The Sceptic | Episode 79: The Quiet War on Boys Plus the UAE’s Dramatic OPEC Exit
In Episode 79 of the Sceptic, host Laurie Wastell speaks to Joanna Gray – writer, confidence mentor and Daily Sceptic regular – on what the modern world gets wrong about gender. They discuss Jess Phillips’ proposed “anti-misogyny” lessons for schoolboys, the female domination of teaching, the lack of male role models and why pathologising normal boyhood is damaging a generation of young men.
And Tilak Doshi, the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor, on the UAE’s shock departure from OPEC – what it means for the cartel, global oil markets and geopolitics in the Middle East.
Donate to the Daily Sceptic to access our premium content. Follow Laurie on X. Read Joanna’s articles on the Daily Sceptic here, here and here. Follow Tilak on X. Read Tilak’s article on the Daily Sceptic here. Subscribe to the Daily Sceptic YouTube Channel here. Produced by Richard Eldred. Filmed at the Westminster Podcast Studio.
Intellectual Yet Idiot: Ed Miliband and the Economic Illiteracy Driving Britain’s Energy Crisis
By Tilak Doshi
The international committee responsible for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s official climate scenarios quietly delivered a bombshell last month: the notorious RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ pathway — the extreme emissions scenario that has underpinned virtually every climate alarm, every Net Zero urgency claim and every justification for Britain’s ruinous energy policy for the past 15 years — has been declared officially “implausible” and eliminated from the next generation of models feeding into the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report. The “era of global boiling” speech of the UN Secretary General António Guterres in 2023 now sounds even more ludicrous than it already did then.
Roger Pielke Jr. – whose research has been heavily cited by the IPCC across all three Working Groups – analysed this stunning admission by the panel in his Substack the Honest Broker on April 29th. The high-emissions scenarios (RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0) that dominated research papers, government reports and headlines are now recognised as describing futures that will not happen.
Yet while the IPCC itself has finally abandoned the nonsense doomsday model it once promoted as the “baseline”, UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, his fellow Net Zero zealots in Whitehall and his globalist colleagues in power in the EU, Canada and elsewhere press ahead with Net Zero undeterred. Indeed, ‘Mad Ed’ and gang are doubling down on the very policies built atop that now-discredited foundation. This is “Intellectual Yet Idiot” governance.
The “Intellectual Yet Idiot” class and Miliband’s credentials
In a 2016 essay, Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Intellectual Yet Idiot” to describe the credentialed class — policymakers, academics, journalists and think-tankers — who impose grand narratives on society while bearing none of the costs.
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking ‘clerks’ and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) whom to vote for.
They may ace exams, dominate elite discourse and signal virtue from the safety of their stately homes in the countryside or Oxbridge common rooms, but they lack practical judgement and ‘skin in the game’. As the essayist and blogger Marcus Stone observed in his analysis of intelligence without judgement, there is a clear distinction among mere ignorance (the absence of knowledge), outright stupidity (reflecting the bell curve in the distribution of IQ, a fact of life) and the irredeemable learned idiocy of those who cling to narrative over reality.
Long before Taleb, George Orwell put across the point acidly: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Thomas Sowell is another keen observer of the phenomenon: “There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.”
Ed Miliband, Britain’s Energy Secretary and a graduate of Oxford’s PPE – which does not stand for Pernicious Political Elite – embodies the IYI archetype with alarming precision. He even wants to ban tumble dryers to appease Goddess Gaia. His recent pronouncements on ‘breaking the link’ between gas prices and electricity bills, his dismissal of North Sea oil and gas resources and his relentless programme of mandates and subsidies for unreliable intermittent renewables reveal not just policy error. Miliband reveals a profound economic illiteracy that threatens Britain’s prosperity and energy security. The Guardian-reading ideologues and comfortable Oxbridge academics repeatedly intone Net Zero mantras and incantations of ‘cheap’ renewables while ordinary citizens pay the bills.
‘Breaking the link’: misunderstanding marginal pricing
Miliband’s flagship idea — repeated by his civil-service wonks, favoured economists such as Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London and dutifully echoed by the Guardian and even the increasingly gone-woke Economist — is that the UK must ‘break the link between gas price and power price’. Chancellor Rachel Reeves (‘Rachel from Accounts’) backs Miliband on this quest.
The argument runs that it is unfair for renewables to be priced at the marginal cost set by ‘expensive’ natural gas generation. This, we are told, makes ‘cheap’ wind and solar artificially expensive. It’s a claim so basic in its misunderstanding of markets that it would fail an A-level economics exam.
Every freely traded commodity or service — electricity, gas, oil, copper, wheat, pork bellies, haircuts — prices at the margin, i.e., the price is set by the cost of producing each additional unit. As a result, the highest-cost supplier needed to meet demand sets the price paid to all suppliers, a price that emerges from the market equilibrium established where the supply and demand curves intersect. This represents the price point where the quantity supplied by producers at that price matches the quantity demanded by consumers at the same price. The same principle is illustrated by Adam Smith’s water-diamond paradox: water is cheap because it is abundant at the margin; diamonds are costly because the marginal unit is scarce.
To be sure, no one expects Miliband and his PPE buddies to have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations at school:
The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.
Miliband and his fellow IYIs appear never to have encountered the concept. They mistake the foundational principle of marginal pricing in economics for a policy failure that can be legislated away. As independent energy consultant Katherine Porter explained in her excellent recent Spiked interview, every market participant understands this; only the IYI class treats it as a quirk unique to British power markets that can be abolished by decree.
