Why I Am Leaving Britain
I am in my 50s, and I have spent three decades in engineering and technology leadership, including safety-critical hardware work in aviation and senior software leadership in regulated industries such as financial services and transport. I have a mortgage on my home, like most people who work for a living rather than inherit. I pay a great deal of tax and have never once asked the state for anything back.
The decision has been building over several years, through a Conservative government that talked endlessly about controlling immigration while presiding over record net migration, and now a Labour government discovering, apparently to its own surprise, that you cannot spend what you do not have without eventually coming for the people who have it.
What tipped us over was not a rumour but a fact: on July 20th, Andy Burnham was confirmed as Prime Minister, and the land value tax he has championed for years – an annual charge, potentially 0.48% and nearly double that on second properties, levied on the land beneath your home – has moved from a leadership pitch to a live possibility. No formal proposal has been published, but there’s no mistaking which way the wind is blowing. It’s sold as a “fairer” replacement for council tax, with council tax, stamp duty and inheritance tax dangled as sweeteners; history suggests those sweetener taxes tend to survive once a future chancellor decides they’re rather useful after all.
I don’t even own my land outright; I have a mortgage on it, which means a land tax would charge me annually on equity the bank and I are still splitting. It would sit alongside income tax already claiming over 60% of earnings above £100,000, National Insurance as a second income tax in all but name, inheritance tax at 40% and energy bills among the highest in Europe.
And it’s not the only ratchet in motion: a flat 10% levy on every estate on death – no threshold, no exemptions, the same “care levy” Burnham floated in 2010, when the Conservatives put it on an election poster and called it a death tax – is being looked at again, with Reform UK warning it would drag an extra 650,000 families a year into inheritance tax who currently pay nothing. A widow in an ordinary £250,000 bungalow, already taxed on every penny that bought it, would owe £25,000 the moment she died. There’s also a mansion tax surcharge already being rolled out, with the Valuation Office Agency using satellite and aerial imagery to value homes for it – first tested in Wales, not denied for England.
Burnham’s top team does nothing to reassure me: his new Chancellor, John Healey, is described by sources close to the Government as sharing his outlook rather than tempering it, and Ed Miliband, the Net Zero enthusiast who as Energy Secretary helped drive our bills to among the highest in Europe, has been promoted to Foreign Secretary rather than moved on.
Within days the pattern was visible. Burnham’s first announcements as Prime Minister – a VAT cut on household electricity and a return of the £2 bus fare cap – were both revealed almost immediately to be uncosted: the electricity cut’s funding source turned out not to exist and the bus cap was funded by converting climate-finance grants into loans. The Spectator called it a “shambles” by day three. The gap between headline and funding gets closed later, quietly, through exactly the kind of tax rise this article opened with.
Underneath the policy detail sits a harder problem: it is no longer clear the ballot box can even fix this.
Reform UK, the party currently leading national polls, has had its leader placed under a Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards investigation over an undeclared £5 million gift, while the Metropolitan Police are now also investigating Deputy Leader Richard Tice himself: two £250,000 donations paid to Reform via a company he controls, funded by a backer whose son is a convicted fraudster, with Reform’s bank account reportedly frozen over suspected suspicious activity. Tice calls it a “politically motivated smear campaign” and says the Met briefed the BBC before ever contacting him – a framing harder to dismiss given the National Crime Agency has separately had to refer itself to the police watchdog after Reform’s confidential financial data was leaked to the press.
Compare that with Louise Haigh, who resigned as Transport Secretary in 2024 after it emerged she had pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation a decade earlier. Fourteen months later, Burnham brought her back – not to a backbench role, but as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and First Secretary of State, his effective second-in-command.
A challenger party’s own deputy leader gets a live police investigation over disputed donations; a governing party hands its second-highest office to a minister with an actual fraud conviction.
Whatever the truth of any individual case, the two established parties who have governed this country for a century closed ranks around their own the moment a serious challenger emerged, while treating that challenger’s finances as the scandal to be policed rather than the policy failures that produced it – which is not a system that leaves the ballot box open in practice, whatever it says on paper.
Twenty years of uncontrolled legal and illegal immigration, on both parties’ watch, has changed the country beyond anything either campaigned on – and saying so plainly now risks a knock on the door for a “non-crime hate incident”, which is why I write under a pen name in a country I still love rather than under my own in one where doing so has consequences.
Speech isn’t the only thing treated differently depending on who you are. The grooming gang scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford and elsewhere sat unprosecuted for years, officially for fear of appearing “racist”, while people posting intemperate opinions online have found police on their doorstep within days. Even the row over the Sentencing Council’s proposed guidance on pre-sentence reports – which would have told judges a report was “usually necessary” before jailing an offender from an ethnic, cultural or faith minority – makes the same point: it only got blocked by emergency legislation after an almighty political row, and the Council’s own chairman noted that ministers from both main parties had been briefed on it at 15 meetings over three years and raised no objection until it became a public fight.
