Nike Slides Towards Disaster as Stock Plummets Following Woke Rebrand
By Will Jones
Nike is sliding towards disaster as its stock slumps to its lowest level in a decade and sales are forecast to continue to decline following a woke rebrand that sent customers looking elsewhere. The Mail has the story.
Nike’s stock has slumped to its lowest level in more than a decade after the sportswear giant warned sales will keep falling through 2026.
Shares hit an 11-year low on April 1st, capping a brutal stretch that has seen the company lose around 75% of its value since shares peaked in 2021.
It is now worth under $68 billion – a third of the value of TJ Maxx.
The latest sell-off was triggered by a bleak outlook, with Nike forecasting sales will slump 4% this quarter – a staggering $500 million fall in the value of shoes, tracksuits and t-shirts.
The brand is being hit by a triple whammy: backlash to its more ‘woke’ image shift, a failed retreat from major retail partners in favor of direct-to-consumer selling, and a deepening slump in China.
The scale of the pressure inside Nike was laid bare in a recent all-hands meeting, where CEO Elliott Hill struck an unusually blunt tone with staff in a recording leaked to Bloomberg News.
“I’m so tired, and I know you are, too, of talking about fixing this business,” Hill said during the meeting. “I want to move to inspiring and driving growth and having fun.”
“You can’t just sit there and say everything’s great,” Hill said, referring to the investor call. “Frankly it needed to be different.”
For years, conservatives have criticised Nike for a shift toward ‘woke’ culture, pointing to partnerships with political activists such as Colin Kaepernick, who protested during the national anthem. The company also faced backlash over its company’s all-female Super Bowl ad.
Meanwhile, a major strategic bet has backfired. Under former CEO John Donahoe, Nike pulled back from wholesale partners such as Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods as it chased higher-margin sales through its own stores and website.
The move was meant to boost margins – but instead cost Nike shelf space and allowed rivals including Adidas, Hoka and On to gain ground.
And overseas, the picture is getting worse. China, Nike’s second-largest market, is expected to post another sharp decline, with sales projected to fall 20% next quarter after already dropping 11% in the latest period.
Worth reading in full.
All together now: go woke, go…
Europe’s Hormuz Armageddon
By Tilak Doshi
European political and intellectual elites have spent the past few decades pushing the risk of imminent Climate Armageddon. Some of us can still picture the young Joschka Fischer, a Leftist of the Greens party who took oath of office as Environment Minister in the German state of Hesse wearing sneakers and jeans in 1985.
Since then — in the name of Gaia, the Greek Goddess of Earth – they have bludgeoned their citizens and straightjacketed their once mighty corporate titans that dominated the global chemical, automotive and precision engineering industries through most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Germany’s Energiewende, the EU’s Green New Deal and the UK’s Climate Change Act unleashed punitive green mandates and carbon taxes. The Obama and Biden administrations joined Brussels in setting virtuous examples of ‘climate leadership‘, a defining criterion of energy policy in Western Europe and the US with the significant exception of President Trump’s two administrations. China, India and Russia and others in the Global South went along with the virtuous ride, but only so far as necessary to benefit from the promise of climate finance and reparations.
Alas, the Western alliance bet on the wrong god. It’s not Gaia but Neptune, the Roman God of the Seas, that threatens Western Europe with Armageddon right now. Europe’s civilisational threat is not from a ‘climate crisis’ but from a crisis in supplies of essential fossil fuels and collateral products such as fertilisers shipped through the Strait of Hormuz – the very commodities demonised by the Gaia cult. To be fair, it’s not Neptune causing tempests for wind-sailed boats that is at fault. But once Mars, the God of War, invokes his passions over Neptune’s domain, it behoves us to pay attention and understand maritime chokepoints and physical geography.
The unprecedented Strait of Hormuz closure
The Strait of Hormuz, connecting the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world, has always been the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, carrying roughly one-fifth of global oil and LNG and delivering cargoes from Middle East producers mainly to Asia, with smaller volumes to Europe, the US and the rest of the world. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz is also affecting about a third of the world’s fertiliser trade, raising prices 30% to 40% and threatening food supply security around the world.
It also accounts for large shares of the global supply of sulphuric acid and helium, which are key to important chemical processes in fertiliser manufacturing, phosphate fertiliser production, metals refining, semiconductor fabrication and medical imaging. The Middle East accounts for 45-50% of global seaborne sulphur trade. Qatar alone supplies around 30-36% of global helium production.
Iranian officials have often made threats to the security of the shipping but the Government has never actually attempted to close the straits. The Strait of Hormuz thus has never been blockaded, although shipping traffic was badly affected during the ‘Tanker War’ phase of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. The spate of tanker attacks and vessel seizures in 2019 heightened the sense of vulnerability of Asian countries to disruptions of their oil and gas supplies from the Middle East. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga, for instance, stated in May 2019 after the tanker attacks in the straits that it is a “matter of life and death of our country in terms of energy security”.
