The normal process of essay-writing, for me, is like this:

1. I have the initial idea.
   I immediately create a new post in Substack. I might write a key paragraph there and then. I will certainly jot down the initial idea along with any related ideas that occur as I’m typing. The goal is to make as many notes as possible now, when the inspiration is fresh, so that when I come back to the essay there will be enough material for me to “find my feet”- not a blank page but a set of starting points.
   I always jot down an idea as soon as possible because otherwise I will probably forget it.
   Some of these notes will immediately be evolved into actual paragraphs for the essay, others will be ignored for the time being and I will eventually get around to either fleshing them out or deleting them.
   What now follows is some days of frenzied writing (usually between one and four days). During this phase, many new ideas are jotted down as they occur to me (see above). Eventually, new ideas stop coming, and the frenzy dies down and I stop writing.
   I might read through the essay and calmly expand the odd paragraph here and there.

2. I take a few days away from it and work on other things. Then comes the “redrafting” phase.
   Most of the paragraphs are written by now, so this is when I revise the structure, improve sentences, etc. This phase can take quite a long time, because the structure of something is very important and because sentences can always be improved.

3. Then comes the “finessing” phase, which is much more casual. The essay is 97% done by now, but the final 3% of work is finishing touches that can make all the difference. This phase can last, on and off, quite a long time - basically until I am happy with the essay. Often the opening paragraph is written in this phase, because by now I know what it should say.

That is the simplest version of the process. With some essays it is much faster, with some it is more elongated and messy. I might write some new paragraphs even at the “finessing” stage. I might split an essay up into multiple parts (a series) or into several completely separate essays; some of those will be written immediately within the same frenzy as the original idea, others will enter a long purgatory and be forgotten about until, months later, I’m looking for something to work on.

The asterisk symbol is my best friend when writing. Because I never use it in the actual text itself, I can safely use it to mark any piece of it that requires attention. This could be a word or sentence I’m not sure about, a need for a hyperlink or supporting evidence, a question I will need to find the answer to, additional research that is needed, or simply to mark the place where an image should go. At any time, I can do a search for the asterisk symbol and immediately find every point in the essay that needs some type of work done. Once there are no asterisks left, it might well be that the essay is finished.

Have a place where you are comfortable and have minimal distractions. Writing requires immense concentration.

Start writing with whichever point interests you most. Do this again and again, until the only points left to write are the boring ones. Then brace yourself one day and just bite the bullet. For each boring point, you can write a basic version initially; tomorrow that version might inspire a more interesting treatment. Having the text in front of you is always better than having it in your head, in some vague form, frightening you because you haven’t written it yet.

Never be afraid to write a paragraph even if “you haven’t got to it yet” in the essay’s structure, or you don’t even know where in the essay’s structure it will eventually go. We live in the era of non-linear editing, after all. The important thing is to write the paragraph while it’s fresh in your mind or you have “zest” for it. You can worry about placement later.

Any point that occurs to you should be quickly jotted down, with an asterisk next to it. Actually, a key part of writing is moving these rough notes around the text until you find the best place for each one. It’s like planting seeds that will eventually grow - each one needs to be in the right place.

The same applies to paragraphs. I said earlier that you can write them in any order and arrange them later. This is true, but you should try to arrange them quite soon. Once something is in its proper position in the whole, it will inspire new things. And if it doesn’t, that means that section is finished and you can devote your mental resources to other sections now.

The first paragraph should simply open the topic. It doesn’t need to be stilted and it doesn’t need to describe the argument you intend to make or the material you intend to cover. It just needs to get the reader “into” the essay. However, you might well achieve that by briefly describing the point you intend to make or introducing the scope of the material. Either way, try to make the first paragraph engaging and short.

Make your text as clear as possible. Ideas are complicated so the text that conveys them should be simple; do not burden your reader with unnecessary cognitive load. To that end, I favour short sentences and will split a complex sentence apart wherever possible.

Always refer to something using the same name. This increases clarity. Multiple names will lead the reader to assume you are referring to different things. You have created unnecessary work for them.

Always delete redundant words and sentences. If two sentences make the same point, merge them or delete one. Keep doing this until there is no repetition at all.

Try to think of ways to make each point more concisely. Keep doing this until it is impossible.

Making the text as concise as possible helps, not only the reader, but you as the writer, because it clarifies the material, enabling you to better work with it and develop it. Redundant verbiage gets in the way like clutter in a room.

Never be afraid to just rewrite a paragraph from scratch. Sometimes it is the only way to make it work. But always keep the original somewhere, because you might want to revert to it or merge it with the new version.

