One of the defining characteristics of a tyrant is his or her unwillingness to be mocked. When the poet Osip Mandelstam poked fun at Stalin’s ‘cockroach whiskers’ and his fingers ‘fatty like worms’ he was exiled and eventually sentenced to five years in a corrective labour camp. Within a year of his imprisonment, he had died of malnutrition and was buried in an unmarked grave.

One might have expected that, given its history, Germany would be especially wary of laws that ringfence politicians from ridicule. Yet in 2021, its government expanded Section 188 of the Criminal Code – aimed at protecting politicians from defamation – so that even crude insults could result in prosecution. This draconian law is why the Free Speech Union is now hoping to launch a branch in Germany.

As with all ‘hate speech’ laws, Section 188 is wide open to exploitation by any politician seeking to suppress dissent. In November 2024, Bavarian police raided the house of retired soldier Stefan Niehoff for a social media post in which he had referred to Robert Habeck, then Germany’s vice-chancellor, as a ‘Schwachkopf’ (dummy). That mild insult was all it took to see his liberties violated by the state.

Such legislation is the equivalent of the lèse-majesté laws that still exist in certain parts of the world, designed to punish subjects who denigrate the king. Countries that retain these laws include Thailand, Cambodia, Jordan, Morocco, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Bhutan. The maximum penalty for insulting the king in Jordan is eerily identical to that prescribed by Section 188 in Germany: a prison sentence of three years.

In Turkey, citizens face similar oppression. Since becoming president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has relied on Article 299 of Turkey’s Penal Code – a previously little-used offence criminalising insults to the president – to investigate and prosecute tens of thousands of his critics. Former beauty queen Merve Büyüksaraç was convicted and received a suspended sentence for reposting on Instagram a satirical poem about the president that she had found funny.

The case of German comic Jan Böhmermann is similarly revealing. In 2016, he had produced a music video which ridiculed Erdoğan. In response, the Turkish government summoned the German ambassador in Ankara to demand that the video be deleted from the internet. Böhmermann in turn responded with a poem that upped the offensiveness tenfold, including references to Erdoğan having sex with goats and sheep. Turkey then requested that Böhmermann be prosecuted under Section 103 of the German Criminal Code, which protected foreign heads of state from insults.

That law was repealed in 2018, but Section 188 remains on the German statute books in its expanded form and is arguably even more authoritarian. A little knowledge of the history of tyranny would not go amiss, and in particular how this kind of legislation has typically been so vaguely worded. Section 188 contains open-ended concepts such as whether a statement is ‘capable of significantly hindering’ a politician’s public work. In the UK, Section 127 of the Communications Act criminalises ‘grossly offensive’ speech, a categorisation that it makes no effort to define.

Such vagueness is not accidental. It enables the authorities to interpret the law expansively, applying it to whatever speech or behaviour they choose to regard as criminal…

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On the very first page of his seminal treatise On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill addresses the ‘struggle between Liberty and Authority’. This simple phrase encapsulates the essence of our present-day culture war, the ‘woke’ movement merely representing the latest manifestation of the authoritarian mindset.

I have been at pains to argue in my articles and books that authoritarianism is the default in human nature. How many societies globally and historically have ever really been free? Even in the rare examples where freedom of speech is enshrined in law, there have always been caveats or exceptions to the principle. The UK is ostensibly a free country, but we have hate speech laws that outlaw certain points of view. No society has ever consistently lived up to wholly liberal principles, and all western political parties are, at present, authoritarian to some degree.

I have always believed that we are better off acknowledging this authoritarian instinct that we share so that we might continually resist it. Creating the conditions for genuine liberty is exceptionally difficult. It requires the gradual development of a civilisation that can uphold it. It requires tradition and inherited knowledge and a sophisticated educational system that can guarantee effective socialisation. More than anything, it requires individual self-awareness and a desire to correct course once we succumb to that universal authoritarian impulse.