The US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on February 28th triggered an immediate cascade in global energy trade. Lloyds of London withdrew marine insurance, tankers turned away and maritime traffic traversing the strait collapsed by over 90%. Oil prices have surged more than 50% and the International Energy Agency and other analysts quantified the shock at 11-15 million barrels per day or roughly 10-15% of global supply. Analysts now forecast Brent between $150 and $200 under sustained disruption, especially if Kharg Island is hit. The energy arithmetic is merciless. Between 10-15% of world oil supply has effectively gone offline. Qatar’s Ras Laffan plant, the world’s largest gas liquefaction plant, with a capacity of 77 million tons per annum, lost 17% of its LNG capacity after an Iranian counterstrike, with repairs projected to take five years and costing $20 billion in lost revenue.
If there is no resolution to the war within the next few weeks, what could be a temporary and costly disruption to global energy and fertiliser trade would turn into a structural rupture in the fabric of the global economy with catastrophic impacts on people’s livelihoods around the world. The short-term pain will be manageable except for the most vulnerable countries, particularly some of the net energy-importing countries in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, which are already showing signs of stress .
But a longer-term scenario for the closure of the strait is catastrophic. As always, when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. The worst of its impact will fall on the most vulnerable in the poorer developing countries, dropping back into poverty and deprivation as energy and food prices soar. In the developed world, it is Western Europe and UK – already struggling with green policy-induced de-industrialisation, high energy prices and deficit financing of overly-generous social welfare states – that face devastation.
Having already literally burned their energy bridge with Russia (in the form of cheap piped natural gas via Nord Stream), they will now have to compete with rich Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea for spot LNG cargoes, facing eye-watering prices for all those without long term LNG supply contracts.
The collapse of the old energy order?
Just over 80 years ago, in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt sealed the foundational bargain with King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud aboard a US Navy destroyer in the Red Sea: American military protection for the House of Saud in exchange for secure Arabian oil flows to Western markets and the recycling of petrodollars into US Treasuries.
That pact, which underwrote Bretton Woods long after Nixon abandoned gold convertibility in 1971, is under increasing stress. The crossing of the global financial Rubicon occurred when the collective Western alliance expropriated half of the Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held offshore – which had totalled some $630 billion – and blocked key Russian banks’ access to the SWIFT international payments system in 2022 upon the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. For developing countries such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa among others in the BRICS+ bloc, they see an imperative to ensure they do not become the next victims of a globalising West wielding its dominance in international financial institutions. Today, for many leaders in the Global South, the “rules based international order” continually proclaimed by Western leaders might appear as cruel deception.
The petrodollar is fraying at the edges as Tehran’s gunboats, drones and missiles effectively convert the waterway into an IRGC-operated toll booth. Some 26 ships have been granted safe passage through the Strait by the IRGC, paying a reported $2 million per tanker fee predominantly in petroyuan, crypto or gold. According to Pepe Escobar writing for the financial blog ZeroHedge, IRGC-linked brokers run background checks on vessel ownership, flag, cargo and crew and approved tankers receive VHF clearance through a narrow five-mile corridor between Qeshm and Larak island. Each transaction bypasses SWIFT and trade sanctions simultaneously. What years of BRICS declarations could not achieve, a de facto chokepoint has delivered under fire. Multipolarity is being born in the Persian Gulf (and in Ukraine’s Eastern provinces), not in conference rooms.
Western Europe’s energy karma
Europe is the first developed regional energy domino to fall. For two decades the continent has pursued an ideological energy experiment: Energiewende, nuclear phase-outs, punitive carbon pricing and ever-escalating Net Zero targets that deliberately sever its access to affordable, dispatchable hydrocarbons. The latest EU Parliament commitment to 90% CO2 cuts by 2040 is merely the latest chapter in that self-harm. The result, even before Hormuz, was Europe’s industrial base hollowing out, households paying the highest electricity prices on earth and an economy dependent on expensive spot market LNG cargoes (relative to long term LNG sales contracts). With a history of banning fracking, shutting down nuclear and coal power plants and marginalising the full potential of North Sea resources (with the non-EU exception of Norway), the EU and UK face their energy karma. Haughty Europeans are paying the price for their own energy folly.
Now the bill is due in full. Asia is already rationing, since 80% of the oil and 90% of the natural gas that normally flowed through the strait went east to Asia. Countries there are now rationing fuel, ordering workers to stay home two to three days a week and desperately shifting back to coal for power generation. Rich Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore can still compete for remaining cargoes. Poorer ones — India foremost among the large developing countries — have already begun rationing petrochemicals and LPG. China has ordered its top refiners to suspend exports of diesel and gasoline, prioritising domestic demand and drawing down on its massive crude oil reserves. Japan, Korea and India have already announced a return to coal to offset the loss of 10-15 million barrels per day from global oil markets. Sub-Saharan Africa, lacking the financial firepower, slides toward energy shortages and the civil strife that follows.
