At the beginning of 2026, I found myself repeatedly at loggerheads with the MAGA influencers on social media. I disagreed with the performative sadism of making memes and gloating on the internet over people ICE were shooting. I regarded the emerging Iran War as stupid and entirely in service to another people. I also thought the sabre-rattling over Greenland and the subsequent anti-European animosity made gullible dupes of Trump’s supporters.

For that, I was predictably called a Britcuck Europoor, impotently lashing out against the Great Colossus, who went where it liked and did what it pleased. I was ‘Anti-American’.

The thing is, I wasn’t and never have been.

When Dolly Parton died, Donald Trump ordered the Stars and Stripes across the USA to be flown at half-mast. This, I thought, is the America I like—mawkish, perhaps overly sentimental, but also well-meant. I believe Donald Trump would have been saddened to learn that Dolly Parton had died, because, like him, she was an American icon.

As an outsider who has never set foot in the United States (and probably never will), my perception of America comes almost entirely through signs and symbols, personalities, and ‘stars’. In this regard, Dolly Parton was the anti-Trump. Where Trump represents the tough-talking, though amusing, New York sleazeball hustler, Dolly was rhinestone-and-moonshine homeliness and bubbly charm.

It’s how non-Americans want Americans to be; it’s the America we like because it isn’t threatening and signals a benign hegemon who means well. It isn’t ‘radical’ in the same way another icon, John Wayne, wasn’t radical, but a tough and fair dispenser of justice and common sense.

America’s icons tend to be strivers and achievers, despite the forces aligned against them. Dolly Parton, famously, grew up dirt poor in a one-room cabin on the banks of Little Pigeon River, Tennessee. Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Muhammad Ali and Madonna all garnered iconic status as outsiders, regardless of how engineered that status often was.

Woke was a catastrophically poor cultural formula because it fundamentally misunderstood the appeal of Americanism, as represented through larger-than-life individuals.

In 2014, as woke was gathering momentum, Dolly Parton appeared at the Glastonbury music festival in England. She was regarded as the ironic act, the act that the feminists and output of the UK’s extreme left education system could laugh at and look down upon. In fact, she brought the house down. For that half hour or so, their cynical, carefully manicured opinions dissolved in an earthy, nostalgia-tinted authenticity that reached ‘under the skin’ of superficial, inorganic dogmas.

In my opinion, Madonna and the rancid message she sent to young women and girls represented an earlier form of woke, more skilful in its message but no less insidious. Dolly Parton, on the other hand, speaks to women as they are, which is why Dolly endured and retained a dignity Madge could only dream of.

In Britain, our icons were born out of long-settled socio-cultural arrangements and institutions. David Attenborough is not a striving go-getter from outside the system; he is the paternalistic voice of God instructing and educating. The fact that British icons also include Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill speaks for itself. Even people who embody the rags-to-riches myth, such as Michael Caine, represent class rather than an individual.

We British are drawn to the ‘free soul’ charting their destiny across untamed landscapes and economic possibilities: the less crass, the more wholesome, the better.

There’s poetic symbolism in David Attenborough and Clint Eastwood reflecting the preferred icons of their respective nations, and both being truly ancient in terms of years. The institutions have decayed and hollowed; the subversion is complete; the lonesome, self-reliant wanderer of the High Plains will also die.

Nothing emerges to replace either. We’re left chasing an echo of a dream.

Perhaps Donald Trump once dreamed of leading a movement where Dolly Partons surrounded him and not Howard Lutniks and Mark Levins. Perhaps ordering the flags of the nation to be lowered for an old country singer is an implicit acknowledgement of it.

In Britain, Bulldog populists stand dumbstruck as the very institutions they look to for succour and meaning spit venom in their faces. As the icons fade and the dreams become harder to grasp, we find ourselves looking for islands in streams in the desert of data centres, asylum seeker HMOs, and Turkish barber shops.

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The British Government recently sent out its “Emergency Alert” to the nation’s phones. The intense, high-pitched squeal we could expect to hear alongside the text: “Moscow has launched” or “Meteor has entered the atmosphere” was instead used to tell us not to use disposable barbecues or fireworks, lest another wildfire start. The modern dystopia of the United Kingdom has various shades, some grotesque, others more akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The emergency alert override warning you not to have a barbecue is firmly in the Brazil category.

Climate Change is a subject that I’m boringly centrist or neutral on. My personal view is that winters are less harsh and summers far hotter than I remember when I was young. Though I’m also acutely aware of my nostalgic tendencies. My natural disposition would always lead me to reminisce about gentle golden nights of inviting summer comfort, contrasted with pristine rolling fields of thick snow like goose feathers. I don't remember it ever being uncomfortably hot for a solid week, but then again, we tend to forget that, most of the time, the pristine snow was dirty slush peppered with dog turds.

Either way, England is in a drought right now. But don’t worry, the mainstream right’s media is on hand to remind us that the 2026 drought is not as severe as the 1976 one.

Here we arrive at the farcical aspect of climate change as a subject. It is absurdly political, with both camps dug in on what seems like an intractable war of narratives.

The establishment is, of course, on the “it’s happening, and it’s manmade” side, and the more populist position is one of flat-out denial that anything is amiss.

Neither help themselves either. The first rays of sunshine do not warrant a heatmap that makes Sussex look like a Venusian volcano. Alternatively, is it really just part of the summer fun that the Cairngorms go up in flames or that parts of southern England went for 52 days without a drop of rain?

The right-wing skepticism usually amounts to arguing that nothing is happening, or that it is happening and that’s a good thing. Polar bears are still alive, and islands in the Pacific Ocean are not yet submerged, after all.

Alternatively, the elite/leftist opinion always comes with a technocratic surveillance grid pocking its laser eyes, peering over their shoulders, getting ready to track your carbon footprint and stuff a Frankenburger in your mouth.

An article in the New Scientist illustrates the frustrating nature of the climate discussion, mixing expertise with a touch of nudge.

It is a sign of the impact of climate change, which is expected to bring drier, hotter summers to the UK. This year shows that even a wet winter isn’t enough to carry the UK through an extremely hot, dry summer. “Currently the situation is that we’re just simply using too much water,” says Kevin Grecksch at the University of Oxford. “We’re not replenishing at the same speed as we’re using water.”

And then.

