Mathias Döpfner is the most interesting man in Germany. A humble music journalist who worked his way up to own one of Europe’s largest media conglomerates, Döpfner’s biography is as meritocratic as may be imagined in a society in which ambition is stifled by inherited wealth. In a German business world run by dour Buddenbrooks characters, he is a rare spark of humanistic erudition; in a democratic public sphere where no one went online during lockdown and Woke 1.0 still rules the roost; where no one can write in PEEL paragraphs and Kurt Tucholsky is for some reason part of the national canon, he is the rare commentator who can speak with a wit and naturalness of expression that would not seem out of place in the common room of an Oxford college. These remarkable qualities makes Döpfner’s thus far catastrophic management of The Telegraph the greatest tragedy for Anglo-German understanding that has ever occurred in connection with that august paper’s name.

Subscribe now

Döpfner’s acquisition of The Telegraph came after months of smoky backroom manoeuvres by the usual Tory mates (Mr. Döpfner might prefer to call them „CSU-Amigos nach britischer Art“) against an Emirati bid that, in the spirit of gentlemanly capitalism that still prevails amongst the sound Sandhurst-educated chaps of the Gulf, would have left the paper’s editorial staff to their own devices. Hitherto The Telegraph had given Reform a fair shake; while it has been argued in J’accuse that the paper’s reversion to its old Tory partisanship following Döpfner’s take-over is evidence of a stitch-up between Axel Springer and Conservative Party grandees, I do not share this assessment. Mr. Döpfner is well-aware Axel Springer’s specific brand of politics was always going to be a hard sell in a country with a very different intellectual heritage and historical experience than the soil from which Axel sprung, and to dismiss him as yet another monomaniacal German ideologue in the vein of Hugh Laurie’s character in the second Blackadder is to sell him short. Die Welt, the Springer flagship, is a paper of radical liberalism in the best tradition of the Heckerlied: in the darkness of the Merkel years, it gave column space to various Peter Hitchens-like figures on the rightward fringes of the public debate and published bold investigate reporting on the chancellor’s dodgy Chinese lockdown deals. Contrary to its pro-American image, it was also the only place that provided Seymour Hersh a venue for his sceptical reporting on Assad’s alleged sarin gas attacks on Khan Sheykhoun in 2017. More recently, it has defied the Brandmauer by publishing Elon Musk’s pro-AfD missals — not an easy thing to do in a Germany where the curtains remain firmly drawn on the pre-2015 Overton window. Döpfner stands firmly on the side of free speech and progress; only a lack of understanding of the differences between German and British could have caused him to swing his publicistic weight behind a party that stands for neither of these things.

What does Döpfner want from The Telegraph? Though he rarely comments on British politics, the German media mogul has in the past displayed a sensitivity to the particularities of our island’s political culture and exhibited remarkably nuanced views on Brexit for a German europhile. Döpfner belongs to the liberal-conservative tradition of thinking about European integration that begins with Ludwig Erhard, the founder of EFTA, and sought to unify the continent as a loose, free-trading economic bloc against French plans for ever-closer integration led by Brussels — a struggle which has come to the fore again recently as German conservatives lobby to expand the geographical scope of „Made in Europe“ origin quotas against the narrow interpretation backed by the French government. Leaving aside specific policy issues, Döpfner’s general pitch to the centre-right in this country is that Britain and Europe should work together to expand trade, beat back Net Zero/the Green Deal, counter Mr. Putin’s mischief, and pursue a more sensible approach to migration in older to salvage the liberal social model and stem the rising tide of antisemitism. This is an agenda that both main centre-right parties in Britain agree on: the question Mr. Döpfner must ask himself is which one can implement it more credibly.