A system that only acts once something threatens to become a scandal, rather than catching it in the design, hasn’t fixed two-tier treatment. It has simply learned to manage the appearance of it.
A Ministry of Defence inquiry found the RAF’s diversity targets led to unlawful discrimination against white male recruits held back from pilot training regardless of merit; those affected were paid £5,000 each. West Yorkshire Police ran a recruitment system sorting candidates into “gold,” “silver” and “bronze” tiers by ethnicity, with white British applicants ranked lowest. NHS England guidance has encouraged trusts to mandate ethnic-minority shortlisting and at least one hospital admitted outright “positive discrimination”. The BBC still runs internships explicitly closed to white applicants. A government department has already conceded, under its own inquiry, that it broke the law.
The basic promise of British life – pay in, and the state looks after the roads, the water, the health service and, eventually, you – has quietly collapsed. Council tax keeps rising while roads crater with potholes. One in four adults in England can’t get an NHS dentist. Eight water companies imposed hosepipe bans this summer, from Kent and Hampshire to Cambridgeshire and, as of this week, the whole of London and the Thames Valley – more than 20 million people in total – while those same companies lose billions of litres a day to leaks left unfixed for decades. Britain pays among the highest household energy prices in Europe, and last winter roughly 2,500 cold-related deaths, mostly pensioners, were recorded in a country meant to be one of the richest in the world.
Behind all of it sits the plainest number: the country is broke. Public sector net debt stands at close to £2.9 trillion, roughly 95% of annual output – a level last seen in the early 1960s, still paying off the cost a world war. The Government borrowed £132 billion last year alone and debt interest now runs to around £110 billion a year – the fourth-largest item in government spending, ahead of the entire education budget. The OBR’s own forecast has the debt ratio not falling at all until the end of the decade, and then only fractionally. A land tax, a death tax, a wobble on inheritance relief, whatever comes next – it isn’t one bad idea from one bad government. It’s what a state does when the bill arrives and there’s no one left to send it to but the people still working and still holding assets.
None of this happens in a state that leaves you alone, either. The DWP’s new “Fraud, Error and Debt” bill lets the department demand bank account data on suspicion of error as well as fraud – prompting Big Brother Watch to warn it risks “unprecedented” mass financial surveillance reaching everybody’s accounts. A state that cannot fix a pothole can apparently watch your garden extension from space and your bank balance from Whitehall.
We are also not remotely alone in leaving. The ONS admitted last year its old methods had badly underestimated how many Britons were going: revised figures show 992,000 British nationals emigrated between 2021 and 2024, 190% more than previously recorded, and for the first time in years the outflow now exceeds the inflow. Set that against 2022 having brought the fastest population growth since 1828, and a foreign-born population share up from 16% to almost 20% in four years, and the picture is unmistakable.
Put all of that together and the question is unavoidable: as a white British family, on what basis are we meant to build our future here? Every institution named above – the armed forces, the police, the health service, the national broadcaster – has now either been found to discriminate against people who look like us, or is actively designed to.
We are not owed anything for being white and British. But we are entitled to ask why a country would build itself this way, and to leave when the honest answer keeps coming back “because it can”. Add a dying tax base, a state pension and NHS that will not be there in the shape promised, and a balance sheet with no way back inside our working lives, and the country starts to look less like a home going through a rough patch and more like a dead duck.
Family comes first, and there is no shame in saying so plainly.
So we are going.
None of this is written out of hatred for the place. Britain is my home. But over my lifetime I have watched almost everything I once recognised as my country be dismantled, one piece at a time – sold off, apologised for, legislated away or mocked out of public life until it quietly stopped being said aloud. You can mourn a home even as you pack the boxes. I do.
But if we don’t leave now, we never will. We have a mortgage we can still sell and a career I can still take elsewhere.
That window doesn’t stay open forever.
Sam Lowry is a senior manager in the software development industry with an interest in political and social issues. His name is a pseudonym.
Allison Pearson Wins Five-Figure Payout and Apology from Essex Police Commissioner
Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson has won a five-figure payout and public apology from Essex’s Police and Crime Commissioner Roger Hirst after suing him for defamation following his comments on her controversial visit from police officers on Remembrance Sunday in 2024. Pearson’s separate defamation action against Essex Police itself remains ongoing. The Telegraph has the story:
Allison Pearson, the Telegraph journalist, has received an apology and five-figure payout from Essex’s police and crime commissioner (PCC), after suing him for defamation.
Roger Hirst, the elected official who oversees policing in Essex, has issued a public apology for comments he made after police officers visited Pearson over a post on X that the police alleged incited racial hatred.