You may have noticed the crunch of dry leaves underfoot in recent weeks. That’s a sign stressed trees are going through a “false autumn”, where they shed their leaves and even branches in an effort to keep their main stem alive

I hadn’t noticed that, and I’m somebody who wanders among and pays attention to trees often. I have, however, noticed that in the confines of my small and cheap greenhouse, tomatoes are wilting and dying, and I cannot ventilate the structure enough to prevent it. The few plants outside are faring much better, though.

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I recently watched a fascinating discussion between a Chinese woman, who is apparently a political philosophy student and lecturer, and film director Christopher Nolan. What makes it interesting is that the Chinese woman, Zhong Shu, is an “outsider looking in” at Western cultural tropes and Hollywood in particular. She allows us to get a sense of how others see us.

I haven’t seen Nolan’s The Odyssey, but I am, of course, fully aware of the discussion and controversy surrounding it. Zhong Shu looks straight past the woke aspects of the film and drills down into the nature of myth and heroism as depicted in modern Western media.

The ancient Greeks, she reminds Nolan, did not even have a word for atonement, and Homer most certainly did not lament or feel guilt for the victory over Troy. Nolan speaks of cinema as being a universal language, but Shu gently points out that atonement, guilt, or the idea of deconstructing great men and heroic archetypes are specifically Western. She even asks Nolan if he is “the bard of a civilisation at dusk”.

There’s a hint of Oswald Spengler here, with Nolan existing within a hermetically sealed metaphysical cultural dome, but his Chinese interviewer being aware of it. Nolan assumes that his particularly Western and postmodern priors apply equally to both other parts of the world today, and even to Hellenic Greece.

The most interesting part of the discussion was when Shu asked Nolan if we should apologise for greatness, meaning should heroes be broken down and reduced to merely human, and Nolan appears to accept that great men should be rendered more recognisably human.

I haven’t watched The Odyssey, but I did recently watch The Death of Robin Hood, and every last one of these tropes applies to that film as to Nolan’s retelling of Homer.

Robin Hood, the quintessential English folklore hero, played by Hugh Jackman, is a broken-down old relic, tormented by his past, which is revealed to be a life spent slaughtering innocents and stealing for his own gain. The myth that partly sprang up around him during his life is a lie. His real life has wrought carnage on everyone he ever met, and now, as he begins to yearn for death, a lifetime of butchery and brutality heaps up around him, forming a cage of guilt and despair.

This isn’t so much Robin Hood and his merry men, but Robin Hood and his marauding psychos.

Moreover, the film was shot in Northern Ireland using a desaturated palette, in what appears to be a rainy November. Personally, I rather enjoy the misty and grim aesthetic of parts of the United Kingdom, but a good time this film certainly is not.

So here, once again, we have a popular myth, a traditional hero, being reduced to a guilt-ridden old basket-case waiting for the end. The Death of Robin Hood at least avoided flooding the screen with favoured groups, but the price we pay for that is a subtext that says: “You brought nothing but misery to the world, White man, and now it’s time to atone and die.”

In his defence, when asked about similar tropes in his movie, Nolan takes a swipe at “amateur movie critics” on YouTube. I can imagine that online pundits like myself would moan about The Death of Robin Hood as not being related to Robin Hood and as a boring, miserable experience. However, Nolan would counter that if all stories were made according to a template or formula, every film would be the same.

He isn’t entirely wrong. Robin Hood is an 800 year-old tale. Do we really need another film with a heroic swashbuckling protagonist wearing a bycocket hat with a pheasant feather and performing amazing feats with a bow? Haven’t we seen it all before?

Naturally, such a film could be firmly set within the “hero’s journey” framework, never veering away from the formula.

The problem with this argument is that boredom with an exhausted formula is exactly what amateur critics of mass media are complaining about and have been for at least fifteen years. Every White male protagonist is essentially a traumatised, self-loathing wreck like a Boomer who just left his first viewing of Schindler’s List. Everywhere, regardless of place or time, is ethnically similar to modern-day Los Angeles. The sacred is desecrated, the heroic reduced to cowardice or venality, the feminine twisted into an avatar of masculine virtue. It is relentless.

These tropes are not natural variations on a theme. They’ve become the entire symphony. Yet Nolan suggests that a modern audience would reject traditional archetypes and heroic figures. They must be flawed, they must be insecure and uncertain, they must be conflicted.

The Death of Robin Hood flopped, whereas Game of Thrones prequel A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which subverted the subversion, was widely applauded. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has become a monolithic example of cinema done well.

In many respects, there’s nothing that can be done about mass entertainment because the people who influence it are hostile to traditional European and Western culture. The industry has baked in policies that require “representation” of client groups, including writers and producers.

Yet the question lingers: what would, for example, a modern iteration of, say, Robin Hood actually look like that didn’t make you feel like you’re crawling out of a bloody car crash?

In 1976 Robin and Marian largely answered that question. The legend remains intact, but the characters, played by Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, are aging romantics feeling the weight of the years. It is a story of love and regret. Connery’s Robin is more of a skilled soldier than a sociopath. Robin and Marian, like The Shootist or Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, belong to a particular 1970s doom-and-gloom sensibility that heralded the “end of legends”. It veered from and tinkered with the lore, but it didn’t annihilate it.

In 1991, Kevin Costner’s Prince of Thieves did gangbusters at the box office, serving up exactly what a “modern audience” wanted. Costner’s Robin Hood was morally upstanding, Marian was beautiful and feminine, and Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham was a wonderful bastard. There was no introspection or navel-gazing. The mood was optimistic and perhaps reflected a wider world in which liberalism was triumphant and the economy was doing well.

The idea that mass entertainment inherently reflects the mood of the zeitgeist is a curious one because while it is true that 1991 was a more optimistic era than 1978, Star Wars also did gangbusters in 1977. The 1970s were a famously gloomy era, especially in terms of cinema.

I think it’s fair to say that the 2020s are an age of shattered identities and distrust in institutions; they are culturally stagnant, and digital media has failed to offer anything to be hopeful about in terms of creativity. The AI revolution is widely dismissed as generic “slop”, and Hollywood and streaming services seem utterly incapable of anything other than cannibalising the past.

Returning to the perspective of a Chinese intellectual, this is what Zhong Shu sees from the outside: a civilisation at dusk that has grown obsessed with its own dissolution. In this climate the only path to higher virtue appears to be the systematic gnawing away of the very forms that once grounded it, accompanied by compulsory guilt and anxiety.