North Sea oil and gas: domestic benefits ignored
The same learned idiocy, so well described by Marcus Stone, infects Miliband’s second favourite talking point: that developing North Sea oil and gas is pointless because “we cannot influence world prices”. Again, the narrative trumps reality. Natural gas has no single world price: it trades in regional markets — Europe’s TTF, Asia’s JKM, America’s Henry Hub — because pipelines and LNG liquefaction and shipping impose large transaction costs on fungibility, on moving it around.
Increased domestic production would displace the most expensive marginal supply (often imported LNG cargoes), lowering the clearing price for British consumers. Porter said that increasing North Sea gas output could displace LNG entirely in summer months, when imports are low, and reduce prices accordingly. The gas from a North Sea rig does not magically enter a global pool; it flows through pipes straight into the British grid. And, yes, it will be priced at the margin, at the point where the most expensive supplier of North Sea gas (not global gas) meets the utility-consumer with the highest willingness to pay.
Oil is much more fungible since it is far easier to store and transport and there are global reference prices such as West Texas Intermediate (‘WTI’) and Brent. Other crude oils price against these reference prices once differences in the quality of the crude and its location are accounted for. But the principle holds: increased North Sea production of oil or gas adds to the nation’s GDP whether it is exported or supplied to the domestic market. It also creates jobs, skills development, shareholder returns and tax revenues.
Again, Miliband’s PPE does not seem to have covered (or it was unlearned soon after school finished) the simple accounting convention GDP = C + I + G + (X – M) which is the most famous identity in macroeconomics. Britain’s GDP is the total value of all goods and services finally produced in the country in a year. By the accounting identity, it is also the sum of expenditures in consumption, investment and government spending plus exports (money foreigners spend buying British goods and services) less imports (money British people spend buying foreign goods and services).
What is it that the policy wonks in Whitehall don’t get? How can it be fine for the UK to chase out further investments from its own jurisdictions of the North Sea while at the same time buying oil and gas from Norway in the face of this simple macroeconomic accounting? In a Robin Hood reversal, is Miliband’s aim to impoverish the country’s own citizens while enriching the already much richer Norwegians? This is all in the name of Britain’s “climate leadership” as Rupert Darwall has thoroughly dissected.
Under Miliband’s punitive windfall tax regime, it was reported last week that even BP is considering selling its North Sea assets for a full exit while Norway invests afresh. Norway’s Government, unafflicted by Stone’s learned idiocy, issued 70 new drilling permits for oil and gas just last week.
Another garbled argument offered by the UK’s Net Zero proponents in their quest to shut down new investments in the North Sea goes as follows: ‘Oil and gas are globally traded commodities. The UK is too small a producer to affect the world price. Therefore, more North Sea drilling will not materially reduce UK energy prices.’
At one level, this is trivially true. But anyone with a smattering of A-level economics would ask, ‘What has that got to do with anything?’ Do countries produce stuff only if it reduces domestic prices? In what universe? Countries produce because it is profitable for them to do so (collectively speaking, since it is business firms that actually produce output). Increased production adds to the country’s GDP. The firm’s shareholders benefit as do those that gain employment and skills from the increased activity. And this does not include another elementary economic principle of the ‘multiplier effect’: the process by which an initial increase in spending, investment, production or income generates additional rounds of economic activity throughout the wider economy.
There is yet another version of idiot economics. An argument that circulates among Miliband allies, climate campaigners, Net Zero commentators and mainstream media hacks runs roughly as follows: ‘North Sea oil is sold on international markets anyway, so it does not belong to Britain in any meaningful sense. Therefore drilling more does not improve British energy security or reduce bills.’
Yet again, one must summon much mental fortitude to grapple with the thoroughly befuddled logic. What happens to the UK’s balance of payments in all of this? Do not British exports improve the current account and strengthen the pound? Furthermore, how can increased output of North Sea oil and gas not enhance UK’s energy security, one asks incredulously. But in vain, for in the world of Net Zero zealotry, such views smack of Right-wing Thatcherism.
IYI economics vs real world
In the normal world, ordinarily, exports are good, production is good, profitable industries are good, trade surpluses are good, high-value industrial sectors are good. But in the Leftist-globalist world of IYI governments and policy makers – where the Church of Climate rules supreme – fundamental laws of economics are legislated against and hydrocarbons production is cast as morally suspect and economically irrelevant. When saving the world is at stake, these issues raised by level-headed economists are mere fripperies.
Profitability itself is suspect and attracts the charge of culpability. In a now deleted post on X, Miliband accused BP of profiting from the Iran war crisis in arguing for retaining the windfall tax on North Sea investments. He considered it “morally economically wrong”. Of course, he did not try to understand why in times of extreme price volatility, commodity trading desks with sharp traders — as BP has — do exceptionally well. That is not, by any stretch of the imagination, war profiteering. Without the imprimatur of a PPE qualification, the double-barrelled adjective presented by Miliband is a bit of a poser. Back in the normal world, profits are good – since they pay for wages, rents, taxes and happy shareholders.
The British public has stirred. Britain’s stunning local election results delivered an unprecedented rout against both Labour and the Conservatives in favour of the relatively Right-leaning Reform UK party which became electorally consequential only in the last year. It is a revolt by indigenous working- and middle-class voters against what David Starkey has called Britain’s long-standing ‘uniparty’ elite. It may mark the beginning of the end of the Westminster two-party system that has defined British politics since the late 17th century when the very concepts of the modern state first emerged. To be sure, the revolt wasn’t just against Miliband’s punitive Net Zero mandates but against the entire package deal offered by the globalist uniparty elite which includes open borders, ever closer union with the EU despite Brexit and the excesses of a politically correct welfare state that values immigrants over indigenes. The ballot box remains the only reliable mechanism for removing those who suffer no consequences for their luxury beliefs and idiot economics.
