauritius is sovereign over the Chagos Islands, it goes without saying that it is free to do as it chooses. It does not need stating. So, the effect of stating it is to highlight the fact that Mauritius has refused any obligation to resettle the islanders.

Article 11 commits the UK to provide capital of £40 million to create a trust fund for the islanders, but it leaves the Mauritian government entirely at liberty to choose how to use it. Yet, when it received £650,000 (equivalent to £7.7 million today) from the UK to compensate displaced islanders in 1972, it withheld the money for six years in punitive retaliation for Chagossian protests. And, again, nine years after it was given £40 million in 2016, to improve Chagossian welfare, it has only disbursed £1.3 million under restrictive conditions.

The treaty’s main concern lies elsewhere. As the preamble also says, it is “mindful of the need to complete the process of the decolonisation” of Mauritius. In saying this, the UK government is implicitly accepting the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in 2019 that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in November 1965, before the latter was granted independence in 1968, was unlawful. This is because it was incompatible with resolution 1514 (XV) of the United Nations’ General Assembly in December1960, which declared that “any attempt aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations”. Indeed, in December 1965, a month after the detachment, the General Assembly adopted resolution 2066 (XX), inviting the UK “to take no action which would dismember the Territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity”. And a year later the General Assembly adopted resolution 2232 (XXI), reiterating its opposition to any “disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity” of colonial territories.

None of these resolutions makes good sense. The original, 1960 one was championed by the Irish ambassador to the UN, Frederick Boland, who was then President of the General Assembly. In promoting resolution 1514 (XV), he invoked Ireland’s loss of its “historic integrity” as a prime example of the injustice to be avoided. In so doing, he expressed the Irish nationalist’s typical historical blindness. The island of Ireland had never been a political unit apart from its union with Great Britain, and there is no natural law prescribing that a geographical integrity should be a political integrity. On the contrary, there can be very good reasons for dividing it. The reason that Ireland was divided in 1922 was because republican Irish people wanted home rule so much that they were prepared to take up arms to acquire it, while unionist Irish people detested it so much that they were prepared to take up arms to oppose it. Ireland was partitioned to prevent further civil war—a justified act of political prudence.

The 1965 and 1966 resolutions are no more sensible. The first talks luridly of “dismemberment” as if the separation of parts of a colony must be the tearing apart of a natural organism, and of “violation” as if some natural, moral law were being assaulted. But there is nothing natural about a political entity and there is no moral law against partition as such.

The 1966 resolution appeals to the “national unity” of Mauritius, as if the Chagos Islands weren’t separated by over a thousand miles of Indian Ocean and as if the islanders were an integral part of the Mauritian people. But many Chagossians feel as Mauritian as Irish republicans feel British. The only connection between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands is an accident of colonial, administrative convenience. Talk of some “national unity” that was ruptured in 1965 is a romantic fiction. Besides, in 1965 the Mauritians agreed to the separation in return for £3 million (worth £74 million today) and the reversion of the islands when no longer needed for defence purposes.

Yet, notwithstanding its nonsense, the original, seminal resolution 1514 (XV) was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN and has since been invoked and confirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

It’s true that the UK has explicitly refused to consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction over British disputes with former Commonwealth countries such as Mauritius. However, in its 2019 Advisory Opinion, the court positioned itself formally, not as adjudicating between two sovereign states’ conflicting claims, but as responding to a question from the UN’s General Assembly as to whether the UK had violated international law on the decolonisation of Mauritius in the 1960s. Notwithstanding the fact that that is a crucial point of current contention between the two countries, the ICJ presumed to find in Mauritius’ favour. It is because the UK Government fears that a subsequent international tribunal — such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — will use the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion to make a binding judgement against it, that it prefers to concede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands and negotiate an expensive lease now.

But there is more to the Government’s motivation than fear. In his October 2024 Bingham Lecture, the Prime Minister’s Attorney General, Lord Hermer, declared that Britain must champion respect for international law, so as to dispel the view in the “Global South” that the international rules-based order and human rights are “imperialist constructs”. In other words, by surrendering its claim to sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, Britain will “decolonise” itself and thereby win diplomatic capital. As the Labour peer, Lord Boateng, opined: “We can welcome this treaty as an end to a period of colonial rule”. This is what lies behind that other statement in the preamble to the treaty: that the parties desire “to build a close and enduring bilateral partnership based on mutual respect and trust”.

January 12, 2026

Is Keir Starmer malevolent or stupid? Or both?