An essay should have a purpose, and you need to know what the purpose is, and it should do nothing but serve that purpose. However, sometimes you need to “free-wheel” for a while and just write organically, and let the purpose emerge gradually. Once it does, you might need to prune a lot of irrelevant material. This doesn’t mean deleting it forever; maybe you will find a home for it in some other essay? But you really should do this, because if it remains where it doesn’t belong it will only detract and disrupt.

If you have written an essay but you can’t say exactly what its purpose is, you should probably shelve it.

Then comes structuring. The structure of an essay depends on its purpose, but generally speaking it should begin by pointing out some source of uncertainty and end as soon as that uncertainty has been satisfactorily addressed. This is why you shouldn’t worry about structure - or the opening paragraph - until a decent chunk of the essay has been written. You might find that you’ve ended up addressing a different uncertainty than the one you initially started with.

The final paragraph should be a summation - probably not of the entire essay, but of its final phase. It’s nice if you can link back to something from early on, but this is an unnecessary flourish. The very last sentence should be punchy.

Sometimes I show an essay to somebody else before publishing it. This can be useful because, being immersed in the topic, you might not realise that you haven’t explained something sufficiently. Conversely, you might have over-explained. Cutting one’s own material can be painful (that’s why writers used to have editors) but it is something I am trying to get better at doing.

Whatever else matters, the two “end conditions” for an essay are:

• it should achieve a purpose

• it should not be boring

If it fulfils those two, you have probably succeeded.

Its 1960s era, covering the first two Doctors, is a beast that I just can’t bring myself to enjoy watching. I know this is bad, a sign of ignorance, but life is only so long and there are many other things I need to do with what time I have. Someone else will need to discuss whether it was “woke” in that period.

However, I do very much enjoy what came immediately after: the 1970-1974 era with the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, overseen by producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks. Writers and directors changed from one story to the next, while Letts and Dicks were the mainstays, shaping and steering the show. They were respectively left and right-wing, and together they crafted an adorable programme which, by the standards of today, is very wholesome and old-fashioned.

I was first introduced to it in 1989 with a VHS of the story The Time Warrior (which I still think is a lovely piece of lightweight, swashbuckling TV drama) and then two more videos. Throughout the 1990s I saw a few more Third Doctor stories at friends’ houses. From the mid 2000s I slowly gathered the whole run on DVD.

It had been about five years since I last watched any vintage Doctor Who, but then I had these Third Doctor stories playing in the background while I worked on Millenniyule X. This gave me a chance to test the claims of today’s left-wing Whovians - admittedly not about the show’s very beginnings, but still, 56 years ago.

Needless to say, there are no transgender characters. There are no gay characters. There are vanishingly few non-white characters. Feminism is present but, even there, “independent modern women” can be brought to heel by a man if he simply speaks firmly, as occasionally he must do during these perilous adventures. Class receives particularly “regressive” treatment, with the working-class nearly always depicted as gullible, helpless and ignorant.

So, clearly, it is disingenuous to claim that the show in this era was “woke” as we use the term today. But people are talking at cross purposes. Right-wingers mean it wasn’t as ludicrously progressive as it is now, and they are correct. Left-wingers mean it was progressive by the standards of its time, and they are correct.

I will briefly discuss various Third Doctor stories in order to make the point.

Spearhead from Space (1970)

This is the Third Doctor’s debut story, setting up this era of the show. A central feature is UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a scientific and military organisation which is international in scope and mentality. UNIT is presented throughout this era as a forward-thinking, well-run, thorough and responsible organisation, unlike the British government and the British military which are presented as backward, petty, bigoted, short-sighted, corrupt and often incompetent.

The Ambassadors of Death (1970)

This features a demented British Army general who is driven by his “moral duty” to destroy a peaceful alien race, including by killing dozens of humans who get in his way. He is aided by friends (“the old school tie”) in the British government. He is foiled by UNIT.

The Claws of Axos (1971)

This features a petty, cowardly English civil servant, Chinn, who interferes and sabotages good people. He is desperate to destroy an alien spacecraft before they have shown any signs of being hostile, but is then immediately taken in by their offer of great wealth. He talks about his responsibility to England - the Doctor remonstrating “not to the world?!” - and off-screen says something nationalistic which the Doctor rebukes: “England for the English? Good heavens, man!”