To inject into this malaise a heroic archetype without such traits would be nostalgic throwback - anachronistic, of the past. This is what Nolan means when he says that modern audiences would reject traditional forms of heroism. The more prescient question that writers and those who influence mass culture should be asking themselves is: How do we get out of this trap?

How do we get to a place where we are post-critical race theory? Or post-postmodern without it seeming anachronistic or mere nostalgia bait?

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms succeeded where most failed precisely because it is an antidote to the usual cynicism one finds in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros. It accepts that the world is fallen, full of schemers, and nihilistic. It begins there, says “Now what?” and, as a result, spawned one of the best memes of the year:

The “Get up!” image implicitly states that, yes, you’ve been knocked down, but you can’t just stay there dwelling upon it and feeling sorry for yourself. It does not deny the injury happened. Moreover, the protagonist, Sir Duncan the Tall, succeeds because we’re already aware of what happens to people with noble virtues in Martin’s world. We know it’s full of plotters and backstabbers, it revels in it, yet against this a big man with a good, honest heart seems like welcome relief.

A story about an aging, tired Robin Hood should work this way too, but even more so, because the audience already has built-in knowledge of a legendary folklore hero. A metamodern incarnation of the 60 year-old Robin trope can be cynical and regretful, but that is where the story begins.

He should not spend 90 minutes tormented with self-loathing, then die. He should go off on an adventure with a young protégé from whom he learns of the importance of the legend surrounding him — that the poor and downtrodden need his myth to believe in, that there’s a world outside of himself.

That, ultimately, believing in something is better than believing in nothing. Even if that something is not much more than a flickering candle as dusk turns to night.

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In this month’s podcast, I discuss the film Backrooms and how it reflects Generation Z’s interest in both 90s nostalgia and the visual media of the time. Is Backrooms itself a meta-commentary on Gen Z remembering a ‘Time they never knew’ through a slightly off-kilter lens?

I also discuss the invasion of Ceuta, and read the essays of the month, which were…

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A discussion and exploration of the warrens in the novel Watership Down by Richard Adams. The novel is a grim but beautiful exploration of English meadows and landscape, but what does it say about nihilism and authoritarianism?

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Whenever Hope Not Hate mention my name, they make the claim that I inspired the American mass murderer, Dylann Roof. Their “evidence” for this claim is a 2014/15 article I wrote with the title “When Jews Turned Blue”, which expanded on a common trope found on /pol/ and 4chan at that time.

In Roof’s manifesto, he also used the trope. I received an email from somebody pointing this out, and I didn’t feel comfortable with the association so I removed the article. Roof’s actual victims were African American churchgoers, and his stated motivation was the Trayvon Martin case and issues more generally related to black people in America’s Deep South.

Not a shred of evidence has been provided by Hope Not Hate that Dylann Roof had ever read my old blog, or even heard of me, let alone that I inspired him. Of course, truth is not their aim, character assassination is.

It appears that there’s nothing I can do to stop my name and face being attached to an atrocity via an outrageous lie because Hope Not Hate is linked to the institutions of power in the United Kingdom, and I am not.

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You’re either on board with the program, morally and ideologically, or you’re a problem. And more often than not, Hope Not Hate will be the source cited by the institutions of the land as to who is a problem, and who is “decent”.

Hope Not Hate found the late Ann Widdecombe to be a problem.

Then, after she was bludgeoned to death at 78 years old in her home, they removed their hit piece on her. You could say Hope Not Hate “archived” Ann Widdecombe.

The man now charged with her murder, 28-year-old Joshua Kerry, is said to have had:

According to reports, investigators found newspaper clippings, articles and printed material relating to Reform UK, party leader Nigel Farage and the party’s immigration policies displayed inside the council property where Kerry lived alone.

A source cited by UK media claimed the material suggested Kerry held ‘a profound dislike’ of Reform UK, its leader and its political positions.

Ann Widdecombe was a Reform UK supporter and spokesperson. Did the man charged with her murder have the Hope Not Hate hit piece among his “clippings” of Farage and his party? Were Hope Not Hate tipped off and advised to archive Ann Widdecombe?

I have been highly critical of Nigel Farage and his various parties over the years because I see it as just Toryism with a new paint job. However, I am well aware that that is not how the British left sees him. I believe his life actually is in danger, and that he does indeed need 24/7 security.

The reason for this is that the media and institutions intentionally radicalise their own base into a frothing frenzy, while strangling the life out of anything outside of their purview and flagging them up for character assassination, or worse. When people on the right do this, it is referred to as “stochastic terrorism”. However, the same rules in reverse would see Hope Not Hate or James O’Brien being shut down or censored.

Who “radicalised” Joshua Kerry? It is doubtful that it was a Telegram chat, or a YouTuber, or Elon Musk’s X. It would, in all probability, have been mainstream and respectable outlets, outlets like Hope Not Hate or media using their work as sound sources. Or the Guardian, or LBC.

Kerry was not known to Prevent, the anti-radicalisation unit, because they don’t look for people with his politics. Neither is there a right-wing version of Hope Not Hate that surveills, monitors, and generally hounds leftists. Leftists are not stopped at airports for a device snatch and work-out session by the Counter Terrorism Police.

They face no scrutiny or hardship for their politics whatsoever.

In this way, the British mainstream consensus-making apparatus has become a cauldron of corruption and crazies who never have to face any cost or scrutiny for opinions which are quite literally insane. It is the obsessive adherence to this consensus that delivers the grotesque outcome of a dying boy insisting that he isn’t a racist, as the life drains from his body and the police refuse to take his pleas seriously because he is white.

When an elderly woman is battered to death in her bungalow, likely because she doesn’t like transgenderism and abortion, the institution that flagged her up as a problem will simply remove the evidence as if to declare “case closed”. There will be no ramifications, no consequences, because the system would have to indict itself and its ideological and moral priors.

Indeed, people from within the bowels of Hope Not Hate are just about to enter the new Andy Burnham government.

The heuristic “a system is what it does” is somewhat over-used, but if we apply it to the system of British political power and judge it by its outcomes and not the goals stated by those working for it, what actually is it? It is a machine that seeks to chew up, pulp, and annihilate the nation, people, and mores it claims to represent. Those who advance that process are rewarded; those who hinder it are punished. That’s what it does, not what it claims to be.