On each of these files, the Conservatives’ record has nothing to commend it. It was fourteen years of Tory incompetence that sapped Britain’s once formidable military puissance (which British readers should be aware enjoyed, up until very recently, a great deal more respect on the continent than it does here) to the point that the army had to hire private security guards to defend its bases whilst British military industry atrophied and post-2022 procurement was wasted on expensive boondoggles. It was Theresa May who introduced Net Zero and lobbied for it at the G7, and her successor who made it a centrepiece of his foreign policy through his ozymandian climate summit in Glasgow. It was a Conservative government that negotiated the Chagos surrender deal. But the Tories’ most unforgivable legacy from a centre-right, europhile, atlanticist perspective must surely be their mishandling of Brexit. The europhile case for Brexit was that it would offer a centre-right government the political capital to carry out wide-ranging pro-market reforms that would provide a competitive stimulus for the EU to reform itself along similar lines; not only did the Conservatives spend their four years in government after Brexit trying to reimpose the frontiers of the state at the European level through Johnson’s climate diplomacy, but it was Kemi Badenoch, the very woman whom they now wish to make prime minister, who, as Secretary for Trade, reversed Rishi Sunak’s pledge to remove 4,000 EU laws, mostly environmental regulations, from the statute book. The Conservative Party has done one worse than the restored Bourbons in Talleyrand’s famous quip: it has learned nothing and forgotten everything.

Subscribe now

A common adage in the American political lexicon holds that personnel is policy, and here too the Tories have little to offer Britain’s German partners. Institutionally, the Tories are the party of Brexit; their current grandees spent their entire political lives fighting to extricate themselves from European entanglements and have a reflexive suspicion that any proposals for deeper cross-Channel cooperation are but cunning ruses to drag Britain back into the common market. Farage, of course, is also an old Brexit hand, but the people who will be responsible for the day-to-day handling of British policy towards the EU in a Reform government are younger, psychically unburdened by the emotional strain of the Brexit negotiations, and thus able to take a more pragmatic attitude when it comes to relations with the bloc. A reversal of Brexit or a return to the single market is not on the cards any which way, and the best that europhiles can hope for is a government in London that can work in a spirit of comity with those on the continent; European politics seems destined, for the foreseeable future, to be dominated by a Le Pen administration in France, and the ideological affinities between the RN and Reform would make cooperation far smoother.

If Döpfner wants to be a power broker in a Britain increasingly drifting away from the Euro-Atlantic world, his best chance is to leverage his influence as publisher of the most important centre-right media outfit to put Farage into No. 10. From his battles to push the CDU in a liberal direction under Merkel and especially Merz, Döpfner will be all too aware of how a party captured by its activists can simply ignore what, in a functioning democracy, would be important stakeholders, like the media and business (Bückbürgertum, anyone?) The Tories are a social clique who want to conserve boozy lunches at the East India Club and will sell the family silver to the Chinese and the Qataris if that is what so doing requires. The party’s Chefideologe, the late Sir Alex Younger (Kemi’s recent manifesto, as she said during its launch at Conference, „is our answer to the challenge the now late Sir Alex Younger posed“), was a man who furnished his office with special high-backed chairs to impress rich Arabs — and we are to believe this is a party with principled objections to Emirati ownership of The Telegraph? Reform is a „politisches Startup“ like Lindner’s FDP pretended to be; it as yet has no clear hierarchy beyond Farage, who is not interested in the nitty gritty of policy, but has a vision for the country and is happy to leave it to others to work out the details. If you want to save the West, there is only one option. Mathias, please stärke die Reform-Partei!

Subscribe now

This piece is not about the ongoing trial and solely intends to examine the cultural impact of his career; which is strange and unique to Britain.

It is hard to convey just how seriously Russell Brand was pushed as a commentator 2013-15. In the closing days of the 2015 election, Ed Miliband chose to be interviewed on Brand’s YouTube channel ‘the trews’ and this was treated as a seminal event of the campaign. Brand’s book Revolution was soberly reviewed in mainstream left-wing outlets like The Guardian as part of the same phenomenon behind Occupy Wall Street. Brand guest-edited The New Statesman: a serious magazine, for serious people. When Brand told young people not to bother voting in 2015, he was treated as the default social representative of “anti-establishment” politics and, as a teenager who also told people not to vote, for very different, Unqualified Reservations, reasons I encountered people who assumed I’d been “redpilled by Russell Brand.” In the High Summer of Britpoppery, Russell Brand was spoken of, like Putin and the Portuguese Man of War, as a “force” outside of “the liberal world order” which might have to be reckoned with in the future.