The broader strategic shift is now unmistakable. The United States, the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter of refined products, retains strategic depth; Europe possesses no such buffer. Washington retains leverage: shale output may have plateaued, but the US can still calibrate exports to shield domestic gasoline prices ahead of US mid-term elections. Geopolitically, Europe’s humiliation is total. Europe’s sanctions on Russia — intended to cripple Moscow — have boomeranged into a structural energy crisis for UK and Western Europe. The same policymakers bet the continent’s future on intermittent renewables now confront the logical endpoint of their strategy. Its leaders have burned every bridge to Moscow. Russia continues exporting oil as the US temporarily lifted sanctions in mid-March to alleviate the price impact on global oil markets.
The trillions of dollars spent globally subsidising renewables and EVs over the past two decade now stands exposed as the most expensive strategic misallocation in modern history. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has shown that access to affordable, abundant supplies of oil and gas remain critical to national survival. The green transition was never a transition. It was a self-imposed vulnerability that has left Europe strategically naked in a multipolar energy contest.
The physics of hydrocarbons
European policymakers speak of rationing, rolling blackouts and tighter border controls as though these can substitute for energy realism. They cannot. The rational course — lift sanctions on Russia, negotiate seriously over Ukraine, abandon the Net Zero dogma — is politically radioactive precisely because it requires admitting that their energy policy is Lysenkoism reborn. Yet the alternative is civilisational erosion: de-industrialisation, supply-chain collapse and the permanent loss of strategic autonomy.
History is rarely kind to civilisations that mistake ideology for physics. The Strait of Hormuz has delivered a corrective lesson written in energy geopolitics. Fossil fuels do not negotiate with virtue signals. Supply chains do not run on Brussels’s green slogans. And the haughty European ruling class that alienated hydrocarbon suppliers while betting the continent’s future on intermittent wind and solar is discovering the limits of its own propaganda. Europe’s Hormuz Armageddon is not merely an energy crisis. It is the moment the post-war geopolitical illusion ends — and the real multipolar world, cold, hard and unforgiving, begins.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
Will Your Phone Allow You to Read This Article?
How old are you? Sorry to ask such a personal question but I need to check you are old enough to read this article. I can’t remember the last time I was asked if I was old enough for anything, so it was a shock when I was asked last week. But not by a person, by my phone, just after it automatically installed the Apple iOS 26.4 update. It was more than asking, it needed verification: ID, credit cards, the usual list. Why? We all know why, don’t we? Or do we?
Let’s start with what is and is not changing. The most recent iOS update on iPhones and iPads in the UK asks the owner to log in to their Apple account (which means they identify themselves), then “Confirm You are 18+”. It explains why: “to change content restrictions”, so it complies with GDPR (you must plainly state your purpose for requesting personal data) and you cannot just self-certify an affirmative answer, you need to offer what in digital ID circles is known as a verifiable credential: your Apple account, a credit card or government issued ID card. This looks like a requirement from the UK Online Safety Act which requires “highly effective” age verification. You do get the option to not confirm (again keeping it GDPR compliant) in which case you will find in your phone’s settings that the content and privacy restrictions that default to OFF are instead now ON and the web content setting has been set to “Limit Adult Websites”. If you try to change that you will be prompted again to confirm your age. Choosing to not confirm your age and not being able to do so for whatever reason end up with the same status: you cannot access ‘adult’ content on the web. There ain’t no way round it other than verifying your 18+ status. Forget VPNs and forget “privacy preserving” browsers such as DuckDuckGo, Brave or even Tor.
What is going on? Clearly there is a political aspect to this but as this is an article from your IT correspondent let’s start with the tech. How can it affect all browsers, especially ones not supplied by Apple? Despite appearances to the contrary, there are only really three web browsers: Blink with 70% market share which you may know better as Chrome, Edge, Opera or Brave; Gecko from Mozilla in the form of Firefox and finally WebKit, presented as Safari. But on Apple mobile devices outside the EU, Apple mandates all browsers to use their WebKit WKWebView API for rendering and JavaScript. That means Chrome, Firefox, DuckDuckGo even Tor on your iPhone render web pages just the same as Safari under the covers. That gives Apple mobile devices a unique pinch point where all web content can be filtered and the 26.4 update uses it. This pinch point is only on Apple mobile devices, so not in its desktops and of course not in the non-Apple Android, Windows or Linux eco systems.