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

On his Substack, Tim Worstall wonders just how damn stupid Two Tier Keir actually is:

I fear our answer has to be very, very, stupid indeed. Unless he’s simply malevolent which makes things oh so much better, right?

Now, I confess to a fundamental disagreement with the very premise here. For the argument about why we should make child porn legal, see here. Making it more difficult to generate, let alone illegal, strikes me as the wrong decision. But then I’m sufficiently wise in years to realise that I might not be able to persuade some people of either that or of the many other things I am correct about. So, let us leave that aside.

There’s also the point that Grok is hardly the only image generation tool out there these days. Further, the one thing we know about computing is that this year’s leading, bleeding, edge is the free phone app of 5 years in the future. Shrieking that this must be banned just isn’t going to cut it as anyone trying that is simply a Cnut demanding the tide doesn’t flow in.1 On that larger issue of image generation in general we’re just going to end up changing the societal rules. A picture is no longer proof of anything. After all, it wasn’t up until about 1850 — those painters would just do any old thing, the truth be damned — and it won’t be after about 2028. Well, there we are then but …

But OK, let us leave all of that to one side and start from where British politics currently is. Grok generated AI kiddie porn is Bad, M’Kay, and must stop:

    Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says she would back regulator Ofcom if it blocks UK access to Elon Musk’s social media site X for failing to comply with online safety laws.

    Ofcom says it is urgently deciding what to do about X’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Grok, which digitally undressed people without their consent when tagged beneath images posted on the platform. X has now limited the use of this image function to those who pay a monthly fee.

    But Downing Street said the change was “insulting” to victims of sexual violence.

“Downing St” is the equivalent of the American “the White House said” … so yes, that is Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister there.

We’ve also an article from Liz Kendall today:

    That Grok continues to allow this kind of content to be created by those willing to pay for it is an insult to victims. No business model should be built on the exploitation and abuse of women and children.

    …

    The Online Safety Act was designed precisely for situations like this, where platforms fail to take their responsibilities seriously and allow harmful content to proliferate. The British public rightly expects robust action. This is a matter of urgency that demands an urgent response.

    I’ve also been clear that the Online Safety Act includes the power to apply to the courts to block services from being accessed in the United Kingdom if they refuse to comply with UK law.

We can see the threat there. If Elon Musk doesn’t do something about this then we’ll block X/Twitter from the UK.

  1. Why yes, I do know the correct story of Canute and the tides.

A Canadian and Australian connection showed up as well:

While I don’t depend on the social media site formerly known as Twitter for my news, I have found it a very useful additional source since Elon Musk took over the site. I’m clearly not the only one to feel this way:

As they used to say, however, “never believe anything until it’s been denied by the Kremlin”:

November 8, 2025

Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published 27 Oct 2025

“Think before you post.” Those were the words screamed out by government social-media accounts, threatening to lock up people for “hate speech”, as riots swept the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024. To those who hadn’t been paying attention, it offered a stark insight into a supposedly liberal, democratic nation that had come to police speech as much as, sometimes even more so, than actual violence. Inciting racial hatred, inciting religious hatred, “grossly offensive” online communications – over the past 60 years or so, Britain has written one new speech crime after another into its statute books. And it has led to a situation in which at least 30 people a day are now arrested in England and Wales for social-media posts. This is a documentary about some of those speech criminals. What we found out was even more chilling than the headlines would have you believe. Featuring: Maxie Allen, Rosalind Levine, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Luke Gittos and Jamie Michael.

October 9, 2025

Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

October 6, 2025

“[Starmer’s] love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways”

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

Britain’s current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is not having even the echo of a political honeymoon despite the utter collapse of the Conservatives in the last general election. Andrew Sullivan, who knew Starmer in school, thinks that Starmer’s plight is a useful illustration of what might have happened in the last US federal election if Kamala Harris had won:

The other day I sat, slack-jawed, reading Kamala Harris’ book — which was not easy to do with my eyeballs permanently rolled into the back of my head. (On one issue that killed her campaign, trans policy, she still hasn’t got the slightest clue what she’s talking about.) At one point, I even tried to imagine what America would be like today if this woke lawyer had actually won last year.

Then it occurred to me that we already kind of know. We actually have a pretty good test case of exactly that: a center-left lawyer-politician coming to power last year after a massive immigration wave had discredited and ousted the previous incumbent. Enter Keir Starmer, my high school frenemy, and now prime minister.