Read more

A stewardess had rather cruelly noted, in a mock hushed voice, that ‘not a lot of people had turned up.’ Yet, what people they were; some of them were clearly ‘the usual suspects’ but some were outwardly normal, two had even brought their children. Who on earth brings their seven year old son to see Sargon of Akkad speak in public? I asked myself, for that, friends, is where we were on a rainy Wednesday evening in Oxford. The topic was ‘our postliberal future’ and what I had imagined it to consist of was a long attempt by Dr. Carl to repeat the phrase ‘elite theory’ and convert to ‘Orthodox Catholicism.’

I was pleasantly surprised this wasn’t (really) the case; when someone, long ago, told me they were ‘redpilling’ Sargon my heart sunk, because what makes Sargon of Akkad important is that he is the baseline white male ‘Gamer’ and expertly reflects whatever this demographic thinks. It is the tradition of The Gamer quand le meme; The Guy in the Chat, The Pokimane Superchatter, the person who talks about “scrubs” and “cheugy”; not “The Gamer” of anti-extremism fame, this is a guy who doesn’t say slurs but if a slur, like “13% do 60%” becomes a “meme”, he will put it in a video-essay about “mad lads” with a police siren sound effect. The Internet Everyman. It was our view that Sargon would become a much less radicalising force if he started talking about “Thomas Carlyle” instead of annoying Feminists.

Sargon begins his speech with a reference to Rizz Ahmed’s music video “the Long Goodbye”; this clip has clearly made a monumental impression upon Sargon, he refers to it, again and again, throughout his speech. It became slowly apparent that Sargon believes Rizz Ahmed’s career is, more or less, a direct parallel to his own achievements and such great vessels are obliged to exchange fog-horns as they pass each other in the night of history. Sargon has fantasised about a meeting between himself and Rizz Ahmed in which Rizz, interviewed afterwards by the news, says “he’s [Sargon] a pretty decent bloke.”

The main part of Sargon’s address was lucid, vaguely original and completely at odds with his actual point. Sargon detailed, ably for an audience he assumed unsympathetic, how the modern Hobbesian state is founded on a separation from organic communities; which means, when this state adopts an ideology of positive discrimination, it inevitably sets up a caste system in which the natives are forced to take up arms against it. This is a perfectly good argument for nativism, one which centre-ground people like Price ought to hear, within the strict confines of Liberal social-contract theory. Unfortunately, Sargon appends to this an c. 2017, series of claims like “nobody is a self-authoring individual” and decides to call the racial apocalypse he foresees a “postliberal moment.” There are a million ways to refute this, a million examples of ‘Liberal’ regimes engaging in ruthless ethnic preservation; so many, that by now the refutations are just as boring as the positive arguments. Better to ask, is this even worth quibbling with? If a popular commentator becomes racist through wholesome chungus postliberalism, is that any worse than if they do so through wholesome chungus Nietzscheanism. Yes.

To say ‘man is not self-authoring but is owned by others’ does not just give you a ‘right’ (which is available by simpler means) to ‘be racist’ it also opens up the possibilities of natural duties and natural rulers. By contrast, amorally pointing to the low human quality and economic drain of migrant populations entails no such reciprocity and is also popular with the masses. One such duty Sargon acknowledges in his conversation with James Price is that people like the Gurkhas who fought for Britain, as what he insists on calling “auxiliaries”, are entitled to settle here. This isn’t high treason but once you acknowledge reciprocal duties between “the English” and colonised groups, you will understand that the content of these duties will be filled by popular enthusiasm which, c. 2026, is “children are dying in Africa, they deserve to come here.”

Read more

The days are drawing in, and the pleasant novelty of feeling ever so slightly chilly outside is fading with it. Britain’s populist right is divided and the timeline gets less readable by the day. Trump pre-emptively denies the mid-term elections, and yet, the old animal spirits of January 6^th are barely stirred.