Back on the iPhone, although we are being asked to confirm our 18-plus status for the phone’s content filters, the filters are not new. They have been part of iOS for years supporting the claim that the device is family friendly and can be made compliant as a device used inside corporations. They allow the parent or company administrator to determine what can and cannot be purchased in the app store and whether to allow access to explicit media in formats such as podcasts, TV shows, eBooks and web content. How any of those categories are determined and who determines them has always been somewhat vague and opaque. When it comes to the web, access is either “unrestricted”, “limit adult websites” or “only approved websites”. Prior to iOS 26.4, unless your parents or employer got to the phone first, these filters started in the off position. After iOS 26.4 they are still off except for the web content filter. That is now on until you can confirm your 18-plus status. To be clear, it does not apply to other content types accessed through apps other than web browsers. However Apple defines what “explicit” means and whoever categorises the content, you can listen to explicit podcasts, buy explicit apps, listen to and read explicit books without proving your age. But you cannot browse “adult” websites without confirming your age. I don’t know if that continues if you take the device outside the UK.
So much for the tech. Why is Apple doing this? Or perhaps we should ask why now? After all, Apple made an anti-pornography stance part of its launch of the iPad. “I want the iPad porn free,” said Steve Jobs all the way back in 2010. It seems incredible now but back when the iPad was launched Germany’s Stern magazine saw its app pulled because it ran topless photo spreads, while the newspaper Bild added bikinis to its topless models. A gay travel guide to New York even got the boot. None of this was because of pressure from legislators: Apple seemed to be showing a puritanical streak. A section in its developer agreement warned against: “Materials… that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, e.g. materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic or defamatory.” These days just reading Apple’s own Content and Privacy Restrictions tells a very different story: books can be explicit; apps can be 18-plus and web content can be adult. What would Steve Jobs think? Even the message on the age confirmation screen that “the UK requires…” has a ‘nothing to do with us’ feel about it. Yes, it can only be the Online Safety Act.
The commentary on this issue has tended to be somewhat parochial. Apple and the other tech giants do not make their products just for us Brits. Global suppliers of whole-planet tech such as Google, Meta and Apple are having to deal with censorious legislation in every region of the globe. Apple calls it “age assurance obligations” and from its developer blog it is clear it’s thinking about Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah and Louisiana in particular. The UK doesn’t even get a mention. Content filtering may not even be its biggest issue. Consider the case that Meta and YouTube just lost in Los Angeles. They were found negligent in not warning users of the “dangers” associated with using their platforms. The case is significant because it does not focus on the content itself but merely on the algorithms suggesting that content. This gets around US section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that protects interactive computer services from liability for third party content. That has huge consequences and it is not too much of a stretch to see the decision being broadened out to the devices hosting the apps that show the content. It has been described as a Big Tobacco moment for Big Tech. In the US, as in the EU, instead of campaigners going after the small-time creators of the actual content they are finding ways of weaponising it and going down the tech stack to the Big Tech providers they really despise. The class action suits could be epic.
Given all this is, it is not so surprising that platform companies such as Apple are keeping up with legislation such as the Online Safety Act. To what extent they also agonise over the slippery slope and free speech arguments we don’t know. But limiting the age restriction to only web content when it would have been justifiable to filter everything it determines as explicit may in fact be an encouraging sign, even if the experience on install is somewhat jarring. On the other hand, we have now seen how control over access to content can be taken out of your hands based on nebulous definitions and vague proxies such as whether or not you have a credit card. It does feel ripe for activists to abuse just as they have with ‘hateful content’. We know the controls are already there, just look at the settings on your iPhone. If the web filter can be forced to ‘on’ then so can all the others. Who knows who gets to define what constitutes adult content. The real question is who controls the controls. As Apple has demonstrated: not you. Enjoy what freedom you have while you can.
People Who Criticise Islam Are “Racist” and it’s “Completely Demented” to Single Out Islam, Says Rory Stewart
By Will Jones
People who criticise Islam are “racist” and it’s “completely demented” to single out Islam for criticism, former Tory minister turned podcaster Rory Stewart has said. The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon thinks the ex-MP doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
People who criticise Islam are racist bigots. That, at least, appears to be the judgement of Rory Stewart, the great sage of centrist podcasting.
Speaking to the New Statesman this week, he said: “I think we’ve got to be very clear that this is basically racism. … All those people on social media who are talking about ‘Judeo-Christian values’, and saying, ‘I’ve got nothing against people of colour, I just don’t like Islam’, are basically racist.”
If I wanted, I could argue that this accusation of racism is itself racist. After all, it implies that Muslims all belong to the same race. Yet – to borrow the language of progressivism – this ‘erases’ the huge number of Muslims who are black, and indeed the huge number who are white. As the Muslim Council of Britain sternly made clear in 2016: “Muslims are highly ethnically diverse and not one ethnic ‘block’.”
Nonetheless, I don’t believe for a moment that Stewart meant to be racist. I just think he’s spouting delusional drivel. Islam is not a race, it’s a religion, and so criticism of it has nothing to do with the colour of its followers’ skin. Whichever colour that may be.
Stewart’s outpouring of wisdom, however, did not end there. The former Tory minister went on to explain that it’s “completely demented” to single out Islam, because people do “horrible things” in the name of other religions, too.
