British officials warned they will be denied U.S. visas if they breach free speech rights of U.S. citizens.

 

Britain's 'The Online Safety Act', requires social media organisations like X, (formerly Twitter), to remove harmful content from their platforms. If they fail to do so, they will face fines of £18 million pounds or 10 percent of their annual revenue.

Free speech advocates say that the Act could lead to excessive censorship and deter investment from American tech giants. The U.S. State Department has raised concerns regarding the laws capacity to restrict freedom of expression and the massive fines it could impose on U.S. tech companies. British officials now face being banned from the U.S. if they are found to have breached free speech rights of American citizens. The visa ban could apply to individuals working for Ofcom who are responsible for policing Britain's online safety laws. Marco Rubio, the U.S. Secretary of State, said foreign officials "complicit in censoring" American citizens and media companies will be denied entry to the U.S.

The announcement is understood to have taken British officials by surprise. The Trump administration considers it unacceptable for foreign officials to demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies, or engage in censorship activity, that reaches beyond their authority and into the U.S. In an ominous warning, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has said:

“We will throw the full force of the law at people: And whether you're in this country committing crimes or from further afield online, we will come after you."

It is known that U S. state officials have met with Foreign Office officials to convey their concerns about the Online Safety Act. They have also met with pro-life British activists over censorship concerns. The White House is also said to be 'monitoring' the case of Lucy Connolly, a British woman who was jailed for 31 months for comments that she made on social media.

Despite the apparent rift between the U.K. and U.S. governments over this issue, sources within the Foreign Office, said both countries would work together to protect freedom of speech across the world. The Foreign Office referred to comments made by Sir Keir Starmer when he visited the U.S. in February. Starmer said:

"We've had free speech for a very, very long time in the U.K. Certainly, we wouldn't want to reach across U.S. citizens and we don't, and that's absolutely right. But in relation to free speech in the U.K., I'm very proud of our history there."

Boris Johnson, the former Conservative Prime Minister, has warned that Britain has become a 'police state' under Sir Keir Starmer's Labour government. He recently said: "The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another gift for Vladimir Putin."

"Police the streets not our tweets!"

 

I think we ought to treat the attack on free speech in Britain seriously. In an article in the Telegraph on 21 May 2025, the former Conservative Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claimed that Britain is becoming a police state under Labour and Sir Keir Starmer.  According to Johnson, "The UK police are now making over 10,000 arrests every year for online comments, more than that of the police in Russia itself, and this judgement is yet another propaganda gift for Vladimir Putin."

Only recently, an Irish singer with the band 'Kneecap', was charged with a terrorism offence for displaying the flag of Hezbollah a proscribed organisation in Britain, during a concert. Anti-abortion protestors have been arrested for praying silently outside abortion clinics and one was fined £20,000 for holding a placard which said, "Here to talk if you want." A couple were even arrested and held for eight hours for writing emails and WhatsApp messages criticising their daughter's primary school. Even though there's no crime of blasphemy in Britain, a man is on trial for burning a copy of the Quran in front of London's Turkish consulate.

Apart from arrest of this kind, there are what's called "non-crime hate incidents" where the "thought police" warn people about the things they have said or done that fall below the criminal threshold. If a crime hasn't been committed, then why does it necessitate a police visit to your home?  The police recorded 13,200 of these in the year to June 2024.

What Boris Johnson fails to mention, is that many of the laws that the police are using to curtail free speech in Britain, were introduced during fourteen years of Conservative government.

Johnson and other prominent right-wingers, have also taken up the case of Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old mother and childminder from Northampton. Since losing her appeal against a sentence of 31 months' imprisonment for inciting online racial hatred after last year's attack on children and others in Southport, who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club, Connolly's plight has become a cause celebre, among some in the Conservative Party. The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has defended the actions taken against Lucy Connolly.

Last September Connolly pleaded guilty to the offence of inciting racial hatred contrary to section 19(1) of the Public Order Act 1986. On 29 July 2024, Connolly had written on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) the following rant:

"Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you're at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me a racist, so be it."