A sane energy policy — now that the IPCC itself has backed off from its implausible ‘end is nigh’ scenarios — would start by recognising marginal pricing, not futilely trying to abolish it; allowing North Sea oil and gas output to rise so long as the private sector is willing to invest under competitive auctions; dropping the pointless carbon pricing on gas and indeed on all energy-intensive industry; putting a stop to the endless subsidies for renewables; ending the mandates for EVs that few want to buy; and cutting over-regulation of the nuclear power sector along proven South Korean timelines and costs (for example) rather than under Britain’s regulatory bloat.
Britain cannot afford another decade of IYI governance. Keeping the lights on, quite literally, depends on it.
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.
The Trans Delusion: A Philosophical Nail in its Coffin
By Chris Milton
The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay ‘What is it Like to be Bat?‘ can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become or can know what it’s like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel — who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals — began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness then there is something that it is like to be that organism, and his question was whether we could know “what is like for a bat to be a bat”.
Nagel’s essay argues for the wholly subjective character of experience, and how this subjectivity is dictated by differences in the physicality of beings. A creature shapes its Umwelt, or lifeworld, through its interactions with the world, and those interactions are determined by that creature’s body. Men and women inhabit similar yet profoundly different Umwelts. The qualia of sensation — meaning the instances of subjective experience, such as what it’s like to perceive a colour, to taste an apple or hear a baby cry — are different for each individual human. But these differences are also sexed. The last is a good example, as the female body — and therefore mind — responds to a baby’s cry in a radically different way to a man’s. But there are also large differences in the way they experience running for five hundred metres, the colour red, having a nipple touched, and innumerable other things (almost everything, in fact). There are qualia that each sex experiences that the other will never be able experience at all, but which help form their consciousnesses. A woman will never get an erection, and a man will never have a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, menstruate or give birth.
All of these ways of experiencing the world physically, along with our anticipations and memories of them, form a human being’s consciousness, its personality, its very being (or soul, if you like), who he or she is. If one, or even half a dozen of the physical particularities of a woman could be miraculously reproduced in a man (which they can’t), such as giving him the same muscle mass and bone density as a woman, a uterus, a clitoris or a brain that reacts in the same way to temperature or noise, he still wouldn’t be a woman physically, or anywhere near being one. Consciousness is a complex feature of evolutionarily determined biological systems, the latter radically different for men and women, such that even their spatial and temporal perspectives for experiencing the world are different.
For a man to become a woman everything, every molecule, would have to be changed, and a lifetime of memories implanted. Each moment-to-moment sequence of experience from the womb onwards grows coherently out of those that preceded it and determines those that follow it. Surgery is merely an in-real-life filter, advanced dressing up, and transitions someone towards nothing that meaningfully resembles a woman. To give one of hundreds of examples: men have no Cooper’s Ligament, which means that after HRT their breasts – which in any case are functionless – will be tubular and spaced very widely apart. Even the cells of men and women are biochemically different and determine, from before birth, many things, including how each sex fights particular diseases. Objective, unchangeable, sexed physical states partially determine subjective states; lopping off this or that part of the body or appending a functionless simulacrum of another will in no wise change the quality of those subjective states.
Every cell in our body has your male or femalness inscribed within it. Even if it were possible to change your hormonal sex completely (which it isn’t) that would still leave your unalterable chromasomal sex, and your genetic sex, intact. There are many male and female brain circuits that behave very differently, sex-recognition is hard-wired into our brains, and the neurons have been identified that allow us ‘instinctively’ to discern a member of the opposite sex, however heavily disguised: this is why no trans people ever really ‘pass’.
So, a man can never become a woman physically, and thus cannot logically be or ‘identify as’ a woman, as you can only know what it feels like to be a thing if you are that thing. To argue otherwise, that there is another, ‘real’ self within us distinct from the bodily self, and that the mind and body are separate , is philosophically centuries out of date – Locke’s empiricism first put pay to Cartesian dualism almost 350 years ago. “Mental states,” Nagel adds, “are states of the body, and mental events are physical events”: the ghost is the machine, the machine is the ghost. The hormonal impregnation of the foetus has a direct effect on neural circuits, creating a masculine brain and a feminine brain, which can be distinguished from each other anatomically and biochemically, and cannot be housed in the body of the other sex, it being determined by the sexed body. Let’s look at a passage of Nagel and replace ‘bats’ with ‘women’:
Even if [men] could transform over time into [women] their brains would not have worked as [women’s] brains from birth, and could therefore never have the mindset of a [woman]. … It is doubtful that any meaning could be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neuropsychological constitution of a [woman]. … Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a [woman], nothing in my present condition enables me to imagine what the experience of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like.
and,
To the extent that I could look and behave like a [woman] without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would [still] not be anything like the experiences of [women].
It is then, the much vaunted ‘lived experience’ that militates against the possibility of transgenderism. Nagel goes on to give the example of trying to attain knowledge of what it is like to be blind or deaf (he could just as easily have substituted disabled, or schizophrenic), concluding that “the subjective experiences of a person deaf or blind from birth are not accessible to me… we cannot form more than a schematic notion of what it would be like”.