Friends. We have been in rougher seas and we will come out of the storm on the other side. You must always believe. Always have a sense of forward momentum. Always have hope that if you keep reading and paying for the words that I write then at some point the grooming gang bomalians will be taken from post-industrial cities in the North of England are cast out, that we shall make a new Thermopylae and not become one with Nineveh and Tyre.

So we must find the silver linings where we can and so I want to share something which has warmed by shivering, sodden bones. Life sprang when I saw this xost on my timeline:

After many years of being a man in Britain I have had to accept, however begrudgingly, that there is a proportion of mankind who find Football interesting and have strong opinions about seemingly interchangeable corporate entities like Liverpool and Chelsea. It still sickens me when well educated people buy into it, either to affect a boorish faux-working class persona or because they are investing their exquisite minds into this dreck whilst so many worthy books and articles go sadly unread. One of the many redeeming features of the opposite sex for most of my life has been their stern refusal to care about chav kickabout and greater interest in reading fiction (with all appropriate caveats).

Read more

Much of right-wing politics is an endless attempt to reinvent the wheel. Since, “the Right” doesn’t really exist but is a coalition of groups incidentally opposed to “the Left” (which is a real philo…

Read more

Despair is a sin and so we must always be cautious about demoralisation pornography. But we must also recognise that Britain is in a bleak place politically. If the Conservative Party recovery contin…

Read more

Absolutely every foreign and domestic commentator up until the 1960s, perhaps even the 1980s, described the English as a uniquely xenophobic people. Orwell said that the only thing the working-class …

Read more

Is there such thing as a right-wing city? The people behind Praxis are going to try to build one; Richard Hannania assures us that one could never exist.

Yet there already is one, and it is right unde…

Read more

Read more

If we accept that the vibe-shift has stuttered in the past year we can point to a few well-rehearsed structural issues with ‘the right’ – Restore making it harder for an anti-Tory right-wing party to win a majority, Reform’s erratic behaviour, the Online Safety Act restricting the free flow of content and Elon Musk changing how X functions for the worse.

But if we were to put these Factors to the side and look closely at the big arguments, the real problem seems to be that the newly minted hard-right has been stuck debating whether or not Ricardo Soonak is an Indian or a Britain since last December thanks to the Triggers. Since then a proportion of the online-right has preferred to relitigate this argument instead of focusing on the pressure points where the pro-immigration case is extremely weak, including (but not limited to) roving Pakistani rape gangs, social housing distribution and huge fiscal transfers from ‘White-British’ voters to specific groups outside of that category.

Read more

In the bland fogginess that blankets the world, there exists a shining beacon. Unbridled desire flourishes; lust for love and life. For the past four years, atavistic masculi…

Read more

After learning about ‘Plantain conversations’ I felt inspired to rewatch the film 2006 film Kidulthood, which is akin to a hood classic in London’s MLE community. It centres on a group of diverse teenagers around the ages of sixteen and seventeen living in West London who operate at the boundary between badly behaved and participating in formal organised crime, the sort of teenager who will engage in the occasional opportunistic mugging but is still uncomfortable with murder. The characters take drugs like cocaine casually but balk at smoking heroin.

This balance makes the characters more relatable for most people who grew up in London than the other grand attempt to taxonomise London’s diverse criminal environs, Top Boy, where the children are already in at the deep end of brutal violence and drug trafficking. It is more like Kids than The Wire. For those resident in London’s hood watching the film is similar to someone from a residential suburb of Manchester watching Coronation Street, a slightly condensed and dramatic version of their own experience – for me the pleasure is both voyeuristic but also nostalgic, as this was a world which you incidentally brush up against as a teenager. On the top deck of a London bus or, if you were particularly badly behaved, meeting a pale girl your age with sick all over her clothes in a drug dealer’s flat.

Kidulthood is the only film I can think of which properly captures the inexplicably indifferent attitude that many White middle class parents had to their children’s safety by dumping them into unreformed comprehensive schools. The film opens with a middle-class white girl being violently bullied by a group of rough teenage girls who beat her face into a bloody mess.