The investigation was subsequently dropped, with no further action taken by the force.
Mr Hirst said he was “very sorry” for the “damage and hurt” he had caused and agreed to pay her “substantial” damages, understood to be a five-figure sum.
His apology comes after Mr Justice Chamberlain, a High Court judge, found that Mr Hirst’s comments were capable of being seen as defamatory.
Pearson has lodged a separate defamation action against Essex Police, which has also been considered by Mr Justice Chamberlain and is ongoing.
Her solicitor, Mark Lewis, of Patron Law, said: “It is very regrettable that the elected PCC who is meant to hold the police to account on behalf of the people who elected him chose to protect the police rather than the public who voted for him. I hope he does not expect the public to pay for his actions.”
The incident in November 2024 when two officers visited Pearson at her home over her post on X prompted a national debate over how police handled alleged hate crime and non-crime incidents (NCHIs) on social media.
Labour has since scrapped the recording of NCHIs in their current form after criticism that they were diverting officers into “policing tweets rather than the streets”.
Pearson was visited by the officers at her home on Remembrance Sunday after it was alleged she had incited racial hatred in a post on X. She said she was left “dumbstruck” by the incident, which led the force to publish a series of press releases online with its version of events.
Worth reading in full.
Britain’s Collision Course With Trump’s Energy Counter-Revolution
Ed Miliband has spent his career as one of the world’s most committed climate zealots, and he now finds himself installed as Foreign Secretary in Andy Burnham’s new government, personally taking up the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced this week that the former Energy Secretary would personally occupy the United Kingdom’s seat as Governor of the World Bank, a job normally left to a junior minister, so that the “climate crisis” and overseas development sit at the very heart of British foreign policy. “International development is not an add-on to British foreign policy – it is central to it,” Miliband declared. “By taking on the role of UK governor to the World Bank, I want to send an unambiguous signal that this Government is serious about its global leadership on development and climate.”
He arrives there determined to push the Bank back toward the climate agenda it has just spent a year being forced to retreat from under the Trumpian energy agenda of “drill baby drill” and “energy dominance”. It sets Miliband, and the Burnham Government behind him, on a collision course with the Trump administration’s deliberate campaign to strip the ‘globalist’ climate agenda out of the very institutions Miliband now intends to use as his platform.
The Trumpian energy counter-revolution
Since Donald Trump’s return to office, his administration has waged a sustained campaign to wrest the great multilateral institutions back from the ‘globalist’ climate agenda that captured them over the past two decades. Washington threatened outright withdrawal from the International Energy Agency unless it abandoned the Net Zero fantasies embedded in its 2021 “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap; the IEA duly reintroduced its Current Policies Scenario, quietly shelving two decades of advocacy dressed up as forecasting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has led the same campaign more bluntly still with respect to the Bretton Woods twin institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The Treasury Secretary told the IMF and World Bank that fossil fuels remain critical for developing nations and, reading between the lines, that the eco-zealots’ stranglehold on global finance had to end. Last October, Bessent told the World Bank directly to refocus on affordable energy, poverty reduction and country self-reliance; by this April he was warning the IMF that “mission creep” into climate, gender and social issues had left it disconnected from its core mandate.
Both institutions seem to have started moves to comply with these marching orders from their most powerful stakeholder. The World Bank formally abandoned its target of directing 45% of lending to climate causes only last month, a retreat which Reuters reported followed months of pressure from Bessent personally. The IMF, for its part, is folding its climate and gender units into a single office focused on core macro-financial work, eliminating what Bessent called “extraneous, non-core issues” from its board work programme.
The actions of key Trump officials such as Scott Bessent and Energy Secretary Chris Wright seek to reverse what amounts to a long march of climate activism through the institutions founded to fight poverty and stabilise the international monetary system, not to remake the global energy mix in the image of Whitehall’s and Brussels’ green priesthood. The same instinct – that Western institutions had been captured from within by a narrow progressive elite indifferent to the people they nominally serve – animated Vice President J.D. Vance’s Munich Security Conference address in February 2025, a speech aimed at European governance broadly but which set the tone for everything that has followed at the IEA, the World Bank and the IMF.
Enter the climate zealot
Miliband declared that his elevation would send “an unambiguous signal” of Britain’s climate leadership, never mind the folly of such an enterprise for a country responsible for less than 1% of global carbon emissions. Lord Nicholas Stern – the leading climate alarmist economist who authored the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change – predictably welcomed the move as a signal that would resonate “powerfully” internationally. No one who has followed Miliband’s career should be surprised. Ed Miliband has spent nearly two decades ratcheting up Britain’s climate commitments, from the 2008 Climate Change Act he shepherded as Gordon Brown’s Climate Secretary through to the legally binding 2050 Net Zero target and the windfall taxes that have throttled North Sea production.