Nagel says that “the more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success you can expect in your guesswork”. So, men can come close to guessing what it is like to be woman. Men and women both experience hunger, sexual desire, boredom and aesthetic pleasure, but the way they experience those things is qualitatively different, and unalterably so. Nagel writes that “there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human language”, and that “to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of logical dissonance”. In other words, the subjectivity of other beings is ultimately ineffable and irreducible to language, and so the subjective experiences of men and women will always be unknowable for each other.
The idea that someone, by adopting the outward and trivial indicators of femininity, can suddenly thereby have access to that knowledge is preposterous. Men can only guess, and approach knowledge through empathy, imagination and the testimonies of women themselves. “Nobody has yet devised,” Nagel writes, “an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy and imagination — that could describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to a being incapable of having those experiences.”
Men and women are restricted by the resources of their own sexed minds, their consciousnesses made sexed by their sexed bodies. To deny that they are sexed is not only contra accepted biology, as well as common sense, it would also completely undermine the discipline of evolutionary biology.
The belief that ‘trans women are women’ makes a belief in magic seem sophisticated, because belief in magic or miracles explained effects for which causes could not (yet) be identified, but there was at least an observable effect to be explained. Likewise, when people believed erroneously that the world was flat, they did so because the world looked flat. With trans women, there is no such observable effect. What you have before you after saying the magic formula ‘trans women are women’ is visibly still a man. At best, after the surgical removal of his genitalia, a man will have a crude cavity, its position and its condition of being a hole with a surgically fashioned ‘clitoris’ being the only things it has in common with a woman’s vagina, and yet it is the only part of a woman’s reproductive system that it’s even possible to crudely mimic. This is why the word ‘trans’ itself is inadmissible, as there isn’t a transition towards or into anything.
The feeling inside that one is male or female is biologically determined, the idea of ‘being in the wrong body’ has no concrete, observable, provable basis: ‘male’ and ‘female’ are ‘assigned’ at birth, or rather conception, but by Nature, not by a doctor or midwife. One cannot move from the fixed point of being male or female and back again, so the idea of gender fluidity, of being non-binary is illogical, impossible, mad. A big difference between men and women lies in their reproductive organs, in their potential reproductive roles, and in the reproductive apparatus that produces sperm or eggs, so that ultimately many social determinations regarding gender are biologically determined. This is why, until very recently, sex and gender were used interchangeably: for there to be a third gender, there would need to be a new, third reproductive function, and new organs to go with it. Arguments that sexual dimorphism can be overcome or does not exist are pure Lysenkoism, and matters of ideology, not science. Gender theorists wanted to separate sex and gender, but it simply can’t be done.
To have given this matter philosophical consideration is to have given it way more than its due, and to have accorded the adherents of trans ideology more respect than they are due, and has necessitated the bracketing of matters such as the data showing that it is in part a social contagion, that its are roots in pornography and autogynephilia, that it’s funded by a small group of trans billionaires, that it’s a multi-billion dollar business, and that its explosion amongst the young is closely tied to social media, beginning with MySpace and Tumblr, then via Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.
The one thing that trans ideology has done more than anything else, that will outlast it, is to have made a nonsense of the idea of human progress, other than technological-scientific progress. It is perhaps the most profound manifestation of human credulousness and stupidity in history, outdoing even the witch craze of the 17th century. It is more egregious than any previous superstition or mass insanity because it is has come well after the end of the age of superstition and the advent of Enlightenment. The ‘truths’ of science have always been subject to suspicion and revision, but trans ideology has never had its Hegelian ‘moment’ of temporary truth that was later abandoned as more information came to light. Quite the opposite: it is wholly retrogressive, an attempt to replace biological knowledge with magical thinking, a regression to something lower even than pseudoscience.
Chris Milton is a freelance writer based in the North East of England. He blogs at the Ragged Wood.
You Just are Racist if You Are White
By Sallust
The title is from an article in the Telegraph by a retired professor of Social Work Education at Dundee University called Jane Fenton. Professor Fenton served as a social worker in the criminal justice system before going into academia to teach the subject. She has plenty to say about what she believes have been destructive changes, and being white has been turned into a synonym for racism:
I have seen situations where social work has saved lives, but in recent years the profession has become captured by fundamentally political concepts that can rob social workers of their agency and, in some cases, put the population at large at risk.
In the past, social work seminars at university were lively places where students would discuss ideas and different approaches to problems. These are the crucial discussions that shape how the social workers of the future will do their jobs.
But around 2015, things changed – Gen Z began arriving on campus, having spent much of their childhood and adolescence on smartphones chasing ‘likes’, and in classrooms where ideas (initially developed in the US) about systemic racism, decolonisation, patriarchy and oppression had taken hold.
Now, if you walk into a social work classroom, you’ll often find silence. This is because many students are afraid to depart from the orthodoxy that has permeated both actual social work and the teaching of it: critical social justice theory.
Under this theory, which is seen by many as the only morally acceptable way to approach social work today, society is explained by the power differentials between the oppressed and the oppressor. It is often taught as an all-encompassing truth rather than what it is: a strongly contested way of seeing the world.
At its very core is the power-and-privilege hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy: straight white men. Everyone else is arranged underneath, depending on their identity, with significant moral status conferred on those who belong to groups in the ‘victimised’ category. If you are a black person, you are oppressed; if you are a woman, you are oppressed. If you are a disabled black woman, you are very oppressed. These are nice, simple calculations to make.