We now know that in the aftermath of the Southport attack where three children were tragically killed, there were riots in Southport and attacks on Mosques and hotels accommodating refugees and asylum seekers. Yet the killer, Axel Rudakabana, who carried out this attack, was not an asylum seeker, but a 17-year-old local man living in Southport. It seems that Connolly removed that message just three and a half hours after publishing it. But within that time frame, the message had been reposted many times for others to read. The message was viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times. She was arrested on August 6, 2024.

An investigation showed that Connolly had expressed other views about illegal immigrants. A WhatsApp message sent to a friend on August 5, said: "The raging tweet about burning down hotels has bit me on the arse lol." In another message Connolly had said that if Ofsted got involved, she would tell them that she was not responsible, but was a victim of doxing. In another message she had said that if she was arrested, she would "play the mental health card."

Many other people were arrested, charged and convicted of offences of inciting racial hatred online, but Conservative politicians have been conspicuously silent about their plight. So, what makes Lucy Connolly's case different? Some think that she's been treated rather too harshly but others received similar sentences in the wake of the Southport attack for similar crimes. The crucial difference between Connolly's case and others, is that her husband Ray Connolly, is a West Northamptonshire Tory councillor.

Although so-called racial hatred posts don't violate X's rules, the company do explicitly prohibit "threats to inflict physical harm on others, which includes threatening to kill, torture, sexual assault, or otherwise hurt someone." A few days after Connolly made her post, X rejected a complaint from a user who flagged the message to it.

The right-wing in Britain is inclined to blame the left and state sponsored "wokery" for eroding free speech in Britain. But targeting migrants has become a politically convenient hobby horse for some politicians who like to whip things up for their own political ends. Prejudice is cultivated if it wins votes. It's easier for politicians to scapegoat one group or another rather than address the root causes of people's problems such as lack of affordable housing, long waits for GP appointments, unemployment and low wages. If you can't get an affordable rented home, then it's all the fault of immigrants.

There never has been an absolute right to free speech in Britain or anywhere else and any right that you believe that you have, had to be fought for. People like Lucy Connolly are encouraged by the state to harbour prejudices and hate but when they express those prejudices online, they get punished by the state. Some people do believe that the police crackdown on free speech in Britain is symptomatic of a Stasi-like police state and an attempt to intimidate and to silence people. I think they make a very good point. 

"This City is Ours" 9BBC 2025) - Review.

 

‘This City is Ours” (BBC 2025) – Gangsterism and the criminological imagination

By: Andrew Wallace (25/05/25)

Gangsterism along with other transgressive forms looms large in popular culture, documentaries and drama. As to why our morbid curiosities are engaged by edgy and unnerving content is an open question to human nature and a commentary on the dialectical interplay between order and anomic breakdown. Whilst the ‘civilising process’ (Elias) has arguably helped to contain and sanitise violence within modern societies with varying degrees of success, it has also provided paradoxical ‘violent entertainment’ on media platforms. Cultural criminology has drawn attention to how reality and media representations have become problematically enmeshed so that social investigators are no longer able to provide a prima facie ontology of crime.

Gangsterism remains intriguing as it captures the complexity of pre-modern forms of social organisation such as medieval warlords and its eventual accommodation to the secular meritocratic rationalism of contemporary standards. ‘This City is Ours’ (TCIO) is centred on a Liverpudlian crime family and the ensuing power struggle and vicious fall-outs that are precipitated as the son makes a bid to head the ‘firm’. There are copious gangster tropes drawn from the template of ‘The Godfather’ (1972), such as the Catholic hypocrisies of ritual piety versus the reality of murder and criminal mayhem. Criminal firms arguably provide an illuminating commentary on the nature of contemporary capitalism with its atomistic premise of welfare state retrenchment and hyper-individualistic modes of engagement. If collectivist pillars have continued to recede, political discourses continue to recalibrate their focus on canny self-enlightened consumerism and individual responsibilities. Wherein Thatcherism celebrated ‘individuals and families’, the firm of extended family ties and kinship help to ameliorate the creative destruction of the coldly secular cash nexus. Criminal enterprise is also a reflexive response to the permissive possibilities of the unfettered market and invites us to question the cultural limits of economic exchange. The libertarians would argue that much criminality stems from the erroneous attempts to regulate the licentious arenas of consumption such as pornography, prostitution, alcohol and drugs. If Prohibition gave us Al Capone, state regulations throw up the moral quandary of the black market, with Thatcherite injunctions that one cannot buck the universal laws of the market. Interestingly Mrs Thatcher proved inconsistent on this point given her socially conservative prescriptions along with Mrs Whitehouse against the permissive society (Campbell, 1987).

