Quotulatiousness

February 15, 2026

The smartphone as a tool to create a real-life Idiocracy

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

Not being much of a film fan, I’d never seen the movie Idiocracy, but based on the description in Christopher Gage’s rant against the smartphone, I might not need to watch it as it’s happening all around us:

Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.

The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us — her captive audience — that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.

Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths — one thousand of them, in fact.

Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.

Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.

TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.

I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.

Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.

This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.

After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.

The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called “Ow! My Balls!” That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.

They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.

Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.

Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.

How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.

One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.

Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.

January 27, 2026

Did People in the Middle Ages Drink Water?

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Aug 2025

A brew of barley, licorice, figs, and sugar

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1393

The myth persists that everyone was drunk in the Middle Ages because no one drank water, only alcohol. While many people preferred to drink ale, wine, or mead, people drank water all the time. Having a source of fresh, clean water was the basis of the location of many cities and towns.

Clean water isn’t just an issue of the past, either. Today, 1 in 10 people don’t have access to clean water. For the month of August, I’m joining thousands of creators across the internet to form Team Water with the goal of raising $40 million to supply 2 million people with clean water which will flow for decades. You can support Team Water by donating at teamwater.org, or by watching and sharing the episode for this recipe. I’ll be donating all of the ad revenue from this video to Team Water!

This sweet tisane is an herbal tea made with barley, licorice root, figs, and sugar. I really enjoyed it, even though the flavor of the licorice and figs didn’t come through. It kind of reminds me of the milk after you’ve eaten a bowl of Raisin Bran, which I like.

    Sweet tisane.
    Take some water and boil it, then for each septier of water add one generous bowl of barley — it does not matter if it is all hulled — and two parisis’ worth of licorice; item, also figs. Boil until the barley bursts, then strain through two or three pieces of linen, and put plenty of rock sugar in each goblet. The barley that remains can be fed to poultry to fatten them.
    — Le Ménagier de Paris, 1393

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January 10, 2026

A Short Tour of Roman London

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

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 19 Sept 2025

The ruins of Londinium – London’s Roman predecessor – are not spectacular. But they are extremely interesting …

0:00 Introduction
0:40 City walls
1:47 St. Magnus the Martyr
2:26 Monument to the Great Fire
3:12 Leadenhall Market
4:10 London Mithraeum
6:19 Bank of England
7:08 Guildhall Amphitheater
8:14 The Gherkin

November 20, 2025

Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled! | A London cinema has banned Think Before You Post

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

spiked
Published 19 Nov 2025

Our new documentary, Think Before You Post, about the rise of the British speech police, was due to have its premiere in London next week. Last night, the venue got in contact to say it would be cancelling our booking, because the event does not align with its “values”.

Here, spiked‘s Tom Slater tells all.

We are working flat-out to find a new venue for the same night. So if you bought tickets, do bear with us. But if we can’t find somewhere else in time, we’ll refund everyone and postpone it for a later date. If you’d like a refund now anyway, get in touch and we’ll process it.

At least they’re proving our point …

About spiked:

Founded in 2000, spiked was a pioneer of 21st-century journalism – the first online-only political magazine in the UK.

Now edited by Tom Slater, spiked reaches millions around the world with hard-hitting articles, incisive essays and a growing roster of podcasts and videos.

November 19, 2025

QotD: Rum Sodomy & the Lash

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

Released 40 years ago by London Irish legends the Pogues, the album is named not after a decent night in old Soho, as the title would suggest, but an apocryphal quote of Churchill’s. “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition,” he’s purported to have said. “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash”. For many years, listening to the album while writing and drinking in this adopted riverside local, I’d no idea it was recorded a stone’s throw away in Elephant Studio, in the basement of Metropolitan Wharf. Or that the pubs of the area, such as this one, were frequented by Pogues musicians: their frontman and chief songwriter Shane MacGowan and the album’s producer Elvis Costello.

The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the river bed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.