Read more

You are going to take Britain into totally uncharted waters and offer a fresh alternative to the failed politics of yesteryear. Naturally, that means you will boldly endorse a mixed-m…

Read more

Thursday has come, and with it, our digital darlings. The Editorial board has chosen a winner (revealed at the bottom of the article). But for now, the entries:

Read more

Reform’s sustained fall in the polls over the past six months has not come as a result of Farage’s ‘corruption scandals’ or because the public has warmed to Kemi Badenoch. Badenoch’s polling has barely changed since the July 2025 nadir, she is still hovering around eighteen percent in most polls. The only thing that has materially changed since last year is that Restore, which did not exist, is now polling at around 6% nationally. If all of those voters defected to Reform, Reform would be beating Labour in the polls and on course for a majority.

Anybody who writes about British politics and is not examining Restore closely simply isn’t in the game, Lowe’s antics are driving change more than anything else. As it stands none of the parties of the right, the Tories, Reform or Restore seem capable of reaching thirty percent of the vote which would give a government enough strength to leave the ECHR and set up a third country forced removals destination like Rwanda. So long as this deadlock continues the ‘small-boats crisis’ will continue apace and more innocent men and women will be attacked by illegal migrants.

To help get us out this situation we must understand how it came to pass. A blindspot in most people’s political memories is the post-1997 rebuilding of the Conservative Party. Most people’s understanding what we call Tory modernisation period begins roughly with David Cameron beating David Davis and then letting gay people get married to help make the Tories look more ‘modern’, eventually leading to the rise of UKIP. In fact the period before Cameron became leader did more to shape the eventual texture of the British right.

Soon after William Hague became leader in 1997 he set out to improve the image of the Conservative Party by making it a more democratic institution by giving the membership the final vote on who could be leader. These reforms were also motivated by the sentimental memories of the Tory party functioning as a mass membership organisation in the post-war period (there are still ‘Conservative Pubs’ dotted around the country), which it was hoped would be renewed by enfranchising members further.

The result of this has been to repeatedly place wholly incompetent individuals at the head of the Conservative Party because of the membership’s strange pathologies – in particular their overwhelming preference for women. Every time that a woman has reached the voting stage of a Tory leadership race she has gone onto win (May, Truss and Kemi). All three of these women were unsuitable to the task, but had been grossly overpromoted because of their sex. All three of them were psychosexually compared to Margaret Thatcher by the Tory press, only to be revealed as weak, emotionally incontinent individuals. Theresa May nearly destroyed the country because she was too weak to carry out Brexit, the incontinent Liz Truss ‘crashed the economy’ (a folk belief which is still carried) and Kemi Badenoch is a feckless, mercurial woman who has brought the Tories to the brink of death. Other structural changes in the modernising years (e.g Women2Win) have biased the pipeline greatly in favour of women. By 2005 Hague was already publicly admitting that he had made a dreadful error.

It is important to grasp that if Hague had not made this change, the Conservative Party would still be the dominant party of the right. Boris was able to rescue the Tories from Theresa May and the Brexit Party. Sunak was able to save the Tories from utter annihilation by Labour. Contra Mrs Lintott the recent history of the Tory Party is women making a dreadful mess and men having to come around the corner to clean it up. Just before his dramatic exit it seemed like Robert Jenrick would fulfil the same function for Kemi. Hague’s reforms are very difficult to reverse (no leader could be elected to remove the franchise) and so there is a permanent leadership problem with the institutional party of the right. Katie Lam is the only candidate of the 2024 intake who is being spoken about as a future party leader and all of the same canards are being crowed (Tough on borders! A bold, pragmatic right-winger! Like Mrs T!) Last year she went onto television to announce that the Tories were planning to deport legally settled people based on amendments they had tabled on ILR. Kemi then denounced this and said amendments were withdrawn. Either the new black Thatcher or the new White Thatcher was lying/incompetent but, as has been the case since the Tories fell below Reform, there was almost no scrutiny of this apparent volte-face. It is important to grasp that the institution has been wrought from a deeply crooked timber and will continue to produce incompetent leaders for the foreseeable future. The problem is structural and nobody within it has the bravery to challenge it; so believing that the Tories might rise at the expense of Reform but this is ok because the former is committed to leaving the ECHR is wrong.