The other key element to the hierarchy is that it is perpetuated – consciously and unconsciously – by the oppressors. Robin DiAngelo, in her book White Fragility, suggests that white people are inescapably complicit in racism, even if they don’t think they are.
The result has been the redefining of terms:
Racism is no longer about treating someone differently or unfairly because of the colour of their skin; it is embedded in the very structures in society. Racism is no longer about your actions, you just are racist if you are white. The absorption of this belief easily explains why (particularly white) students fear questioning or debating issues of race.
In the terrible case of Valdo Calocane, who killed Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates in Nottingham in 2023, mental health professionals considered the over-representation of black men in detention when deciding whether to detain him following a violent incident in 2020. They will almost certainly have been taught this during their training as an example of ‘systemic racism’ or ‘unconscious bias’. Professionals in the Calocane case came to the decision not to lock him up. It is not a stretch to see how these notions might be influencing work on the ground – professionals do not want to be implicit in perpetuating oppression or racism.
Uncontested ideas about power and privilege, oppressed and oppressor, victimhood, trauma and harm have been extended across all disciplines to explain how society works. All this is resulting in a significant number of sub-standard professionals – and it is, shockingly, only going to get worse.
Only the other day, also in the Telegraph, Michael Deacon wrote about the Left’s most dangerous delusion:
On Friday, a 23 year-old woman from New York told a newspaper that she and a friend had been assaulted by a stranger on the subway in early April. Luckily, police were close by, and arrested the stranger. Yet the two friends chose not to cooperate with prosecutors. Why?
Well, in the words of the young woman: “Maybe a part of me was just like, ‘I don’t want to put another black man in jail.’”
She says she now regrets this decision “100%”, and feels “really bad”. Mainly because, mere weeks later, the very same man allegedly killed a 76 year-old retired teacher by hurling him down a flight of stairs. On Thursday he was charged with murder.
Jane Fenton’s piece in the Telegraph is worth reading in full.
The Death of the Nation State Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Two recent statements by very different public figures from our Left liberal elite throw an interesting light on the world picture through which this elite shapes how the rest of us think and feel.
The first was a comment by Amol Rajan, University Challenge and former Radio 4 host as well as former editor of the Independent, in which newspaper in 2012 he called the nonagenarian Duke of Edinburgh “a racist buffoon” and condemned the late Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations as “the industrialisation of mediocrity”, for which, much later, he apologised.
In a recent interview with Gyles Brandreth, Rajan expressed doubts about Britain’s future and wondered whether it was the best country in which his four children should grow up. He was keen for them to visit India, where he himself was born, he said, so that they might “fall in love with the civilisation that’s in their blood” (the last three words are the key ones).
The second statement was by Zack Polanski, Leader of the Green Party, in an interview with Robert Peston on ITV, in which, asked if he thought Israel had a right to exist, he replied: “I don’t believe any country has a right to exist. People have a right to exist, the Israelis have a right to exist, the Palestinians have a right to exist. By “country” I’m assuming Polanski meant ‘nation state’ or just ‘state’ (since its meaningless to talk of ‘nations’ – the other possible meaning of ‘country’ – having ‘rights’ because a nation is what Ernest Renan called “a spiritual community” daily renewed in the minds of its members and as such cannot have ‘rights’). When Peston responded that the implication of his statement was that Britain also had no right to exist, Polanski did not disagree.
Without in any way suggesting that Rajan and Polanski are political bedfellows, what these two statements highlight are the tensions within the world picture of our ‘Anywhere’ ruling class (to use David Goodhart’s terminology) to which both these figures undoubtedly belong.
The blood line still speaks
Rajan speaks about an Indian civilisation that is in his ‘blood’ and which he wishes to pass on to his children. The implication, as the Daily Sceptic pointed out in reporting this exchange, is that links of ‘blood’ must also therefore be a wholly acceptable element in the identity of the majority population of England. I can only assume that Rajan, who calls England “my country”, would agree with this, though with the caveat (which I would share) that English identity is also open to those who do not have the “blood” line but who culturally assimilate, as many over the years have successfully done.
Many on the Left, however, have most definitely not seen Englishness in this benign way. This has been particularly evident over the last year in derogatory comments from Labour politicians about English nationalism, denouncing it as “dysfunctional”, “populist” and (pejoratively speaking) “ethno-nationalist”, with former Labour minister Geoff Hoon in the vanguard, and at a local level through the removal by Labour councils of St George’s and Union flags during the ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ campaign. This of course is just one instance of a wider and pervasive ‘two-tierism’ by which one set of heritages is celebrated while indigenous ones are seen as potential sources of Right-wing extremism, as in the case last summer of a white English girl draped in a Union Jack being excluded from her school on a Culture Day while her ‘diverse’ schoolmates inside celebrated their own cultures.
So next time Labour politicians tell you that expressions of English patriotism are undesirable while simultaneously pandering to minority cultures, remind them that a fellow pillar of the Establishment – you can’t be more ‘in-crowd’ than Radio 4 and ‘The Indy’ – is okay with a blood line being a central part of one’s identity, as long as national identity is fully open to those without it who willingly assimilate.
Do nation states have a right to exist?
Zack Polanski’s statement about nation states undermines current woke orthodoxy in a different way while also accentuating it. What distinguishes us, he is implying, is that our rights come to us primarily or exclusively as individuals – presumably from universal declarations of human rights and international law – not as members of communities and particularly not as citizens of a nation state. Polanski was asked whether Israel had a right to exist as a state. The answer to the question was known in advance, but to make his well-known rejection of Israel’s right to exist sound more acceptable he generalised it to all countries.