His tenure at the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is defined by an economic illiteracy borrowed wholesale from his favourite economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “mission-oriented” industrial policy. Miliband’s doubling-down instinct has persisted even as the IPCC’s own high-emissions scenarios were quietly abandoned as unrealistic. His successor at DESNZ, Miatta Fahnbulleh, offers no meaningful change of direction and the real question is whether she will be “as mad as Ed Miliband”, not whether Britain’s Net Zero trajectory will bend under this new Burnham Government. What has changed is the stage. Miliband now carries his climate maximalism from a domestic arena that voters can eventually punish at the ballot box into an unelected international board seat at the World Bank precisely at the moment Washington is dragging that institution back toward energy realism.
A green activist in Downing Street
Miliband’s elevation cannot be separated from who put him there. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, the former Manchester mayor now installed in Downing Street, is himself an enthusiastic green activist, insisting there should be “no turning away from Net Zero”, even as households across Britain buckle under energy bills inflated substantially by that same agenda. While the UK Government’s overseas aid will fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2029, and climate finance itself has already been cut by 14% – it doubles down on the rhetoric. That combination, cutting the cheques while intensifying the sermon, is entirely of a piece with a governing instinct that treats climate virtue as costless because someone else, eventually, pays the bill: the British consumer at home, the World Bank’s other shareholders abroad. Burnham and Miliband are not an odd pairing but a matched set, each reinforcing the other’s conviction that Net Zero orthodoxy is not up for renegotiation, whatever Washington or the British electorate might think.
Collision course with Washington
None of this bodes well for the transatlantic relationship. Donald Trump could barely tolerate Sir Keir Starmer; he will find still less to like in a Downing Street occupied by an unapologetic green activist and a Foreign Secretary who has spent a decade insulting him. Miliband once called Trump a “racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper”, a line that resurfaced painfully when BBC Breakfast’s Jon Kay put it back to him on air and Miliband could only mutter that he had “said some things in the past”. Trump allies have not let the appointment pass quietly: Steve Bannon told the Telegraph the choice was “very injurious” to the special relationship, and the White House was reportedly “deeply concerned” well before the appointment was confirmed.
President Trump has shown before that he can forgive past insults, but as one commentator observed, Miliband may yet have to “bend the knee” much as the ill-starred Peter Mandelson did in describing his own past attacks on Trump as “ill-judged and wrong” before taking up his short-lived Washington ambassadorship – a piece of public grovelling that Miliband, given his temperament and his convictions, seems far less suited to replicate.
The deeper problem is not personal but structural. Miliband’s record gives Washington plenty of substantive grounds for concern beyond old insults: he has been a vocal opponent of new North Sea drilling and, as one commentator noted, led opposition within government to the US use of Diego Garcia for American bombers – hardly the profile of a British Foreign Secretary Washington would have preferred. Washington’s entire strategy at the World Bank and IMF has been to strip out precisely the climate mandate creep that Miliband now intends to reassert from his new perch. A British Foreign Secretary who arrives at the Bank’s board table determined to reverse Bessent’s hard-won progress is not merely an awkward diplomatic footnote; he is a direct challenge to the declared policy of the United States Government, delivered by a minister with no shortage of past provocations already on the record. Add a Prime Minister who seems unlikely to countenance any retreat from Net Zero, and the ingredients are in place for a genuinely fractious chapter in US-UK relations – one considerably more consequential than the everyday friction of allied governments who happen to disagree.
The British Government appears not to have noticed the ground has already shifted beneath it. The IEA, the World Bank and the IMF are, however fitfully, rediscovering their founding purposes under American pressure. Miliband’s determination to drag the World Bank back the other way, backed by a Prime Minister who shares his convictions, suggests Britain is about to find out just how much leverage a single governor’s seat still carries against the wishes of the institution’s largest shareholder – and just how much patience Washington has left for a government that keeps choosing the losing side of that argument.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic‘s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO₂ Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.
No Action to be Taken Against Polanski Over Farage T-Shirt Image
The Metropolitan Police has confirmed it will take no further action against Green Party leader Zack Polanski over his sharing of an image joking about beheading Nigel Farage, ruling the post “unlikely” to constitute a criminal offence. The Met has, however, referred the individual wearing the offensive T-shirt to Avon and Somerset Police, stating a crime “should be recorded” against him. The Telegraph has the story:
On Wednesday evening, the Metropolitan Police said it would take no further action against Mr Polanski for sharing the image, since it was “unlikely” to constitute a criminal offence.
The force added that Mr Polanski had not seen the image in question, and that any criminal investigation would apply to 130 people and organisations that also shared it.
However, the Met has referred the person wearing the T-shirt to Avon and Somerset Police, arguing that a crime “should be recorded” against them.
Any further action would be a matter for the West Country force.