Throughout Hague’s time as leader the Conservatives also went through a series of race rows. For a long time the Tory Party had been remarkably tolerant of ‘extremist’ views on ethnicity. Although Enoch Powell was expelled after the Rivers of Blood speech there was an explicitly Powellite wing of the Tory party and formal bodies like the Monday Club which would openly advocate for the deportation of all non-whites in Britain throughout the 1970s and 80s (which luminaries like John Bercow were members of). But there was also a more porous relationship between the Conservative Party fringes and bodies such as the National Front.

In the 1990s Mark Cotterrill and other National Front members left the National Front to create the Patriotic Forum which, alongside the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus, worked within the Conservative Party to drag it to the right. Cotterill was able to become a Conservative Party member in 1993 despite having been part of a political party (the NF) led by John Tyndall, who was at one time in his life an explicit Nazi who called for armed violence.

Another illustrative figure from earlier in the century is Jane Birdwood, the wife of a Hereditary Peer who wanted the original Edict of Expulsion against the Jews to be enforced on the grounds that it had never been legally overturned, opposed abortion on the grounds that White babies were being killed and became friends with Banderites who had organised pogroms during the Second World War. Birdwood did this all while being a member of the Monday Club (later going to the BNP).

The ongoing associations between the extreme right and the Tory party became a political target for the Labour party during Hague’s premiership. Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary who would later resign over Iraq, attacked Hague over extremists in the Conservative Party, focusing particularly on Right now!, a magazine which interviewed explicit fascists like Nick Griffin and Peter Brimelow (VDARE) alongside Conservatives like Roger Scruton, Anne Widdecombe and Bill Cash.

In Hague’s last year as Tory leader he was beset by a scandal when one of his backbench MPs, John Townend, attacked Robin Cook for asserting that there is no such thing as a British race (sound familiar?) Townend had been explicitly racist for most of his career, in the 80s he called for England to be reconquered by the English, but Hague also had to contend with a new BAME faction within the Conservative party hierarchy. An attack was led on him internally by Lord Taylor. Lord Taylor was a Jamaican Barrister imposed by central office of unwilling associations in both 1987 and 1992 as part of an effort to show warmer attitudes on race. John Major personally campaigned in his seat in the 1992, but Taylor managed to lose the seat to the Lib Dems (during a general election in which the Tories earned the most votes that a British political party has ever managed). After failing twice to make it in as an MP the Tories made him a Lord – a routine they also did with Sayeeda Warsi after failing to parachute her into the Commons.

Hague survived this episode but his successor Ian Duncan Smith was much more aggressive on the ‘right-flank’ of the Conservative Party. It was Ian Duncan Smith who formally proscribed the Monday Club and forced three MPs to step down from it. The hard right of the Tory party attempted to mount a defence of themselves by setting up the Conservative Democratic Alliance in 2001, the architect of which was expelled before defecting to UKIP in 2005. While Hague had dithered about Townend, IDS made a show of sacking one of his shadow ministers for making a racist joke at a rugby club dinner – again at the behest of Lord Taylor.

So the link between the Conservative Party and the far-right was formally severed, again changing the mechanics on the right of British politics. Before IDS ideologically motivated activists could kid themselves that changing the Tory Party would be more fruitful than setting up an alternative organisation, and this also provided a home from racist voters. Eurosceptics were able to take advantage of flexibility on Europe, paving the way for an eventual Brexiteer coup. But on immigration the story was quite different. It is in the early 2000s that we begin to see a resurgence in the extra-parliamentary right in Britain. The BNP began to win councils in the North of England and in East London. At the same time Nigel Farage of UKIP sensed an opportunity to tie the Eurosceptic cause to immigration after the 2004 EU enlargement (which gave Romanians et al passports to Britain), taking the party from being a hobby-horse for fringe academics to a national political force.

