This is an edited extract from ‘In Defence of Populism’ by Frank Furedi, published with permission. In recent times I have been struck by the frequency with which common sense serves as a target of scorn by educators, especially in universities. It is also treated with contempt by the cultural elites in the media. Common […]
At midnight on May 4, 1926, the General Strike began. In Blackburn, William Woodruff’s family ‘sat in silence in our kitchen, holding their breath, waiting for the revolution to begin’. Instead, Britain’s trade unions suffered total defeat. These unions had been growing in power before World War I, but this coincided with a relative weakening […]
To egalitarians, anything that rises above the average, be it wealth or exceptional beauty, is questionable. And, as in the economic and social spheres, this is another area in which they expect the state to intervene with regulations and bans. Heather Widdows, whose book ‘Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal’ was published in 2018, […]
Economic comparisons have been made in recent months with the 1970s, with fears of an energy crisis and talk of stagflation. But it’s worth focusing instead on the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s and the sea-change that then gripped the economy, with enterprise, home ownership, risk-taking and a can-do attitude to the fore. While many […]
Vikor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian elections was not surprising, but it was profound. This was the failure of an idea: a decisive public rejection of the fruits of sixteen years of postliberal politics. Orbán had reimagined the state on illiberal lines, destroying the checks and balances which had been a feature of the country’s […]
George Orwell wrote his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ a year after the end of the Second World War. He showed how the ‘debasement of language’ corrupts thought and, in the process, corrupts our politics. The standard view is that economic and political causes drive the decline of language. But the reality, as […]
Hostilities have a way of flushing out unpleasant truths. The Iran campaign has done just that. Never mind the outbursts from the Oval Office, or the legalism of the ‘international community’. What has been revealed this side of the pond is a country bereft of sovereignty, thoughtlessly outsourced since the Second World War. While Brexit […]
Friedrich Hayek has been accused of many things. His fans have eulogised him as the greatest 20th-century philosopher of classical liberalism, as a deep thinker who exposed the innate flaws in planned economies and who provided the intellectual foundation for the reform programmes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. His detractors have called him an […]
If you’re under the age of 53, no human being has ever left low Earth orbit in your lifetime. Just nine spaceflights, all under the Apollo Program, took human beings beyond Earth orbit at all. And they all took place in a four-year burst between December 1968 and December 1972. Tonight, NASA attempts to change […]
Over the past year, my pastime has been defending Americans from Ofcom, the UK’s internet censorship agency, while parrying demands from regulators in Australia, the EU and Brazil. Most readers will know about this work because of a cartoon hamster. That hamster, sent in a letter to Ofcom on behalf of my client 4chan, illustrated […]
Kristian Niemietz of the Institute of Economic Affairs recently wrote, ‘How do commies sustain the illusion that they’re edgy rebels when everyone celebrates them and cheers them on?’ He was referring to Hasan Piker’s appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscars Party red carpet – a man who has said ‘America deserved 9/11, dude’, and is […]
Iran’s strike on Ras Laffan this week was not just an attack on Qatar, but on one of the most important energy hubs on the planet. In this extract from his book ‘Material World’, Ed Conway explains why this vast LNG complex matters so much – and why damage there could reverberate through gas markets, […]
On Wednesday mornings in my little rural village in Hampshire, I have two options for a morning coffee. The first is the charming community café, freshly ensconced in the village hall, which is a cross-generational space where my teenage daughter serves coffee to our octogenarian neighbours, and which I happen to love. The second is […]
For the past eight and a half years, I’ve lived in Buenos Aires. Which means that every day for what is now nearly a decade, someone back home has sent me a hysterical headline about the mind-boggling fluctuations of Argentina’s economy. For the longest time, these headlines were nothing but doom and gloom. ‘Peso Collapse […]
This week marks the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’. At the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), we have naturally been busy celebrating the masterwork’s semiquincentennial. Talks have been held, even graphic novels scribbled. Most importantly, pieces have appeared this week in CapX, written by […]
From Alexander the Great to Benjamin Franklin, nations and empires have long imprinted on their currency the likenesses of their most respected luminaries. It projects power, influence and most importantly, immortalises historical legacy. Who knows this better in the modern age than us Britons? Go to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of the Caribbean, […]
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