A Met Police spokesperson said: “We absolutely understand the reaction to this image being shared online, particularly in the context of increasing threats towards politicians.
“We take the safety and security of those in public life, including politicians, very seriously. Where we identify threats, we take appropriate action and where there is evidence of offences we will investigate.
“While there will be people who will argue that those who shared the image in this Instagram post should be subject to criminal action, our review has concluded that on this occasion, the threshold is not met.
“We have spoken with those impacted to explain that decision-making and to provide reassurance around our ongoing commitment to their security and the additional support available.”
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Reform has accused the Met of ‘two tier policing’ over its refusal to investigate Zack Polanski. The Telegraph has more.
Is Axel Rudakubana Making Fools of His Jailers?
Last week, our state authorities turned one of Britain’s most notorious child murderers into a victim to be pitied rather than punished. Axel Rudakubana – the son of Rwandan migrants who, in a fit of Islamist-inspired rage, slaughtered three young girls and attempted to butcher 10 others – was transferred from Belmarsh high security prison to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital under the Mental Health Act. Among other things, he will now have access to a state-of-the-art gym, an on-site café and a swimming pool, and all for the princely sum of £300,000 per annum, instead of the £60,000 it costs to keep him incarcerated at Belmarsh. Perhaps these amenities will transform him back into the angelic Welsh choirboy he was purported to be before his orgiastic descent into bloodlust and violence. Or perhaps they will provide a degree of luxury for an irredeemable monster with a long history of manipulating the credulous.
I suspect the latter, as do the families of the little girls so cruelly taken from them. Prior to his sentencing last year, the court found that a mental disorder was not responsible for his actions. One might therefore reasonably wonder what has changed. Furthermore, the Southport Public Inquiry claimed that before the attack there were “strong indications” that Rudakubana had researched “mental health explanations and defences that might be available to him following a criminal prosecution”. This points to an individual well-versed in manipulating a system mired in progressive groupthink – a system that views perpetrators as victims and, in the process, callously ignores the bereaved (the real victims) and sneers at their pleas for justice.
This is the latest act in a morality play that exposes the perverse and iniquitous consequences of the radical Left’s malign capture of the British state. Rudakubana took a knife to school on 10 separate occasions, attacked a pupil with a hockey stick and searched school shootings in America during an ICT lesson. In what world does this catalogue of warnings go without meaningful intervention? He had just one conviction. One! Despite carrying a knife into school on 10 separate occasions. Furthermore, when Joanne Hodson, his former headteacher, described him as “sinister”, “cold and calculating”, she was swiftly rebuked and accused of racially profiling “a black boy with a knife” by an unnamed health worker. The accusation silenced Hodson. This amoral refusal to see Rudakubana as anything other than a victim is not only axiomatic of the liberal-Left’s warped vision of criminal justice; it is also the reason why three little girls were butchered. Radical progressivism kills.
It also maims. Last year Rudakubana allegedly threw boiling water over a prison officer – I suspect because, as the President of the Prison Governors’ Association admitted, prisoners are allowed to boil water in their cells. Bless them. Let’s not worry about the safety of the wardens, eh, as long as the prisoners, even the violent animals guilty of the most unspeakable crimes, get to make a brew. They’ve been let down by society, after all. They at least deserve a mug of Tetley’s.
And then we come to the biggest state failure of all: the fact that he was in the country in the first place. How and why were his Rwandan parents, not long after the brutalising experience of the 1994 genocide, allowed to come here, set up home – no doubt supported by the welfare state – and raise a child to become a mass murderer? And why are they now living in anonymity at great expense to the taxpayers traumatised and endangered by their feckless parenting? These questions have yet to be asked, let alone answered, by the political class. The truth is inconvenient. Suicidal empathy invited them here and suicidal empathy continues to indulge them, mixed with a large dollop of national self-loathing. They are the victims; we the oppressors.
Axel Rudakubana’s story reveals a disturbing reality. The British state has been captured wholesale by the radical Left. His parents were admitted by an immigration system that fetishises the migrant and demonises the native. The school, healthcare and criminal justice systems, moreover, indulged him at every turn, treating him as a victim to be coddled and pampered rather than a disturbed young man needing punishment and isolation for the safety of the wider community. The state has blood on its hands.
This piece first appeared on Joe Baron’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here.
The German Establishment is so Desperate to Crush the AfD it has Developed an AI ‘Racist Uncle’ and Sent it into Schools for Children to Debate
Täteropferumkehr is the German term for “victim blaming” – often hyphenated as Täter-Opfer-Umkehr to make it look slightly less clunky. In recent times, our political and media establishment have turned it into a sharp tool, employed with reference to both foreign and domestic politics.