No doubt. The thing is, though: they don’t do terribly many of them in this country, do they? Which is probably why we don’t see “all those people on social media” fretting that Britain will suffer yet another massive terror attack by Buddhists.
Or calling for a national inquiry into Confucian grooming gangs. And, while we’re on the subject, I haven’t heard of many teachers in Batley being forced to spend the past five years in hiding after receiving death threats from militant Quakers.
Worth reading in full.
Largest Teaching Union Votes to Oppose “Racist, Fascist and Far Right” Reform in Classrooms and Campaign to Overturn Palestine Action Ban
By Will Jones
The National Education Union – Britain’s largest teaching union – has voted to combat “racist, fascist and far Right” Reform UK in classrooms and lobby to overturn a ban on extreme group Palestine Action. The Mail has more.
The National Education Union (NEU) passed a motion today to “oppose” Nigel Farage’s party, claiming it is “racist, fascist and far Right”.
The motion committed the union to distribute “anti-racist teaching materials” as part of a campaign to stop the party taking power.
It also called on teachers to “campaign actively” against Reform UK in the forthcoming local elections, on May 7th.
And it said teachers should encourage “school-based anti-deportation campaigns” to support failed asylum seekers.
This afternoon, Reform’s Education Spokesman Suella Braverman MP said: “This is yet more evidence of political indoctrination in our classrooms, cheered on by militant trade union chiefs.
“The National Education Union is blatantly political, biased and partisan and that’s what it wants its members – many of them teaching in our schools – to teach our children.
“Parents are sick of it, Britain’s schools should be about education, not ideology. Reform UK stands with hardworking teachers and mums and dads who love Britain and want our schools to be free from political dogma.”
Meanwhile, Chris McGovern, a retired headteacher who runs the Campaign for Real Education, said: “The intolerant, authoritarian and anti-democratic NEU delegates who passed this motion are carnivorous sheep. They are the real fascists.
“Most parents will be appalled that classrooms are to be turned into platforms for political indoctrination and brainwashing.
‘”he Government needs to enforce the law which outlaws bias and indoctrination in schools.”
The motion was passed at the union’s annual conference in Brighton, which is famous for showcasing hard-Left causes. …
Separately, the union also vowed to campaign to legalise the Palestine Action group, which was proscribed under terror laws last year due to criminal damage during protests.
Worth reading in full.
Macron Hits Back at Trump for Mocking Him for Being Shoved by His Wife – as He Calls European Military Action to Reopen Strait of Hormuz “Unrealistic”
By Will Jones
Emmanuel Macron has hit back at Donald Trump after the US President mocked him for being shoved by his wife – as the French President called European military action to re-open the Strait of Hormuz “unrealistic”. The Telegraph has more.
In a speech in which he attacked Nato allies for not joining the Iran war, Trump said Brigitte Macron had treated the French President “extremely badly” and that Macron was “still recovering from the right to the jaw”.
Macron said Trump’s reference to a 2025 video that showed Mrs Macron shoving her husband in the face, was “not elegant, nor up to standard”.
He said the White House’s call for allies to take military action in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been closed by Iran, were “unrealistic”, adding: “It is not our operation.”
The US and Israel started the war on February 28th without consulting allies, he said, adding: “They then complain that they are not being helped in an operation they decided on alone.”
He said Trump could not keep “contradicting” himself every day on Iran.
In a prime-time speech on Wednesday night, Trump told the American people that the “hard part is done” and said he was “very close” to ending the war.
He urged allies to “take the lead” in reopening the Strait of Hormuz, telling them to “build up some delayed courage”.
On Wednesday, the US President told the Telegraph that Nato was a “paper tiger”. He said he was reconsidering American membership of the military alliance after allies rejected his demand that warships be sent to reopen the waterway, which serves as a conduit for about a fifth of the world’s oil.
During the speech, Trump claimed he had asked Macron to send French warships to the Gulf, saying he had urged France to deploy vessels “immediately” but that Macron had refused, offering instead to help “once the war is won”.
Trump said: “No, no, I don’t need them when the war is over, Emmanuel.”
Before he described calling Macron, Trump mentioned Mrs Macron and the shoving incident last year, which went viral on social media at the time.
Macron told reporters in South Korea: “I am not going to respond to them [the comments]; they do not deserve a response. What we must do is work towards de-escalation, a ceasefire, and the resumption of negotiations.”
He added: “We are talking about matters of grave importance – we are talking about war, about the men and women fighting on the front line, about the men, women and civilians who are being killed.”
Macron said that the war would not resolve the issue of Tehran’s nuclear programme and that only “in-depth negotiations” could.
“Targeted military action, even for a few weeks, will not allow us to resolve the nuclear issue in the long term,” Macron said during a state visit to Seoul.
He added: “If there is no framework for diplomatic and technical negotiations, the situation could deteriorate again within a few months or a few years.”