But unlike Harris, Starmer has at least shown signs of understanding his problem: he kicked the far-left Corbynites out of the party, called out anti-semitism, and in his big speech to his party’s annual conference this week, spoke proudly of flying the Union Jack, saying “we placed too much faith in globalization”. In office, he backed Israel’s war against Hamas strongly for a year-and-a-half, followed the science by banning puberty blockers and sex changes for kids, tightened immigration rules a bit, and pursued deregulation of the private sector, especially housing.

So how is he doing?

In one recent poll, his approval rating is 18 percent, with 61 percent disapproving. His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent. And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent. The Tories — who gave Brits a massive wave of non-white, non-European immigration after Brexit — are at a historic low of 15 percent. Boris may have done what no leftist could: destroy the most successful political party in the West.

This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined. On paper, Starmer still has four years to right the ship. But in reality, a prime minister who is loathed by four out of five Brits is like Wile E Coyote five feet off the cliff edge. To get a flavor of the general public’s view of Keir, check out this hilarious profile. Money quote:

    Then there is the voice — a cornucopia for sketch writers. We could fill pages with descriptions of the thing — an expiring corncrake, a Dalek suffering stasis of the lower bowel, a fart in a coffin, etc. His love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways — “I follow the game like any other carbon-based life form”.

The fart in a coffin did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British.

No vote was ever taken on this policy of making London 40 percent foreign-born, a place where English is now often not heard at all — and even where it is, is almost always in a foreign accent. But the minute anyone ever proffered the slightest objection to mass migration (around a million migrants a year for the past four years), the charge of “hate” and “racism” was instantaneous and deafening.

Elite right and left were as one, defying the public for decade after decade. The hangover, especially after Boris’ brutal betrayal, is now here. (For a single glimpse, think of yesterday when a British citizen named Jihad attacked a synagogue, with two dead, and a flash mob of Hamas supporters swarmed Downing Street.)

Update, 7 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 4, 2025

What did poor Liverpool do to deserve “the worst speech in modern British political history”?

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

In The Conservative Woman, Sean Walsh wonders why his home city of Liverpool was chosen to be the site of a modern political crime-against-humanity in the form of a Two-Tier Keir speech to the Labour faithful:

LIVERPOOL happens to be my city of birth, and my family is generational CIA (Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic). I get back there when I can, usually for funerals family reunions. I can confirm that if you don’t mention Thatcher, the Sun, any Manchester band, the Wirral, or ask a native to pronounce the word “chicken”, you will be made to feel more than welcome as a visitor there. Scousers are rightly celebrated for a quick, if chippy, wit and unique sense of humour. Not least by ourselves.

Hopefully that last quality will help the city survive this week’s invasion by activist lawyers, Islington familiars, boilerplate career MPs, lanyard fetishists, lobbyists, and the process algorithm who was slush-funded to the Labour leadership.

For years Liverpool dodged hosting the Labour conference and was probably resentful at the snub. Now its rejuvenated docklands are the go-to venue for this annual festival of enforced fun/confected joyfulness. It’s probably resentful at that as well.

I’m not sure British politics has seen a speech as bad as the one the Prime Minister gave to this year’s wake gathering. And before you mention Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood”, that speech was “bad” only in the minds of those who never read it or were unable or unwilling to appreciate the deep truths Powell was advancing behind the veil of metaphor.

The Prime Minister was vindictive and politically maladroit in equal measure. Powell, a genuine member of the British working class, was a trained classicist who thought, spoke and wrote in the languages and metaphors of the ancient world. Powell’s lack of condescension and unwillingness to dumb down created room for bad faith and mischievous interpretation.

Starmer, who thinks and speaks the language of the petty bureaucrat, has no such defence. Where Powell made his predictions in poetry (which have proven correct, let’s not forget), Starmer rams home his malevolence in bullet points and crass soundbites.

I make this unhappy comparison partly to draw attention to the decades-long decline in the culture of political speechcraft, which TCW recently wrote about, and to affirm that even by the standards of today Starmer was awful.

We expect our political speeches to be unlovely now. Starmer’s went beyond that and managed to be offensive and yet boring all at once. As I said, the Prime Minister is an algorithm, and there are three things you can say about algorithms: they lack memory, have no sense of humour, and are unaware that they are, well, an algorithm.

On his Substack, Christopher Gage offers “A forward-thinking manifesto to deliver change for stakeholders”. That’s just the sort of bafflegab progressive thinkers think the general public wants to hear, apparently:

Alice in Wonderland by Oskar Kokoschka (1942)

This year’s Labour Party conference kicked off in the idiosyncratic style befitting its more excitable, green-haired cohort: confusion, contradiction, and faux contrition.