The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories to erupt — the piratical and press-ganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.

The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square, in 2017, to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country … to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war … Many would never return to Ireland”.

[…]

Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, and cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.

At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash‘s success and legacy is embrace of apparent opposites: high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialisation.

The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of the modern band Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in the music of Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines DC. But the album also impels its listeners to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, than rusting plaques, and lasts much longer. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting to escape.

Darran Anderson, “The Pogues soundtracked Irish London”, The Critic, 2025-08-05.

November 2, 2025

“Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?”

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

Mark Steyn has a bit of fun at the expense of the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, His Royal Majesty King Charles III, and the current British government:

The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night, HM The King announced that his brother, until recently HRH The Duke of York KG KCVO, will now be formally stripped of all his titles, styles and dignities and will be reduced to trying to book fashionable London restaurants — or even Pizza Express in Woking — as plain old Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. As longtime readers may recall, I dined at Buckingham Palace, midst princes, dukes, earls, viscounts and knights, as the only mister at the table and rather enjoyed it — although, even at that lowly rank, the sense of remorseless imperial decline down the decades is palpable: from Mr Gladstone … to Mr Steyn … to Mr Mountbatten Windsor … Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?

Be that as it may, it was the final sentence in the Palace’s 109-word statement that caught my eye:

    Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Had the King said that to me in person, I would have had great difficulty in restraining myself from punching him on the nose. Their Majesties have never expressed any “utmost sympathies” for the thousands upon thousands of their own young subjects in virtually every town up and down what passes for the spine of England gang-raped, sodomised, urinated on, dangled off balconies, doused in petrol, burned alive, fed into kebab mincers, etc. A decade ago, when I first met “grooming gang” victims in Rotherham, one of Sammy Woodhouse’s chums told me that “Charles and Camilla” were said to have expressed interest in meeting with survivors — although Sammy herself, ground down by official dissembling even then, expressed some cynicism as to the likelihood of any such Royal audience ever happening.

It never did. The Prince of Wales has his Earthshot campaign to save the planet, and for a while the Duke of Sussex had his HIV-Aids charity in Botswana and Lesotho. You would think one’s “utmost sympathies” for such uncontroversial apolitical causes as climate change and Aids could be easily extended to little girls taken as sex slaves — particularly when it’s visible from the sod-bollocking turrets of Windsor Castle. Just to pluck at random, less than three miles from St George’s Hall, where the King uncontroversially celebrates Ramadan iftars and where equally uncontroversially Princess Beatrice’s masked ball once hosted not only Jeffrey Epstein but also Harvey Weinstein … how does the old song go? “I Danced with a Perve who Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales“? Anyway, less than three miles from Windsor Castle lies Diamond Road in Slough, where a chap called Azid Ahmed was found to have engaged in “five acts of sexual activity with a child”.

Any “utmost sympathy” for that victim, sir? Or does your sympathy in such matters not extend beyond the territorial waters of Epstein Island? England is a land that, literally, rewards sex predators. If you want the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince to bugger off out of sight, why not give him a year’s salary as the British state has just done to Hadush Kebatu? Mr Kebatu is the Ethiopian who two days after arriving by dinghy sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Epping and set off the summer of “far-right” “racist” protests. He was convicted and imprisoned at HMP Chelmsford, which then managed to release him — “accidentally”. He spent two days wandering around the most surveilled city on earth and piling up enough camera footage to outpace the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings. So, for the crime of embarrassing Sir Keir Starmer, he was immediately put on a flight to Addis Ababa and given five hundred quid if he would agree not to contest his deportation.

Average annual salary in Ethiopia: 524 pounds sterling. So Hadush Kebatu is back home living large and telling friends he had a great holiday in England and this King Charles guy paid him a year’s wages for raping a fourteen-year-old.

Next time (he’ll be back by Christmas) he should make like Harvey Weinstein and hold out for a CBE.