In doing so he laid bare a key part of radical progressivism – that we are citizens of the world unconstrained by the limitations traditionally imposed by the social, national, religious and gender categories into which we are born. From this perspective the world is a tabula rasa where the past need not constrain us and which we can remake as we see fit.
It’s no accident therefore that Polanski’s Green Party champions the rights of those who want to live as if they were members of a sex into which they were not born. It’s also unsurprising that – along with the Liberal Democrats and many in the Labour Party – it’s keen to merge us again into the EU, strengthen the powers over us of the UN and bind us through international ‘green’ treaties that regulate every aspect of our lives, reducing the nation state to a hollow shell.
The problem is that the Palestinians, whom Polanski champions, appear to have a distinct (if recently acquired in historical terms) sense of identity, a desire for their own state and, presumably in many cases, a strong sense of their membership of the Ummah. They, along with Israelis and many Jews in relation to Israel and many indigenous English in relation to England, would doubtless dispute Polanski’s assertion that no country has a right to exist. Quite what such a right involves is open for discussion but – for each of the Israelis and English (and almost certainly for Palestinians too) – it’s highly unlikely to be one that is compatible with the globalist vision of the future Polanski has in store for them.
Reports of the death of the nation state are greatly exaggerated
What is most striking about the hostility of Western elites towards patriotism and nationalism is its shortsightedness. Those who feel the nation state has had its day ignore the fact that historically, in much of the world it is still in its early stages. At the beginning of the 20th century vast numbers of people lived either in large multi-national monarchical empires (Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire) or in the vast colonial empires of European powers. The first group broke up at the end of the First World War and the second group fell apart, at varying rates of disintegration, over the following 50 or so years, in all cases ending up with the creation of new nation states. Others re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. There were 51 founding member states of the UN in 1945. There are 193 today.
The nation state therefore is currently of greater importance to a much higher proportion of the world’s massively increased population than ever in the past. Some states may be heavily dependent on more powerful ones or on big business, and all will be much more interconnected with other parts of the world than ever in the past, but outside Europe federal associations of nation states like the European Union have not caught on. Far from being the inevitable future model, Europe is an outlier in having embraced the EU.
Despite common misapprehensions, most people in the world also still live within a few miles from where they were born. In 2024 only 3.7% of the world’s population lived outside their country of birth. In this respect European and other Western countries are similarly outliers in having large and growing immigrant populations, the UK with 16% of its population foreign-born at the 2021 census, rising to an estimated 19-20% today. By contrast many non-European nation states, while they may have rapidly rising populations and well-established multiple ethnicities, lack the destabilising influence on national identity of large populations constantly arriving from elsewhere.
It’s mostly Western elites therefore that have turned their backs on patriotism and the nation state, through cultural and ethical relativism, misplaced guilt about past empires, a false identification of nationalism with fascism, a decaying civilisation’s boredom with the nation’s past achievements, and out of a sense – the unholy product of Christianity and Marxism – of the world being divided between oppressors and victims.
But even in Western countries the idea of a nation is still alive and well among majority populations, as Amol Rajan has shown through reminding us unwittingly how interest in the blood line remains an endemic feature of our lives and as Polanski too will find, having tied himself in knots by opposing the very idea of a nation state while yoking his political future to the supporters of a people who desperately want a new one for themselves.
Dr Nicholas Tate was chief executive of England’s school curriculum and assessment authorities in the 1990s, director-general of the International School of Geneva 2003-2011 and adviser 2025-2026 to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) in Hungary. He has written extensively on education and the nation state. His most recent book is Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.
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Zack Polanski Admits Not Voting in Local Elections Despite Telling Candidate: “You’ve Got My Vote”
By Will Jones
Zack Polanski has admitted he didn’t vote in last week’s local elections, despite telling the Greens’ mayoral candidate in Hackney “You have my vote” and claims from his spokesman that he had voted by post. The Mail has more.
The Green leader was campaigning in Wales on polling day but his spokesman indicated he’d cast a postal vote in Hackney the day before.
He even told the London borough’s mayoral candidate in an online post: “You have my vote.”
But following questions about the surprising move, he admitted that he had not had time to register to vote after moving home.
It comes after he admitted he had not paid council tax during the three years he lived on a houseboat.
He is believed to have moved to rented accommodation earlier this year but appears not to have registered to vote at his new address.
Polanski faced questions about whether he had voted because it is highly unusual for a party leader not to be pictured voting on election day – usually in a place where they are expected to do well.
He publicly pledged his support to Zoe Garbett, the Green candidate who went on to become Hackney mayor, telling her “you have my vote” in a campaign video released on May 3rd. …
Polanski’s admission is the latest in a series of episodes in which he has had to admitted he has not told the truth.
He previously denied that a houseboat had been his main residence for three years before later admitting it.
He said he was now seeking “clarity” over whether council tax was owed.
He also falsely claimed that he worked at the Ministry of Justice while campaigning for elected office.
Worth reading in full.
FTSE 100 Plunges as Burnham Triggers Bond Markets Turmoil
By Will Jones
The FTSE 100 plunged after Andy Burnham’s campaign to return to Westminster triggered turmoil in bond markets, with borrowing costs pushed to their highest level in 28 years. The Telegraph has more.
Britain’s flagship stock market fell 1.7% – the biggest drop since the first weeks of the Iran war – as UK Government borrowing costs rose to their highest level since 1998 in the wake of Mr Burnham’s leadership push.