On Sunday, Sir Keir Starmer, our accidental prime minister, condemned Reform’s plan to deport migrants as “racist and immoral”. By Tuesday, it was Labour policy.

Politicians will say anything to keep suckling on the erect nipples of eternal power. And Labour politicians, despite their holier-than-thou affectations, are no different. They’ve seen the polls. Reform has led with room to spare in the last one hundred.

Labour has changed its spots. Starmer’s new Home Secretary, the combative and admirable Shabana Mahmood, is one foot on planet earth, at least.

At the conference, Mahmood warned the Guardian-reading element that they “won’t like the things I do”. She duly unveiled plans to ensure migrants “earn the right” to stay here: speak English, pay their way, and don’t expect their family to follow.

These once radioactive proposals are now common sense — two-thirds support immigration restrictions, whilst one-half wants not only the door welded shut but for many recent arrivals to be ushered politely through it. If Labour wants to win another election, they’d better listen to Wetherspoon Man over Performative Male.

As the week spluttered on, Starmer opted in to opting out to opting in to opting out. But Labour is listening. Nigel Farage, the Wetherspoon Man high priest, must feel his pockets lightened this week. Just glance at the swathes of Labour members waving the Union Jack, faces stretched incredulously like those masks from The Purge.

One impression emerges from this blancmange of bodily fluids: Farage has won the argument. Labour loves Britain, mate. Britain, big tits, Stella Artois, and XL Bullies.

Starmer even took it to Boris Johnson, onetime prime minister and two-time shagger of the year. The epithet “Boriswave” leapt from Starmer’s tongue with pace-sticked regularity. According to the prime minister, letting in four million people in two years — the Boriswave in Twitter slang — is an affliction so terrible that to reverse it would be, erm, even worse.

To be fair, such logic is not so much witless as it is anti-sense. And anti-sense has defined the Labour Party since I was spermatozoa.

One thing is clear. The Labour party, which presides over the sputtering, worn-out appendage known as Great Britain, needs some dire advice.

Here are a few proposals, the wholesale adoption of which would solve every problem befalling broken Britain.

October 3, 2025

Adding digital ID to the pocket moloch … what could possibly go wrong?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Andrew Doyle explains why it’s a terrible idea to trust the government — any government — in forcing digital ID on everyone:

An illustration of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison.
Drawing by Willey Reveley, 1791.

During a trip to Russia in 1785, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham sketched an outline for a new prison design. The cells were arranged around the circular perimeter and, at the centre, he placed his “panopticon”: a watchtower which afforded a view of any of the cells at all times. The prisoners might not always be being observed, but they could never be sure that they weren’t.

Bentham’s design was never directly used, but the idea took hold as a symbol of state overreach and control, most famously in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975). Foucault was alert to the political ramifications of such a concept, and how surveillance might become an internalised experience. With Keir Starmer now pledging to introduce a digital ID system as a mandatory condition for the right to work, are we seeing the first step towards the realisation of Bentham’s vision?

I suppose we are already there. I have seen friends switch off their phones before discussing politically sensitive issues, genuinely convinced that digital eavesdropping is the norm. Many people are mistrustful of the “Alexa” voice assistant, which they are persuaded is recording their every word. While this all seems terribly conspiratorial, I’m sure most of us remember those reports a few years ago about the Pegasus spyware which had been covertly installed on the phones of journalists and government figures, turning the devices into pocket spies.

[…]

Few will be surprised to hear that public trust in political institutions has plummeted. The increasingly authoritarian tendencies of successive governments, our two-tier policing system, public manipulation as embodied in the “nudge unit”, and the corrupt prioritisation of the interests of the political class over the people they serve – perhaps best demonstrated by parliament’s flagrant efforts to overturn the Brexit vote – have all contributed to this climate of mistrust. The bizarre overreach of police during the lockdowns – in which dog walkers were publicly shamed with drone footage, and shopping trolleys were probed for “non-essential items” – has hardly helped matters.

To many of us, it is baffling that anyone at all would support the prospect of the government keeping track of our movements and holding our private details in a database. Starmer claims that the scheme will curb illegal immigration, but we are talking about criminals who already work outside the system and will doubtless continue to do so. Besides, identity cards have been a reality on the continent for years, and have done precisely nothing to resolve the problem. Employers in the UK are already legally obliged to insist on proof of immigration status from workers.