Unsurprisingly, Germany’s woke lLeft – always eager to champion the alleged plight of the “oppressed” – views Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, as the ultimate perpetrator, while framing bloodthirsty Arab aggressors as the true victims. In 2025, five Berlin-based “activists” (four of whom openly identify as “they/them”) ransacked an Elbit Systems facility in Ulm, causing over a million euros in damage. Now standing trial in Stuttgart, they naturally view themselves as the victims.
One wonders what would happen if “roller-skating” Daniel, “music-making” Crow, “poetry-writing” Leandra, “community-organising” Vi, and “nature-loving” Zo were dropped onto the shores of Gaza. Would “they/them” receive a warm welcome from Hamas? The non-binary inmates might have gleaned an inkling of what radical Islamists have in store for them following the Islamist attack on the Berlin Pride parade last Saturday.
On the domestic front, we see an equally Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The one political party that has been systematically cut off from public funding, denied committee chairs, pilloried behind a political Brandmauer (“firewall”), and whose members suffer the lion’s share of physical assaults is routinely portrayed as the sole perpetrator. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is ceaselessly accused of peddling racism, revisionism and Russophilia – to name just a few of the slurs slung its way by the goody-two-shoes gatekeepers of the moral high ground.
The siren song of establishment polity, legacy media and state-funded NGOs has increasingly been amplified in secondary schools. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, one in five schools belongs to the taxpayer-funded “School Without Racism” network, backed by a leftist teachers’ union. Where these funds actually go is often opaque, but the encouraged “activism” almost always targets “Right-wing extremism” – which, in modern German parlance, simply means campaigning against the AfD.
Currently, state and federal authorities are in a panic over the prospect of the AfD winning an outright majority in upcoming state elections. Polls show support for the maligned party hovering above 40% in Saxony-Anhalt, which could easily translate into a parliamentary majority. Reiner Haseloff, a former Minister-President of the state, even resorted to scaremongering, hinting that secondary school diplomas from Saxony-Anhalt might no longer be recognised in other parts of Germany if the “wrong” party wins.
Often, the anti-AfD machinery operates more subtly. Before the last local elections, municipal authorities displayed posters and information for all mayoral candidates in my school’s foyer – well, almost all. The AfD candidate was conspicuously missing. When I asked the election official about this glaring omission, I was told the local AfD had failed to respond to the municipality’s request for information. When a colleague followed up with the local AfD branch, they confirmed they had never been contacted in the first place.
But the most ludicrous example of state-sponsored indoctrination in my area is an AI robot named “Navel”. Developed by a PhD student at the local university in cahoots with the largely taxpayer-funded “Active Museum South-Westphalia”, the robot was programmed to impersonate a “racist uncle” at a family reunion, spouting anti-immigrant talking points. Secondary school students were encouraged to “spar” with the divisive Dalek to hone their skills in rebutting Right-wing thought. To make the exercise even more absurd, the robot is built to look like a toddler and wears a woolly cap to “humanise” it.
Yet, despite the vast sums of money, resources and personnel poured into this apparatus by governments and their ‘civil society’ allies, the desired outcome remains elusive. Marcel Fratzscher, a favourite economist of the establishment Left, recently lamented in Die Zeit that young men in particular are turning to the populist right because they “feel like losers of modernisation”. His grim conclusion: “There is little remedy.”
So what does it mean when the concerted effort of the righteous left cannot turn the tide of sustained AfD support? Perhaps the commentariat, the wokerati and the creator of the unwittingly ironically named AI uncle “Navel” should engage less in navel-gazing and doublethink and more in recognising reality. Israel – not Hamas – is our ally; the AfD is a party like all others, entitled to the same privileges; and children in school must not be indoctrinated.
Perhaps we should send “Navel” to the “they/them” lot in jail for some instructive lessons. But they might refuse to engage with him so long as he declines to share his pronouns.
The author is a teacher at a German secondary school.
The Daily Sceptic Has Hit One Million Comments Since 2020
Who would have thought six years ago that this website would attract a million comments, a milestone it reached last night? When Lockdown Sceptics was started in April 2020 it combined a very serious and urgent cause with some rather light-hearted subjects and reader involvement. The serious cause was of course the Covid panic in all its glory. Being a lockdown sceptic was at that time very much a minority viewpoint – almost seditious, and certainly not one which any of the mainstream media outlets would allow you to espouse.
As comments on the site quickly proliferated, Toby needed moderators to keep things vaguely in check. The volume of comments that were moderated at that time told us that many more people were sceptical when in a sympathetic forum than they were in more established media, or even among their friends.
The light-hearted subjects were the start of moderating in earnest – many comments on a huge range of topics which had been set by readers, far more comments on any given day than is the case now. I’m guessing hundreds of comments each day and about a dozen moderators to oversee it.
