‘Foreigners Like You Have No Right to Interfere’
- January 16, 2019
- by
- Matt
Just after the referendum in 2016, I got a message on this site from an anonymous fascist, which I wish I’d kept. The gist of it was that the people like me had lost, and that people like the writer were now going to take their country back.
The tone was quietly triumphant and determined, and it was clear that the writer saw the referendum as the beginning of something much bigger. I thought of that letter yesterday, when Professor Tanja Bueltmann posted the following screenshot on Twitter, listing the abuse that has been directed...
Brexit: Clowntime is Over
- January 14, 2019
- by
- Matt
‘In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do,’ wrote Charles Mackay in his classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852). ‘ We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds...
Ceasefire: Goddard’s ‘Westminster mob’ are a threat to our common future
- January 11, 2019
- by
- Matt
Few people who pay any attention to British politics will be unaware of the small but vocal group of far-right demonstrators who have been gathering outside Westminster for the last month. Led by Tommy Robinson fanboy James Goddard and inspired by the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement in France, these protesters have heckled and abused MPs, journalists...
Gavin Williamson: Brexitland Rules the Waves
- January 06, 2019
- by
- Matt
In the final pages of the Beagle diaries, Charles Darwin celebrated the incorporation of Australia and other British colonies into ‘ a grand centre of civilization’ and declared approvingly:
It is impossible for an Englishman to behold these distant colonies, without a high pride and satisfaction. To hoist the British flag seems to draw as a...
Jeremy Hunt’s Chain of Fools
- January 04, 2019
- by
- Matt
As a schoolboy studying for my History O’Level, I once memorized the British Foreign Secretary George Canning’s famous 1826 dictum: ‘I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old.’
At the time I was never exactly sure what it meant, but I understood that it had something to do with the ‘informal...
2019: The Reckoning
- December 31, 2018
- by
- Matt
Politically speaking 2018 was a dismal year, but I can’t help feeling that 2019 is going to be a lot worse. In the UK we are now faced with a situation that was unprecedented – and until the 2016 referendum – unimaginable. A minority Tory government, propped up by a heavily-bribed DUP, is using the...
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