The taqiyya mayor of London, soon to be joined by the taqiyya mayor of New York, claims that the “King apologised for taking so long to knight me“. I can well believe it. So Sir Sadiq Khan now outranks Mr Mountbatten Windsor at state banquets (my palace dinner was a little more informal, so I got to sit between Sir Angus Ogilvy and the Earl of Carnarvon). Is that because Sir Sadiq has also expressed his “utmost sympathies” for “victims and survivors”? Not at all. As the political overseer of the Metropolitan Police he has consistently lied about the existence of any Pakistani Muslim rape-gangs in London. The official position of the British state was that “grooming gangs” may all very well be operating in Newcastle, Middlesborough, Blackpool, Bolton, Manchester, Rotherham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Telford, Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry, Banbury, Aylesbury, Oxford, High Wycombe … but that it all mysteriously grinds to a halt once you hit the outskirts of the Metropolitan Line.

Alas, there are now so many dark secrets swept under the rug even Scotland Yard has noticed the bulge. So the Met has just announced they’re “reviewing” one or two … er, actually, no, nine thousand cases of “grooming”.

The striking feature of the end-phase Yookay is its total lack of “utmost sympathies”. Earlier this week, in Uxbridge (where, as it happens, the Metropolitan Line does end), an apparently pleasant fellow called Wayne Broadhurst was taking his dog for a walk when he was fatally stabbed by an Afghan who’d arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and had, as is traditional, been given “leave to remain” — because of his potential contribution to GDP through increased machete sales.

October 29, 2025

The Making Of Modern London – The Heyday of London Transport 1914 – 1939

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

Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 15 May 2020

A lovely documentary telling the story of the development of the London transport system from 1914 to 1939 — The heyday of London Transport. This film features awesome archive footage of buses, trams and London street scenes from the time. It’s one of a number of episodes this one featuring London’s transport system.

I’ve cut out the LWT adverts but I have left two in that I think you’ll love!

This film was broadcast by London Weekend Television in 1984 and later by CH4.

Written, Directed & Narrated by Gavin Weightman

October 28, 2025

Whitechapel protest – “an unholy union of witless leftists and menacing Islamists”

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the weekend protest in the Whitechapel area of London, after the police had prevented a UKIP event in the same part of the city:

The next time someone asks what we mean when we say “Islamo-left”, I’m going to show them footage from yesterday’s protest in Whitechapel in East London. What a morally suicidal schlep that was. What an unholy union of witless leftists and menacing Islamists. “Refugees welcome here!”, cried the granola-fed grads of the limp-wristed left. “Allahu Akbar!”, barked the masked mob of religious hotheads. Rarely has the lethal idiocy of the left’s bed-hopping with Islamism been so starkly exposed.

This assembly of godless genderfluids and Koran-botherers was ostensibly a march against UKIP. That knackered old party had hoped to hold its own protest in Whitechapel yesterday. It was clearly a provocation: they targeted Whitechapel precisely because it has a large Muslim population. A Ukipper’s wet dream is to wang on about “Islamist invaders” and the need for “remigration” as Bangladeshi Brits look on with alarm. A wind-up masquerading as a march. The Metropolitan Police, fearing “serious disorder”, put the kibosh on it and told UKIP to do their wailing elsewhere.

So they went to Whitehall instead. Around 75 of them gathered outside the London Oratory with their flags and their hernias. And Whitechapel was left to the Islamo-left, to that seething mob of plummy radicals and gruff Islamists who love to scream blue murder about “Zionists”. And there you have it: in the eyes of the Met it is an offence against decency to let a handful of Ukippers traipse through Whitechapel, but it is absolutely fine to surrender those same streets to columns of black-clad fanatics raging against “Zionist scum“. The hypocrisy stinks to heaven.

