Those bootlicking apologists for trivial interventions

Towards the end of August, Christopher Snowdon wrote a most interesting Critic piece on the erosion of small freedoms and the corresponding accumulation of small annoyances. 

This is one of the problems of course, those small annoyances accumulate. Over time they become a drag on daily life until we adapt, while knowing we shouldn't have to adapt to preposterous official intrusions.   

In defence of small freedoms

Bootlicking apologists should stop defending government intervention on the grounds of its supposed triviality

As laws become more preposterous and governments intrude ever further into the private lives of individuals, you might expect the public to revolt. Instead, the growing state has given rise to a strange breed of bootlicking gimps who go out of their way to bat for the government.

The journalist Tom Harwood was in Washington D.C. this week and tweeted a video of himself unscrewing the cap from a bottle of Coke with the caption “Sweet land of liberty”. The point was that he was able to fully remove the plastic cap without violently twisting and tugging its tether — a freedom that has been denied to residents of the EU since 2024 thanks to Article 6 of the Single-Use Plastics Directive.

At this point, Snowdon brings in the bootlickers who defend each little pointless burden as if nothing much is being demanded of us. We should suck it up is their airy message, telling us we're making a fuss about nothing. 

The whole piece is well worth reading because as we know too well, another example could pop up tomorrow.

But minor inconveniences soon add up. I wrote last week about the government’s plan to put vape products behind shutters in shops. The Impact Assessment rather conservatively assumes that this will lead to transaction times taking two seconds longer. That doesn’t sound like much, but when you add it all up it amounts to a cost of £43 million on retailers. It has been estimated that Europeans waste a total of 575 million hours per year clicking on cookie consent buttons which, when monetised, amounts to €14.3 billion. Those who defend GDPR don’t seem to mind this, although they suddenly find that their time is incredibly precious when the non-EU queue is longer than the EU queue at passport control. It then becomes the turn of the eurosceptics to say “It’s only a queue, mate! What’s the big deal? You don’t mind queuing at the supermarket, do you?”

That Finger-Wagging Alert

Yesterday we didn't receive the national alert on our phones because we have it switched off. We have no intention of doing anything which could start a wildfire anyway.

But they know that.

 

One step at a time

Digital driving licence ‘ready for rollout’

An annual report published by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency claims that, following initial early tests, the new virtual document is primed to deploy to millions of people

Some 18 months after first being promised, a new digital driving licence is “ready for rollout”, according to government documents.

As part of a wider suite of virtual credentials being created by various Whitehall agencies – including a new digital veterans’ card, and planned electronic versions of the likes of National Insurance cards and marriage and death certificates – ministers stated in January 2025 that an initial version of a digital driving licence would be available by the end of that year. Government intends that citizens will be able to store all these formal documents in a newly created GOV.UK Wallet – that will operate in much the same way as similar platforms from Apple and Google...

Other new online services created in FY26 include “a new digital portal with the ability, for the first time, to deal with over 1,000 medical conditions” that need to be declared by drivers.

An idiot’s guide to promoting “public health” policies

Christopher Snowdon has a delightfully incisive Critic piece on the authoritarian games played by those tedious food moralists who insist on promoting useless "public health" policies.

An idiot’s guide to promoting “public health” policies

How to make irrational authoritarian moralism sound like urgent common sense

The Health and Care Committee has published a report calling for yet another slew of anti-obesity policies. After taking “evidence” from such experts as the orthorexic children’s entertainer Chris van Tulleken and some “youth activists” from Jamie Oliver’s front group BiteBack, it has called for a ban on fast food outlets opening near schools, a ban on all outdoor advertising of high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) food, a ban on companies associated with such foods advertising themselves even if they are not advertising an HFSS product, and a ban on companies which “derive more than a certain proportion of sales from less healthy products from any discussions on the formation of policy on food, diet and obesity prevention.”


The whole piece is well worth reading for the way it eviscerates political delusions of grandeur.


Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”

UC Berkeley Joins Forces With Nancy Pelosi

Lloyd Billingsley has a useful American Spectator piece on Nancy Pelosi and the modestly named Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy (NPI).

The whole piece is well worth reading, including the linked piece Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist.

UC Berkeley Joins Forces With Nancy Pelosi

Presenting the ‘nonpartisan’ Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy (NPI).

