This site is a successor to Lockdown Sceptics, which I set up at the beginning of April 2020. The idea for the original site was that it would serve as a hub for sceptical articles, academic papers and interviews that had appeared elsewhere, as well as a place for experts and non-experts to air views that they couldn’t get published anywhere else. As the ‘state of emergency’ dragged on for longer than most of us expected and public enthusiasm for the lockdowns remained stubbornly high, the tone inevitably became rather stoical. I even published a series of articles under the heading ‘Why Haven’t Our Points Landed?’ But it wasn’t all doom and gloom. From the start, the more serious content was broken up with lighter fare, such as a daily selection of musical numbers chosen by readers to reflect whatever was dominating the news. We tried never to repeat the same song twice, but ‘I Want to Break Free’ by Queen appeared at least a dozen times.

I always imagined I would retire the site one day – turn it into an archive that would serve as a record of that dark period in our history – and ‘Freedom Day’ (July 21st 2021) seemed like a good time to do that. But after almost 16 months of continuous activity, the site had developed in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t just mean it was averaging 1.5 million page views a month and had almost 15,000 email subscribers, as well as several employees. It had also attracted a community of regular contributors and commentators. Together, we’d created a kind of intellectual home for tens of thousands of people, and I got regular emails from people all over the world telling me that if it wasn’t for Lockdown Sceptics they would have gone mad. I turned some of these emails into ‘Postcards’ and grouped them under the heading Around the World in Eighty Lockdowns.

So instead of shutting down Lockdown Sceptics, I decided to turn it into the Daily Sceptic. All of the original content we published would be retained and organised under the headings you can see in our Archive, but the subject matter would be broader. I wanted to create a permanent online news magazine imbued with the same irreverent, antic spirit as the original site, and the same rigorous, analytical approach.

So the Daily Sceptic includes sceptical articles by disaffected journalists and academics – including citizen journalists and independent scholars – about a range of public policies that are supposedly based on science or data or evidence, where ‘the Science’ is being invoked as a source of unassailable authority, but which often appear to be rooted in a concealed political agenda (Net Zero being the paradigmatic example). The idea is to challenge the new powerful class of government scientists and public health officials – as well as their colleagues in universities, grant-giving trusts, large international charities, Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry – that emerged as a kind of secular priesthood during the pandemic, providing not just ‘scientific’ advice but moral guidance, too. And to challenge them on their own terms, much like the group of citizen journalists who successfully rehabilitated the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis after it had been designated a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the pages of the Lancet. (Scientific and medical journals will also be in our crosshairs.)

The temptation when debunking ‘the Science’ behind these policies is to see sinister cabals at work, bent on some secret plot to subvert democratic institutions and usher in a New World Order in which they control every aspect of our lives. But as someone who’s earned his living as a journalist for nearly 40 years, occasionally with a front row seat on the inner workings of government, I’m a subscriber to the cock-up theory of history. I don’t doubt that plenty of clever, successful people seized upon opportunities during the pandemic, enriching themselves or consolidating their power and status in some other way, and some even did what they could to prolong it for entirely self-interested reasons (and that goes double for the ‘climate crisis’). But that’s a far cry from the ‘Plandemic’. History can in rare circumstances be bent to the will of an extraordinary individual, but few historical episodes are ever planned. Societies ‘reset’ themselves all the time, but not in a way that’s ‘great’ if by that is meant ‘permanent’, and I doubt even the new disgraced Klaus Schwab really believed that. He was just a carnival barker standing outside a tent called ‘Davos’ and we shouldn’t take his flimflam too seriously.

I hope you enjoy the site. Do keep the contributions coming, both above and below the line. (Email us here.) And if you appreciate what we do, please help us keep the wolf from the door by making a donation via our secure donation page. The Daily Sceptic is a labour of love, and has a staff of four – Will Jones, Richard Eldred, Laurie Wastell and me – as well as a roster of regular paid contributors, such as Steven Tucker, Chris Morrison, Noah Carl, Charlotte Gill, Paul Coleman, James Alexander, Joanna Gray, Tilak Doshi, Mark Littlewood, David Shipley and Ben Pile. But we also have wives and girlfriends and families and mortgages, and every little helps. (The Daily Sceptic is published by a company called Skeptics Ltd, registered at 1st Floor, 48 Chancery Lane Holborn, London, England, WC2A 1JF.)

I know some readers will disagree with my cock-up theory and I look forward to seeing that debate play out in the pages of the Daily Sceptic, much like it did in Lockdown Sceptics. I’m a free speech zealot. In February 2020, a couple of months before I created Lockdown Sceptics, I helped set up the Free Speech Union, a non-partisan, mass membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely. The timing was fortuitous since one of the hallmarks of the coronavirus crisis was the suppression of dissenting voices within the scientific and public health communities – the creep of cancel culture into the hard sciences. That process was already underway, as any health professional who dissents from trans orthodoxy can tell you, but the pandemic acted like an accelerant. The Daily Sceptic will campaign against this climate of Maoist intolerance that is sweeping through our most important institutions and companies – and that includes taking the Mickey out of woke gobbledegook. Scientific censorship is a deadly serious business, but the way to take down the would-be Torquemadas is often to aim at the funny bone.

If you have a complaint about an article, please email us here. We try hard to make sure all the articles published on the Daily Sceptic are factually correct and our policy is always to link to the source of evidence-based claims. However, if you spot a mistake please do let us know so we can correct it as soon as possible. If you disagree with an opinion expressed in an article we encourage you to set out your reasons why in the comments and we sometimes publish replies to articles and then replies to those replies.

Stop Press: To help increase our revenue, we’ve launched a Substack called the Climate Skeptic that will republish all the content on this site written by our team of climate contrarians – Chris Morrison, Dr Tilak Doshi, Ben Pile and Paul Homewood – and provide subscribers with a daily news round-up dedicated to all things climate-related. You can find that new site – and subscribe to it – here. Becoming a premium subscriber to the Climate Skeptic is another way of supporting our work since all the revenue will flow into Skeptics Ltd, but if you’re a recurring donor to the Daily Sceptic you’ll already have access to the paywalled articles by our climate team on the Daily Sceptic.

The Team

Toby Young

Toby Young is the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Sceptic. He is the author of several books, including How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, and co-founded the Knowledge Schools Trust. In addition to being Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Sceptic, he is the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union and an Associate Editor of the Spectator, where he has written a weekly column for more than 20 years. In 2021 he won the Contrarian Prize. In 2024 he was made a Conservative peer for his work defending free speech.

Will Jones

Dr Will Jones is Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He has a PhD in political philosophy, an MA in ethics, a BSc in mathematics and a diploma in theology. He lives in Leamington Spa with his wife and two children.

Richard Eldred

Richard Eldred is an Associate Editor of the Daily Sceptic. He spent close to two decades working in broadcast journalism in Hong Kong before returning to the U.K. in 2022.

Laurie Wastell

Laurie Wastell is an Associate Editor of the Daily Sceptic and the host of the Sceptic, our weekly podcast. He is also a regular contributor to the Spectator.