Now that we understand the relationship between the Tory Party and the far-right we can begin to grasp what the Restore phenomenon really is:

Restore is a return to the pre-IDS settlement, whereby the Tories absorb the lawful elements of the extreme right to make them impotent within a larger body.

This is the role that Rupert Lowe serves, this is why Gavin Williamson, May’s dark Prince, worked on the fake Rape Gangs Inquiry. It is why Rupert never criticises Badenoch and writes tweets attacking all parties except the Tories. That is why he feels comfortable telling a room full of his supporters (the Cromwell Club) that he is in constant messaging contact with Kemi Badenoch. Many people working within Restore have attempted to work for the Conservative Party and they maintain relationships with individual advisers within it. The leader of Restore wanted to defect to the Tory party as recently as last year. He has done them an even greater service by using his heft on social media to attack Reform relentlessly and draw a portion of their voters away into miniscule fringe party whose only power is to weaken Reform.

The fact that so little has been made of the relationship between Kemi and Rupert belies the truth that Britain has neither a meaningfully free press nor an intelligent enough population which are both necessary for real democracy. It is as if Nick Griffin was in constant contact with David Cameron during the early 2010s when UKIP was damaging the coalition. A very basic centrist line of attack would be that Kemi is behaving like Imperial Germany releasing Lenin into Tsarist Russia, that she is opening a crack in the door for vicious antisemites and holocaust deniers (who use Lowe as a figurehead) to save herself from Farage. If the press was hostile to Kemi, they would connected this to her attempt to push a former Nazi convicted for harassment against Luciana Berger forward as a councillor (and then doubling down by giving him an advisory position). We would be hearing non-stop about the Conservative Party’s antisemitism crisis as we did writ Labour during the Corbyn years.

Instead Kemi is actively celebrated by centre-right journalists whilst they hound Polanski (who is himself Jewish) on charges of antisemitism because his activists may have expressed scepticism in some Google Document questioning the Ben Gvir to snuffle starving Palestinian children’s food. Remember that many of the people going after Polanski on this issue have also been praising Shabana Mahmood (who once led a mob into a Sainsbury’s to protest the stocking of Israeli goods, and called for mobs to protest MPs offices if they did not support Palestine), telling us with a straight face that she would be tough on immigration (reader, she was not). You are entitled to your own views on all of these matters but the sheer hypocrisy is bloody vomit inducing.

Read more

Spending my whole life in London, I haven’t, frankly noticed a particularly big shift in British demographics. It is not simply autism which leads me to reject ‘the Boriswave’ as a watershed moment, I genuinely haven’t noticed anything change. 1950s (Sweden) demographics have always been the goal for me and it has always been an ideal, progressive goal derived from axioms of Pure Reason rather than one imported from nostalgia of lived experience. I am genuinely baffled by people who speak as if Britain in 2011 was some kind of acceptable demographic detente.

Nonetheless, like everyone, I do feel Britain c. 2026 is a grimier, dirtier, stranger place than Britain even in 2009.

The main burning point of evidence of this for me lies overwhelmingly in the decline of manners among white English people. And I suspect much racism in our society is motivated by a cowardly refusal of many to admit they feel the same way. You could find endless streets full of Pakistanis, places where nobody could speak English and female genital mutilation posters in NHS hospitals in the Britain of 2009. What you certainly would not have found is Alistair Darling feeling compelled to tell people he has ever had a “2 am kebab.”

This is a sitting member of Parliament, a representative of the people, a holder of the King’s commission, pretending that he drinks into the early hours and orders fast food for popularity.

Go to Kings Cross station stand and wait for 30 mins and count how many people have tattoos, how many men have beards and how few people speak with descendants of received pronunciation. It used to be that fake tan was a fixture of TOWIE, it is now seemingly a uniform for 70% of women under 30.

When I watched the Adam Curtis documentary last year, what struck me was not that Britain was noticeably whiter back in the day but that the White people actually acted in a White way: they dressed properly, they spoke properly, they read books and had hobbies — across the socioeconomic spectrum. You can see this on far more recent artefacts of Telly, like the reporting on the Icelandic ash cloud of 2010; the people being interviewed did not go to Eton or grow up on Bishop’s Avenue, they are ordinary professionals with polytechnic degrees, yet they carry themselves with a dignity which has become alien to us. The people in the documentary who, at the time, would’ve been seen as deeply tragic people on the margins of society, like the Elvis impersonators in Stockport, act and speak like the average English person today.

