BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN There is a particular quality to a Saturday morning in the Surrey villages. It is not peace, exactly. It is the absence of the City. The silence left behind after the 23.42 from Waterloo has taken its last wretched soul back from the big smoke. For the man in question – a commuter, a husband, a prisoner of the screens – that … Continue reading The Flymo
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN A spectre is haunting the West—not of revolution, but of forgetting. It is a quiet, insidious amnesia, not of dates or battles, but of the very intellectual grammar that built the free and prosperous world we inhabit. The syntax of liberty—the complex, humane arguments for limited government, spontaneous order, and individual sovereignty—is fading from the young mind, replaced by a sterile, managerial … Continue reading The War of Omission: How the West is Forgetting the Grammar of Liberty
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN AND JAMIE FOSTER It is a peculiar truth of the modern age that the institutions we assume to be most solid—the pillars of the state—are often the most vulnerable to decay. We imagine the law as a kind of granite edifice, blindfolded and impartial, weighing evidence in her scales without fear or favour. The reality, as any honest observer of recent history … Continue reading The Hanging Judge and the Factory of Truth
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN AND JAMIE FOSTER Descent into Intellectual Servitude It is a peculiar and profound despair that grips the mind when it is forced to witness the noble architecture of British liberty being dismantled, brick by brick, by the very hands sworn to uphold it. We find ourselves in an age where the clarion call of freedom, for which our grandparents spilt their blood … Continue reading The Bonfire of Our Liberties
BY SEAN WALSH To steal and misapply a line from Woody Allen in Annie Hall it’s looking like Keir Starmer’s notion of compulsory digital ID won’t even make it to the concept stage, let alone become a workable idea. Colour us unsurprised. Starmer’s saving grace, his accidental virtue, is a preternatural incompetence attached to an unmatchable personal detestability. He delivers policy in the same way … Continue reading Resisting the Digital Prison of a National ID
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Freedom is rarely abolished in thunderclaps. It disappears in murmurs – a statute amended here, a civil liberty waived there, always with plausible justification. These small surrenders accumulate like snowfall, each flake weightless until the branch snaps. By the time we notice the drift, we’re already buried beneath it. History’s lesson is written in palimpsest: the Roman Republic’s slow strangulation by emergency … Continue reading Remember How Liberty Slips Away Quietly
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN To live free is to breathe at full depth while others gasp beneath a knee. It is to stand upright in the storm of existence rather than crawl through the corridors of sanctioned thought. The dictator’s first lie is that he offers safety; his second, that men cannot govern themselves. But history’s brightest flames have almost always burned in open air, rarely … Continue reading Your Brain is Not a State Facility
BY JOHN DREWRY Arise, the 39 United Kingdoms of England! Most of us now are aware of the ever-tightening grip of tyranny, and the erosion of our liberties, occasioned by ever more remote centralisation. To break it, we need a process which prevents power, both political and commercial, from continuing to rise to the top of a pyramid, from where our little lives are run … Continue reading We the People
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Sated by a superb Sunday roast and verging on tipsy from claret, with the soft glow of Dartmoor’s evening light filtering through the gaps in our host’s drawing room curtains, I was presented with a truly rare treasure from his private stash—the Second Growth. This exquisite cigar, crafted by the legendary Henke Kelner (pictured above), had apparently ‘been waiting patiently for the … Continue reading Second Growth
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Every now and again, an event prompts me to smoke one of my remaining, hand-rolled Peñamil Oro cigars. I refrain from reaching for one – the occasion must be especially special as I have so few of these cigars left. I bought them as a gift for my late father. Smoking them, I reserve, in my own way, as both a means … Continue reading Cigar
BY GARY MCGHEE It was May 1997. Blair had recently entered No.10. A new dawn had broken (had it not?) and an even more important dawn had broken for me. Only this one was set to truly transform my life. I met my Baby Bear. We stared at each other across the bar of Compton’s in Old Compton Street, Soho, a smoke-filled, drunk-addled sleaze-pit as … Continue reading The Queer is Dead
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN Introductory Notes: In Greek mythology Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra. He was punished by Hades for cheating death twice by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down every time it neared the top, repeating this same action for eternity. In the final chapter of his ‘Myth of Sisyphus’, Albert Camus … Continue reading Our Sisyphean Liberty
BY STEPHEN SHELTON There was a chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he … Continue reading Wake Up America
BY QUENTIN PIGG Across the Western world, politicians heap disdain upon the democracy which saw them elected. Though voters have become accustomed to being threatened, coerced and shamed by their government, a recent speech from the Scottish Labour Leader somehow managed to be so shocking as to surpass all three of these tragic expectations. Anas Sarwar warned Scotland’s unvaccinated citizens that ‘we know where you … Continue reading Freedom V Safety
BY JAKE SCOTT The British Government seems intent on pushing ahead with Vaccine Passports, for both international and domestic usage. Whilst I am reluctant to make it known to any travel authority the circumstances of my health, especially when other infectious diseases are allowed to travel unhindered, I do understand the logic behind international vaccine passports. What I cannot, and will not, abide by, is … Continue reading Vaccine Passports
BY JAMES MELVILLE “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World The Covid crisis has created the perfect storm of coercive authoritarianism. A combination of government psychological manipulation, SAGE cultivated … Continue reading Authoritarianism V Liberalism
BY EFFIE DEANS When the Thirteen Colonies rebelled against Britain, slavery existed in each of them and did so legally. In Britain by contrast the Somerset v Stewart case (1772) made explicit what had been implicit for centuries – that there was no basis for slavery in law in Britain. If a slave entered Britain, he was thereby made free. In 1807 Britain abolished the … Continue reading The Third American Revolution