Colony in Space (1971)

This has a planet being settled in 2472 by two sets of humans, one a group of peaceful independent colonists, the other an evil mining corporation. Meantime, the planet has intelligent native species who are low and barbarous now but once had a thriving civilisation which made highly-advanced interstellar weapons, technology far ahead of that of the 25th Century humans.

This story’s anti-imperialist message is less clumsy than that of The Mutants (see below), but my main criticism of that story also applies to this one: to make imperialism look bad, you make the subject peoples look good instead of barbaric. Their apparent barbarism is explained away as a temporary condition, or an illusion caused by prejudice, or even a result of the imperialism itself. No consideration is given to the scenario that they really are barbaric, and a danger to themselves and everyone else, and that their daily life is one of needless hardship and suffering from which they can only be elevated by an imperial power stewarding them. That scenario (of actual, consequential diversity) is apparently inconceivable for the progressive writers of Doctor Who. For them, and their successors working on the show today, diversity is only ever trivial, something that brings harmless and fascinating delights, but never actually matters.

“We’re all the same, really” is the abiding anthem of progressivism. But, for the post-war post-imperial British progressive, the anthem is even more self-sabotaging: “we’re all the same, but, because the barbarian recognises this and we don’t, he is better than us”.

The Curse of Peladon (1972)

This “examines” whether Britain should join the European Economic Community (the EU) via the allegory of a primitive planet joining an advanced federation. The absurd bias should already be clear, but I have written a dedicated essay.

The Sea Devils (1972)

Echoing Chinn from The Claws of Axos, this story has Robert Walker, a trigger-happy English politician who is just desperate to genocide an alien race and is a pathetic coward, as well as selfish, self-aggrandising, foolish, impractical, and eager to blame others for his mistakes. This is how “the British Establishment” is represented here.

Meantime there is Colonel Trenchard, whose defining feature is said to be his patriotism, but his patriotism is used to trick him into helping evil.

Taking Walker and Trenchard together, patriotism is shown to be - only - a weakness.

Countering this somewhat is the Royal Navy as an institution, which is actually shown to be very efficient and well-run. That its staff may be motivated by patriotism is never contradicted, but also never acknowledged.

The Mutants (1972)

This is by far the most egregious, warranting a dedicated essay.

The Time Monster (1972)

A pioneering scientific team has a female member, Dr Ruth Ingram. She mocks her male colleagues for their chauvinism and, when eventually she gets control of the project, outshines them in imagination and competence. The implication is that inside every downtrodden, sidelined female scientist is a Marie Curie desperate to get out, if just given a chance.

Frontier in Space (1973)

In the 26th Century, Earth’s militaristic one-world government is being goaded into war against the Draconian Empire, a war that would devastate both sides. On Earth, only the Peace Party is working to avert this catastrophe. Though beleaguered and borderline illegal, the Peace Party is global and highly organised. One member says “we have contacts everywhere. Journalists, broadcasters, even friends in the government” - agents embedded in every organ of society, quietly subverting, or waiting for the signal to mobilise.

The Peace Party is represented on-screen by a youth activist (played by an Indian actor) but mostly by its imprisoned leader, Professor Dale.

Despite his name, Dale is an extremely Jewish character: an intellectual, an educator, and a dedicated activist who has gone to prison for his ceaseless and courageous struggle for peace. I suspect the actor was consciously chosen, being extremely Jewish himself; his name was Israel Goldblatt! Moreover, this is a very positive portrayal of Jewish political activism: Dale is wise, kindly and intelligent, and uniquely open-minded among the story’s characters. Imagine! All the gentiles we see are feckless and war-like. Thank God that Professor Dale is around to teach them about peace - if only they would listen to him! Instead, they punish him for his intellectual and moral superiority by throwing him in prison!

The Peace Party is an obvious analogue for Comintern, and Dale is an obvious analogue for Trotsky, or really any Jewish intellectual who ever took it upon himself to remake the world and save the goyim from themselves.

This story was written by Malcolm Hulke. He was not Jewish, but given his politics and his writing of the Dale character, I suspect he was in awe of them.

Hulke was a talented writer but also a hard leftist. He was a member of the Communist Party until at least the early 1960s. Whether he stayed a member or not, he remained ardently left-wing and wove messages into his work. In a 1975 letter to a friend, he mocked the conservative establishment for being so naive as to never notice what he was doing:

For seven years running I wrote subversive Doctor Who serials. No one noticed. I’ve since attacked the Right in my Writing for TV in the 70s and in six Doctor Who books. Not a comment.