With that in mind, here’s my list of five ways to tell if you’re an authoritarian…

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Yesterday saw the anointment of Andy Burnham as our new Prime Minister. He had not worked in parliament for over a decade, has no serious mandate from the public to lead the country, and has been helicoptered in by his colleagues in the hope that he can recover what is left of the reputation of the Labour Party. Given that Keir Starmer has presided over the most authoritarian government in living memory, is it possible that Burnham will see the error of his predecessor’s ways?

The early signs are not good. Burnham has already appointed two staff members from Hope Not Hate, a militant leftist organisation that has a habit of smearing people with mainstream opinions as ‘far right’. And the Telegraph has now revealed that a new report commissioned by the Government Office for Science early this year and published in May could end up influencing the Burnham government’s future direction on online misinformation and issues relating to free speech. It offers a guide to what it calls ‘psychological inoculation’ of the public. In other words, how to play mind games and manipulate the great unwashed into behaving themselves.

If Burnham has any sense at all, he will denounce this report at the earliest opportunity. Its fundamental ethos is illiberal and anti-democratic. It is called False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice, and it was produced by a consortium called Behavioural Research UK. It is without a doubt one of the most chilling and authoritarian documents that has ever been commissioned by a British government. It’s worth looking closely at its contents, because it might well become a roadmap for Burnham’s policies.

The report is Orwellian not simply in its recommendations, but in how it presents itself. The authors repeatedly describe it as an ‘evidence review’, but it actually contains numerous policy recommendations. Perhaps the most egregious is the suggestion that the public should be ‘inoculated’ against misinformation through a process of ‘prebunking’; a sinister euphemism for censorship. It describes prebunking as the ‘first line of defence’. Here is the relevant passage as it appears in the report:

‘Prebunking refers to a broad category of strategies aimed at stopping people from accepting false and misleading information before they encounter it. The most widely employed of these strategies is psychological inoculation, the core idea is that presenting someone with a weakened form of a misleading claim builds psychological resistance against future manipulation. Psychological inoculation typically consists of two elements: alerting someone in advance that their beliefs may come under attack (e.g., “warning: someone might try to influence you by claiming X”), and offering a preemptive counter-argument that undermines the false claim before it takes hold (e.g., “this is misleading, because Y”; van der Linden, 2025).’

The report offers vague guidance to the government on how to psychologically manipulate the public so that it is not susceptible to ‘misinformation’. It does not address the key problem: that ‘misinformation’ is often the term used by those in power to describe information that is accurate but inconvenient. The report does not consider the ethical aspects of treating the public like toddlers who can be tricked into certain modes of behaviour. Moreover, it refuses to specify how the manipulation might work in practice.

Let’s take one of the policy suggestions: ‘Game-based inoculation interventions’. One assumes that this is referring to computer games produced for schools and workplaces. We’ve seen this kind of nonsense from the Labour government before. Back in January, the Telegraph reported on the state-funded Pathways game, aimed at secondary school children and sixth form students, that warned them that questioning mass migration could result in a referral to the counter-terrorism unit.

It features a character called Charlie (pronouns they/them, naturally) who is lured onto the slippery slope of radicalisation by watching online videos. It’s difficult to decide which is more cringemaking: the game itself, or the government’s faith that such overt propaganda will have the desired effect.

We see the same paternalistic philosophy in this recent False and Misleading Information report, an attitude that evidently mirrors that of Burnham’s government…

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Few would deny that the internet both creates and amplifies bad behaviour. In the wake of the death of Ann Widdecombe, I made the mistake of browsing through comments on Facebook. Apparently, for some, the brutal murder of an elderly woman is cause for celebration. I had not realised that I was acquainted with so many sociopaths.

In truth, Facebook is a platform that I rarely use, which means that most of my listed ‘friends’ are those who I knew in the pre-woke era, those halcyon years before so many succumbed to ideological fanaticism. Much of the glee seemed to be coming from comedians and actors I once knew or worked with and who probably wouldn’t speak to me today because I’ve been such a vocal critic of their culture war. Reading the comments, I found myself wondering: were these people always so bigoted and lacking in basic humanity, or have they been curdled and poisoned by the political climate of the day?