Thus the incentives toward sociopathy are baked in. If the standard being set is that a satirical blog post about one group can be held responsible for an atrocity committed against another group in another country, without any evidence the wrongdoer ever read the original material, where does that leave so much of the British consensus-making apparatus?

Are we to dissect the entire “ecosystem” or “influencer network”?

Will we get a little introspection? Or will we simply get more people archived? More cases closed.

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There is a scene at the end of Chinatown when Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stares in shock at the newly dead body of his lover, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). Famously, Jake’s associate pulls him away from the carnage with the line:

“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The line, on one level, obviously highlights the ethnic foreignness of Chinatown. On a deeper level, though, it speaks to the intricate web of lies, corruption, sleaze, and incest that has led to the death. It’s saying that in this world, untruths are true; there are plots inside schemes, and everyone is on the take, and trying to reach any catharsis or justice is simply futile. It’s as apt a description of the director Roman Polanski’s personal life as of his film.

I’ve been thinking about the end of Chinatown, and that line, quite a lot recently while observing the aftermath of Ann Widdecombe’s murder. Distrust in institutions is so widespread now that anything the police or government say will be met with severe skepticism and outright rejection. That said, the narrative that we’re supposed to accept is, as of writing, that a White British man with special needs drove five hours from Rotherham to Widdecombe’s house in rural Dartmoor, battered her to death, then drove five hours back home. And the authorities insist that the murder was not politically motivated, which only leaves us asking why he did it and what manner of disability he actually has.

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Despite Ann Widdecombe being famous for her devotion to Christian morality, and the British left openly celebrating her death, we were also expected to discount the possibility that politics could have motivated the killer, until that changed and anti-terrorism police took charge.

Whatever the truth of Widdecombe’s murder, she certainly isn’t the first well-known Brit with sincere moral convictions to die violently or under strange circumstances.

During the 1980s, the British State continually had to fend off opposition to nuclear power, both to its civilian uses as a replacement for coal and to its military role. The CND, feminists, environmentalists, Marxists, Scottish Nationalists and youthful members of the Labour Party all vehemently opposed nuclear weapons, and because of the threat it posed to the miners and, by implication, their Unions.

Hilda Murrell

One highly respected opponent of nuclear power was the elderly naturalist, Hilda Murrell. She was a horticulturalist and founding member of the environmentalist Soil Association who had made her name nurturing roses. Like many opponents of nuclear power, Murrell homed in on the problems produced by nuclear waste, which she viewed as the “Achilles’ heel” of the industry. In 1978, she wrote a paper titled What Price Nuclear Power?

In 1984, ahead of the first inquiry into the construction of a nuclear power plant, Sizewell B, Murrell prepared another paper called An Ordinary Citizen’s View of Radioactive Waste Management. She told friends and relatives that she felt she was being watched, that she would receive phone calls where nobody spoke on the other end, and that there was a steady stream of “tradesmen” turning up to her house with excuses as to why they should be allowed in.

She believed she was being spied upon by the British State, and that they wanted her to know it. Murrell had a nephew, Robert Green, who had his own travails with the British State because he was one of the few people on the inside involved in the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War.

On the 21st of March, 1984, Murrell’s home in Shropshire was burgled, and Murrell was abducted and driven off in her own car. There were signs of a violent struggle in her home, and the phone line was cut; the phone itself was half off the hook. Murrell’s body was found days later in a small woodland copse on some farmland. She was half naked and had slashes across her hands and abdomen. She died of hypothermia.

A local farmer insisted that in the intervening days he had searched the copse himself and that Murrell’s body could not have lain there for that length of time. A sixteen year-old boy, Andrew George, who did not fit the description of the driver, and who couldn’t drive, became the suspect and was eventually convicted of the crime. George certainly was in Hilda Murrell’s house. The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, investigative journalist Judith Cook (who wrote two books on the murder), and Murrell’s nephew all remained extremely skeptical.

There are essentially two theories on the murder of Hilda Murrell: either a burglary gone wrong, or a state operation. Both have paradoxes and loose threads.

The official cause of her death was hypothermia.

Willie McRae

A year after the Hilda Murrell case, prominent Scottish Nationalist Party member and anti-nuclear campaigner Willie McRae passed away under similarly odd circumstances. McRae had successfully campaigned against nuclear waste being stored in the Galloway Hills in Scotland. According to McRae, the British State should put “nuclear waste where Guy Fawkes put his gunpowder”.

McRae claimed that his office in Glasgow had been broken into and that he was under surveillance. He noted the registration plate of a car that routinely circled his place of work and handed it to the police. However, the police claimed that no such number or vehicle existed. Both McRae and the Scottish police knew very well that Special Branch and MI5 did not have their cars registered with the DVLA (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency).

His files on his anti-nuclear activities routinely disappeared or were rifled through. In one instance he was informed that Scottish Police had taken files for “safekeeping”.

Perhaps not without reason, Willie McRae became increasingly paranoid. He was prone to bouts of heavy drinking and depression. He began carrying an old pistol that he had acquired during his time in the British Army serving in India.

On the 4th of April 1985, McRae’s flat suddenly caught fire. Passer-by Pat Gallagher, a forklift driver, hurriedly bolted into the building to help and said he saw a man in a boiler suit carrying a briefcase leaving as he entered. Gallagher asked about the fire and the boiler-suited man simply replied that he was “in a hurry to get to work”. Gallagher then pulled McRae out of the building despite McRae fighting to re-enter and retrieve his files.

Despite everything, McRae was widely reported to have been in good spirits because he’d made a major breakthrough in his work against the British State, citing “I’ve got them!”

That evening, having just survived near asphyxiation, McRae left Glasgow to drive to his remote cottage in Ross-shire in the north of Scotland. Before his departure, McRae joked with a policeman while buying whisky. The policeman noted that two men were following McRae.

Two Australian tourists found McRae in his Volvo the next morning. He was 90 feet off the road on the heath straddling a small burn.

McRae was unconscious and transported by ambulance to Inverness hospital. However, here it was discovered that he had severe brain trauma, and so was then taken to Aberdeen hospital, where it was discovered that McRae had actually been shot in the head.

Back at the crash site, things get even weirder. McRae’s pistol was discovered far from his crashed car, in the small burn. In this scenario, McRae drove off the road and careened across thick heather, only to then shoot himself in the temple and throw his pistol 60 feet, where it landed in the burn.