Bank stocks dropped by more than 2% over concerns of potential taxes on profits while utility company shares plummeted by as much as 7.6% over fears they could be nationalised.
UK Government bonds have come under pressure since Burnham took the first steps on his path towards a leadership contest to replace Sir Keir Starmer.
The yield on 30-year gilts, which shows the return the Treasury must pay when borrowing from financial markets, has leapt from 5.65% to a 28-year high of 5.85%.
Meanwhile, the benchmark yield on 10-year gilts, as UK government bonds are known, rose to 5.17% – the highest point since 2008.
The Labour leadership drama has put the pound on track for its worst week since the aftermath of Rachel Reeves’s first budget in November 2024, falling by more than 2%.
Modupe Adegbembo, an economist at Jefferies, said: “Political developments now present a clear headwind for UK assets.”
Burnham’s leadership gambit has raised concerns in financial markets that he will push up borrowing and leave the public finances on an unsustainable footing.
He has previously said that the Government was “in hock” to the bond markets and has suggested putting defence spending outside the Chancellor’s fiscal rules.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph notes that Burnham’s agenda suggests he is “set to rip up Labour’s manifesto pledges on tax and spending if he seizes power from Sir Keir Starmer”.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester has said he wants to increase income tax and tweak the Chancellor’s “non-negotiable” fiscal rules as part of a policy blitz that would breach two of Labour’s core commitments from 2024.
He has also said in recent months that he would ultimately like Britain to rejoin the European Union, despite Labour vowing to “make Brexit work” at the last General Election.
The clashes will raise concerns that Burnham will abandon Sir Keir’s agenda and plough his own furrow if he wins the keys to Downing Street, betraying the public’s decision at the ballot box two years ago.
An ally of Sir Keir Starmer said there would have to be an immediate general election if Burnham took over as leader, while the Tories insisted he would have “no mandate to enact his fantasy manifesto” if he won the race for No. 10.
News Round-Up
By Toby Young
- “Starmer’s week gets worse: No10 accused of Mandelson files ‘cover-up’” – Parliament’s intelligence watchdog has accused Sir Keir Starmer’s Government of concealing failures in the Peter Mandelson scandal, reports the Mail.
- “Starmer readies for leadership battle with £18 billion boost for defence” – Sir Keir Starmer is expected to approve an £18 billion increase in defence spending as he fights for political survival, says the Times.
- “Rivals told to skip leadership contest if Andy Burnham wins by-election” – Cabinet members have called on Wes Streeting and Sir Keir Starmer to stand aside if the Greater Manchester mayor defeats Reform in the Makerfield by-election, according to the Times.
- “Labour’s civil war is bizarre, shambolic and pointless” – Sir Keir Starmer’s record as Prime Minister is one of blaming others when he trips and making excuses when he blunders, notes the Telegraph.
- “Starmer is right to resist this clumsy Labour coup” – The PM’s stubborn defiance of his internal challengers is constitutionally sound, even if his Government richly deserves its troubles, writes Charles Moore the Telegraph.
- “Rayner cleared in tax investigation 24 hours after demanding a decision” – HMRC closed its inquiry into Angela Rayner’s £40,000 tax bill just 24 hours after her lawyers demanded a resolution, reveals the Telegraph.
- “Where is proof the taxman has ‘cleared’ you over £40K bill, Angela?” – Labour’s former Deputy Leader declared that HMRC had absolved her of wrongdoing over the purchase of her Hove home, yet she has produced no documentary evidence of that clearance, says the Mail.
- “Understanding the entity known as Starmer” – Smug, bloodless, lawyerly and sanctimonious – everyone knows what Starmer is, but few understand how a man of such evident limitations came to hold the highest office in the land, writes Will Self in the Telegraph.
- “Geert Wilders: I will press charges against Wes Streeting” – In Breitbart, Geert Wilders says he’ll shortly file a criminal complaint with the Dutch police against Wes Streeting.
- “Trans women are women, new Health Secretary said” – James Murray, Wes Streeting’s replacement as Health Secretary, defended a transgender swimmer competing against female athletes as recently as 2022, undermining his credibility at the very moment he takes office, notes the Telegraph.
- “Stopping the boats shouldn’t require magical thinking” – In the Spectator, Matthew Parris argues that the BBC’s exposure of Kardo Ranya as a people-smuggling mastermind is a journalistic triumph, but anyone who thinks it will “smash the gangs” is deluded – where there is demand, there will always be supply.
- “‘A battle for the nation’s soul’, Starmer’s warning ahead of rallies” – Sir Keir Starmer has warned of a “fight for the soul of this country” referring to today’s two rival protests in central London, reports the Mail.
- “‘Far-right agitators’ banned from entering UK before rally” – The Home Office has blocked 11 individuals from entering the country ahead of Tommy Robinson’s rally today, says the Times.
- “Social media influencer Hasan Piker must be banned from Britain, say Jewish leaders” – The online agitator who likened Zionists to “Nazis” and refused to condemn Hamas poses a direct threat to British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council warns, says the Jewish Chronicle.
- “Met will not divert pro-Palestinian rally away from synagogue” – Jewish worshippers leaving Westminster Synagogue on Saturday will be caught up in the Nakba Day rally after police refused to alter the march route, according to the Times.
- “Man threatened to ‘behead Jews’ in east London” – Police are hunting a man who declared “Jews gonna get beheaded” on Whitechapel Road in Tower Hamlets, reports the Telegraph.