In among the serious cause, and alongside the LS team’s great efforts to persuade serious writers to provide material, the site carried sections like ‘Love in a Covid Climate’, which attempted to be some form of dating site. We also had ‘Postcards from around the World’, which if nothing else reminded the imprisoned masses that there was a much bigger world still out there, even if it was only available to those whom governments would allow to travel.
The moderating team was busy, keeping things reasonably clean, stopping Toby being slung into jail and generally encouraging everyone to ‘Question Everything’, ‘Stay Sane’ and ‘Live Free’.
After about 18 months we morphed into the Daily Sceptic, at which point Covid was still a primary focus, with the Net Zero scam and woke behaviour added later. The site had survived being a rebellious upstart and seemed to become a little more grown up; the volume of comments slimmed down a bit, and commenters’ behaviour by and large improved. And that trend has continued until the present.
We know some of you dislike moderators because we sit in judgement on what you write. That’s a very understandable and healthy line to take, given that the Free Speech Union is our sister ship. Some think the moderators run an Old Boys Club expressly for the purpose of sniping at female commenters, which is hogwash. And yet others thank us for the odd bit of help with spelling, grammar or technology. But mainly we hope that you don’t even notice our presence as moderators and certainly don’t feel that we are breathing down your neck. We try to exercise a light touch when reviewing your comments.
Very early on in the life of Lockdown Sceptics, Toby had come up with his admirably succinct editorial policy in relation to comments and it has served us well:
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Have there been permanent bans? Yes. Our protocol is to engage with offenders, point out what we don’t like and why, warn them and then, if they take no notice, ban – a rare occurrence.
Have we given warnings which have been heeded? Yes, I’m pleased to say.
What is the hardest thing we have to moderate? Well, that would probably be whenever freedom of speech is invoked – it is precious to us too, but we are also looking over our shoulders at the reputation of the site.
We allow a lot of freedom, but unless we really have to, we don’t allow through words which will trigger algorithms that could lead to the site being banned by internet browsers or the daily newsletter being blocked by email servers.
For a long time before the DS became an accepted part of life and Toby became ennobled, we moderated words which could make us look like fringe Right-wing nut-jobs and thereby an easy target for the popular Press to ridicule.
Thanks to people like Frisby, Kisin, Pearson, Peterson and Murray, it is now much more difficult for the Thought Police to shut down Right-wing views and commentary. And hearing the Starmer anthem sung at football matches will forever represent the time when the people spoke truth to power without fear of 31-month prison sentences.
He really must be a w****r to think that banging Connolly up wouldn’t blow up in his face.
There is still far too much hate crime nonsense, cancellation and no-platforming, but at least our arguments can get published now.
Which subject produces the biggest demand for moderation? Almost certainly on the DS, it’s Palestine. The views are entrenched; commenters aren’t always split along Left-Right lines, so there are attacks from both sides. The language is as strong as the feelings. Toby is well known as a supporter of Israel and the subject just seems to light a blue touch paper.
Can moderators be bribed? Certainly; we have an account at Berry Bros & Rudd for just that purpose. I’d publish the account number if I thought the moderators would allow it…
A thank you to all our commenters for over six years of insight, argument, humour, support and mainly polite behaviour.
News Round-Up
- “Green Hackney mayor gave Israeli city October 7th deadline to respond to twinning move” – Hackney Council mayor Zoe Garbett told her counterpart in Haifa that the town hall was seeking to end the twinning relationship, with a deadline set for October 7th, reports Rachael Burford in the Standard.
- “Hackney’s Green mayor is not even trying to hide her disdain for Jews” – Zoë Garbett’s decision to set an October 7th deadline to discuss ending Hackney’s twinning with an Israeli city is a detail that reveals the depth of her contempt, writes Stephen Pollard in the Telegraph.
- “Scores arrested at London Palestine Action demo as founder told she can challenge ban” – Dozens of demonstrators were arrested outside Westminster Magistrates Court before it emerged that Palestine Action’s co-founder has been given permission by the Supreme Court to challenge the Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold the Home Office’s proscription of the group, report Matt Watts and Rachael Burford in the Standard.
- “Labour plots £18 billion council tax raid” – Labour is planning an £18bn tax raid on millions of families across England, according to the Telegraph.
- “Diane Abbott readmitted to Labour” – The Hackney MP, who was suspended under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership in 2025 following an antisemitism row, has been welcomed back into the party, says the Telegraph.
- “US launches ‘powerful’ retaliatory strikes against Iran” – The United States has launched fresh strikes on Iran lasting around two hours after President Trump vowed to give Tehran a “beating”, reports the Times.
- “Record reoffending after 70,000 prisoners released early” – Almost a third of those freed under Labour’s early-release scheme have gone on to reoffend, reveals the Telegraph.
- “Migrants storm EU border: moment hundreds charge up beaches” – Thousands of migrants have entered the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta by sea in recent days as officials declare a total emergency, writes Imogen Garfinkel in the Mail.