The anti-UKIP counter-demo in Whitechapel was not an anti-racist march. We all know it. The dogs in the street know it. It was an orgy of intolerance dolled up as tolerance. It was a display of Islamist arrogance wearing the thin veil of “anti-racism” to fool the overeducated idiots of the bourgeois left. Well, if they’ll believe someone with a cock can be a lesbian, they’ll believe Islamist fanatics who dream of annihilating the Jewish homeland are anti-racists.

For those of us who still have a quaint attachment to the virtues of reason and secularism, it was a sickening spectacle. Mobs of men in black masks hollered Islamist slogans in a distinctly menacing manner. They denounced “Zionist scum” and darkly promised to hound them “off our streets”. They yelled “From the river to the sea” (translation: destroy the Jewish homeland) and sang the praises of “our martyrs” (translation: the Jew-killers of Hamas). And all the while, the pricks of the new left who think it’s bigotry to say “he” about a fella in a dress just stood there smiling.

Anyone who says “They were just criticising Zionism” is going to get slapped. Our crisis is too pressing for pussy-footing. When the devotees of a hardcore species of Islam take to the streets to fume about “Zionists”, we know who they mean. We know they don’t mean people like me – Gentiles who support Jewish nationhood. It’s not the likes of us they want to drive out of Britain, 1290-style. It’s them. Those Zios. The kippah people. Are we really going to do that dumb dance of saying, “Criticising Zionism is not the same thing as hating Jews”? Stop it. I’m tired.

Here’s my question: why is it racism for Ukippers to dream of expelling “Islamist invaders” from the UK, but anti-racism for Islamists and their posh simps on the left to agitate for the expulsion of “Zionists” from Britain’s streets? I agree UKIP’s chants were racist. To brand Muslims “Islamist invaders” and demand their “remigration” is vile bigotry. But why can’t the left say the same about the Zio-bashing that we all know is Jew-bashing? Far from calling that out, they snuggle up to it. They fancy themselves as the righteous enemies of racism when in truth they are the obsequious fluffers of Islamist bigotry.

Andrew Doyle on the “useful idiots” at the protest:

There is a species of leftist that is so blinded to the lack of compassion in its enemies that it sees them as friends. The Chinese even have a word – baizuo (白左) – to describe white Western liberals whose generous nature leaves them open to exploitation. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s remark in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): “There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly”. For the most egregious example of recent years, look no further than the absurdly self-defeating phenomenon of “Queers for Palestine”.

What happened at Tower Hamlets this weekend was a show of strength. The video footage makes that clear enough. Men blocked the streets to pray to Allah in public as a sign of religious dominance, while other men roamed aggressively, virtually daring anyone to object. Women were notably absent.

These chest-thumping, territorial displays followed the Metropolitan Police’s decision to ban a UKIP march through the East End under the banner of “reclaim Whitechapel from the Islamists”. With a significant Muslim population in the area – 40% in Tower Hamlets – this was always bound to provoke. Of course, protests are by their nature provocative, or they wouldn’t be protests. Islamic supremacists are likewise permitted to march peacefully, but we shouldn’t be foolish enough to ignore what this demonstration portends.

September 19, 2025

What Medieval Fast Food Restaurants Were Like

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Apr 2025

Golden brown fried pastries filled with a fruit and spice paste

City/Region: Paris
Time Period: c. 1393

Fast food has been around since the Middle Ages, and while a lot has changed in food production and cooking in the last six hundred years or so, then, as now, you could get a fried apple pie.

Rissoles were fried filled pastries (modern versions are usually some kind of filling rolled in breadcrumbs and fried), and they could be made savory or sweet. These ones are made with roasted apples, raisins, figs, and sweet spices. I chose cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg, but you can choose whatever spices you like.

    It is common that rissoles are made of figs, raisins, roast apples, and nuts peeled to imitate pine nuts, and powder of spices [and a little fine salt]; and let the paste be well saffroned and then let them be fried in oil [and sugar them].
    — Le Ménagier de Paris, c. 1393

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September 15, 2025

A few thousand deplorable “gammons” disrupt the peace in London

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

At least, the headline is how I assume most establishment types in Britain would try to describe the Unite the Kingdom march in London over the weekend (all photos by Esmeralda Weatherwax of the New English Review):

As I said earlier I have never seen a crowd like it – the police were overwhelmed with the numbers and I think even the organisers were pleasantly surprised at the turnout.