- “Until the CPS can grasp the reality of antizionism, it will keep on failing Jews” – New antisemitism guidance is being billed as a major breakthrough, but the problem was never a lack of manuals for prosecutors – it was the repeated failure since October 7th to prosecute blatant antisemitic offences at all, writes Sir Michael Ellis in the Jewish Chronicle.
- “Musk pledges to crack down on antisemitism on X” – The social network has made a “public commitment” to remove 85% of hateful posts within two days, as Elon Musk signals a tougher line on antisemitic content, notes the Telegraph.
- “Syrian refugee guilty of raping woman, 19, in locked beachside toilet” – Mohammed Abdullah’s victim burst into tears as the verdicts were read out at Bournemouth Crown Court, with the judge telling the defendant that a prison sentence was “inevitable”, reports the Mail.
- “Why do feminists refuse to believe that Hamas raped Jewish women?” – UK charity Sisters Uncut dismissed claims of Hamas sexual violence as “Islamophobic and racist weaponisation”. Yet the evidence of systematic rape on October 7th continues to mount, says the Telegraph.
- “Debunking Kristof’s claims of systematic Israeli sexual violence” – In Quillette, Yuki Zeman argues that Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times essay turns unverified claims into anti-Israel propaganda, collapsing under scrutiny of the evidence.
- “Billionaires are abandoning Britain – this is what it means” – One in six people on the Rich List two years ago no longer appear in 2026, and a third no longer live on the mainland, in a flight of wealth that carries grave consequences for the public finances, according to the Times.
- “Civil servant pensions exceed £150,000 a year” – More than 263 Civil Service retirees are now receiving six-figure payouts, with 23 having crossed the £150,000 threshold, in figures obtained through Freedom of Information requests that prompt fresh calls for reform, reports the Telegraph.
- “Miliband’s North Sea law is hugely economically damaging” – The idea that Britain somehow helps the climate by importing more energy rather than producing it domestically is simply false, and Miliband’s legislation threatens to make energy more expensive and less secure for decades to come, writes Kathryn Porter in the Telegraph.
- “Households saddled with up to eight bins” – Labour councils have imposed “overwhelming” recycling schemes on thousands of households, requiring as many as eight separate bins in a bureaucratic overreach that residents find maddening, notes the Telegraph.
- “In which the Green Party commits an accidental fascism by passing a law with AfD support” – On his Substack, Eugyppius says Germany’s cartel parties have built an elaborate firewall around the AfD, yet the Greens have now voted through legislation with AfD support, exposing the absurdity at the heart of their democratic posturing.
- “Dale Vince: I’d give Starmer cash to fight off leadership rivals” – One of Labour’s biggest donors has pledged to bankroll Sir Keir Starmer in any leadership battle, offering a financial lifeline as the Prime Minister faces mounting pressure from within, says the Telegraph.
- “Block the Greens from power at every level” – No mainstream party should strike a coalition deal with extreme Greens, and every democratic actor has a duty to deny them a foothold at any level of government, says a Telegraph editorial.
- “JCB boss: Stop conning taxpayers over £333 billion welfare bill” – Lord Bamford warns that the Government “can’t get away with” granting benefits of up to £60,000 a year to people who don’t work, and predicts a public revolt if ministers fail to act, reveals the Times.
- “Green councillor ‘Baggy’ Khan drives a gas-guzzling Lamborghini” – Mohammad Baghdadi “Baggy” Khan, newly elected Green councillor for Bolton’s Halliwell ward at just 25, is revealed to be the owner of a Lamborghini, reports the Mail.
- “The return of history: Britain’s democratic deficit and the risk of internal disorder” – On Substack, C.J. Strachan argues that Britain has survived unrest before, but only when its rulers remembered how to listen to the governed.
- “Voter troubles” – In The New Conservative, Jack Watson explores the paralysing dilemma facing voters who find themselves unable in good conscience to support any party on offer.
- “Frankenstein is ‘transphobic’, non-binary director claims” – American filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun declares that Mary Shelley’s classic gothic novel is “transphobic” because it concerns “a constructed body” – a claim that says rather more about the claimant than the 200-year-old text, says the Mail.
- “Song about choking women and bondage makes it to Eurovision final” – Romania’s controversial Eurovision entry has made it through to the final after the lead singer writhed around on all-fours in a skimpy leather outfit, according to the Mail.
- “Nicki Minaj on how Gavin Newsom and Jay-Z turned her into a MAGA fan” – A major turning point in Nicki Minaj’s shift away from the Democrats was California Governor Newsom’s refusal to meet her after her home was “swatted”, says the Mail.
- “MAGA influencer and partner charged over ‘racially aggravated assault’” – Melissa Rein Lively, 40, has been charged with ‘assault by beating’ while her partner Philipp Ostermann faces two racially aggravated public order offences following an incident at Bond Street Underground station, reports the Mail.
- “Taliban recognises child marriage under new rules” – A 31-page Taliban regulation now formally governs child marriage and the dissolution of unions under a wide range of religious and legal conditions, says the Mail.
- “AI isn’t paying off in the way companies think. Layoffs driven by automation are failing to generate returns, study finds” – In Fortune, Jake Angelo reports that a Gartner study found no correlation between workforce reductions driven by AI automation and higher return on investment, despite 80% of companies surveyed having cut headcount.
- “If you do anything today, watch Maeve Halligan at the Cambridge Union” – On X, Thea Sewell posts a clip from her friend Maeve Halligan’s speech at the Cambridge Union standing up for sex-based women’s rights
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