You would almost think the establishment wasn’t conservative at all. In fact, MI5 had a file on Hulke so must have “noticed” what he was doing, yet let him continue. Boasting of his “subversive” writing, Hulke was pushing at an open door but never realised. He was the naive one.

The Green Death (1973)

A hippie commune of young scientists and activists fight for the environment against an evil corporation, while doing groundbreaking work in the field of ecological science. They are aided in their fight against ruthless capitalism by UNIT.

They have house parties in which a Black man (presumably a brilliant scientist like the rest of them) gets close with a beautiful young blonde.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974)

The British government and army are defeated by an internal coup and have to be rescued by UNIT, the embodiment of globalist cooperation and integrity. (However, to be fair, one of UNIT’s officers, Captain Yates, is also involved in the coup.)

And yet, for all that, early 1970s Doctor Who is still infinitely less “woke” than the programme today.

• It accepts without question that men and women exist, are different from each other, and complement each other.

• It recommends marriage and family formation as a norm, the only norm.

• It shows society being run by hard-headed patriarchs, with women using their wiles to nudge, persuade, encourage, reassure and inspire.

• It accepts social class and even celebrates it, from the adorable brashness of the worker to the urbane charm of the aristocrat.

• It distinguishes between high culture and low culture, with no hesitation.

• It celebrates Englishness - in tastes, morals, attitudes, places, landscapes, fashions and achievements.

• It sees Britain, even with its imperial past, as a good country with a good culture.

• Perhaps most un-progressive of all, it believes that the ethnic British exist - otherwise it would not be able to browbeat them, or celebrate them.

So the right-wingers who claim the show wasn’t always “woke” are correct. And the progressives who claim it always was are sort of correct, but they are being dishonest - as they always are, and always were.

It seems that one of the key ways in which progressivism advances is by lying about history, then lying about the lie, then lying even about that - building one lie upon another in service of the biggest lie of all: equality.

This is one of those topics where I think someone can give good advice even if they aren’t basking in a joyful multi-decade marriage. For those of us not so successful, it is easy to retrospectively identify the mistakes we have made. Moreover, the chances we had for contentment are more obvious in retrospect than at the time, when we stupidly turned them down because of youthful passion or idealism. With all of that in mind I am confident that the advice I am about to give is very sound, and I would implore young men - and women - to take it to heart. (It is written from the male perspective but a lot of it is relevant to women as well.)

I will not write here about what you should do to make yourself attractive. But I think it goes without saying that you should, especially as a young man, be trying to make yourself the best you can become. Competence, resilience and social status are the things to cultivate. No woman wants to be with a loser and you shouldn’t settle for being one. Don’t expect women to be impressed if you don’t have wherewithal, “get up and go”, and at least some money. I mention this because the rest of this text could seem quite demanding, so I want to clarify that you are not “entitled” to have high expectations of women if you are a mess of a man.

Now the things you should look for. They are not listed in any order of importance. I consider them all equally vital.

There is raw sexual attraction

This might seem so obvious it shouldn’t need saying, but it is actually very possible to be with someone who ticks all the other boxes but just doesn’t turn you on, and you might well think you should overlook this problem because everything else is good. Unfortunately, it is a problem that never goes away. It will bother you and eat into you, and she will sense this and feel deeply hurt, which in turn will make you feel guilty… and these feelings on either side will spiral into heartache, disappointment, regret, a sense of deep betrayal. Even if everything else is great, this one problem will destroy the relationship. In short: if she doesn’t turn you on, be strong, do yourself and her a favour, and end it.

Note that this is not just a visual thing. A woman can turn you on visually - say, in photos online - but then when you’re physically with her, something just isn’t right. I think there is such a thing as pheromonal incompatibility. If you find yourself struggling to be aroused by her, in the flesh with pheromones flying, that is a sign of a fundamental problem that, I’m sorry to tell you, cannot be solved.

I should clarify for men: you will always be attracted to other women - it is our nature to enjoy novelty - so “noticing” other women does not mean that you are unattracted to your spouse. Indeed, it doesn’t mean anything at all. So don’t be discomfited by those feelings. However, if you find yourself wishing dearly that your spouse were different, that is a very bad sign.

On the other hand, if you honestly enjoy making love to her and such thoughts do not come up, then it’s fine.

I belabour this point because, yes you guessed it, this happened to me once. She was a wonderful woman, and perfectly pretty, but something just wasn’t right at the pheromone level.

You enjoy each other’s company

This is self-explanatory but, again, something whose importance people can under-estimate.