I gave up all hope early on of getting near enough to a screen to see or hear the speakers. But you can catch them up on line. I’m sure there are already links to Katie Hopkins, Laurence Fox, Tommy himself, Elon Musk by video link and the others.

I decided I was of most use photographing the numbers and variety, talking to people and following events away from the stage.

The march was scheduled to muster at Waterloo on the south bank. Knowing the turn out would be good attendees were advised to leave at Blackfriars Station and cross Blackfriars Bridge to join the march in Stamford Street east of Waterloo Station. The route was to be along the South Bank, over Westminster Bridge and into Whitehall at the south end. Antifa and Stand up to Racism were expected to march from Russell Square and would be rallying in the north end of Whitehall by Trafalgar Square with a long corden sanitaire between. Well that worked well last time.

I went straight to Whitehall and went to greet friends who were involved as marshals. Already the area was filling up fast and there were queues for the portaloos. They had to be provided as Westminster Council had shut and locked the public ones outside Westminster Station and on Westminster Pier. I don’t know why they do this. There will be mess afterwards.

August 27, 2025

Operation Raise the Colours

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

Gawain Towler on the groundswell of quiet patriotic display in England, against the active attempts by local governments to suppress any and all flag-waving or even flag-flying by the plebs:

It was a seemingly innocuous tweet during the 2014 Rochester and Strood by-election that exposed a deep cultural rift. Emily Thornberry, then Labour’s shadow attorney general, a paragon of establishment elite thought, posted a photo of a terraced house in Strood adorned with multiple St George’s Cross flags, a white van parked outside.

No caption, just “Image from #Rochester”. To Thornberry, the image spoke for itself: a symbol of backward, flag-waving patriotism, the domain of the “white van man” she and her metropolitan peers presumably viewed with quiet derision. She expected her audience to share the contempt, to chuckle at the vulgarity of overt Englishness. But the backlash was ferocious. The public saw snobbery, a sneering dismissal of ordinary lives. Thornberry resigned from the shadow cabinet that day, rebuked by Ed Miliband for disrespecting hardworking families. I played a modest role in that storm, forwarding the tweet to Guido Fawkes and The Sun, which amplified the outrage and forced the reckoning.

That episode, now over a decade old, feels eerily prescient as I contemplate the “raising the flag” phenomenon sweeping Britain in recent weeks. What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised. Yet I acknowledge the disquiet it stirs: in a polarised society, such displays can evoke unease, linked in some minds to far-right agitation or the riots of summer 2024, that and deeper darker memories of NF marches in the 1970s.

Why is this happening now? The timing aligns with the anniversary of last year’s Southport tragedy and ensuing unrest, where misinformation, both from the state and other bad actors, fuelled anti-immigration protests that spiralled into violence. Many participants frame it as a response to “two-tier policing”, swift crackdowns on native demonstrations while pro-Palestinian marches proceed with apparent leniency. It’s a broader reclamation of national pride amid economic stagnation, unchecked migration, and a sense of cultural dilution. For the overlooked, those Thornberry’s tweet mocked, this is a way to say, “We belong here”. and stronger yet, but uncontroversial in any other land than our own, “This is our land”.

It’s contemplative defiance: not riots, but ribbons of red and white asserting identity in a nation where Englishness often feels like an afterthought.

August 26, 2025

“One of the top tips for having a decent country is never, ever, allow the fuckwits to gain power”

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

If you need to drop someone off at London’s Gatwick Airport, you’ll find yourself facing a £7 charge for the privilege, no matter what day of the week or time of day you choose. Tim Worstall explains why:

“Gatwick Airport, North Terminal” by Martin Roell from Berlin, Germany is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

It’s sod all to do with congestion and everything to do with the tractor production statistics the fuckwits have imposed upon the airport.