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Many others have experienced something similar. The actor Frances Barber, a lifelong Labour voter, posted this week on X: ‘Reading, reluctantly the comments from my so-called friends “on the Left” re Ann Widdecombe. I want absolutely nothing to do with you’. Increasingly, traditional leftists are noticing that there is a serious problem on their own side: a marked lack of empathy when it comes to political opponents.

It is disturbing to see so many of my former friends abandon their humanity for the sake of political point-scoring. If they ever had a moral compass, it has now surely been shattered beyond repair. But why would they do it? The answer might lie in the preponderance of groupthink among those working in the arts, a desperate need to be seen to have the ‘correct’ views in order to advance their careers. It just so happens that the fashionable set of opinions at the moment are those that are anti-liberal and inhumane, gilded with a sheen of counterfeit virtue.

I would like to think that had I asked any of these people, back in the Before Times, whether they could imagine themselves cheering on the killing of a total stranger simply because she did not share their political views, they would all have rejected the possibility. I find it difficult to believe that I could have maintained relationships with anyone who thought otherwise.

I am therefore inclined towards the conclusion that they have simply become so tied to their tribal identity that anyone outside the group has, in their eyes, been delegitimised to the point of irrelevance. They can celebrate Ann Widdecombe’s death in good conscience because those who disagree with them are evil and therefore undeserving of human sympathy. As I have said many times before: ideology rots the soul.

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This is not to say that this does not likewise apply to elements on the right. There have been some appalling comments this week regarding the murder of pro-Palestine activist Jamey Carney by a migrant she had welcomed into her home. While some have argued that the victim’s naivety had put her at risk, a handful of online ghouls have taken pleasure in her demise as proof of her ‘suicidal empathy’. The idea that anyone deserves to die for their beliefs is as repugnant as it gets.

There is, however, an important distinction. Whereas the gloating over the murder of Jamey Carney has largely been confined to the cranks on the right, the equivalent response on the left to Ann Widdecombe’s murder has come from both the crankish and mainstream elements. That is to say, when it comes to the left it is becoming harder to dismiss this as simply the egregious behaviour of a handful of extremists. The acquaintances of mine who are revelling in Ann Widdecombe’s death are not crazed antifa cultists, but recognisably ordinary Labour supporters. And this is the worrying aspect.

I was genuinely shocked by the gloating and victim-blaming on the mainstream left after the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Similarly, in the aftermath of the killing of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, his killer Luigi Mangione was elevated as some kind of hero. More recently, leftists have been tying themselves into contortions to justify the actions of the pro-Palestine activist who struck a female police officer in the spine with a sledgehammer at the Elbit Systems facility in Filton.

Again, I am not surprised when extremists on both sides of the political spectrum reveal their moral bankruptcy. But it is remarkable to see it coming from those who claim to be moderates who are ‘on the right side of history’. I find such hypocrisy and doublethink difficult to comprehend. Anyone in doubt about the extent of the vitriol need only search Ann Widdecombe’s name on Bluesky, a forum for left-leaning social media users that has arguably become the most toxic of all online platforms.

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It goes without saying that those who are currently dancing on Ann Widdecombe’s grave have no idea who she really was. They have concocted a monster of their own imaginations: a folk devil for their tribe. Had they known her personally, they would have realised that she was kind and generous and, unlike the bigots who denounce her, always willing to hear out the other side and engage them in discussion. This is what she said to me during an interview back in 2021 when I asked her about the rise in political tribalism:

‘I have friends from all parts of the political spectrum. I have Catholic friends, Anglican friends, atheist friends, you know, I have gay friends and straight friends and old friends and young friends. And I cannot imagine saying to any of them, I don’t want to be friends with you anymore because you think this. I’d rather discuss why they think that, or if I think they’re too emotional about it, I’ll say, look, let’s just move on and talk about something else.’

How many of her detractors could say the same? During that interview we also discussed the myriad ways in which she had been mischaracterised. She specifically addressed the myth that she had wanted pregnant women in prison to be chained to their beds while giving birth, an absurdity that is currently being rehashed by the online trolls. I was able to challenge her on the issues where we disagreed in the spirit of healthy debate. She had far more integrity and tolerance than any of those cruelly revelling in her death.

