DEBATE: Does the shift in police attitudes threaten British society? March 30, 2020 Does the shift in police attitudes threaten Britain’s free society after this crisis is over? YES, says Matt Kilcoyne, deputy director of the Adam Smith Institute. Our police keep us safe by consent. Overreach by rogue forces risks more than criminalising vast swathes of our society, it risks the very principle of our civilian police [...]
Climate activists: Prepare to win the peace after the coronavirus war March 27, 2020 Winston Churchill may have won the war, but Clement Attlee won the peace. The pill that Churchill swallowed was bittered by the fact that his victory had paved the way for Attlee’s. Without the spirit forged by the collective efforts of wartime, there would have been little appetite to build Attlee’s welfare state when peace [...]
By restricting free speech, we risk sleepwalking towards a tyranny worthy of Orwell March 12, 2020 In an unpublished preface to Animal Farm, discovered amongst the author’s papers in 1972, George Orwell argued that: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” In the last two weeks, we have twice been given reason to question what our liberty is [...]
Keep calm and drink Yorkshire Tea until the Twitter storm blows over February 27, 2020 Another day, another Twitter pile-on. This time, the warriors of social justice turned their ire on homely hot-drink merchants Yorkshire Tea. Their equally voluble online opponents rallied to its defence. Why? Because Yorkshire Tea had the temerity to be, unbeknownst to them, our new chancellor’s choice of brew. Or, more precisely, the drink selected by [...]
Tesla’s short-selling critics do not have to be rewarded to be right February 17, 2020 Short-selling, or shorting, is the act of betting against a company’s stock. If the share price goes down, the short-seller makes money. If the share price goes up, they lose it. It is the most rhetorical of investments. A short position is a statement of a belief: a minority opinion held against the will of [...]
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is fuelling the toxic media discourse she so despises October 29, 2019 At a US congressional hearing last week, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – the leading light of the 2018 Democratic intake – confronted Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg was supposedly attending the hearing to discuss libra, Facebook’s nascent digital currency, now facing considerable legislative pressure. In five blistering minutes, Ocasio-Cortez widened her aim, taking him to [...]
Reality is finally catching up with overblown Silicon Valley rhetoric September 26, 2019 Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the backbone of a classical education. Today the term is more often pejorative: rhetoric is found wherever reality isn’t. No fantasy, however, can be long sustained. If rhetoric is to deliver its original purpose and persuade, it cannot escape reality for long. So Silicon Valley is discovering. For over [...]