    The conditions attached by the transport secretary included national landscape provisions as per the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023, more consideration for sustainability in buildings design and additional pollution-related mitigation measures.

    The government said in its formal response to the Planning Inspectorate’s recommendations on the Gatwick DCO that it wanted more detail on how it would achieve its commitment of 54% of passengers arriving at the airport via rail within the first year of dual runway operations, which could be by the end of this decade.

The government has a target. That 54% of the arrivals at an airport — yes, an airport, where people get on jet planes — must be by public transport. Therefore the airport is charging for car drop offs in order to decrease the number of car drop offs. There is no more reason than that. Or, as up at the top, the reason there’s a £7 drop off charge at Gatwick Airport is because we are ruled by the fuckwits who have a target for public transport to an airport where people then get on jet planes.

    London Gatwick has also accepted a requirement to have 54% of passengers using public transport prior to bringing the Northern Runway into operation and has reiterated the need for third parties, including the Department for Transport, to support delivery of the necessary conditions and improvements required to meet this target. This would include, for example, reinstating the full Gatwick Express train service.

    Given the reliance on other parties to achieve this 54% target, should it not be achieved then London Gatwick has also proposed an alternative cars-on-the-road limit to be met before first use of the Northern Runway to address concerns about possible road congestion. Furthermore, if neither the 54% transport mode share or the cars-on-the-road limit are met, then use of the Northern Runway would be delayed until £350m of road improvements have been completed. This would make sure any additional road traffic flows can be accommodated and any congestion avoided.

It’s all fuckwit targets set by fuckwits.

Of course, there are those who think that fuckwit targets set by fuckwits are a good idea. For one of the problems of life is that there are always fuckwits:

    When we talk about airport expansion, we often focus on runways, terminals, and the physical infrastructure. But what about how people actually get to the airport?

    The journey begins long before passengers step foot in a terminal, and their choices about transport can have a significant impact on congestion, carbon emissions, and overall passenger experience.

    One of the conditions set for Gatwick’s expansion is a legally binding guarantee that 54% of passengers will travel by public transport, up from today’s 44%. On the surface, it sounds like a simple shift. But transport isn’t just about availability — it’s about behaviour, convenience, and incentives.

One of the top tips for having a decent country is never, ever, allow the fuckwits to gain power. But we have done so therefore there is this £7 charge for a drop off at Gatwick Airport. That’s it, there is no other reason. There are fuckwits buried in the belly of the British state and they’re making the rules now.

August 25, 2025

George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

Filed under: Books, Britain, France — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Down and Out was one of the first Orwell works I read as an adult, having encountered Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four as school texts. I would not say that I enjoyed the book so much as it gave me a very different view of both cities between the wars and encouraged me to seek out more of Orwell’s work. On his Substack, Rob Henderson considers the book and its author:

I was in high school the first time I read Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell. A memoir about his time in the slums of France and England.1 Orwell, while in Paris, worked as a plongeur — a person employed to wash dishes and carry out other menial tasks in a restaurant or hotel. Plongeur sounds much better than “bus boy”.

Because, at the time, I was also working as a busboy and dishwasher, I enjoyed Orwell’s description of employment in a busy restaurant. He wrote that the work itself was simple, like sorting a deck of cards, but when done against the clock it became exhausting. That captured exactly how I felt on my Friday and Saturday evening shifts.

Later I was disappointed to learn that Orwell had come from privilege. The guy went to Eton, a prestigious all-boys school. The book recounted his experiences with slum tourism. When he was penniless during the periods described in Down and Out, particularly during his return to London, his well-to-do family could and did take him back in for temporary periods so he could eat well and shower. At first this made the story feel less authentic.