Labour’s digital ID scheme seems more about control than anything else. The possibility of fraud is also a major concern. It’s not as though the government has an unblemished track record of preventing data breaches. We all recall the massive leak of official MOD data regarding Afghans who had worked with the British government during the UK’s military campaigns. And who could forget the senior civil servant who, in 2008, left top-secret documents concerning al-Qaeda and Iraq’s security forces on a train from London Waterloo? Are we really to suppose that the creation of an all-encompassing centralised database will not leave the public open to risk from hackers and hostile foreign powers?

Tim Worstall adds that “they c’n fuck off ‘n’ all”:

So we’ve that wet dream of Tony Blair raising its ugly head again. There should be a national ID system. Actually, it’s not just Blair, T — the bureaucracy has been right pissed at the erasure of the wartime system since the 50s when it was abolished.

For there are two ways of looking at, thinking about, the whole governance thing. One is — the Blair, bureaucrats’, version — that the population are cattle, kine, to be managed. For the benefit of the bureaucracy of course — or at very least to be forced into doing what the bureaucracy thinks they — we — should be doing.

Then there’s that stout Englishman, the Anglo Saxon, version, which is that government are just the slaves we communally hire to make sure the bins get emptied. Well, OK, maybe raise a bit of tax for a Royal Navy to sink the Frenchies. But even then, not too much of that — the Civil War was, after all, triggered by Ship Money. Did the people who would not be slaughtered by the first wave of invading Frenchies — because they had the silly excuse of living 25 miles inland — have to pay the tax to run the Royal Navy to keep the Frenchies at bay or not? The King said yes — the King was right — and not for the first nor last time in British political history the guy who was right had his head cut off for being so.

Digital ID, so which version should we have? That one beloved of Froggie-type bureaucrats who view La Profonde as kine to be corralled? Or the Anglo Saxon version where we just devolve the scut work to a few slaves?

[…]

The reason this never will be proposed is that it doesn’t fit the reasons why our rulers wish to have an ID system. They’re insistent that we be their kine rather than they our. So, the Hell w’ ’em.

But it could be done. Government simply publishes an interface — an API — which says that proof of identity needs to be presented in this format. We’re done as far as whose kine is whose.

Update 4 October: From Samizdata, another illustration of just how toxic Two Tier Keir has become to British voters:

The Guardian reports:

    “Reverse Midas touch”: Starmer plan prompts collapse in support for digital IDs

    Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.

    Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.

    The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.

September 29, 2025

Powderkeg Britain

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

The ever-expanding anti-immigration protests in Britain are an unmissable flashing red alert to the British government … which seems determined to ignore it and continue to plough ahead with their MOAR immigrants policies despite the anger of the public. Spaceman Spiff characterizes it as a revolt:

Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies do not function in the way homogenous nations do. People of radically different origins, culture and beliefs often trigger conflict as incompatible aptitudes, temperaments and worldviews operate within a shared territory.

Artificial situations like this do not naturally harmonize, despite the rhetoric. Instead, competition for resources emerges. Power sharing between rival groups is fantasy. Life is winner takes all.

This can be disconcerting as reality asserts itself and the cost of large-scale migration becomes obvious.

Some in Britain already understand the dangers we now face at home. Others are waking up and looking for answers as their world declines. They are the ones who will grasp at anything to reset society.

Racists and hatemongers

Critics of mass immigration in Britain are often branded as racists and hatemongers.

We see blanket condemnation from establishment figures for even mild observations about the effects of this deeply unpopular policy.

The noticers of reality are derided as far-right extremists even when they are evidently normal people exhausted with unwanted demographic change.

The approved media and political spokespersons insist those who make observations have become radicalized by extremist writers and thinkers. Little more needs to be added. The labels do much of the work; Nazi, fascist, racist.

It doesn’t matter that many who are critical of mass immigration are not extremists calling for violence. They are just normal people who notice what is happening.

One of the unfortunate things the noticers recognize is mixing distinct cultures inside a single geographical area might be dangerous. They sometimes read material based on government statistics that tells them mass immigration infers almost no benefits on the host nation while extracting potentially catastrophic costs.

To ordinary people that sounds like something worth discussing to determine if it is true.

Normal people are revolting

Western countries have endured unexpected demographic shifts in recent years.

The only acceptable view is this is always a net positive. We are told group differences do not exist except in the minds of racists. Foreigners are already very like us and any deviation from our norms are superficial or unworthy of comment.

It is therefore all the more shocking when this is proven wrong. From dress and manners to dietary habits, to the treatment of women and children, the world beyond our borders is quite alien when seen up close.