Nancy Pelosi is the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro, a Baltimore mayor and member of Congress. He passed away in 1987, the year Nancy first ran for Congress in California, representing part of San Francisco. In the Congressional Record in 2001, Rep. Pelosi praised Harry Bridges as “the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century” and “beloved by the workers of this nation.” For all but the willfully blind, he wasn’t.

As Joshua Muravchik noted in “Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist” article, Bridges’ membership in the Communist Party had been revealed a full nine years before Pelosi’s encomium. Bridges was a Stalinist thug dedicated to the Soviet Union, a Communist dictatorship. The former Speaker also has some strange ideas about how democracy works in America.

Trend-spotters have already spotted this one

Ex Treasury adviser warns HMRC to use AI to create surveillance state

A former senior Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown has warned that HMRC is on the cusp of using artificial intelligence to track people’s and businesses income and expenditure without them knowing.

Dr Chris Wales, who was a member of Mr Brown’s Council of Economic Advisers for more than six years, has sounded the alarm while launching a chilling book on the conduct of the Spanish tax authority, Agencia Tributaria.

He is set to join former Labour Treasury minister Baroness Dawn Primarolo at an event next week flagging up how the Spanish model of dealing with tax evasion is about to arrive in the UK suggesting that the door is opening for a “surveillance state.”

In a preview of the future, Dr Wales has claimed that confidentiality in personal life – not just finances – “will simply go out of the window” and asks whether there are adequate safeguards in the UK to prevent HMRC from emulating its Spanish counterpart.

How likely is it that a Burnham government will debate this openly before implementation is too advanced to call a halt?

On a scale of 0 to 0

It never goes away

EU's 'chat control' plan is back: Critics warn it could allow governments to scan your private message

Privacy advocates warn of potential overreach as EU revisits controversial messaging regulations.

The European Union's controversial 'Chat Control' proposal is back on the agenda after fresh negotiations this week, bringing back discussions over whether governments should be able to scan private messages in the name of child protection.

Ahead of a crucial round of talks on Monday, former Member of the European Parliament Patrick Breyer warned that the latest developments could pave the way for widespread monitoring of encrypted communications if the proposed rules move forward...

Critics argue that the proposal goes far beyond targeting illegal material already known to authorities. In its strongest form, they warn that it could allow governments to issue detection orders requiring companies to scan private messages, even without a judicial warrant.

Starmer announced a policy handed to him by the Tony Blair Institute

A concise presentation of the Digital ID issue.

Signal

Anne-Laure Dufeal has a Brussels Signal piece on the UK move to implement the technical and regulatory framework of a mass surveillance system under the guise of child safety. 

We've known about this for some time of course, but the point is worth making over and over again until we can't make it.

Signal accuses UK of creating a mass surveillance system under the guise of child safety

The company criticised the proposals, warning that they could have far-reaching implications for privacy and civil liberties.

Following UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s call for tech companies to introduce device-level controls, the messaging platform Signal has accused the UK government of laying the groundwork for a “mass surveillance system” under the guise of child protection...

“The UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the UK be scanned on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning, will not safeguard children”, Signal warned in a statement.

“It endangers us all, whilst strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s market dominance and their control over our most personal information”, the company added.


The UK government will probably be comfortable with strengthening Apple, Google, and Microsoft’s market dominance. It only has to hold "discussions" with those three.

Stooge Trip

  

Burnham allies plan cross-party council to stop a Reform UK government

Senior figures from the progressive parties will form a new group to discuss how the "progressive majority" can stop Reform winning the next election, including discussing electoral pacts.

Allies of Andy Burnham will form a new "council" of cross-party figures to discuss working together to stop a Reform UK government.

The "council for the progressive majority" is being instigated by Compass, a centre-left thinktank whose founder Neal Lawson is an influential supporter of the Greater Manchester mayor.

The council will be comprised of two leading figures from each of the progressive parties in the UK - Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru.

Blimey. Establishment stooges on a power trip, aiming to slam the door on plebs who might prefer the type of democracy where voting makes a difference.

Sorry chaps, stick your mark on the voting paper and clear off.