Seems Europe continues to put its faith in asking the bad guys really nicely not to be so beastly.
Worth reading in full.
In Defence of Being ‘Divisive’
My heavy two-volume tiny-print edition of the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED), with its accompanying magnifying glass, has been a constant companion for much of my adult life. Ever since learning that the poet W.H. Auden in his study in Austria had surrounded himself with 12 of the 13 massive normal-print-size volumes of this dictionary – the remaining one (whether A-B or V-Z we are not told) used in the dining room as a booster cushion (Auden was quite short) – I have always wanted a full set for myself but never dared raid the family budget to buy one. Auden loved his dictionary so much he chose it as the ‘single book’ he would take to a desert island.
I have been picking up my magnifying glass a lot recently to check in this dictionary words with multiple meanings that are applied politically either as if they had only one meaning or, when the meaning is negative, used differently across comparable contexts, in both cases with the intention of discrediting opponents. These words include ‘divisiveness’, ‘discrimination’, ‘hate’ and ‘prejudice’. I write here about the first.
The nouns ‘divisiveness’, ‘division’ or ‘divide’ and their adjective ‘divisive’ are words we hear exclusively from the Left criticising the Right for its views on immigration, gender, race, elites and anything else to which the negative associations of these words can be attached. We have heard them a lot over the last 12 months.
From early 2025 onwards the new Labour Government decided that the best way to counter Reform UK’s existential threat to its position was to convey the message that this was a party totally beyond the pale, ‘toxic’, ‘racist’, ‘far Right’ (some even said ‘fascist’), one that would set people against each other and that no decent person would wish to be associated with. If it were ever to come to power, we were told, the country would go down a dark path.
In May 2025, during the Hamilton by-election campaign, the ‘d’ word was added to this message, Keir Starmer accusing Reform of creating a “toxic divide” within the country. The word was given prominence at the September 2025 Labour Party Conference, where Starmer denounced Reform’s policies on tackling immigration as “racist” and, pushing further the notion of an existential choice between goodness and evil, light and darkness, told the country it faced a choice between “decency” and “division”.
With opinion polls showing Labour falling behind Reform, and with local elections looming, Starmer opened the New Year in January 2026 with an instruction to ministers to target Reform with the message that it was a party feeding on “grievance, decline and division“. On March 25th the word was centre stage during Prime Minister’s Questions, first in a reference by Starmer to Reform-led councils bringing nothing but “chaos, grievance and division” and then, in connection with a ban on cryptocurrency donations to political parties, accusing Nigel Farage as “the one party leader who has shown that he will say anything, no matter how divisive, if he is paid to do so”. The word was turning into a nervous tic.
It was a tic obediently picked up by Labour Ministers. Jo Stevens, Secretary of State for Wales, said that Wales faced the choice of “decline and division” with Reform or “renewal and decency” with Labour and Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, criticising Nigel Farage as “divisive” for daring to say something critical of the behaviour of parts of some Asian communities (perish the thought!) In Scotland, Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also repeatedly criticised Reform’s “divisive” politics in the strongest possible terms. Outside Labour and ever ready to jump on a bandwagon, Lib Dem leader Ed Davey added his own voice, criticising Reform for its “divisive” values while joining the others in failing to specify what he believes these to be.
My Complete OED defines divisive, in its main meaning, as “having the quality or function of dividing… expressing division… making or perceiving distinctions; analytical”. The Left’s use of the word turns it instead into one that can only refer to the dictionary’s subsidiary meaning of “causing division”, with all that phrase’s implicit negative associations. If one looks into the contexts in which the word ‘divisive’ is used by the Left there is always the assumption that “making or perceiving distinctions” must involve unfairly pitting one group of people against another with negative effects.
For example, criticising the view that anti-black institutional racism is widespread in the UK is liable from the Left to be seen as a ‘divisive’ opinion, ignoring that the notion of ‘institutional racism’ reinforces a distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ to the disadvantage of ‘whites’. Those shouting ‘divisive’ in this case would be those who themselves are ‘causing division’ by drawing attention to the difference between groups and promoting the interests of the minority against the majority.
Similarly, those who stress the rights of women to benefit from women only spaces can be seen as ‘divisive’ because they highlight a distinction which supporters of gender ideology are keen to remove in the interests of transgender people. In removing one distinction, however, they are creating another – between the respective rights of the two groups – by giving a tiny minority of trans women a right of access that deprives the much larger group of ‘biological’ women of their own right of access to spaces for females only.
‘Divisive’ and ‘division’ may seem little more than boo-words designed to make people feel negatively towards those one is attacking, but there are also fundamental aspects of our dominant progressive Zeitgeist at play here. One is the obsessive prioritisation of minorities at the expense of majorities. The other is the equally obsessive wish to bring down all borders and boundaries.
Prioritising minorities has three main origins.