London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders

All this alienness was once elsewhere with oceans to protect us. Now it is here in our midst.

This is becoming obvious and is at odds with all we have been told. What we see does not match the harmonious melting pot we were sold.

Inevitably this encourages people to seek out information.

July 3, 2025

“[T]he old Fleet Street … would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words ‘prime minister’, ‘firebombings’ and ‘quartet of male models'”

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

Mark Steyn notes the amazing disinterest the British press has been showing for Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent firebombing “male model” troubles:

Sir Keir Starmer speaking to the media outside Number 10 Downing Street upon his appointment.
Picture by Kirsty O’Connor/ No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

Meanwhile, “Two-Teir Keir” gave an extraordinary interview to a friend from The Observer, in which he reveals that, other than his war on the remnants of UK free speech, he’s spent the last year getting everything wrong. It’s a weird and psychologically unhealthy confessional that one could not imagine from any of his predecessors, whether the wretched David Cameron or the Marquess of Salisbury. If you want the scoop, skip the lame-arse coverage from the decaying Spectator and go to my old chum Dan Wootton. The Speccie’s snoozeroo “gossip columnist” headlines his piece “Four lowlights from Starmer’s Observer interview“, yet fails to note the most intriguing lowlight of all.

Six weeks ago, Sir Keir gave a speech on immigration which, while being a statement of the bloody obvious two decades too late, nevertheless went further than anyone else of any consequence in British life has been prepared to go. Somewhat curiously, this speech came just a few hours after his car exploded and two houses of his were firebombed — for which three (at the time of writing) Ukrainian “male models” have been arrested. I would not wish to suggest the PM has a unique fascination with Ukrainian “male models”. A fourth man has since been arrested — a “male model” from Romania. Diversity is our happy ending! The words “male model” do not appear in The Observer‘s account:

    In the small hours of 12 May this year, there was a firebomb attack on the Starmer family home in Kentish Town. His sister-in-law, who had been renting the house since he became prime minister, was upstairs with her partner when the front door was set alight. “She happened to still be awake,” Starmer says, “so she heard the noise and got the fire brigade. But it could have been a different story …”

    The prime minister, who had arrived back from a three-day trip to Ukraine the night before, was due to unveil the government’s new immigration policy that morning. “It’s fair to say I wasn’t in the best state to make a big speech,” he says. “I was really, really worried. I almost said: ‘I won’t do the bloody press conference.’ Vic [Lady Starmer] was really shaken up as, in truth, was I. It was just a case of reading the words out and getting through it somehow …” – his voice trails off …

So Sir Keir has now disavowed the only non-bollocks thing he has ever said. He “deeply regrets” saying Britain risked becoming “an island of strangers”, but he only did so, he offers in mitigation, because he was stressed out by all the firebombing from the massed ranks of fetching Slav twinks congregated on his various doorsteps. Unlike the Speccie, my chum Dan Wootton has a nose for a story:

Lucy Connolly was fast-tracked into her gaol cell in nothing flat – because that was the priority of the British state. By comparison, the men who firebombed the Prime Minister’s car and houses will not appear in court until next April, because determining how a remarkable number of East European “models” with no English-language facility were sufficiently familiar with Sir Keir’s homes and car to firebomb them is not a priority. Presumably, by the time April rolls around, the boyish charmers will have been persuaded to do an Axel Rudakubana and cop a plea, so that no trial need be held at all.

Say what you like about the old Fleet Street, but they would not have foregone the pleasures of a story involving the words “prime minister”, “firebombings” and “quartet of male models”. The silence of The Spectator is very typical. If you subscribe to James Delingpole’s view that the increasingly bizarre individuals who make it to the top of the greasy pole — Starmer, Macron, Trudeau — are there because the people who really run the world have got kompromat on them (which is your basic Occam’s Razor), then terror cells of Donbass rent boys blowing up the PM’s motor is an obvious false-flag operation designed to discredit the general thesis …

Here’s the gist of it all, courtesy of another Bob Vylan crowdpleaser:

    Heard you want your country back Ha! Shut the f*** up! Heard you want your country back

    You can’t have that!

I’m Keir Starmer and I endorse this message. As I wrote twenty years ago — whoops, no, thirty sodding years ago, a counter-culture has to have a culture to counter. And in Britain and elsewhere an old establishment has merely been supplanted by a new one with lousier tunes. It’s not “edgy” or “transgressive” if you’re live on the BBC’s biggest outlet at an event run by a bloke with a knighthood. The only true counter-culture is that identified by the pseudo-edgy ersatz-transgressive Sir Bob Vylan — the ones who want their country back. Ask Peter Lynch.