For many, politics has become a sacred component of personal identity, with the result that they have forgotten that those who take a different view are human beings with a right to dissent. Those who misinterpret disagreement as evidence of evil are narcissists and authoritarians who expect the world to bend to their will. For all their infantile loathing of Ann Widdecombe, they have a lot to learn from her.

Last week saw yet another victory for women’s rights in the US. The Supreme Court upheld state bans on males participating in girls’ sports. Predictably, the ruling was split along party lines, with the six Republican appointees supporting single-sex sports and the three Democrat appointees voting against.

Riley Gaines has been quick to note the perversity of so-called ‘progressives’ working against women. ‘Justice Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor ruled against women having equal protection under the law,’ she posted on X. ‘Liberal women, yet again, prove to be the biggest hurdle women face.’

It is a feature of today’s culture wars that so many individuals are gulled into working against their own interests. Time and again, polls reveal that the staunchest advocates for gender identity ideology are women, even though it is a fundamentally anti-woman movement. Likewise, many gay men are found to be supportive of genderism, in spite of the fact that it represents the most serious threat to gay rights in living memory.

So what is going on here? I am reminded of Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992). The book opens with an arresting epigraph: ‘When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us’. The novel concerns the barbarity of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as practised in certain African tribal societies, which is why Walker dedicated the book ‘with tenderness and respect to the blameless vulva’.

We often speak of FGM as though it were an example of the patriarchy destroying women’s sexuality, making it impossible for girls, as they grow up, to experience sexual pleasure so that they will remain faithful to their husbands. While there is some truth to this analysis, Walker forces us to confront a harsher reality. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the depiction of the older women in the tribe as being mostly responsible for the perpetuation of the practice. Little girls are mutilated at the behest of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters. Often the men know little at all.

The novel was the inspiration for Tori Amos’s Cornflake Girl, surely the only song about female genital mutilation ever to break the top ten. But Amos’s song is really about that broader principle of betrayal among women. Today, the song resonates for a different reason. The ‘cornflake girls’ – those who turn on other women – are now mostly to be found on the self-styled ‘progressive’ side of politics, upholding an ideology that has seen the erosion of women’s single-sex spaces and services.

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I had the pleasure of contributing a story to this wonderful new collection by Heresy Press, a publisher that was established to promote artistic freedom and to push back against the conformity and self-censorship of our times.

Axe: Stories That Cut Deep was inspired by Kafka’s injunction that ‘a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us’. The editors, Bernard Schweizer and Adam Szetela, had contacted an array of authors they admired. This was their message: ‘If you can manage it, please write for us a story sufficiently audacious, offbeat, experimental, cryptic, disorienting, discomfiting, impertinent, tasteless, or annoying that it would quite likely meet with rejection by the average mainstream editor’. This book is the result.

I have to say it was so refreshing to be asked to simply ‘follow the muse’ and to write entirely according to my instincts. In the end, I wrote a story called ‘Propaganda’, but I won’t say too much about it in the hope that you’ll read it for yourselves.

Axe also features stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Lionel Shriver, Richard North Patterson, Jeffrey Ford, David Sedaris, Alice Walker, Bradford Morrow, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Santlofer, James Morrow, Elizabeth Hand, and an afterword by Junot Díaz.

It’s out very soon, but you can pre-order now at Amazon UK or Amazon US.

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‘Citizen Vigilante Is One of the Most Disturbing Movies I’ve Seen Lately.’ So runs the headline of a review in Slate of the controversial new movie written and directed by Uwe Boll. It stars Armie Hammer as Sanders, an American businessman based in an unspecified country in Europe who targets violent migrant criminals and those who have enabled them in the spheres of politics, law enforcement and the judiciary.

The reviewer for Slate is not the only one to brand the movie racist. Unsurprisingly, it has been accused of inciting violence against ethnic minority groups, and was effectively banned in Germany after the FSK (the country’s film classification body) refused to give it an age classification. This meant that it could not be released theatrically, distributed or advertised. Yet after Elon Musk posted the full movie on X for a limited period of two days, it was viewed many millions of times. The Streisand effect strikes again.