TCIO titillates our decadent curiosity in the criminal ‘other’, entrepreneurialism albeit heterodox in nature. Narcotics continue to be the primary activity for the Phelan-Kavanagh partnership and how they constitute their business through a set of intermediaries and their Columbian overlords. The firm also have their legitimate front-end ‘shells’, innocuous type business premises (laundry) or professional

associates (qualified accountants) who give the outward veneer of respectability. This is undoubtedly abetted by government rhetoric about the need to deregulate and cut red tape and illustrates the alarming symbiosis of formal business practice and the subterranean criminal operations. What lies beneath is often very unsavoury whilst also paradoxically providing us with several hours of compulsive viewing thanks to the charismatic presence of James Nelson Joyce (Michael Kavanagh) and Ronnie Phelan (Sean Bean). Definitely a guilty pleasure of the antihero genre, but somewhat disconcerting that others may watch this not as drama but a semi-documentary bolstering a seductive and transgressive career path for wannabe gangsters.

BBC: This City is Ours (2025). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028mhs

(Accessed 25 March 2025)

Campbell, B (1987) The Iron Ladies. London. Virago Press

Elias, N (1939) The Civilizing Process. Basel. Switzerland.

IMDB: The Godfather (1972). Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/

Is Labour past its sell-by date?

 

Wes Streeting

I didn't vote right-wing Labour because of scumbags like Wes Streeting. He's been taking financial donations from hedge fund dealers who have a vested interest in private health care.

Sir Keir Starmer-oid is a self-confessed Zionist whose attitude towards the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been appalling. Tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza including women and children, have been annihilated by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDS) and Starmer-oid says the Israelis have the right to defend themselves. The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, callously said that this isn't genocide because not enough people have been killed.

The International Criminal Court (ICC), have issued arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the former Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel have now imposed a food blockade on the people of Gaza to try and starve them to death.

Labour have betrayed the pensioners, WASPI women and people with disabilities. It has taken them just ten months to be hated and despised. No wonder Reform UK are taking Labour and Tory votes and are setting the agenda.

Labour is past its sell-by date and has become politically irrelevant. All the electorate are being offered is Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Trump told Musk to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet when cutting government spending.

 

Elon Musk

There was an excellent article on the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Musk in the UK Financial Times (FT) yesterday. Elon  Musk vowed to cut U.S. government spending by $2 trillion but DOGE's website claims $170 billion in savings.

An FT investigation shows that only a sliver of that figure can actually be verified. The FT said there's evidence of inflated valuations being used to boost the numbers while contracts that were already lapsing, have been claimed as new savings. U.S. Treasury data has also shown no drop in government spending. 

Musk's appointment to DOGE was supposed to last until next summer but he's left after just six months because he faced a backlash from members of the Trump cabinet and persistent protests from Congress. Musk also gave disgruntled senators his personal phone number in attempt to calm their fears. His political exploits have also wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off Tesla's share price.

The FT says that DOGE's emissaries appeared to have had little appreciation of what branches of government they were targeting actually did, which alarmed some people in the Whitehouse. The Trump administration had to halt the firing of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration which guards the nation's nuclear stockpile. The FT says that DOGE should have learned how government works before they started tearing it apart. Trump told Musk to use a scalpel rather than a hatchet and told him that the Secretaries of State had the final say over decisions affecting their departments.

Musk has repeatedly claimed that DOGE is operating with "extreme transparency" but he refused to provide information about the number of staff it has hired, the number of agencies targeted, and the number of criminal referrals it has made for "tremendous fraud." There has also been disquiet about giving young coders working for DOGE access to sensitive data.