Oh, wait, you can’t: He’s dead. Sir Keir Starmer and Jeremy Richardson KC killed him — because, in order to prevent you “harming” them, it is necessary for them to harm you.

March 5, 2025

Trump’s next target – Europe

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle thinks that the next step of Donald Trump’s culture war will be highlighted by a struggle over freedom of speech with the UK and the regulators of the European Union:

British PM Keir Starmer talks with US President Donald Trump in the White House.

New battle lines are forming in the culture war. While the woke movement appears to be in retreat, the forces of authoritarianism are regrouping for a fresh assault. Rather than maintaining a straightforward conflict between right and left, the next phase of the culture war will most probably be waged between Europe and the United States. It has all the qualities of a novel by Henry James for the digital age, with the distinctions between the old world and the new brought once again into sharp focus.

Free speech will be the key issue. Most of us will have seen the footage of vice-president J. D. Vance last week in the Oval Office taking Keir Starmer to task for the “infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British” but also “American technology companies and by extension, American citizens”. Starmer pushed back, saying “in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of our history there”. It’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter boasting about his ongoing commitment to vegetarianism.

The word “history” was apt, given that Starmer’s government is seemingly determined to ensure that free speech is consigned to the past. One of its first acts after seizing power was to ditch the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In February, Angela Rayner revealed her plans for the establishment of a sixteen-member council on “Islamophobia” which could see the criticism of religion criminalised. Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has been staunchly defending the police for recording “non-crime”, while the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, has suggested that the best approach to tackling the controversy is to simply rename “non-crime hate incidents” as something more palatable. Apparently Lord Herbert believes that the problem is the nomenclature, not the fact that citizens are being investigated by the armed wing of the state for lawful behaviour.

All of this is before we get to Starmer applying pressure to the judiciary to mete out draconian sentences for offensive posts and memes on social media, and the government’s determination to crack down on online “disinformation”. Ours is an authoritarian government, and Starmer’s Orwellian denial of the truth of his position in the Oval Office is to be expected. Autocrats throughout history have enacted censorship “for the public good”. Today, they target “disinformation”, a term so vague that it can be applied to anyone who questions the narrative of the ruling class.

And so, as I say, the new front of the culture war will most likely be transatlantic. The US government will simply not tolerate the widespread censorship of its citizens by laws passed overseas. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, has already issued subpoenas to eight US tech companies to divulge all communications they have had with the UK government regarding “content moderation” (i.e., censorship). Jordan is particularly concerned about the Labour government’s intention to empower OfCom to regulate social media, and he has specifically mentioned UK officials who “have already threatened to use UK laws to police American speech”.

N.S. Lyons suggested in the latest post at The Upheaval that Vice President J.D. Vance’s real message to the European leaders can be rephrased as “Give Up the Information War and GTFO”:

The political elite of Europe and the Anglosphere appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s wonderfully blunt speech in Munich last month. The U.S. Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the NATO alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and canceling elections. But if this shock isn’t feigned then it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already effectively at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than the importance of “shared values” or even Washington’s new friendliness to nationalist parties. Practically, it was an implied warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflicts raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled left-wing deep state must end – or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control”.

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the U.S. Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”, as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including U.S. companies – to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

March 2, 2025

The end of the Ukraine narrative

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Captain Benjamin” outlines the last several years of progressive narrative that may have been totally derailed in the Oval Office the other day:

Zelenskyy walked into the Oval Office wearing an outfit that was reminiscent of the uniforms from Star Trek, he was escorted out a few hours later and the entire liberal consensus that has been the guiding narrative of the West for the last three years was a smoking hot mess, as if struck by several Photon Torpedoes from the Starship Enterprise itself.

It’s forgotten now but the Ukraine War was how the Liberal consensus moved on at breakneck pace from the Covid hysteria without ever having to explain why we had hidden from a cold for the previous two years and spent untold billions doing so.

I still remember being in a newsagent and the woman behind the desk told me that Covid was over and Ukraine was the new thing now, that was how quickly it happened, one mass consensus narrative seamlessly replaced another and the show went on.

Until today when show came off the tracks crashed into the buffers and a million Liberal talking heads exploded in unison as the entire narrative which had served as this strange outlet for their repressed jingoistic and nationalist desires was destroyed.

