- Blog
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What have we learnt?
The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms of the end of the progressive or liberal period are everywhere – and we learn that it was really all bullshit anyway. I argue about…
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Where is my patriotism?
Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag…
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A small bookclub
All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book Club, which is designed to get us all reading despite our shriveled brains and crippling TikTok habits. More about it on the blog: Nabokov vs…
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Flat tax?
A surprisingly large number of politicians apparently want to nuke taxation from orbit… — It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with…
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Assisted dying or compulsory suicide?
Do your duty, prepare for your departure. — Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the ‘economically inactive’ population. This system would like the idea of more people taking the voluntary way out. Am I being neurotic? My concerns about the…
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How do you fund a monarchy?
There are only two ways: taxation or plunder — In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since the end of empire, the plunder route is basically closed off too. In Britain no one pays tax directly to the monarch any more. But…
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Some bullet-points about regulation
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about…
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Look like you mean it
Riot season arrived on schedule. — Back in the old days… …lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us in order to control us, in order to disempower us and better exploit us. We should work to unite working people, to bring black and…
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Tape trauma
In the late eighties I lived in the East End of London and I used to rent movies from a little video shop on the A11 near Bow Road underground station. The routine – you might remember this – involved picking up a video on the way home from the tube and returning it in…