Last month Senator Richard Blumenthal alleged that Musk and his companies faced at least $2.37 billion in potential fines from federal investigations and regulatory actions being carried out by the very agencies being gutted by DOGE.

Although DOGE claimed that there was widespread fraud in the U.S. welfare system and welfare programmes such as social security, Medicare and Medicaid, account for more than half of annual government spending, DOGE didn’t target these programmes. This is probably because many of Trump’s supporters are reliant on these programmes. 

Anarchist collectives in the Spanish Revolution.

 

Spanish Anarchist militia men and women

The Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT collectivised not just agriculture but much of industry in Catalonia as well as the public transport system in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. It is probably the only time when anarchism has been put into practice. Firms were put under workers' control. The Ritz Hotel in Barcelona was turned into a workers' restaurant.

Not all Spanish peasants wanted to be collectivised nor were they sympathetic to anarchism. Anarchism was always quite strong in Andalusia but it wasn't in a conservative province like Navarre. It has been alleged that the anarchist forced the peasantry into agricultural collectives in much the same way that the Bolsheviks had done in the Soviet Union. For me, this rather defeats the point, because as we know from the Russian experience of collectivisation, forcing people into collectives doesn't really work and it didn't work in the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks really detested the peasantry and the peasantry didn't think much of them or their policy of expropriating peasant property and grain requisitioning by force. Karl Marx wrote about 'rural idiocy'. During the Russian civil war of 1918-21, the Bolsheviks fought a war against both the White Army and the Russian peasantry.

I have read Gaston Leval's book 'Collectives in the Spanish Revolution', and he suggests that the Spanish peasantry joined the collectives when they thought it was worthwhile to do so. Although the anarchist Jose Buenaventura Durutti, said they were building "Libertarian Communism" in Spain, the Communists in Spain detested these agricultural collectives and if Leval is to be believed, people like the Spanish Communist International Brigade Commander, Enrique Lister, spent a great deal of their time physically attacking them. Lister had been given the job of restoring government authority in the anarchist collectives of Aragon.

The Spanish socialist had a slogan which said vote Communist and spare Spain from Marxism.

Tommy's on the Western Front.

 

British soldiers - 1914-18

I have just been reading the book ‘Tommy's’ by the military historian Richard Holmes. This is not the only book that I have read about WWI. It's about British soldiers in the 1914-18 war.

Soldiers' opinions about their German enemy/opponents varied with the circumstances. It seems the British soldier had quite a lot of respect for Fritz as a German infantryman. They often thought that the Germans were better disciplined and had better officers than themselves. As far as the ordinary British soldier was concerned, he bore no real hatred against the Germans. They probably disliked the French even more because they ripped everybody off. We do know that there were instances of fraternisation between German and British soldiers especially at Christmas and gifts were exchanged. This sort of thing worried the military top brass. Nevertheless, many soldiers knew that they were at war with an enemy and that involved killing one another.

I suppose the soldier is fighting to keep himself alive and his mates. The British soldier had no time for the sniper or trench mortar men or those that used gas. If captured they would probably be shot or bayoneted. If a soldier surrendered there was no guarantee that it would be accepted. A German officer surrendered to a British sergeant and handed him his field glasses. The British soldier politely thanked him and then shot him through the head. As for the Germans, the Saxon Germans hated the Prussian Germans more than the British and some even deserted. The same can be said for people from Alsace.

In WWI, conscription wasn't introduced until 1916 and many lads were keen to join up. They probably saw it as a bit of an adventure and an opportunity to travel. They were clothed and fed and got a wage and cigarettes. Many had probably never travelled far from their home area or could have been unemployed. The Germans did shell and bomb parts of Britain which resulted in deaths. The British soldier would have had different ideas about why he was fighting in that war. Some thought that they were doing so to prevent the Germans from invading Britain or coming under the control of Germany. As far as I understand the Germans did not plan a large-scale invasion of Britain during WWI and the allies didn't really take over the running of Germany.

That imperialist war was more about the possession of colonies and the struggle for markets. When Germany was defeated, the French and British basically carved up between themselves what was left of the Ottoman Empire. The British were very interested in the oil wells of Mesopotamia and waged war there in the 1920s.