Whatever one’s views on the merits of Citizen Vigilante, Musk was right to promote it. I tend towards the view that any creative work that is banned ought to be amplified by those with the means, irrespective of its quality. In such circumstances, the principle must take precedence. I am reminded of a speech delivered by Stephen King in the 1990s to a group of school pupils on how best to respond to the banning of books:

‘Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighbourhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest non-school library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.’

Citizen Vigilante belongs to a familiar tradition of the vigilante thriller, a subgenre of exploitation cinema, in which a lone figure takes revenge on society’s scum. One thinks immediately of Death Wish or The Equalizer, movies that revel in the moral ambiguity of citizens taking the law into their own hands. The character of Sanders in Citizen Vigilante does not deviate one jot from the archetype. There is a gratuitous sex scene with a prostitute, and he kills an innocent driver on the road simply to make a rhetorical point. He’s not a nice guy.

The popularity of the movie is easy to understand. It taps into a direct – and some would say ignoble – pleasure of popular storytelling: the thirst for poetic justice. With the two-tier systems of justice currently prevailing in many European countries (the UK included) many people are frustrated and angry at the failure of the law to reckon with criminals if they are from minority backgrounds. The case of the rape gangs in the north of England is perhaps the most obvious example, but there are many more.

None of this rescues Citizen Vigilante from being a terrible film. Hammer gives a strong performance, but the plot holes are cavernous and the script is ham-fisted. That said, its critics would do well to try to understand why it has struck a chord. It is the same reason why the 2005 thriller Hard Candy – a much worse film, in my view – was so appealing to those who are rightly furious that sex offenders have so often escaped justice. In that movie, a victim tracks down her paedophile abuser and spends most of the time torturing him both psychologically and physically. Similarly, I Spit On Your Grave (1978) depicts in disturbing detail the gang-rape of the lead character, who then systematically pursues each of her attackers and exacts bloody revenge.

Such films offer fantasies of retribution. The experience is close to what the ancient Greeks called catharsis: the arousal of pity and fear in tragedy which leads to a purgation of violent emotions. So the wife whose husband has left her for a younger woman can watch a production of Euripides’s Medea, relish her brutal reprisals (Medea sends her husband’s new lover a poisoned dress which tears away her flesh when she tries to remove it) and leave the theatre without any desire to commit similar acts of violence in real life. It’s a neat system.

Uwe Boll has said that Citizen Vigilante was inspired by a notorious case in Hamburg in 2016, when a group of teenagers raped a 14-year-old girl, only for the perpetrators to walk free with suspended sentences. The movie dramatises a near-identical case, culminating in Sanders holding the migrant Muslim family of one of the perpetrators hostage before forcing him to summon the other rapists and shooting them one by one.

Yet where Boll’s movie departs from the typical vigilante thriller is that its aim is not primarily cathartic. Like all revenge fantasies, it offers the audience the vicarious satisfaction of poetic justice, but it departs from this formula by leaning heavily into didacticism. Sanders is presented not simply as an avenger but as an exemplar, repeatedly arguing that the ruling class has abandoned ordinary citizens, leaving them with no alternative but to take matters into their own hands.

The film is interspersed with pixellated video recordings that Sanders broadcasts on the internet. At one point, he leans towards the camera and speaks aloud the message of the film: ‘I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself’. There are many words one could use to describe Boll’s filmmaking, but ‘subtle’ is not among them.

It is at this point that one can already hear the cries of ‘incitement!’ and ‘hate speech!’ from the pro-censorship lobby…

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Gender identity ideology is not the first religious creed to have seized control over those in power, but it is certainly the most baffling. In our supposedly post-Enlightenment world, it is remarkable to think that so many members of the political and media class have kowtowed to a supernatural belief system which they cannot coherently defend. For the…

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It has been fourteen months since the UK Supreme Court ruled that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, not ‘gender identity’. And yet in all that time many companies and public bodies have been evading their responsibility to obey the law. The most egregious example came this week, when Linda Pollock, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), put out an internal memo that once again betrays a shocking disregard for legal responsibilities.