Examination of attitudes

Examination of attitudes when buying a house: Government argues about explosive encroachment on property rights

In Berlin, the dispute over a possible test of conviction when buying a house is escalating. The background is a draft from the Federal Ministry of Construction by Verena Hubertz, who belongs to the SPD. According to the available reports, municipalities should be able to intervene if the buyer is suspected of "anti-constitutional tendencies". In addition, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the BKA are to be involved in the examination, while the ministry explains that the text is still being coordinated by the departments. The initiative therefore hits a highly sensitive core of the rule of law, because not only criminal offenses, but already political suspicions could have consequences for the purchase of residential property.

The real scandal, however, lies deeper than in a usual departmental debate. If the state links the purchase of a house to a preliminary examination, it shifts the line between danger prevention and political selection. Property would then no longer be just a question of contract, financing and compliance with the law, but at the same time of the state's assessment of the person of the buyer. This is precisely a pattern that free societies must strictly limit.

Has it had an impact?

Earth Day started as a US 'teach-in' 56 years ago. Now it's a global event

Millions of people around the world will pause Wednesday, at least for a moment, to mark Earth Day. It's an annual event founded by people who hoped to stir activism to clean up and preserve a planet that is now home to some 8 billion humans and assorted trillions of other organisms.

Here are answers to some common questions about Earth Day and how it came to be...

Has it had an impact?


Indeed it has -

 

Carney Doubled

 

Zack Polanski’s rental populism

Maxwell Marlow has a useful CAPX reminder that the fog of war should not divert our attention from nutters closer to home. This time it's not Keir Starmer's legion of useful idiots, it's Zack Polanski's.

Worth reading as another reminder that most political rhetoric is driven by whatever low information voters can be persuaded to support. It is not aimed at those who pay attention to how political rhetoric is used and why.

Zack Polanski’s rental populism won’t help anyone

• Rent controls will only make our housing crisis worse
• From Berlin to Stockholm, rent controls have failed wherever they have been tried
• If the Greens were serious about helping urban renters, they would be campaigning for planning reform

The Green Party has a new plan to solve the housing crisis that is simple: make it worse. With local elections looming, the Greens are set to offer rent controls and various measures against ‘commercial housebuilders’ as part of their local election offer. It is the political equivalent of treating a fever by smashing the thermometer. It might feel satisfying for a moment, but nobody ends up healthier.

At their 2025 conference, the Greens formally adopted a motion to seek what they called the ‘effective abolition of private landlordism’. They want to end buy-to-let mortgages, impose rent caps and build 150,000 social homes a year through public acquisition and council-led construction. It is the most radical housing platform of any party with elected MPs while also being the most economically illiterate. An impressive feat.

This time it will be different

Zohran Mamdani's $70 Million Grocery Gamble

Amid a $5.4 billion budget deficit, the mayor of New York City is pushing forward with a proposal that has historically yielded terrible results.


North Korea tightens grocery store regulations

Gray market workarounds may no longer be tolerated under new rules

“In the past, store managers have met government quotas with goods from the gray market, but it doesn’t look like that will fly anymore,” the source said. “Managers aren’t sure whether it will be possible to meet government quotas if they follow state-mandated procedures and use goods provided by the state.”

A quasi-religious belief in government power

Eliot Wilson has a useful Critic piece on what he calls Keir Starmer's quasi-religious belief in government power. 


Labour is trapped in a statist doom-loop

Keir Starmer has a quasi-religious belief in government power

Sometimes politicians are required to say preposterous things. One of the most obviously outlandish arguments recently came when Sir Keir Starmer spoke from outside 10 Downing Street for the first time as Prime Minister. He lacks Sir Tony Blair’s eye for the dramatic flourish, the impromptu lyricism of 1 May 1997: “A new dawn has broken, has it not? Isn’t it wonderful?”

The words Starmer did find were dramatic in their implausibility. He promised “to deliver change, to restore service and respect to politics, end the era of noisy performance, tread more lightly on your lives”. Anyone who has been awake for the last 20 months will know how little of that has come to pass — service and respect are on extended sick leave, while noisy performance would at least be better than muffled stasis — but it was the pledge to “tread more lightly on your lives” that caused eyebrows to raise and jaws to drop.

This has never been how “progressive” politics works. In 1889’s Fabian Essays in Socialism, Sidney Webb, co-founder of the London School of Economics, from whose pen had flowed the old, long-cherished Clause IV of the Labour Party Rule Book, had seen the future. He foresaw the “unconscious abandonment of the old Individualism, and our irresistible glide into collective Socialism”.


