Outside In

I’ve been meaning to blog for a couple of days now on the absurd suggestion by the Royal College of Physicians that people should be banned from smoking in their own cars, regardless of whether they have anyone in the car with them or not. As usual, the protective shield…

A fascinating story today in the Telegraph, about millionaire businessman and founder of the Kwik Save chain of supermarkets, Albert Gubay, who has given away the vast majority of his fortune to charity in order to ‘fulfill a pact he had made with God’. In short, devout Roman Catholic Gubay,…

This is an article I have produced for ResPublica’s blog, the Disraeli Room. “Without power, you are pointless” Thus one glimpses the ideological point upon which William Brett’s recent article ‘Bring Back the Machine’ pivots. And, accepting for the moment the immanentised ethic upon which the assertion rests, one can concede…

Jon Cruddas has an interesting article in the Guardian today, offering some opinions on the toxic legacy bequeathed the nation by Margaret Thatcher, or more accurately her neo-liberal economic approach (Hayek, Chicago School, etc. etc.). As even the quickest glance at the comments will show, the commenters remain unimpressed –…

A few months ago I began writing about ‘social conservatism’ and the Labour tradition, and the ruckus currently taking place with those social liberals who like to call themselves ‘progressive’, and those who aren’t quite signed up to the whole project and are therefore labelled, by the ‘progressives’, as ‘social…

A post here from Tom Harris today who argues that ‘progressives’ are ill-at-ease in the Tory Party, and naturally belong in the Labour movement, whose raison d’etre is at one with the ‘progressive’ agenda. You’ll have to read the post yourself to witness the crudeness of the caricatures, but needless…

Here’s an article of mine that has just been put up on the new ResPublica blog (“the Disraeli Room”) – read it here. Or, if link-clicking isn’t your thing… There can be little doubt that the most fashionable idea in contemporary political debate is that of ‘localism’. It is an…

Quite often one comes across a totemic issue that not only seems ill-suited to the tradition in which it has nested, but also seems to go against everything it is that particular tradition proclaims itself to stand for. And it seems to me that, for the left, the ‘Living Wage’…

It is finally becoming evident that the free-marketeers want anything but free markets. Indeed, if recent events are anything to go by, it rather seems that free-marketeers are in fact committed to nothing less than the absolute liberty of the biggest and strongest to go about distorting and perverting the…

A wonderfully written piece here by A. N. Wilson who, whilst not my usual cup of tea, captures the pernicious consequences of dehumanised capitalism, cherished of neo-liberal economists and ‘free-marketeers’ alike, brilliantly well.  As I’m sure you’ll agree, he makes a better fist of articulating the wider problem than Douglas…