No. We need to ask how many politicians have actually ever done or achieved anything outside of their PPE, wonk/union, MP sinecures? Stop the regulatory rentierism that enables armies of useless busybodies. Want growth? Get out of people’s lives and stop punishing the doers.

I think the future will be more ‘blue collar’ anyway. Skilled trades and people that actually do/make things etc, ideally with an enabling regulatory economy. Lots of doom and gloom, especially on here but most of what bedevils the UK can be fixed and idiotically self imposed.

Had a number of people ask: what is ‘regulatory rentierism’: a situation where a state-quangocracy extracts economic rent through regulatory power rather than through productive activities and that is incentivised to expand power/rents. Often justified through moral policing.

It also weakens one of the most important barriers to chaos and social breakdown: that of shared collective norms. Open criminality with zero costs creates an escalatory normative free for all. Today’s nike trainers will be tomorrow’s murderer.

Somebody on 50k a year currently pays £249 a month for the NHS.

🍂⏰️ The fall semester begins: 🌐 Get ready for The 4th Geopolitical Summit on September 17–18, jointly organised by the 🇭🇺 Danube Institute and 🇺🇲 The Heritage Foundation Foundation. ❓️The central theme of the conference is: 'Whose New World Order?' 👉 The program & the

My article in Times Higher Education on why the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act isn't a "hate spech charter" Blocking Tories’ free speech law will not help to protect Jewish students timeshighereducation.com/blocking-torie…

£2,547,753,609,230

The right to free speech does not exist to amplify the loudest voices. It exists for the voices that would be silenced without it. And since there is no justice without access to justice, a properly accessible legal right is needed. archive.is/2024.08.30-000…

The problem is politics is always downstream from morality. Any rational conservative argument will collapse with even an intimation that somebody/thing will suffer, somewhere. Absent a strategic ethical grammar, conservatives are stuck with weak woke ‘egg on the face’ attacks.

Two strays seem to have adopted me whilst on holiday. Never even liked cats much, but I am running around buying cat food and milk and being meowed into feeding them at the crack of dawn. Lovely little things actually.

The Taliban are doing an incredible job of deconstructing the gendered metanarratives of western colonial epistemological violence through a praxis of discursive othering. thetimes.com/article/85c5b3…

Some unis are unlawfully suppressing free speech & academic freedom. The HE free speech act enables academics to access their existing ECHR rights. Labour needs to implement it, not use free speech as a political football to attack the Tories. My column theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Why I don’t think this is a strong argument against the HE (freedom of speech) provisions🧵 1. Production of knowledge is the core purpose of universities. Academic freedom/academic free speech fundamental to that. At the mo there’s no effective means to enforce existing rights.

The problem is less ‘decolonisers’ but the vast majority of academics who seethe but do nothing. They watch as the fragile values of reason, freedom, rational adjudication and the pursuit of truth, are destroyed.

The critical minerals and rare earths that clean tech relies on come from China; especially acute in terms of 🇨🇳 processing. Absent domestic energy supplies or a viable critical mineral plan, this fundamentally compromises national security.

In England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the current target for urgent cancer treatment is no more than two months between the date the hospital receives an urgent suspected cancer referral and the start of treatment. 😕

🧵 1/8 "Self-censoring fear now a fact of academic life" and students are "frightened" to speak their minds, say Oxford dons. THIS is why it's so important that the Government changes its mind about quashing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/0…