Over time, though, I came to see it differently. It took someone like Orwell to write about life in the slums in a way that other educated people would pay attention to. I had to go through something similar. Only after spending time around the upper middle class did I understand how to describe my life in a way that would actually make them pay attention.

[…]

In the second half of Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell describes living rough in London’s East End, staying in lodging houses and casual wards. He worked alongside the city’s laborers to understand poverty from the inside.

Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published book, written when he was in his mid-twenties. It is striking is how little he romanticized the idea of being an impoverished bohemian in world-class cities, the way so many others of his background might have done. Instead, he treated his immersion in the Parisian and London underworlds as an attempt to strip away the prejudices he had inherited as an upper-middle-class Etonian.

The book is restrained in its politics. Orwell rarely pauses for commentary, preferring to tell the story as it happened and saving his more general conclusions for a couple of chapters at the end. This is more or less the same approach I took with Troubled; describe the world as it was, or at least as I remember it, and let the meaning emerge on its own.

One of the strongest features of Down and Out is its focus on the psychological effects of petty humiliations. Orwell describes kitchens where people from every corner of Europe are screaming at each other in different languages, frantically trying to keep pace with the chaos. If you have ever watched one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, you have some idea. He admired the strange order that somehow emerged from the chaos.

This voyeuristic quality is part of the book’s appeal. We all go to restaurants and see only the polished surface, knowing almost nothing about what happens behind the doors. Likewise, we all encounter homeless people in daily life and know little about how they live. Back in the 1930s, you didn’t have to make many mistakes to find yourself in a tough spot. My guess is that because society today is wealthier, there are more social services available, and powerful recreational drugs more accessible, the typical homeless person (he uses the word “tramp”, which was a prevailing term at the time) Orwell encountered nearly a century ago is very different from those we see today.

During his year and a half working menial jobs in Paris, Orwell wrote a few books, all rejected by publishers in London. None of this appears in Down and Out. He never dwells on his literary ambitions or his many failures. He does not even treat “writing” as a subject worth mentioning. For him, sleeping on a bench along the Embankment was a detail that mattered more than discussing proofs with an editor. Struggle is more interesting to read about than success. Sometimes people ask me if I’ll write a follow up to Troubled. No way. No one wants to read a whole book about a guy who went to elite universities and then blathers on about his subsequent prosperity. The thought of it induces a feeling in me of both amusement and nausea. Even if I focused on the unexpected struggles and costs of upward mobility, the stakes are so low that I can’t bring myself to take it seriously.

  1. It just occurred to me that this was in 2005. Around once a week I’d stop by my high school library after class and browse the shelves. By 2006 and 2007, I noticed fewer and fewer students actually reading in the library and more and more of them on the desktop computers, watching videos on a new website called “YouTube”. Can’t help but wonder how much streaming videos have reduced interest in reading among young people.

July 27, 2025

QotD: London coffeehouses and Paris salons of the Ancien Régime

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

Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris at the end of this era of strict censorship, which helps explain why her honeymoon with French public opinion was short-lived. The official press, notably the Mercure and Gazette, continued churning out fawning snippets of society news about the royal couple. But the scandal-mongering libelles and pamphlets had their own paragraph men, called nouvellistes, who picked up “news” from well-informed sources posted on benches in the Tuileries, Luxembourg Gardens, and, of course, under the tree of Cracow. Police efforts to repress nouvellistes‘ gossip proved futile in the face of high demand. One famous libelle of the era, Le Gazetier cuirassé promised “scandalous anecdotes about the French court”. (It was printed in London, out of reach of official French censors.) Another publication printed in London starting in the 1760s was the famous Mémoires secrets, an anonymous chronicle of insider gossip and anecdotes from Parisian high society. A scurrilous book about Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, also appeared as a collection of gossip that nouvellistes had picked up around Paris.