The context of the memo was a Court of Session ruling issued last week by Lady Ross. It followed a judicial review brought by For Women Scotland over the Scottish Prison Service’s 2024 guidance on the management of trans-identified inmates. The SPS has been permitting men who identify as women to be accommodated in the female estate if they satisfy a risk assessment. It has been its policy, in other words, to prioritise gender identity ideology over safeguarding. The risks of this approach are not hypothetical. In April, a male murderer called Alan Baker was charged for sexually assaulting a woman at HMP Greenock.

Lady Ross held that the SPS guidance was unlawful, finding that Scottish prison rules require separate accommodation for men and women. She cited the Supreme Court ruling on the Equality Act and pointed out that, as a matter of law, biological sex must be the determining factor. It is mind-boggling that we require judges to state the obvious, but that is the reality of the UK in 2026.

Pollock’s response was remarkable. While admitting that the SPS has been acting unlawfully, she nonetheless stated that the current admission policy ‘remains in place’ but that she ‘will carefully consider Lady Ross’s findings before responding’. Here is the memo in full.

This is an astonishing admission, and could very well constitute contempt of court. A public body does not get to set its own timetable for when it obeys the law. Pollock has a duty to update the unlawful aspects of SPS policy without delay. That this needs to be said at all demonstrates how those who are in hock to genderism consider their ideology to be above the law…

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The contortions of activists and commentators over the conviction of the ‘Filton 4’ are something to behold. Amnesty International – a charity that once campaigned for prisoners of conscience but now produces screeds against those upholding the rights of women and homosexuals – has claimed that the sentencing represents ‘another step in the ongoing crac…

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‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ These words are among the most frequently quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see them in memes, in online arguments, repeated endlessly in opinion columns in the national press. The passage has turned into the very thing that Orwell hated the most: a cliché.

Yet ideas become clichés for a reason. So many aspects of Orwell’s novel seem prescient today, not least this tendency among authoritarians to blur the lines between truth and fiction and demand that the population play along. There is no clearer example than what has become known as ‘two-tier policing’. The evidence for it is overwhelming, and yet commentators, journalists, politicians, podcasters, activists and online loudmouths continue to deny it. Once again, the narrative has taken precedence over reality.

The notion that members of the public must be treated differently according to their group identity is not simply a speculative explanation for egregious police conduct. It is explicitly encoded in guidance published by the College of Policing and the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council). There are numerous recorded interviews with officers who tell us that their job is to investigate and arrest those who have caused offence to particular groups. Multiple whistleblowers have revealed details of training sessions they have been compelled to attend that have instructed them to take a two-tier approach.

But you wouldn’t know any of this had you only read a recent article by Andy Hughes, LBC’s Crime Correspondent. Hughes argues that it is ‘nonsense to say police are told to treat people differently based on their ethnicity’ and claims to have spoken to dozens of officers who have confirmed his view. It seems odd that Hughes does not realise that there is nothing particularly surprising about officers repeating the party line. Far more revealing are those who are speaking out about two-tier policing – none of whom Hughes appears to have spoken to – in spite of the risk to their career. They’re called ‘whistleblowers’ for a reason.

Then there is the police guidance itself. Hughes attempts to shrug off the Police Anti-Racism Commitment on the grounds that he doesn’t understand it:

‘The NPCC guidance says: “Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences.”

I’ve read this section several times, and I still don’t know what it means.

The wording is “clumsy”, as the NPCC admits, and police chiefs say they will review the guidance.

But to suggest this means every police officer is now told to treat people differently based on race is inaccurate – and dangerous.’

A generous interpretation would be that Hughes simply hadn’t read the following sentences in the guidance, which could not be clearer even for those unfamiliar with the activist jargon.

And there you have it. The ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ explicitly states that officers should treat people differently based on race and that they must reject the principle of equality before the law. Their commitment to racial equity, it says, ‘does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind” (racial equality)’. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hughes stopped reading at that point. It’s more plausible that he realised that the document flatly contradicted his narrative and decided to omit the relevant line.

