We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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It follows from this that digital ID could easily function as a permissions system. The computer might say No, leaving John unable to hire the car or buy the wine. That could be the result of an administrative error or technical glitch but, by the time the issue was resolved, John’s plans would have been cancelled. But it could also be due to the cancellation of his digital ID, a possibility the Government makes explicit in the consultation, explaining it would need the power to revoke someone’s digital ID.
Speaking at the Parliamentary committee, insider-outsider Whitley said that the system envisaged for the right-to-work checks was one in which permissions for other activities, such as buying alcohol, could be switched off and on at will.
– Alex Klaushofer
I’ve said before that the belief authoritarian politics is popular rests heavily on issue-based polling, filtered through a professional class reacting against the provincial, small-c conservatism of their childhood. This has causality backwards, the curtain-twitcher is mocked because busybody enforcement offends British social instinct. The nosy neighbour survives as a figure of comedy precisely because such behaviour is aberrant. British manners default to mind your own business: people do not discuss their salary, do not trumpet credentials, and do not boast, because doing so is considered gauche and intrusive. Most contemporary prohibitions (speech codes, licensing creep, online safety rules, public-health) are not therefore demanded by the masses banging pots and pans for more regulation.
Reform UK has mostly avoided authoritarian posturing so far. Euroscepticism was inherently libertarian, which is why UKIP attracted voters who valued “boozy, defensive liberty.” Some worried Tory defectors might import paternalism, so it matters that Reform draws a clear line: there’s a difference between performative power-worship and simply expecting crime to be punished and public order maintained.
Reform policymakers should recognise that this is a rare political window. Unpopular authoritarian measures are increasingly being associated in the public’s mind with Keir Starmer himself, and opportunities like that do not come along often.
If there is ever a moment to argue for rolling back the frontiers of the state, whether on speed limits, smoking restrictions, firearms licensing, or freedom of speech, it is when public frustration and moral indignation are already doing half the work for you.
– Felix Hardinge
Offshore wind provides the bulk of electricity generation under the CfD scheme. Even with today’s elevated gas prices, the reference prices in March 2026 (£77/MWh) were much lower than the current strike prices of projects awarded contracts in AR6 (£88/MWh) and AR7 (£97/MWh). Onshore wind strike prices are slightly lower and those for solar much lower. But these projects produce trivial amounts of electricity compared to offshore wind, so we can expect subsidies to keep rising and bills to go ever higher.
Labour’s announcement that it will scrap the Carbon Price Support mechanism in April 2028 is a welcome, if tardy, intervention that will reduce wholesale electricity prices and hence reference prices. However, this means that CfD-funded generators will simply collect more of their revenue from subsidies rather than the market.
Conclusions
Even with elevated gas prices, CfD subsidies are soaring and the outlook is that Miliband’s AR6 and AR7 auctions are going to send bills even higher. This has not stopped Ember putting out another shonky report that tortures the data to produce the result they want.
It should be obvious, even to them, if subsidies are being paid to renewables then they are more expensive than gas. With this level of desperation from Ember, we really must be witnessing the dying embers of Net Zero propaganda.
– David Turver
Unfortunately for anyone committed to sticking it out for the next few years, Labour seem to have all but abandoned hope of hanging on to lingering British dynamism. OpenAI recently announced that it would abandon its UK Stargate data centre plans, citing the exorbitant costs of energy and the maddening bureaucratic maze that stands in the way of building anything in Britain. While their competitor, Anthropic, seems open to Starmer’s suggestions to scale up its London presence, this has less to do with British competitiveness and more to do with the American Department of War’s combativeness.
Meanwhile, Skycutter, a domestic drone manufacturer, can’t seem to get a callback, and may now have to painfully decamp to America just to keep flying. As their operations director, Vince Gardner told the BBC, “We want to stay here, this is our home, this is where we’ve developed this technology. We don’t want to leave but the opportunities [in the US] are too great to turn down currently.” It’s not entirely obvious why, despite promised government support, the opportunities for a drone manufacturer would be on the other side of the Atlantic from Ukraine, unless, as Gardner says, any promised support simply seems slower than moving an entire company out of the country.
– Evan Riggs
The reason the Conservative Party is dying, is that they have come to believe that their task is to run the Socialist State more efficiently than Labour.
– Steven Barrett
Hundreds of British girls were raped by grooming gangs while Mr Blair was the prime minister. Of course, this was a more diffuse, less murderous phenomenon than October 7. But it is hard to stomach lectures about what must be done in the face of evil from someone whose government did absolutely nothing. Of course, mistreating innocent people should have been unjustifiable in both cases. But Blair should be the last person to hold forth on “removing threats”.
Anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism are certainly dangerous, but so is Tony Blair, and just as I don’t want to listen to a Wahhabi cleric on Western foreign policy, I don’t want to listen to Blair on Islamism.
Can we pay him to go away? I’ll set up a GoFundMe.
– Ben Sixsmith
The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.
– Jacob Reynolds
The basic justification that Lowe’s online supporters offer for abandoning Reform at precisely the moment when they seem poised to destroy not one but both of the established political parties and usher in a government of a new party for the first time in a century is that the party as a whole, and Nigel Farage in particular, cannot be trusted to deliver on the priorities of the right, especially regarding immigration and demographics.
[…]
This is an attitude which plagues the British Right. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Politics is not a game in which the loser receives a consolation prize and a pat on the back. The stakes now are too high. Either we take power, by whatever means, or we’re done for. A future where there is no right-wing government in 2029 looks incredibly bleak. I do not want to risk backing the weaker horse, especially when its policy is practically identical to that of Reform, just because some of its leaders say the words I want to hear more vehemently and care less about the political impact of doing so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened at the precise moment when the path became clear on both sides for Reform to win a victory at the next election. The desire to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is palpable.
– Pimlico Journal
Read the whole thing.
The British State did not want Birmingham to be portrayed as a “no go zone” for Jews. Instead they submitted fabricated evidence to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group to secure the ban. For example, they falsely attributed to Tel Aviv fans actions taken against them by Muslims in the Netherlands at a previous match. They said Israelis had thrown Muslims into canals, when the truth (as subsequently confirmed by Dutch police) was the precise opposite. Dutch Muslims on an organised “Jew Hunt” (their words not mine) had actually committed the violent acts that English Muslims were threatening.
West Midlands Police offered no evidence to the authorities about the actual threats. With the usual excuse of potential damage to “community relations”, they falsely portrayed the visitors as the danger. “Community relations” with Britain’s Jews or (still less) Britain’s relations with Israel were not a concern, apparently.
Essentially his force was guilty of cowardice. They bowed before a threat of violence. They were too gutless to be honest about it.
– Tom Paine
Soon Brits will need Starlink + VPN to read the news. Like Iran
– Douglas Carswell
And here is where Britain’s particular brand of suicidal virtue-signalling becomes lethal. The Liberal West, and Britain most zealously, has spent fifteen years chasing Net Zero with the fervour of a medieval flagellant. We’ve shuttered coal, dithered on nuclear, blanketed the countryside with unreliable windmills, and now face the grim prospect of energy rationing. The National Grid’s own forecasts admit that data centres alone could consume 7-10% of UK electricity by 2030, and that’s before the real AI boom hits. Microsoft, Google, and the rest are already scrambling for power purchase agreements that dwarf entire cities. Yet our political class still preens about “green leadership” while quietly preparing the public for blackouts and sky-high bills.
– Gawain Towler
Officials with the lowest approval ratings in the world (Macron, Starmer, Merz, Sanchez) are the loudest champions of social media bans for teens and ‘misinformation’ crackdowns.
– Pavel Durov
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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