As with all soldiers, the British soldier was subject to military law. If he struck an officer he could be shot. Over 3,000 death sentences were issued in the British Army during WWI. Around 90% of these were not carried out and some other punishment might be imposed. Around 346 British soldiers were shot for desertion or other offences. The vast majority of these were ordinary rank and file soldiers and they were probably shot as an example to others. Some of these would be suffering from shell shock or battle fatigue. Only three British Army officers were shot during WWI. Siegfried Sassoon who fought on the Western Front said that some British Army officers did lose their nerve but they were often removed from active service and this was often covered up. Sassoon said you couldn't do this with Tommy. If he loses his bottle, it was a No 9 pill and he stayed there until he was wounded or killed.

Protests grow over arrest at Quaker Meeting House in Westminster.

 

The Trump administration in the U.S.  have been critical about the way in which the British government and the police have been cracking down on free speech in Britain. At a recent meeting that took place at the White House in Washington, the Labour Prime Minister, 'Free Gear' Sir Keir Starmer, denied that this was the case.

While we're told that Britain isn't a police state, what we are seeing in Britain, under Starmer's squalid Labour government, is the increasing use of the police and state power to crackdown on peaceful protest and free speech which is said to be the cornerstone of any truly democratic society. Although Britain isn't a politically violent country compared to many other countries and most people are politically passive, some critics believe that this is a deliberate policy to intimidate and silence protestors. There have been numerous cases where people have been arrested and charged for comments made on social media. Some have even been imprisoned.

On Thursday, March 27, 2025, 30 Metropolitan Police Officers, some armed with stun guns, smashed down the front door of the Grade II-listed Quaker Meeting House in Westminster, where six young women from the group 'Youth Demand,' were holding a meeting. The women, mostly students, were there to share opinions about climate change and the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza where tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children, have been slaughtered by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The group are calling for a trade embargo on Israel. On the table in the meeting room were cups of tea, ginger biscuits and a selection of vegan cheese straws. Although the meeting had been publicly advertised on Instagram, leaflets and posters, and the room at the Friends Meeting House had been hired, the young women were arrested on "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance." Some of the women were 'rear stacked', hands cuffed behind their back and held against a wall. The police confiscated laptops, mobile phones, Oyster cards and even a French book on grammar.

One of the activists, Lia-Anjali Lazarus, a 20-year-old politics and languages student from UCL, said the raid was "a traumatic experience" and described the police's response as "outrageous" and felt it was akin to "thought policing."

The accusation of "conspiracy" is one that particularly jars with the young women who describe their meetings as "a weekly welcome talk." They say that if the police raid was "intelligence led", as the Met claims, then the police ought to have known that the meetings are not that well attended to justify a raid by thirty armed police officers and that the activists posed no threat to them.

Mal Woolford, an eyewitness to the police raid and an elder at the Westminster Quaker Meeting House, said the "gathering had looked like an innocuous meeting of drama students." He described the police response as "ridiculously heavy handed." Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain said no one in living memory had been arrested at a Quaker meeting house.

After their arrest, five of the women were released on bail pending further inquiries and one faced no further action. Since the police raid at the Quaker Meeting House in March, there have been complaints made by religious leaders and groups, politicians as well as protests. Carla Denyer, the Green Party co-leader and the MP for Bristol Central said: "This isn't just a single incident, this is about an increasing stamping down on the right to peaceful protest in this country."

When expressing moral concerns about genocide or existential threats to the climate are treated as intent by the police or potential crimes, then we ought to be rightly worried and concerned. Similarly, when armed British police go for the Quakers and smash down the front door to a Quaker Meeting House, then we might well be justified in asking if Britain has become a Stasi-like police state.

Christopher Hitchens - 'ARGUABLY'.

 

Christopher Hitchens

I am just reading Christopher Hitchens's collection of essays and articles called 'ARGUABLY'. Although it's now rather dated, it does contain a wealth of good material.