However, the ‘clumsy’ language that Hughes cites (but does not understand) is evidence enough. When the guidance calls for ‘equality of policing outcomes’, it is saying that suspects should be treated differently according to their race in order to reduce disparities. It draws on a principle of Critical Race Theory, that equality of outcome is evidence of unequal treatment. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, ‘racial inequality is evidence of racist policy’.

It’s the same logic that prevented Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, from being sectioned by the NHS. Having perpetrated a violent crime, mental health staff did not detain him because they were concerned about ‘over-representation of black men’ among those committed. They were simply following the NHS guidelines, but Calocane went on to murder two teenagers and an older man in June 2023. When ‘racial equity’ is adopted as policy, it costs lives.

Let’s have a closer look at the evidence of institutional capture as reflected in the official police guidelines…

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While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the …

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Cancel culture is often wilfully misunderstood. It is a retributive system of public shaming and character assassination that seeks to punish dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy, often through libel or deliberate misrepresentation. It is not cancel culture to be denied a platform or refused employment by people you have publicly attacked. That would be like marching into a shop, telling the owner his products were trash, demanding a job, and then complaining when he refused.

A similar scenario is currently playing out in the French movie industry, and it’s as good an example as any of how cancel culture is so often misconstrued. It all began with a petition published in Libération on 11 May 2026. The over 600 signatories include prominent figures in the industry, such as Juliette Binoche, Adèle Haenel and Raymond Depardon. This ad hoc collective of actors and filmmakers refers to itself as ‘Zapper Bolloré’ (‘switch off Bolloré’) and takes aim at Vincent Bolloré, the right-wing billionaire businessman with a vast media empire. He effectively controls Canal+, the country’s dominant private film financier that backs an estimated 40% of French movies.

The petition focuses on Bolloré’s growing influence and expresses particular concern about his right-wing views. The signatories fear that Bolloré seeks to take over the industry and to use it as a conduit for his political ideology. They claim that he already uses outlets like CNews and publishing houses to push a reactionary and extreme right agenda. But the histrionics in the petition don’t end there:

‘Voulons-nous prendre le risque que demain ne soient plus financés que des films de propagande au service d’une idéologie?... En laissant le cinéma français aux mains d’un patron d’extrême droite, nous ne risquons pas seulement une uniformisation des films, mais une prise de contrôle fasciste sur l’imaginaire collectif.’

‘Do we want to risk a future in which the only films financed are propaganda in the service of an ideology?... By leaving French cinema in the hands of a far-right owner, we risk not only a homogenisation of films, but a fascist takeover of the collective imagination.’

Quelle horreur! The pearls have been well and truly clutched. Apparently these grandees of French cinema are seeking to cancel their own boss for being too right-wing. They are sick of the industry’s silence on the issue, and hope to build a new movement that will grant them independence from Bolloré’s venemous and wide-reaching tentacles.

The response from Maxime Saada, CEO of Canal+, was rather surprising. He said that the insult was obviously unjust, and announced that the company would no longer employ any of the signatories. They have just written their own blacklist…

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Schadenfreude is the most ignoble of instincts. The English are so ashamed of it that they have left it to the Germans to invent the term. It is of course a perfectly natural impulse, albeit one that we should strive to curb. But who doesn’t feel that warm interior glow when our enemies finally get their comeuppance?

If we’re honest, plenty of us are fee…

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The current Labour government is the most anti-liberal in living memory. It has cracked down on free speech, sought to scrap juries in certain trials, postponed elections that are unlikely to go its way, laid the groundwork for the reintroduction of blasphemy laws… the examples are endless. And now, to cap it all, it has charged forward with its plans t…

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The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – ‘Reflections in the Water’ – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.

Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.

Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.

It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.

For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.

Consider the party’s deputy leader, Rachel Millward, who, on this week’s episode of the BBC’s Question Time, was asked by Piers Morgan whether women could have penises. ‘Do you know what, Piers?’, she replied, ‘I think you have a unique, strange obsession with people’s genitalia’. Owen Jones reposted the exchange with the comment: ‘Obsessing over people’s genitals is weird, actually’. A predictably asinine piece in the Metro ran with the headline: ‘Piers Morgan brilliantly shut down after asking “weird question” on BBC’.