When did it become acceptable, in modern Britain, to be what used to be called ‘a chav?’

I will here be accused of ‘snobbery’ with people no doubt invoking the term ‘working class’ to beat me over the head.

Working class people, by which I mean people who perform manual labour on a 9-5 basis for a working week, not people like Tom Skinner who are privately educated and comfortably well off; were, historically, very interested in high culture. Even after the passion of self-education went away, they never had much interest in the music hall fake-culture I’m describing. Bernard Manning never pretended to be thick. Working class people care about vaccine Harms, the censorship of John Cleese and the historical failings of Winston Churchill.

What I am describing is how a tabloid-reality T.V identity created for media consumption in the 2000s has become the actual culture of people who would call themselves middle-class.

Read more

After being introduced by his chief of staff, Alistair Harrison, Lowe took to the stage and…claimed that Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, messaged him “all the time”.

Read more

The outcome currently being shilled for hard by the MSM and Woke Polls, Labour winning around 256 seats in a hung Parliament with Farage as LOTO, is far from the worst possible scenario. This governm…

Read more

We have been greatly enjoying a recent scientific article by Aria Shrecker on what makes women attractive to men. In the piece, Mrs Shrecker produced an AI image of what she believes to be the most a…

Read more

Us bloggers are perhaps better disposed to Artificial Intelligence than most because, thanks to safeguarding measures, the writing we do cannot be automated away easily by the LLMS.

Think about some of the more robust J’accuse articles. There is no way that a commercial LLM is going to produce text which takes a stern view on Carribean crime in post-war London. Even if you could trick Claude into writing about the topic it would insist on equivocating about racism throughout. So long as there is an appetite for extracurricular perspectives we shall be banking the wages of our sin.

This is not just a bonus for those of us who brave the wilderness. Anybody who writes with flair or humour is safe, for now, for the most part. Language models are generally not trained on opinion writing as they find it difficult to parse irony and sarcasm. I am yet to see them produce any good text based memes, something you can see for yourself by asking your preferred brand of LLM to produce a funny piece of writing for you. Here is what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to produce a Tim Chapman Tweet:

Just had a genuinely lovely conversation with my Deliveroo rider about the importance of liberal institutions.

He was from Romania. I voted Remain.

Britain can still work.

Hmmm. And for balance, I’ve asked Claude to do Tom Leicester:

Nobody tells you moving to the countryside means learning the difference between four types of gravel. This is what the managerial class doesn’t understand. This is the real class divide. Peter, 41, knows his gravel.

One aspect of internet culture where Artificial Intelligence is having a more problematic impact is in visual memes. It would seem that much of the creativity of this artform is being sucked out by Artificial Intelligence. It is increasingly rare for people to make original memes à la the old ragecomics, or high quality edits (not just based films cut together with rap music) – increasingly what I see online has clearly been created using AI. I present an example below:

The big tell that this meme has been made with AI and not a human is how visually crowded it is. When LLMs learning how to create images they are instructed not to leave blank spaces anywhere. Every inch of that ‘meme’ has been covered with unnecessary fussy detail. The government official has two ‘State Partnership Program’ badges to avoid having a bare chest, or an empty baseball cap. The LLM has freelanced some random bullet points to make a poster on the wall. Behind the new happy couple there are books and wrinkled sheets. Have a look at this ancient ‘troll-science’ comic for by comparison:

Like frozen spring water on a hot summer day. If an LLM had created this meme it would be pointless details all over the restaurant building which serve no purpose, much like Chekhov’s loaded rifle on the stage. Tables are a particular giveaway. AI would never just have two plates of food but an awful trypophobia inducing smorgasbord of different steaming pots and bowls. Just look at this image from an old J’accuse.

And another, this time from Mr Chapman:

Read more