The alternative theory is that the police removed the car thinking it was simply a mundane crash, only to later return the car to the wrong place. This could explain the mysteriously flying pistol. If McRae had committed suicide, he could have just dropped it out of the window. However, publicly, the police flatly denied ever moving the car; it was only found years later in internal records and documents.

Whatever the case, the official cause of death was suicide.

Jill Dando

Unlike the cases of Hilda Murrell and Willie McRae, the case of Jill Dando will be familiar to most people in the UK and perhaps even farther afield. Dando was one of the most popular and prominent BBC presenters during the 1990s. According to the Guardian:

As Dando was about to put her keys in the lock to open the front door of her home in Fulham, she was grabbed from behind. With his right arm, the assailant held her and forced her to the ground, so that her face was almost touching the tiled step of the porch. Then, with his left hand, he fired a single shot at her left temple, killing her instantly. The bullet entered her head just above her ear, parallel to the ground, and came out the right side of her head.

The precise nature of Dando’s awful death has never been in dispute. The controversy is who and why.

The original investigation and criminal proceedings focused on “local loner” Barry George, who had clippings of Dando and a somewhat odd interest in female celebrities. In 1983 George had been arrested for stalking Princess Diana while carrying a rope and knife. Dando was not dissimilar to Diana in physical appearance.

However, being a weirdo does not impute to an individual high-level assassination skills. After being convicted of Dando’s murder in 2001, George was acquitted in 2008.

The theories into Dando’s murder in many ways map onto the changing attitudes of British society. In the early 2000s, besides ex-boyfriends or lone nuts, the focus was primarily on Serbia reacting to the NATO bombing campaign and support for Kosovo. Dando had been the face of Britain’s humanitarian effort during the Balkans campaign. Three days prior to Dando’s murder, NATO had killed 13 journalists in Belgrade by bombing the state broadcaster.

More recently, this theory of Dando’s death has lost steam and been replaced with a theory that she was set to expose a massive paedophile ring centred on the BBC and Jimmy Saville. The theory gained traction following a Netflix show called Who Killed Jill Dando?, but also leans into established facts that there indeed was (or is) a network of child abusers prominent within the BBC and the institutions of British power and influence.

Moreover, the argument goes, as presenter of the BBC flagship Crimewatch program at the time, Dando had the connections and platform to highlight the issue if she so wished.

I personally find it difficult to believe that the BBC would have green-lit a profoundly damaging investigative report into itself. Then again, Dando had the profile to simply write a book, or perhaps have a documentary aired on another station. Perhaps worst of all is the simple fact that no evidence exists to support this claim beyond an anonymous source cited in the Daily Star.

Regardless, we are left with yet another mysterious case that lingers in the national psyche. Another high-profile, much-loved figure with genuine decency, professionally murdered by forces unknown.

Dr David Kelly

In the aftermath of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell’s “dodgy dossier” that sold the Iraq War to the British people as a matter of extreme emergency, Dr David Kelly, a veteran specialist on biological warfare, was revealed to be leaking criticisms to BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan. Kelly accused the Blair government of “sexing up” the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and claimed that the 45-minute threat posed by his regime simply didn’t exist.

The implications of Kelly’s revelations did not merely embarrass the Blair Government; they highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the American neocon agenda by implication.

As a UN weapons inspector, Kelly had promised his Iraqi contacts that if they simply complied with the (unending) demands of the United States and United Kingdom, their country would be spared from invasion. Kelly eventually recognised that war was going to happen regardless and that his contacts would likely be killed. Kelly feared that he would himself be cast as a liar.

Eerily, Kelly even predicted the exact nature of his death. As the Irish Times wrote:

Mr Broucher said he asked what would happen if Iraq was attacked despite Dr Kelly’s assurances. “His reply was, which I took to be a throwaway remark: ‘I will be found dead in the woods.’

“I thought he might have meant that he was at risk of being attacked by the Iraqis in some way,” Mr Broucher said.

“I now see that he may have been thinking on rather different lines.”

Kelly, coming under extreme pressure from the press, the Government and the intelligence services, went for his afternoon walk on the 17th of July, 2003. His body was found the next morning by volunteers searching for him. He had taken an overdose of his wife’s arthritis pills, despite having a lifelong aversion to taking pills. He had apparently cut his wrists with a pruning knife, though he sliced the wrong vein, and it was noted by the volunteers that almost no blood was either on or around him.

Moreover, a thermal imaging helicopter had passed directly over the spot where he was found the previous day and detected nothing. This led many to suspect that he had been abducted and his corpse returned to the spot in the woods later.

After the volunteers found Kelly and went to inform the police, they stated to the Hutton Inquiry that in the intervening time Kelly’s body had been moved from being slumped against a tree to lying flat on the ground.

Despite the oddities surrounding the David Kelly case, Lord Hutton, a Blair appointee who was regarded by Blair as a “safe pair of hands”, placed a 70-year restriction order on Kelly’s postmortem, photographs, medical records and his toxicology report to “protect the family’s privacy”.

The official cause of death was haemorrhage (heavy bleeding) caused by incised wounds to the left wrist. The Guardian reports that the pathologist who carried out the autopsy called it:

a textbook case of suicide but he would have “dearly loved” to have found evidence of murder.

Conclusion

The term the British intelligence agencies use to describe an assassination or sanctioned murder is “Wet Job”. They apparently borrowed this phrase from the Soviet Union, where similar work was referred to as “Wet Work”. Am I saying that Jill Dando or Willie McRae or Hilda Murrell are examples of MI5 doing Wet Jobs? No. My honest opinion is that I have no idea. Neither am I implying that Ann Widdecombe was killed by the deep state. In all probability, it was a mad leftist.

The problem is the cultural context is one in which these odd mysteries and unresolved questions heap up and loom over every conversation, every instance of government involvement is treated with profound suspicion, and when one digs in a little, there’s usually something and not nothing.

Culturally speaking, the British intelligence services represent something seedy and squalid. There is the whiff of a depressed John le Carré careerist stirring a cup of lukewarm tea, lingering outside of graffiti-covered, piss-smelling bus shelters, and spying on somebody who has a moral core.

There is also the ancient Anglo liberal spirit at play, perhaps. We assume the state is malevolent, untrustworthy, shifty, and that its minions must be of low character. The boiler-suited man with a briefcase fleeing the mysterious fire in the Willie McRae case embodies it.