To me there was always something about the Ukraine War that didn’t pass the sniff test, whether it was Hunter Biden’s links to energy companies there, the way in which valid criticisms of the NATO expansion were shouted down, the mysterious blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline that was never explained.

Or the feverish want to protect Ukraine’s borders while European elites operated an unpopular open borders policy themselves, the billions being funnelled in, the tales of Ukrainians buying up yachts and sports cars.

But most clearly fact that the entire Uniparty Party and the chattering classes were in absolute lockstep about what needed to be down and any disagreement or attempt to question the narrative had you dismissed as a traitor or Putinist.

It was all very reminiscent of the groupthink that had swept the world two years previous during Covid, another unquestionable narrative, with the Uniparty in lockstep and anyone who dared to question it smeared as an anti-vaxxer.

I didn’t support Covid as the narrative had more holes than Swiss cheese and the Ukraine narrative has similarly porous texture, but to see the narrative explode so spectacularly was as much as a shock to me as it was to Zelenskyy who found himself in a hole and just kept digging.

At one-point he shocking seeming to delivered a veiled threat to Trump himself: “During war, everybody has problems, even you, but you have a nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.”

A comment that really sent the meeting side-ways, as Trump swiftly told Zelenskyy not to tell him what he should feel, leading to the arguments that scuppered the signing of a deal.

And the essence is that Trump wanted to make a deal, he’d been bragging about it to Starmer the day before, he was going to get a great deal, recoup American loses with rare-earth minerals and the EU could save-face by guarding the American mines as a peace keeping force.

It also meant that America wasn’t getting sucked into a Vietnam in the snow.

Trump doesn’t want to be a war-time President, especially a war he doesn’t think is necessary or good for business, Trump wants to usher in an AI Golden Age, send rockets to Mars, and American living standards to the moon; a 21st Century tycoon economy.

He wants peace for Ukraine and Russia as he knows that thousands are senselessly dying every week, and knows his presidency and the country cannot cope with hundreds of Americans coming home in body bags every month.

And so he wanted to make a deal with Zelenskyy, make a deal with Russia, and America gets paid, it’s a crude outcome but its aligned with reality.

But Zelenskyy doesn’t want that, he wants America men and weapons to win the war and make Russia to pay, while the EU have gassed him up to believe this possible because the EU are clinging to this war as a chance to project the veneer of power that they cannot possibly muster domestically due [to] Populist parties eroding their authority at home.

However, as Trump asked Keir to much nervous laughter, can you take on Russia alone?

America knows without them the EU cannot continue this charade, but more than that the Americans are disgusted with the EU, they view them as a drunk Uncle that has run out of goodwill.

How they are suppressing the free-speech of their citizens, failing to protect their own borders, yet grandstanding off the back of the US defence budget?

These are the questions being asked Stateside about the since Trump took office.

While the America people are questioning why are billions of tax dollars being poured into Ukraine as America goes deeper into debt.

Trump wanted to close the chapter with a deal, Zelenskyy wanted to continue a war he cannot win, and as Zelenskyy realised he wasn’t going to drag America deeper into this war he lost control, and in doing so forgot he wasn’t dealing with the Bidens and petulantly disrespected his new would-be patrons, triggering the mother of all blowbacks in the process.

Trump made it clear that what Zelenskyy was asking for was for America to risk World War 3, and Vance made it clear that everyone knew that Zelenskyy was a creature of the old regime, even highlighting how Zelenskyy campaigned against Trump in Ohio, while Trump reiterated that without the America Zelenskyy holds no cards for future negotiations with Russia.

This dose of reality was too much for Zelenskyy and also for the EU who tweeted up a storm in the aftermath pledging to ‘stand’ with Ukraine, only Starmer staying conspicuously silent.

This wasn’t simply a change of policy direction this was the public evisceration of the sacred cow of the waning Liberal Order by the ascendant Populist Insurgency.

Ukraine has functioned as the binding narrative, and in the Oval Office it faced Total Liberal Death, the fragile myth of the rules based international order being violated by Russia Man Bad and being saved by the Liberal Democratic Alliance Good, no further thinking necessary, had functioned as a very effective distraction from the utter failure that Liberalism had turned into domestically while allowing our elites to cos-play as war heroes on the world stage.

This narrative has now been utterly destroyed.

What comes next is still unknown but what we can clearly see is that the Populist Pax Americana will be a very different beast from the Liberal Pax Americana.

As always my friends, thank you for reading I know this is a very polarising issue, so if resonates please like, share and follow, if not please feel free to point out the flaws in my thinking in the comments.

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

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