The new Keir Starmer Labour government’s energy secretary Ed Miliband, former leader of the party (2010-15) has overruled his officials to ban offshore North Sea energy drilling, sued to stop a coal mine project to which the Tories had given the go-ahead, announced the resumption of new onshore solar and wind projects and promised greater investment in Britain’s attempt to reach Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050. By pushing Britain’s climate change mania so vigorously, he will ensure that the disasters to which it will lead will hit Britain first. Continue reading →

France’s cuisine is probably civilization’s finest creation, and its art, music and fashion aren’t bad, either. Yet the French people fall for every leftist scam that is pulled on them, notably in the second round of elections last week, and are far too prone to revere intellectuals who would best be placed in solitary confinement. Economically, this has caused the country to underperform even worse than Britain. It is perhaps worth examining this pathology in more detail. Continue reading →

For 200 years, leftist political economists and low-wage sweatshops have lobbied governments to put in taxes and regulations that lower wage rates, supposedly to “create jobs.” Such interference with the market, by making labor artificially cheap prevents the “creative destruction” that alone produces productivity gains and better living standards. The policy mix that produces high wages and good living standards is often termed “populist” but it is simply aimed against regulation freaks and monopolistic corporate rent-seekers. In every country, governments should work to raise wages and improve their people’s lives through deregulation and proper economic management. Continue reading →

If polls are correct, the British “Conservative” party will suffer a huge defeat on July 4, with Labour winning a large majority and Nigel Farage’s Reform party eating a big share of the previous Tory vote, albeit winning few seats in Parliament. Given the “Conservative” party’s abominable performance in the previous 14 years of government – and to a large extent in the 180 years before that – it will be time for a root-and-branch rethink of right-of-center British politics. Here’s what it should contain. Continue reading →

The United States Supreme Court’s season ends in the next few weeks with a slew of decisions, after a year in which it has been subjected to increasingly vitriolic criticism by a left that feels neglected. In Britain, the “Supreme Court” set up by Tony Blair has been a fount of leftist Establishment wokery and has never established its legitimacy. It is therefore worth defining what the function of a Supreme Court should be in a well-run society and why a well-functioning Supreme Court is needed to preserve that society from ruin. Continue reading →

The election win of Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico dooms that country to at least six more years of violent Marxist wokery. Yet in a few countries elsewhere in Latin America, the universal gloom of socialism is lifting – Xavier Milei’s government in Argentina and Nayib Bukele’s in El Salvador both offer hope for the future of a kind the region has rarely seen. We must all hope that the light begins to spread and overwhelm the darkness. Continue reading →

At the end of the 19th Century, it appeared that slavery had almost been eliminated worldwide. With slaveowners in British colonies bought out by Britain, an appalling Civil War in the United States, confiscation in Brazil and a major effort by the Royal Navy to extirpate the trade, its prevalence had been reduced to a few straggling societies in the Middle East and Africa. Then 20th Century wars brought “National Service,” a concept now extended by the leftist bureaucrat state, while modern cheap-labor-lobby immigration policies have brought the return of indentured servitude. Free labor is an existential condition of a free society; it is fast being eroded. Continue reading →

All of us who are old enough can remember where we were when it happened – the fantastic sight of demonstrators breaking down the Berlin Wall that had divided Germany and mankind for several decades, apparently marking the death-knell of the evil Communist tyranny. But a generation later, the question has to be asked: did the West actually win? Did the free market actually triumph over the miseries of central planning? Or was Communism simply transmogrified into a form that, promulgated through the universities and the media, is now dominant and repressive throughout the West? Continue reading →

The Industrial Revolution is currently 256 years old, if you agree with my chronology in “Forging Modernity” dating its inception to 1768, plus or minus a year or two. Even given that it soared beyond mere human limitations, you would expect it to be showing signs of age by now. Yet in recent years, it has shown signs not merely of maturity but of senescence; it is losing capabilities that it once possessed. If the Industrial Revolution has turned Struldbrugg — Jonathan Swift’s mythical creatures who live forever, growing ever older, ever uglier and ever feebler — our economic future is a grim one. Continue reading →