Despite the libelles circulating in Paris, the Bourbon monarchy was still relatively protected compared with the hurly-burly across the channel in London, where coffeehouses buzzed with political innuendo and intrigue. Some French philosophes, it is true, attempted to replicate London’s coffeehouse culture at Parisian cafés, such as the Procope on the Left Bank. (Voltaire frequented the place, where he liked to add chocolate to his coffee.) Other regulars at the Procope — named after the Byzantine writer Procopius, famous for his Secret History — were Rousseau, Danton, and Robespierre, as well as Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

The Parisian equivalent of the coffeehouse was the salon, which differed from London coffeehouses in both ambience and function. Whereas London coffeehouses were boisterously public, salons were essentially closed spaces, usually held in private homes. Most were by invitation only. Many were hosted by women, usually titled or wealthy ladies with an interest in culture and politics — such as Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Necker, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. There was also the Marquise du Deffand, a friend to Voltaire and the English man of letters Horace Walpole, to whom she bequeathed not only her papers, but also her pet dog, Tonton.

As access to these rarefied spaces increasingly became a symbol of social success, admission got more tightly controlled. (Madame Geoffrin expelled Diderot from her salon because she found his conversation “quite beyond control”.) Still, those who frequented salons represented a great diversity within the elites — from rising young writers and established authors to powerful politicians and eccentric aristocrats. The tacit rule was, as in London coffeehouses, that wit was more important than rank. Many great French writers launched their careers thanks to their admittance. One was the philosopher Montesquieu, who found success at the salon of Madame Lambert.

Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.

July 19, 2025

QotD: William Wilberforce and the anti-slavery movement

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery,” says [Eric] Metaxas [in Amazing Grace], “something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world.” Ownership of existing slaves continued in the British West Indies for another quarter-century, and in the United States for another 60 years, and slave trading continued in Turkey until Atatürk abolished it in the Twenties and in Saudi Arabia until it was (officially) banned in the Sixties, and it persists in Africa and other pockets of the world to this day. But not as a broadly accepted “human good”.

There was some hard-muscle enforcement that accompanied the new law: the Royal Navy announced that it would regard all slave ships as pirates, and thus they were liable to sinking and their crews to execution. There had been some important court decisions: in the reign of William and Mary, Justice Holt had ruled that “one may be a villeyn in England, but not a slave,” and in 1803 William Osgoode, Chief Justice of Lower Canada, ruled that the institution was not compatible with the principles of British law. But what was decisive was the way Wilberforce “murdered” (in Metaxas’ word) the old acceptance of slavery by the wider society. As he wrote in 1787, “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners”.

The latter goal we would now formulate as “changing the culture” — which is what he did. The film of Amazing Grace shows the Duke of Clarence and other effete toffs reeling under a lot of lame bromides hurled by Wilberforce on behalf of “the people”. But, in fact, “the people” were a large part of the problem. Then as now, citizens of advanced democracies are easily distracted. The 18th-century Church of England preached “a tepid kind of moralism” disconnected both from any serious faith and from the great questions facing the nation. It was a sensualist culture amusing itself to death: Wilberforce goes to a performance of Don Juan, is shocked by a provocative dance, and is then further shocked to discover the rest of the audience is too blasé even to be shocked. The Paris Hilton of the age, the Prince of Wales, was celebrated for having bedded 7,000 women and snipped from each a keepsake hair. Twenty-five per cent of all unmarried females in London were whores; the average age of a prostitute was 16; and many brothels prided themselves on offering only girls under the age of 14. Many of these features — weedy faint-hearted mainstream churches, skanky celebs, weary provocations for jaded debauchees — will strike a chord in our own time.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” remarked Adam Smith. England survived the 18th century, and maybe we will survive the 21st. But the life of William Wilberforce and the bicentennial of his extraordinary achievement remind us that great men don’t shirk things because the focus-group numbers look unpromising. What we think of as “the Victorian era” was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce which he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We, children of the 20th century, mock our 19th-century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it’s because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a “social conscience”: in the 1790s, a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the Nineties as the “broken windows” theory: “The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.”

Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.

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