- “Reform reports lawyer to police over ‘terrorist’ protest comment” – Glasgow MSP Thomas Kerr has reported Left-wing lawyer Aamer Anwar to the police, claiming his remarks about anti-immigration protesters, branding them ‘fascists’, went “beyond robust political debate”, says the Times.
- “Reform’s rocket fuel has been exhausted – it now needs to chart the right course” – In the Telegraph, David Frost argues the party must now move beyond insurgent energy and set a credible governing course.
- “Cambridge is coming out very badly from the Jason Arday affair” – In the Spectator, Andrew Tettenborn argues that Cambridge’s handling of the controversy over Professor Jason Arday – whose doctoral thesis contains remarkable similarities to other works – raises serious questions about the university’s integrity.
- “University lecturer sacked and branded ‘misogynistic’ after calling women ‘females’” – An employment tribunal has ruled that Derby University did not breach its free speech obligations by dismissing lecturer Russell Cherrington for describing women as “females”, reports Peter Stevens in GB News.
- “If Labour chooses ‘skills’ over knowledge, children will suffer” – Cognitive science has demonstrated that critical thinking depends on extensive memorised information rather than internet searches, which means Labour’s plans to downgrade knowledge in favour of skills could have catastrophic consequences, writes Nick Gibb in the Telegraph.
- “Biohacker Bryan Johnson confesses he may have ‘taken things too far’” – Having built a global reputation trying to cheat death through science, only to then get an incurable disease, Bryan Johnson has now admitted he may have “taken this whole longevity thing too far”, reports Xantha Leatham in the Mail.
- “‘Out of control’ Suffolk wildfire grows as ‘no risk’ to power plant” – A blaze on Dunwich Heath is spreading towards Sizewell B nuclear power station, roughly 2.5 miles away, as holidaymakers are evacuated, says Olivia Christie in the Mail.
- “Andy Burnham says Britain ‘can’t ignore’ the North Sea” – Andy Burnham has signalled he is ready to ditch Ed Miliband’s Net Zero stance, revealing he told Donald Trump he would take a “pragmatic approach” to fossil fuels, writes Greg Heffer in the Mail.
- “Net Zero scepticism is not climate-change denial” – In the Telegraph, Kemi Badenoch argues that conflating scepticism about Net Zero policy with climate change denial is a fundamental error that stifles legitimate debate.
- “Swap books for Kindles to hit Net Zero, government advisers say” – Government advisers have recommended that readers ditch printed books in favour of e-readers as part of Britain’s push to reach Net Zero, reports the Telegraph.
- “BBC new drama The Rapture used climate change storytelling consultants” – In her Substack, Charlotte Gill reveals that the BBC’s new drama The Rapture was shaped behind the scenes by Climate Spring, a well-funded organisation dedicated to embedding climate change narratives in popular culture.
- “US extreme weather and climate change dashboard” – On his Substack, Roger Pielke Jr. unveils a new dashboard tracking the relationship between US extreme weather and climate change.
- “The great church sell-off: how Britons are turning them into homes” – Dwindling congregations and soaring repair bills are driving more former places of worship onto the property market, though conversion comes with its own challenges, notes the Times.
- “Santander faces legal action over three-day office mandate” – Staff at Santander are pursuing legal action after the bank attempted to require its new TSB workforce to attend the office three days a week, reports the Times.
- “Inquiry after BA jet stalls over London on approach to Heathrow” – Air accident investigators are examining a serious incident in which a British Airways passenger jet stalled over London while approaching Heathrow, says the Times.
- “The guga hunt ban is a brutal act of colonialism” – The campaign to ban the traditional Hebridean guga hunt amounts to mainland cultural colonialism against a tight-knit island community that has practised it for centuries, writes John MacLeod in the Telegraph.
- “Sophie Cunningham’s common sense” – Basketball player Sophie Cunningham’s straightforward declaration that “young girls in sport shouldn’t have to go against biological men” was met with a media shrug – a sign of how rapidly the debate has shifted, writes Kat Rosenfield in the Free Press.
- “Well done FA and Uefa for standing up against shameless Infantino” – Threatening a World Cup boycott was the only fitting response to Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s brazenness over his sell-off plans, and he should now resign, says Jim White in the Telegraph.
- “Fauci twisted arms and misrepresented data in single-minded drive to mandate Covid vaccines, his diary shows” – On the Public Substack, Alex Gutentag reveals that Anthony Fauci’s private diaries show he knew natural immunity worked and that vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission, even as he pushed mandates.
- “RFK Jr. reveals the single most disturbing thing he discovered in Anthony Fauci’s diaries” – RFK Jr. drops a bombshell: Fauci suffered from myocardial infarction, a potentially deadly side effect, after he took the Covid vaccine.
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