We wonder to ourselves, do such people exist in the British State? Still today, when everything is digital and gay? And when we say so out loud, with sincerity, we almost always get the reply that is the equivalent of:

Leave it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.

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I have to credit this phenomenal 8-hour documentary for helping me with this article.

We dive into the all-time classic of vigilantism featuring Charles Bronson as the world’s least likely liberal architect. We also discuss the 1970s gloom era and New York’s grimy aesthetics of post-industrial decay and urban rot, and much more…

In this month’s retrospective, I read through all the essays and speculate on House of the Dragon and its depictions of sociopaths ruling without empathy, and how, despite being ‘dragonslop’, it bears some similarities to the British political class.

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In the aftermath of the Henry Nowak murder, Horus and Millennial Woes join me for a deep dive into the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent Macpherson Report that deemed the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist. We discuss the various movers and shakers involved, the power dynamics, and whether or not the state was waiting for what turned out to be the perfect test case.

Also discussed is the term “institutionally racist” and how, when acknowledged, it results in the total capitulation and capture of the institution. What’s more, when viewing media from that time (1999), it is quite clear that the assault on the Metropolitan Police would be merely the first domino to fall to pave the way for the “new world” to come.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary I reference from 1999:

You can find Horus on Substack here:

Horus

Essays on history

And Millennial Woes here:

Millennial Woes

A Scottish guy pontificating about the world we are living in, and heading towards.

The British political system is currently reconfiguring itself in its latest forlorn attempt to cling to a fig-leaf of legitimacy. To do this, it has been gradually easing its way into a form of managerialism that places real people front and centre of its political messaging, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” political formula. As the nation sinks ever further into the quagmire of social dysfunction, bankruptcy, and routine bouts of civil unrest, the political formula seems to foreground the mundane everyman (and everywoman) as a meat shield against its own hollowness.

This is nothing particularly new, of course. We’ve long been accustomed to Nigel Farage performatively drinking a pint in a local boozer. You see, he’s just like us and wears a Barbour jacket and everything. At least Nigel Farage actually does drink; anyone unfortunate enough to remember the grotesque spectacle of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich could never conclude that Miliband was a frequent greasy spoon enjoyer. Then you have Keir Starmer’s punchbag shame.

The demise of Starmerism is also the demise of the Westminster technocrat as the public face of Power. The term “elitist” here isn’t entirely accurate because somebody from a Northern council estate, like Angela Rayner, can just as easily belong to the system as a privately educated “toff” such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. Both Rayner and Mogg, and for that matter Shabana Mahmood, are culturally coded to speak to their respective demographics. Keir Starmer had no such constituency; he was entirely a creation of the regime and its laws.

People will point to the various backtracks, scandals, and failures of Starmer’s tenure as the reason he had to be brought down. In reality, he just wasn’t liked by either the public or his own party. Tony Blair was re-elected after he lied to take the country to war and broke the back of the socialist leanings of the Labour Party, but he had charisma, so it was fine. Starmer’s robotic personality and total lack of empathy revealed not just him as something alien and detestable, but, because the system was his only constituency, it, too, was revealed as something cold, hateful and borderline psychotic.

Thus, Starmer had to go not because of policy failures but because of what he revealed.

Notice that nothing here has anything to do with policy outcomes, with increased beds in NHS wards, efficiency of police response times or reductions in crime or immigration. Everything, absolutely everything about the United Kingdom’s method of governance is a matter of perception management. Keir Starmer created the wrong perception of the British State.

So, what perception do the Labour Party and various civil service bureaucracies want to create?

It is, it seems, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” managerialism.

I’ve often wondered to what degree the Trump administration is influenced by the cultural memetics that have glued themselves to Donald Trump since 2015. Does, for example, the fact that JD Vance is a meme alter his real-world persona and how he views politics? Is policy something entirely separate from internet posts and “influencers”?

The Labour Party, whose MPs are nigh-on 50% female (!), has a very different understanding of itself, far removed from X and social media. Indeed, many of them want to ban X. The most common work background for Labour politicians, especially their members of Parliament, is public affairs and politics, law, political research, special advisors (SpAds), and a variety of media management consultancy and NGO work. Keir Starmer was the embodiment of this system, its avatar.

Unfortunately, when the people this system creates actually enter public life, they seem distant, cold, inept, unlikable, and dull, with a streak of cruelty and even sadism.

And this is a problem because it represents almost nobody and nothing except the system itself.

Enter, then, cheeky chappy (call-me-Andy) Andy Burnham to placate the regime harpies and add a touch of Northern soul to the barren womb of managerial conformity and ugliness. Keir Starmer held up a mirror to the state careerists, and they did not like what stared back at them. Starmer gave them the ick. Starmer was a signal, a flare, that said “we are just power-hungry vultures sucking the lifeblood out of a nation, without humour, and without warmth”.

A term such as “Two-Tier Keir” stung because it was an unpalatable truth about the British power structure as a whole, whose foul-smelling backwash splattered across the pantsuits and power-bobs of Labour ladies. Far better to get Handy-With-Andy, who goes jogging in a hoodie and speaks like a beloved 1980s television show character.

Andy Burnham was the mayor of Manchester during the Manchester Arena bombing, when we didn’t look back in anger. And we won’t be looking back in anger at future atrocities either. However, unlike under Starmerism, you’ll be less likely to have your door kicked in for actually being angry about it on social media.

You’ll be invited to feel, to empathise, to even shed a tear, to perceive it differently from what your instincts are telling you.

Because, when all is said and done, you aren’t ruled by a “regime” populated by mad women and weak, cold men who, as Pink Floyd sang, “radiate cold shards of broken glass” but by Andy from the local post office, by Hannah, the blonde girl plumber, who wasn’t racist and sexist like the Reform candidate, Bev from the gym.

There isn’t a regime; there aren’t culturally-coded perception management techniques and nudge departments; there’s just us ruling ourselves.

Before Hope Not Hate went public about the surveillance operation they’d been carrying out on me, there were tremors within my real-life social circle that something was not quite right, because two young men had been around asking questions. Messages swirled around, both directly and indirectly to me, querying whether everything was alright and who these two young men with such a keen interest in me actually were.