Hitch was an excellent writer, polemicist and wit and was a great debater. I didn't share his support for the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq or his atheism. Hitch also thought that the Taliban wouldn't get back in power in Afghanistan. They're now back in power. In Vanity Fair in 2004 he wrote:

"I will venture a prediction: The Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power. Vicious though their tactics are, they don't show any sign of having a plan, or a coordinated leadership, or a brain. They are now much hated and so heavily outgunned. We can still get a failed state or rogue state in Afghanistan if we really work at it."

Did any invading foreign force ever get anywhere in Afghanistan? Ask the Russians. The war in Iraq might have removed Saddam Hussein from power but it also created a vacuum of power and paved the way for Islamic State. The U.S. and their coalition allies were warned that this could happen. They got "dragged into the sands of Iraq" - this is something that the Orientalist T.E. Lawrence would have recognised. 

Politically it is the Iranians who have benefitted from the war in Iraq. Neither war can be described as a success story. In 2005, Hitch also thought the Euro was overrated and wouldn't last. I think he admired George Orwell greatly and possibly modelled himself on him, but I think Orwell was the better writer and thinker of the two.

Nigel Farage and Populism.

 

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage is a salesman and a very good salesman. He's also a charlatan, a racist, and a showman. Reform UK, is basically a cult that follows a charismatic leader. Politically, Nigel Farage is a Thatcherite and he's said so himself. He's also an English nationalist. Unlike Keir Starmer, Farage can connect with the English people with whom he has a good rapport.

I don't find myself in agreement with Farage very often but he did say recently that all politicians were wankers, adding, "but at least we're honest about it." I think he's spot on but disingenuous.

In my view, right-wing populism both in Britain and the U.S. was inevitable and is a backlash against many things, including what is generically called, 'political correctness'. Many people must feel that they're being treated as Guinee Pigs in a social engineering experiment.

I'm currently reading essays by Christopher Hitchens and came across this, which amused me: "Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the difference between men and women”, a bishop replied, 'Madam, I cannot conceive'." Somebody should've told Starmer and Sturgeon that a long time ago.

I have never failed to be amazed by how some human beings can come to embrace the most bizarre ideas and grotesque absurdities. It's almost as though they abandon all reason for one passing fad or another. I suppose this explains the interest in conspiracy theories and the success of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code.

The Making of the English Working Class - E.P. Thompson.

 

I must have read E.P. Thompson's book 'The Making of the English Working Class' about four times over the years and every time I read the book, I read it in an entirely different way. I probably first read Thompson's book in the early 1980s, when an anarchist friend called Ian Smith, recommended the book to me. Ian taught sociology at Ashton College on Beaufort Road.

I am skeptical about Thompson's basic premise that there was such a thing as a homogeneous 'working-class' by the time of the Reform Bill struggles and he shows an excessive interest in religious cranks like the Muggletonians.  Nevertheless, there are some excellent chapters on the early radicals (Jacobins) who were very much influenced by the French Revolution.

The Napoleonic Wars were initially a war against Jacobinism aimed at restoring the Bourbons to the throne of France. The French Revolution put the fear of death in the British oligarchs who corruptly governed Britain through their pocket and rotten boroughs. That fear also led to repressive measures being taken against radicals. Many British radicals knew that that had little to fear from a French invasion of Britain.

Today, 'Bonapartism' is synonymous with political opportunism. After Napoleon staged a coup on (18 Brumaire), November 9 1799, he became a provisional consul and then later, First Consul of France and by 1802, Consul for life, with the power to appoint his own successor. In May 1804, he became Emperor of France and put members of his own family on the thrones of Europe. Napoleon and his brothers did rig elections, but it must also have occurred to some people, that there was something rather contradictory about being the Emperor of a French Republic. Napoleon's regime rested on French military domination in Europe and when the tide started to turn, and the French people grew tired of war, that was the end of Napoleon.

Musk says Tesla faces imminent collapse.

 

Elon Musk - CEO of Tesla

See how the mighty have fallen. Donald Trump as a knack for bringing people down who are close to him and that also applies to Elon Musk.

Since joining Trump's administration, Tesla's sales and share price have plummeted. Musk is now admitting that he's run out of options and that Tesla is facing imminent collapse.

It seems that many people find Musk's opinions and political views reprehensible and are boycotting Tesla.

