Samizdata

The suffering of Gaza, the death and destruction, is undeniable. You can make a legitimate criticism of Israel’s tactics in the conduct of the war. Many Jews around the world make exactly those critiques. But you cannot engage in such criticism legitimately if you do not also condemn the terrorism of October 7.

We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Brian Micklethwait’s blogs fell off the internet a while back for reasons not entirely clear. Some of them I had scraped, and have now republished on the Brian Micklethwait Archive site.

We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property.

“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026 Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026: This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015.

Our judges will bend over backwards to find ways to allow people who ought to be deported to remain, and will connive with charities performing strategic litigation in order to allow this to happen. And their genuflections have become so convoluted that it is almost pointless to try to subject them to careful doctrinal analysis. We simply need to cut to the chase: the problem is not a legal, but a political or even sociological one. It is an issue concerning the makeup of the judiciary itself.

3. The Big Tent vs. The One-Man Island. Farage: Even when he’s the “dictator” of a party, he keeps the machinery moving toward a single goal (Brexit, Reform). Lowe: Recently launched Restore Britain (Feb 2026) because he couldn’t play nice with others. His “my way or the highway” approach suggests a Prime Minister who would resign by lunchtime if his Cabinet didn’t like his choice of stationery. – Steve Scrase Read the whole thing, its both on the money & quite humorous.

For the first time anyone can remember, in a contest for a Westminster seat in an English city, the two parties vying for power won’t be Labour or the Conservatives, but instead be two insurgent outsiders. This is a twin-pronged revolt against the political mainstream – against a clique that has become ever more detached and tin-eared since the advent of globalisation in the 1990s.

We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] The future is choice. The BBC hates choice — because choice exposes irrelevance. No more reverence. No more compulsory funding. No more pretending this is about anything other than control.

It still boggles my mind that people can talk about the Holocaust without saying the J-word. It’s like holding forth on the transatlantic slave trade and not once saying ‘people from Africa’. Or lamenting the nuking of Hiroshima and forgetting to mention Japanese people. And yet here we are, 80 years after the Shoah, surrounded by Jew-free yapping about that most calamitous event in history. – Brendan O’Neill

In response to a question about where the problem in British politics lies, I agreed with the questioner it’s “the system” as currently configured that’s the crux of the matter. Britain faces a series of systemic institutional structural problems, not a problem of leadership or competence. The Civil Service doesn’t serve, it has its own agendas, and the QUANGO-ocracy is where the real power lies, not with Parliament and the elected government.