The first is Marxism’s focus on the struggle between oppressed and oppressors and the need to support the former in their struggle against traditional elites. This is a struggle attractive to progressive elites keen to disguise how they are often as equally self-serving and autocratic as those they are attacking.
The second is the legacy of a Christendom which no longer exists but whose religion gave priority to “the poor and mean and lowly”, a view of human relations, detached from its theology and wider social context, which leaves us with little more than a profoundly damaging view of the world as one divided between victims and oppressors.
The third is a hyper-individualist strain of thought, with origins in the Enlightenment, which in extreme ways puts the individual before the interests of family, community and nation. This explains the whole paraphernalia of universal human rights, the refusal to support one form of family more than another and the failure to distinguish between the status of the indigenous and the recently arrived. The reductio ad absurdum of this hyper-individualist world view is the judicial decision – well-known to readers of the Daily Sceptic – not to deport an Albanian criminal because his son disliked foreign chicken nuggets.
Anyone who does not put individuals and minorities first is thus ‘divisive’ even though this is itself ‘divisive’ in giving priority to the rights of the minority over the interests of the majority.
The other fundamental aspect of the dominant Zeitgeist that makes ‘divisive’ such a popular term of abuse is contemporary progressivism’s distaste for boundaries, borders and barriers. This is another product of hyper-individualism.
Régis Debray, a Marxist and former militant Latin American revolutionary who later became a Gaullist and is one of France’s most prominent intellectuals, has written a brilliant essay on this: ‘Éloge des frontières‘ (‘In Praise of Frontiers’), focusing on boundaries between cultures and nations. He cites the Caribbean poet Aimé Césaire, at one time also a Marxist, who observed that in the modern world “there are two ways of losing oneself: walling oneself up within the particular and dissolving oneself within ‘the universal'”. Neither is desirable, says Debray, but at present universalism is the more powerful (he was writing in 2010) and therefore the more to be avoided.
Sociologist Frank Furedi, another Marxist who had second thoughts, in his book Why Borders Matter, similarly sees this distaste for boundaries as a distinctive feature of our contemporary world, putting it in an even broader context and describing it as the “unbounding of cultural domains in all aspects of social life”: adult-child (drag queens in nursery schools), private-public (facial recognition cameras), male-female (trans women in female sports), human-animal (animal rights), nation-world (international law superseding national law).
Given these attitudes anyone who is keen to “maintain distinctions” – people who wish to allow some animals to be hunted, oppose ‘sexuality education’ for young children or criticise measures to boost the recruitment of less physically strong women into front line positions in the police or army – is liable therefore to be dismissed by current progressive elites as ‘divisive’ even though “maintaining distinctions” is what ‘divisive’ also means.
Next time therefore you hear the word ‘divisive’ or, as a member of a so-called ‘divisive’ party, are labelled as such, remind yourself that it is even more ‘divisive’ to prioritise minorities over majorities than the other way round and that perfectly valid ‘distinctions’ in many aspects of our lives that have stood the test of time need to be upheld and are matters one should be proud of.
Dr Nicholas Tate is Adviser to the Learning Institute, Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary and author of Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.
News Round-Up
- “Scrapping non-crime hate incidents has helped us stop real criminals” – According to the Met Chief Sir Mark Rowley, scrapping non-crime hate incidents has freed up police time and helped officers solve more real crimes, says GB News.
- “Asylum seeker accused of gang-raping woman claims ‘rape is sex’” – An asylum seeker accused of gang-raping a woman on Brighton beach has claimed in court that “rape is sex”, reports the Mail.
- “Teen bravely waives her anonymity to reveal horrific sexual assault by Iranian migrant” – A 19 year-old woman has waived her anonymity to speak out about her horrific sexual assault by an Iranian small boat migrant, says the Mail.
- “M&S accuses Sadiq Khan of being soft on crime” – Marks & Spencer has warned that lawlessness is putting shoppers and staff at risk, reports the Telegraph.
- “The state completely failed Valdo Calocane’s victims” – The state completely failed the victims of Valdo Calocane’s Nottingham rampage by allowing a known dangerous schizophrenic to roam free, writes Ed West in the Spectator.
- “Starmer pulls offer of extra training places for striking doctors” – Keir Starmer has withdrawn his offer of 1,000 extra training places for junior doctors after strike talks broke down, reports the Telegraph.
- “NHS to overhaul staffing” – The NHS is planning to overhaul staffing to reduce reliance on striking junior doctors, says the Mail.
- “165,000 homeowners to be hit with mansion tax” – Labour’s controversial “mansion tax” is rapidly unravelling after Britain’s official forecaster warned nearly half of homeowners who appeal the levy would successfully overturn it, reports the Telegraph.
- “The blood of Denby pottery is on Labour’s hands” – What does it say about us that we can’t even seem to make our own tableware? asks Alec Marsh in the Spectator.
- “Labour’s shooting crackdown threatens to hollow out the countryside” – Labour’s planned restrictions on shooting could devastate rural businesses and traditions across the countryside, warns Patrick Galbraith in the Telegraph.