The American basketball legend, Michael Jordan, was once asked to stand for office for the U.S. Democratic Party but he declined because he knew that even Republican voters buy trainers.

Faragism: Britannia Unchained or Protectionism. By Andrew Wallace.

 

Nigel Farage

The doyens of the free market are usually keen to push what they salute as the emancipatory essence of unfettered economic exchange, a voluntaristic state of affairs that is also regarded as a crucial guarantor of individual and civic freedoms. Conversely critics of this market ontology (Polanyi, 1944) argue that markets have been mythologised and reified above and beyond their historical and social context. Furthermore it can also be contended that markets can also be deployed as coercive instruments and weaponised against sections of the population. Thatcherism’s liberatory credo was also a paradoxical moment of foreclosure in the counsel of There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Faragism’s latter-day alternative to mainstream politics has certainly been happy to double down on neoliberal orthodoxy in its exultation of the low tax small state and its denigration of ‘high national debt, wasteful government spending and nanny state regulations’ (Reform UK: Our contract with you). Opposition to Net Zero and woke ideology has been fused with the heresy of opposition to mass immigration which has provided Farage with his crucial niche of ‘respectable’ dissension to liberal cosmopolitanism. This has also been reinforced by a post-Covid critique of the emergency state interventionism witnessed during the pandemic and the fierce anti-collectivist tirades of other Reform MPs and activists. And Farage is also a long standing critic of the NHS in which he has argued needs to be replaced by a system based on private insurance.

This however sits in a peculiar position alongside the recourse to what might be labelled Farage’s Trumpist perorations. Bastani has saluted the ‘French-style dirigisme’ (Bastani, 2024) of Reform’s 50% public ownership plans for the utilities, whilst Farage has made a recent high profile case for the nationalisation of British Steel. So will the real Nigel Farage please stand up? Perhaps we should take our cues from some of Reform’s lieutenants or exes such as Rupert Lowe who has served as a veritable ideologue of free market militancy. Then there was the obvious love-in between Farage and Liz Truss, who welcomed her highly controversial 2022 mini budget alongside other Hayekian radicals. Arguably Reform is indulging in postliberal heterodoxy mindful that Thatcherism might also be equally repellent to so-called left behind red wallers.

References:

Bastani, A (2024) ‘Nigel Farage Has Spotted a Major Gap in the Political Market’, Novara Media, 21 June

Available at: https://novaramedia.com/2024/06/21/nigel-farage-has-spotted-a-major-gap-in-the-political-market/

Accessed 03/05/25

Guardian staff (2022) ‘Great divide: pundits’ reactions to mini-budget run from alarmed to delighted’, The Guardian, 25 September

Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/sep/25/great-divide-pundits-reactions-to-mini-budget-run-from-alarmed-to-delighted

Accessed 03/05/25

Polanyi, K (1944), The Great Transformation’. Penguin Books.

U.N. Ugandan judge gets six years in jail for domestic slavery.

 

Lydia Mugambe

Lydia Mugambe, 50, a United Nations judge and human rights lawyer, has been sentenced to six years and four months’ imprisonment for forcing a woman to work unpaid as a domestic slave at her home in Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

In a written statement, read to the court by prosecutor Caroline Haughey KC, the victim- who cannot be named for legal reasons - described living in "almost constant fear" due to Mugambe's powerful standing in Uganda. She said "she can't go back to Uganda" due to fear of what may happen to her and added that she might not see her mother again.

Mugambe was studying for a PhD in law at Oxford University when police discovered she had a young Ugandan woman at her home carrying out unpaid work as a maid and nanny. She fraudulently arranged a visa for the woman that claimed that the woman would work as a private servant at the diplomatic residence of John Mugerwa, Uganda's former deputy high commissioner, based at the country's embassy in London. Prosecutors said that Mugerwa sponsored the victims visa knowing that she would work in servitude for Mugambe. As a quid pro quo, Mugambe had given him legal assistance in a court case in Uganda in which he was the defendant.

The Crown Prosecution Service authorised the police to charge Mugerwa with conspiracy but he had diplomatic immunity which the Ugandan government didn't waive.

A University of Oxford spokesperson said they were "appalled" by its student's crimes.