Of course, the chance that anyone involved in this debate sincerely believes that their opponents are obsessed with genitals is close to zero. As much as I disagree with Millward and Jones on just about everything, I have to credit them with more intelligence than that. So why are they lying? What is going on here?

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Few political leaders have the good sense to retire before they are pushed. The lure of power and status may be an innate human instinct, but it is surprising that more politicians don’t keep a keener eye on their legacy. ‘All political lives,’ wrote Enoch Powell, ‘unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is…

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It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction. The viral images shared online this week of Matt Rattley, a lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Oxford, were first assumed by many to be satirical. For here was a bearded, middle-aged man with large prosthetic breasts who proudly wears this garb to work. It looke…

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On Saturday evening, an attempt was made to storm the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The suspected gunman is Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher from California, and his likely target was President Donald Trump and other figures from his administration. This is the third assassination attempt against Trump in less than two years. At this point, few would deny that political violence has become normalised. The more contentious question is what we can possibly do to reverse the trend.

Once again, the usual debates are raging online and in the legacy media. Does the left have a particular problem with violence, or is the right just as bad? Is the incendiary rhetoric of public and political figures to blame? On CNN yesterday, the political commentator Scott Jennings broached both of these questions, citing a speech this week by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in which he vowed ‘maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time’.

All such debates are understandable. The gunman at the Correspondents’ Dinner sought not only to deprive other human beings of their lives, he sought to deprive voters of their democratic rights. At times like this it is always worth emphasising that political violence is fundamentally authoritarian, a means by which an individual or group seeks to enforce their worldview on others.

But it is not helpful to explain away this behaviour as the unique tendency of a particular political tribe, or the impact of intemperate language on a malleable population. Those who have equivocated or even celebrated recent political murders – such as those of Brian Thompson, Melissa Hortman or Charlie Kirk – all share a tendency to justify violence through a process of moral reframing. There is good reason to believe that this is a sign of an increasingly infantile culture and a weak educational system.

Allen is surely a case in point. The recent ‘No Kings’ rallies – which Allen is said to have attended – saw thousands take to the streets to protest against a President who won both the popular vote and an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. Criticism of the ruling class is healthy and necessary, but pretending that they are unelected tyrants is childish and self-defeating.

Allen apparently sent a ‘manifesto’ to his family shortly before the attack on Saturday. It is the usual sub-literate and self-aggrandising affair, but the contents are interesting for what they reveal about the anti-democratic mindset and how it seeks to justify itself. Most notably, Allen presents an argument for political violence, one that reframes it as a form of defence against tyranny.

There is nothing new in this approach, of course. It was the reason given by the conspirators against Julius Caesar, the most famous political assassination of all time. In his manifesto, Allen claims that all administration officials are legitimate targets, and calls Trump a ‘pedophile, rapist, and traitor’. This is simply an extension of the standard activist tactic of branding one’s opponents as evil in order to dehumanise them. Charlie Kirk was falsely branded a ‘fascist’ by those who defended and celebrated his murder. Feminists are routinely branded as ‘TERFs’ to excuse violence against them. This trick is as common as it is transparent.

Allen goes on to describe anyone who attended the Correspondents’ Dinner as ‘complicit’, the kind of guilt by association that we have come to expect. It’s the same logic as those activists who cancel speakers for ‘sharing a platform’ with those they have decided are beyond the pale.

Thereafter, Allen makes the standard case for political violence as a form of defence. He is not fighting for himself, he claims, but for the marginalised. This of course is the entire guiding principle of the ‘woke’ movement, which simplistically divides the world into categories of oppressor and oppressed – oftentimes misattributing each label – and poses as the defender of the latter. Allen writes:

‘Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.’

So let’s examine his claims a little closer…

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I met Victoria Wood only once. I had been told by those who knew her to expect her to be ‘prickly’ and ‘standoffish’, which might seem strange for the woman who once won a nationwide poll of ‘People You’d Most Like To Live Next Door To’. As it happens, I enjoyed our conversation, but I certainly detected that guarded quality I had been warned about. It …

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