- “Premeditated industrial destruction?” – The UK has deliberately destroyed much of its industrial base through energy policy and now needs a clear plan to reverse the damage, says the Great British Business Council.
- “King Charles ‘warned Keir Starmer against appointing Peter Mandelson’” – King Charles reportedly warned Keir Starmer against appointing Peter Mandelson as US ambassador, delivering yet another humiliation for the Prime Minister, says the Mail.
- “Farage sacks Reform’s housing spokesman” – Nigel Farage has sacked Reform’s housing spokesman after just a month amid a row over his complaint that regulations brought in after the deadly Grenfell Tower fire were too tough and “everyone dies in the end”, reports the Mail.
- “Nigel Farage commits to keeping ‘triple lock’ for state pensions” – Nigel Farage has committed to keeping the triple lock on state pensions if he becomes Prime Minister, while Reform UK considers cutting gold-plated civil service pensions, says the Mail.
- “Reform is wrong: the state pension triple lock must go” – Reform UK is wrong to defend the state pension triple lock as it has revealed itself as just another version of the old politics it claims to oppose, writes Tom McPhail in the Telegraph.
- “Hamas should not be treated as terrorists, says Green activist” – The architect of a Green Party attempt to equate Zionism with racism said Hamas should not be treated as a terrorist group and claimed it was only banned in Britain to undermine “armed resistance” to Israel, reports the Mail.
- “Why the keffiyeh classes have forgiven Kanye West” – In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising Hitler is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel, writes Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
- “Britain’s top private schools in Middle East teaching pupils to beat their wives” – Britain’s leading private schools in the UAE have been using textbooks that teach Muslim pupils the “right way” to beat their wives, reports GB News.
- “Trump’s made a mess in the Middle East” – Kemi Badenoch has slammed Trump for creating a mess in the Middle East and called on him to fix the oil supply crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, says the Telegraph.
- “Trump is right: this is Europe’s war” – The continent has allowed its distaste for the US President to cloud the geopolitical and economic threat Iran poses, writes Stephen Daisley in the Telegraph.
- “Starmer has thrown away the US alliance” – Keir Starmer has damaged the vital US alliance with Britain, and put Nato at risk, warns the Telegraph in a leading article.
- “US begins secret talks for new military bases in Greenland” – The US has begun secret talks to establish new military bases in Greenland, seeking access to three additional sites for airfields and ports, reports the Sun.
- “Trump sacks Bondi over handling of Epstein files” – Donald Trump has sacked Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of the Epstein files following a heated argument, according to ITV News.
- “Nasa vows America will never give up the Moon after first launch in 53 years” – Nasa has vowed that America will never again give up the Moon following the successful launch of its first crewed lunar mission since 1972, reports the Telegraph.
- “Why Mark Carney’s Canadian liberals are going to war with the Bible” – Mark Carney’s Canadian liberals are pushing a new law that removes religious defences against hate crime charges, which critics say is aimed at silencing biblical criticism of progressive policies, says the Telegraph.
- “Jim Ratcliffe backs Tory plans to scrap Net Zero taxes” – Chemicals tycoon Jim Ratcliffe has backed Tory plans to scrap Net Zero taxes to help British industry compete globally, reports GB News.
- “Rachel Reeves opens rift with Ed Miliband by backing North Sea drilling” – Rachel Reeves has opened a clear rift with Ed Miliband by publicly backing North Sea oil and gas exploration, according to the Times.
- “SNP backs North Sea drilling in U-turn” – The SNP has performed a major U-turn by backing North Sea drilling, reports the BBC.
- “Where’s my free BMW?” – In the Spectator, Rod Liddle highlights the absurdity of modern green policies.
- “Low intensity tornado wrecks major solar farm, creating a potential toxic dump” – A low-intensity tornado has wrecked a major solar farm, raising concerns it could create a toxic dump from damaged panels, according to No Tricks Zone.
- “Britain is quietly awakening to full-fat supernatural Christianity” – Britain is quietly experiencing a revival of full-fat supernatural Christianity with growing numbers returning to church after years of decline, notes David Frost in the Telegraph.
- “Boss of London Pride parade is sacked” – The boss of London Pride has been sacked after allegedly spending £7,000 of donations on luxury perfumes and Apple products, reports the Mail.
- “BBC falls for hoax about death of world’s oldest tortoise” – The BBC has fallen for a hoax claiming the world’s oldest tortoise has died, quoting a fake vet account on X, says the Telegraph.
- “Judge delivers brutal slapdown of Blake Lively” – A judge has delivered a major pre-trial win for Justin Baldoni by dismissing all of Blake Lively’s sexual harassment and fat-shaming claims against him, reports the Mail.
- “Salaam alaikum” – King Charles III won’t be putting out an Easter message this year – but somehow still found the time to wish Muslims well for Ramadan.
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