The whole piece is well worth reading as yet another reminder that the UK Labour Party reached the end of the Fabian line years ago. There is nowhere else to take Labour ideology beyond a totalitarian cul-de-sac, the route Starmer is currently following one step at a time. That too is the gradualist, Fabian way.

Change is coming, because our current model is so clearly unsustainable. I suspect there could be some first-mover advantage for a politician who was willing to set out some unvarnished and uncomfortable truths about Britain, but who also had plausible, considered, ambitious and optimistic plans about how we can not rewire but remake and reimagine the nation.

It becomes more and more obvious by the day that Sir Keir Starmer is not that kind of catalyst or visionary; but the Labour Party is not intellectually ready to produce and support such a figure. It is stuck in a statist doom loop, haunted by questions but unable to produce any answer except more government.

Reliable

Starmer's China trip provides exquisite optics for the 'world's most reliable superpower'

Let's be frank, in China the UK is not seen as a particularly big or important player

The optics of the British prime minister being here, revamping this relationship, at exactly the moment that Donald Trump is seriously disrupting traditional transatlantic partnerships, is exquisite for the Chinese.

Indeed, under President Xi, China has long nurtured the narrative that it is, in fact, the world's most reliable superpower, that countries should look to it, and not the US, for stable global leadership.


Reliable in some ways of course -

Xi's military purge claims biggest victim as he removes China's top general amid Taiwan uncertainty

President Xi has achieved total control of China's armed forces after removing a top general over alleged 'violations of discipline and law'.

Zhang Youxia is the latest high-ranking figure subjected to Xi Jinping's long-running purge of military officials.

Keir's Spiritual Home

Exclusive-Britain, China to revive 'golden era' business dialogue during Starmer visit, sources say

BEIJING, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Britain and China will aim to revive a "golden era" business dialogue when Prime Minister Keir Starmer visits Beijing next week, three sources familiar with the initiative said, with top company executives from both sides invited to participate.


No the post title isn't intended to be sarcastic. For many globally-minded European politicians and senior bureaucrats, China does appear to be regarded as an important model. A furtive faith in monopolistic politics hasn't disappeared.

As Starmer keeps reminding anyone who pays attention to these things.

Authoritarian upgrading

Grokipedia has the interesting phrase 'authoritarian upgrading' in its entry for Uzbekistan.


Despite economic progress, Uzbekistan retains authoritarian characteristics under Mirziyoyev, with limited political pluralism and state control over key institutions. Press freedom has deteriorated, with Uzbekistan ranking 148th out of 180 countries in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, its score falling from 37 to 35 points, amid economic pressures on independent media and efforts to co-opt bloggers. Reforms have improved some human rights areas, such as reducing forced labor, but core controls persist, including restrictions on opposition and media, indicating authoritarian upgrading rather than substantive democratization.

Here's another interesting phrase - 'there's a lot of it about'.

When certainty requires ignorance

Alex Story has a fine Critic piece on the deliberate promotion of ahistorical politics by the UK Labour party as a way to evade responsibility for past damage caused by its totalitarian ideology.


Taking down the past

The ahistoricism of Labour’s leaders is worse than ignorant. It is deliberate

As Goldfinger observed: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. It is a good observational rule, not least to judge our political rulers by what they do rather than what they say.

Early in October 2024, Keir Starmer removed the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh from 10 Downing Street. Both were painted in the late sixteenth century, a handful of years after the defeat of Spain’s Philip II and his Great Armada.

Both were old hat. After all, fighting for England’s religious and cultural survival is rather reactionary and potentially “far right” now that hoisting your country’s flag on a pole in your own country could earn you a police visit.


The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading, if only because Labour Party ignorance is so easily dismissed as stupidity rather than a cover for yet another dose of totalitarian failure.


Knowledge, truth and their pursuit require cautious discernment and love of the subject; their absence demands revolution. We are faced by the latter, while yearning for the former. Being ahistorical means never taking responsibility for the devastation your ideology and its many permutations have left and will leave behind. Such certainty requires ignorance. It is a totalitarian shield, enabling politicians to bray mendacious and accusatory slogans without shame and to which to acknowledge popular sentiments to “turn the clocks back” is anti-progressive and anathema.