Naturally, the Hope Not Hate employees claimed they were mere journalists with an interest in YouTubers, rather than what they are, which is a deeply immoral institution that routinely bends the truth and the law to achieve their ends, which is to “expose” people with opinions not aligned with the power structure.

From a single photo taken of me at a private event, and against my consent, they had somehow managed to find a previous address and intended to “doorstep” me. The purpose of doorstepping a target is primarily psychological. It destroys the target’s sense of security, it surprises, it sends the message “We found you, and we can return to question you whenever we feel like it”.

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The LBC host James O’Brien has become a uniquely loathed figure in British political discourse - and he’s earned every drop of it.

He is the shitlib manifest.

In this moment, he is the vindictive sophist to Keir Starmer’s autonomous android. He is there to twist his heel on your broken limbs, to pour sand in your eyes. No atrocity committed upon the British natives is too grotesque to be blamed on themselves, no victim of his own ideals unworthy of his hate and scorn. There is no logic too complex or convoluted to prevent him from arriving at an argumentative frame that disadvantages you and not the regime.

His resolve to defend the status quo is as absolute and unshakeable as his namesake’s in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing is too paradoxical or hypocritical to defend, no grievance or injustice suffered by the natives awful enough to prompt a smidgen of introspection.

His performative, sweating frustration and endlessly exasperated intonations serve as spells cast to purge heretical thoughts and to ward off, forever, thoughts or utterances not sanctioned by a 2005-era Blairite consensus. The institutions are wise, sacrosanct and beyond reproach - you are the ones who are corrupt.

To the unaligned listener, he has become something repellent; he oozes dishonesty, which chafes at ideals of fair play and common decency. Rare is it in this age of infinite talking heads and content churn that giving a person your attention for a 30-second clip is met with such grim resignation, like scraping dog shit from the sole of a favourite boot. You know he “won’t get it” because his purpose is not to get it. Moreover, he is instructing his own side not to get it. No matter how illogical, deceitful, stupid or bankrupt the argument is. Something is better than nothing.

No matter the casualty rate, no matter the blood on the pavements and the gore on the streets that his worldview is responsible for, his structural role is to say to his own side “not one step back” and to his opponents “not one step forward”.

The enemy incarnate, distilled and concentrated like a greasy jam designed to make good people vomit.

Many people ask, “how can outrages such as the Henry Nowak killing be defended by these people?” The answer is, it can’t. But the reaction to it can be foregrounded and judged, sneered at and lambasted. You have no agency; you are simply manipulated because you’re stupid and easily led. Your ignorance and bias are the story, not the corpses. Your valid concerns are worthy only of contempt and scorn.

O’Brien is the symbolic embodiment of this lunacy and, yes, this hatred.

He will cleave to the centre that cannot hold because there is no outside of it for him. A set of cascading failures and changing incentives would never include him - better to continue swimming in the shrinking pond than to bake alive on the crusted mud.

To seethe and sweat, lie and wallow in the moral filth of what his class did to Britain - all with unbridled hubris.

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In the 2010s, when Islamic terrorism was more rampant across Europe than it is now, content creators and commentators online began to notice that the responses of the various governments had become standardised and mass-produced. To begin with, it was the act of terrorism itself and questions related to mass immigration. Gradually, though, people started to see the coordinated and replicated responses. This was the era of “Pray for Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid” and so on.

Love and tolerance never did actually win. A bloated surveillance state did.

European authorities had adopted plans of perception management in lieu of a plan to remove a violent and historically antagonistic religion. Don’t call for mass deportations, place a candle in your Facebook avatar to show your solidarity with peaceful Muslims, and the Europeans who were slaughtered. But mainly the peaceful Muslims.

The problem for the regime was not so much that they were increasingly sitting atop a pile of their own dead citizens, but that the most obvious and glaring solution was beyond the pale and “far right”. The purpose of the perception management mind-benders was to roll out a narrative that led the panicked masses back into a frame that the neoliberal consensus was comfortable with. Like sprinkling pellets on the ground to lead chickens back into their coop.

This profoundly cynical and somewhat sociopathic managerial damage control was viewed by those on the “outside” with a degree of horror and fascination.

I’ve spent the last few days viewing the reaction to the Henry Nowak murder with a similar degree of bafflement, repulsion, and horror. I’ve watched segments on Sky News, Channel Four, LBC, Novara Media, GB News, and statements from the Government itself.

Millennial Woes has done an excellent piece explaining the details of the story.

Here, it is important to draw a distinction between the waves of Islamic violence cited earlier and the violence endemic to the “Yookay”. Today, violence and murder speak more to a rising tide of chaos, sporadic savagery, and cold indifference to death, rather than networks of highly coordinated religious zealots with ties to other networks across the Islamic world. In the Yookay, an Afghan could stab you to death while you walk your dog, and there’d be no rhyme or reason to it, no larger ideological aims or geopolitical grievance.

It is more Cormac McCarthy than War of the Flea.

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Where the two strands of barbarism converge is the fact that managerial liberalism and its policies are ultimately responsible for both, and in both cases, its defenders have to explain, lie, squirm, and bullshit their way through the news cycle. It could always be argued that Islamic terrorists weren’t representative of all Muslims, and indeed, were just a tiny minority. An element of plausible deniability was available.

The Henry Nowak case has none. It is a straightforward question: Are the institutions of power anti-white?

The mainstream has long scoffed at the allegation of “two-tier” policing as a far-right or populist trope, but the problem is, they all championed a multitude of policies and legislation, training modules, and advisory guidelines to ensure and insist that groups the Equalities Act designated as having “protected characteristics” were, well, protected.

Let us just remind ourselves of what happened on the fateful night of Nowak’s murder. A Sikh called the police to allege a racial offense had been committed against him by a young white man. When the police arrived, they proceeded to handcuff the obviously severely wounded young man despite his repeated claims to have been stabbed and that he “couldn’t breathe”. Indeed, the generally derisive attitude of the police was ghastly in and of itself, but the true question is why the officer made the choice in that moment to believe the brown man and his family and not the wounded white man.

Why, ultimately, was the young white man’s life devalued in this way?

The primary response of left/liberal commentators was to claim that yes, this was an appalling display of police incompetence, but that it wasn’t a structural issue.

Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, a leftist many on the right have some sympathy for, explained it thus:

Hampshire Police proudly boasts of what it describes as its “Race Action Plan”:

Their guidelines span the entire gamut of DEI social-justice sound bites, complete with reverential mentions of George Floyd. They also include:

Bastani wishes to frame the police response in terms of incompetence, that the police have become unprofessional and somewhat inept. There is obviously truth to that, but even if we grant that the police who arrived at the scene of Henry Nowak’s murder were utterly useless, the decisions made in the moment did actually correspond with the policies and training as stated by Hampshire Police.

This is to restate my argument on whether the system is simply incompetent or malicious. If incompetence were the only factor, we would, by default, see outcomes that benefited white natives from time to time, even if only by accident. But we never do.

To be fair to Bastani, he put these concerns to another leftist on his show, wherein he adopted the “right-wing” side of the argument and asked whether there was truth to the claim that British justice was prejudiced against white people. His guest expressed surprise and even shock at the suggestion and said there was no evidence to make a serious argument that the natives were treated worse than minorities. To which, somewhat admirably, Bastani broadened the discussion to encompass the “Grooming Gang” crisis. Once again, and despite myriad examples of inquiries and court proceedings stating quite explicitly that child protection services, police, and local politicians were mortified by being called racist as the catalyst, it was denied by the leftist guest, and complex inter-class material factors were used to explain the issue.

Meanwhile, the News Agents podcast also raised the possibility that there was indeed two-tier policing in the United Kingdom. However, their resident expert on the police reminded the audience that black men were most likely to be stopped and searched, and a young black woman was stripped-searched in a London police station once.

On LBC, the utterly repellent James O’Brien almost entirely neglected the racial components of the case, instead devoting his show to moaning about Nigel Farage’s reaction.

What Did They Expect?

To believe the narrative of the British political and media mainstream (Bastani is not entirely mainstream, it should be said) is to believe that some groups can be protected by the law and be granted special dispensations, and another group not, and that somehow this will not result in perverse outcomes.

It is to believe, quite literally, that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others, and that when such policies are manifested in late-night scuffles, inter-ethnic rape scandals, and killings, there would presumably be some Marxian sky-fairy that would descend and deliver the perfectly “equal” results of the policies.

Alternatively, the foundational thinking of such ideological frameworks is sheer lunacy.

In 2020, the BBC reported that the security guard at the Manchester Arena bombing that massacred 22 people, mainly young girls, at an Ariana Grande concert, shied away from approaching the terrorist because he worried about being called racist:

I felt unsure about what to do.

It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male.

I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.

I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.

I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.

It’s easy to scoff at the young man, Kyle Lawler, who was 18 at the time. But he wasn’t incorrect that if he had accused an Asian man of being a terrorist when he wasn’t, he would probably be fired and perhaps even prosecuted or hauled out into the public sphere to be demonised.

Similarly, and not widely discussed, is that Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s school teacher, Joanne Hodson, had tried to raise the alarm but was warned off by a mental health worker, according to The Spectator:

On sharing this draft, Hodson found herself ‘met with hostility’ by both the boy’s father and a mental health worker, Samantha Steed. Indeed, Steed went so far as to accuse Hodson of ‘racially stereotyping’ Rudakubana as ‘a black boy with a knife’, in her response to him looking her dead in the eye and stating he had intended ‘to use’ the knife he took to his previous school. Cowed with the threat that she was ‘racially profiling’ him, Hodson deleted the phrases.

The result is three more little girls butchered for anti-racism, and once again, a member of the public has to face the Hobson’s choice of saving lives or making a mistake and then having their careers and lives destroyed.

The question arises, however, of what precisely it is that so terrifies these people in the first place, and the answer is the state bureaucracy, of course. The state for which the police are the primary muscle.

Thus, it is, of course, true that a security guard or a school teacher is not representative of the British police, but it is the prospect of becoming entangled with the state and its organs that places dread in the hearts of ordinary people. And the reason for that is because everybody knows full well that it is “woke” and the police have made it loud and clear that they represent the tip of the woke spear.

The police, unlike a binman or a minimum-wage security guard, have specific guidelines and training that imbue them with the morals and ideological priors of the state.

Despite all of this, we’re expected to believe that all of this dogma, myriad incentive structures, and straightforward fear are not informing the decisions of authority and are perfectly compatible with “equality before the law”.

Moreover, Vickrum Digwa and his whole family, unlike liberal leftists, saw straight through it all, and that is why they played the race card to begin with. Regardless of guff about class and economic status, minorities have an incentive to game the system, and white people have an incentive to not trip the explosive minefields placed under their feet.

The results speak for themselves: death, rape, injustice, fear, double standards, and lies, heaped one on top of the other like body bags in a soggy pit.

‘‘Perhaps the police officers in the Henry Nowak case took it a little far, these policies sounded nice in the workshops and policy think tanks, surely we can’t be at fault? It must be incompetence, they just didn’t follow the training properly…’’

Of course, it is both systemic and structural. Both terms the left used to understand well, but somehow forgot.

Structural racism refers to the societal systems, institutions, and policies—such as those in housing, healthcare, education, and criminal justice—that interact to perpetuate racial inequities. It operates continuously even without overtly racist individuals, as historical biases are embedded into the everyday functioning of these structures.

The policeman is called to a scene. Before him, a white boy writhes on the floor, claiming he’s been stabbed, and a brown family claims they’re the victims. The policeman handcuffs the white man, and he dies.

Must be just incompetence, just a one-off, don’t ask any bigger questions.

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In this edition of my monthly review podcast, I read through and comment on the articles of the month, as well as speculating on the politics of gardeners on YouTube.

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In my latest video monologue, I speculate on the recent trend of quintessentially British spaces being overwhelmed by people of immigrant stock during the summer months. The pockets of ‘real’ or ‘true’ Britain that we regarded as ‘ours’ are perhaps reflective of a lingering mythology, or spiritual connection that the spread of managerialism and multiculturalism simply doesn’t recognise, or does, and seeks to strip from these places, intentionally leaving as reptiles slithering a de-territorialised wasteland open to all.

This, in my view, touches the heart of the crisis beyond economic or mere demographic raw data, namely, can we lay claim to anything as ‘ours?’

We dive into the intelligent and underrated 2000 film Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis. How can rational actors following rational strategies create fundamentally irrational outcomes? What are the similarities or differences between Trump’s Iran stand-off and the Cuban Missile Crisis?

And is Pete Hegseth simply basing his persona on Hollywood incarnations of men such as Robert McNamara?

And much more!