Any relationship means that you will spend a great deal of time together, in the domestic setting and elsewhere. It is essential that the two of you are able to be alone together, a lot, without becoming irritated by each other. This doesn’t mean that you need to have shared interests or hobbies (you don’t). It just means that you should simply enjoy being together. You should miss her when she is away, and look forward to her being there again.

She is sane and loyal

Again, obvious, but we are tempted to overlook it if passions are high and sexual allure powerful. Choose a partner who is stable, sane and sensible, and will be loyal to you, insofar as you can ascertain these things. If you detect a capacity for treachery or instability, maybe let her be someone else’s problem.

Being stable and sensible doesn’t mean that she needs to get everything right all the time or that she should never be upset. It just means that she shouldn’t seek to cause problems, and that she should listen to sense when it is told to her. If instead she reacts with outrage, leave her, because this portends a lifetime of pain for you.

This also goes for women choosing men.

I have known people who suffered a lot because they chose an unstable or unreliable partner. Usually there are signs (“red flags”) early on, and usually you see them but overlook them, for some silly reason you later regret. If you are susceptible to this, ask your male friends what they think of the person. Trust your macho friends over your sensitive ones; macho guys have a very good sense for crazy women and for skeevy men, while sensitive guys tend to be naive or too forgiving.

At the same time, you have a responsibility to be the same way for her: stable, sensible and loyal. Don’t embark on serious relationships unless you are confident about these things, because you will only be setting women up for pain, and yourself for guilt.

You work well together and counter each other’s flaws

It’s a cliché but true that a relationship is a partnership. At the practical level, a relationship is the story of two people confronting together a thousand little problems (and maybe ten big problems). As in any partnership, you have to function as a “team”. This means that each of you does the things the other isn’t good at, and that you accept these shortcomings in each other without futile recrimination.

If you are socially reserved, she should be outgoing. If she isn’t good with deadlines, you need to be able and willing to prompt her, and she mustn’t resent you doing that. If you are dream-headed, she should be realistic. If she gets carried away, you need to be calm. Etc. This will differ from one couple to another so don’t be too hung up about “gender roles” - as long as the flaws are countered, that is what matters.

Try not to end up with someone who has the same flaws as you, because it means they will be compounded and hamper the partnership. It would help if you identify your most serious flaws so that you can look out for them in potential spouses. Ask your parents what your flaws are; friends probably won’t be honest about it, especially if they are female.

You respect and admire each other

This means appreciating each other as people, enjoying the thought of each other, and being grateful that you are together.

Unfortunately feminism encourages modern women to be bitchy, entitled, and to think men stupid and inferior, etc., so it is harder than before to find a woman with the right attitude - but far from impossible.

Every man has his own tolerance level for being taken for granted, hen-pecked, criticised, mocked, etc. Some men accept it, a few even seem to enjoy it in some bizarre way. Personally I can’t abide it. I would leave a woman instantly if she didn’t respect and admire me. This doesn’t mean I expect her to be blind to my flaws (indeed, she’d be little use to me if she were) but that I expect her to recognise my work, my talent, etc. This might sound vain but I think it is the healthy way for most relationships throughout history. In some sense the woman has to look up to the man, otherwise she will default to treating him as an errant son, or a factotum. I have seen quite a few relationships like this and they are never happy. Eventually her growing contempt leads her to divorce him, or else he is drained by it and starts looking to other women for positive feelings, or else they stay together forever with him withered and her contemptuous. This is the fruit of a woman not taking her man seriously. You should expect, at a bare minimum, that she respect and admire you. It is that important.

On the other side, you should respect and admire her. “Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” is a strategy that does work during the flirting stage, but to conduct a relationship in that manner is an exercise in cruelty and egotism. She is a human being, not your plaything. Give her compliments, thank her for things she does, and be sincerely grateful for her. Enjoy her little ways, and the attitudes she brings to everyday life. Celebrate her in your mind. Be grateful that life brought you together.

This rule, to respect and admire, is essential for maintaining a relationship. As such, when seeking a spouse you need to look out for it. If she begins by showing a lack of these qualities, do not pursue. If she does not seem interested in learning about your particular strengths then she will never come to respect and admire you for them, so do not pursue. At the same time, if you don’t see qualities in her that you can respect and admire, do not pursue.

She helps to bring out your potential

Some people might voice this as “does she share your values?” but I think it is more practical than that.

If you are a man, you should ponder:

• Will she be good for me?

• Will she help me to be successful?

• Will she help to build the life that I want?

If you are a woman, you should ponder:

• Will he be good for me?

• Can I help him to be successful? And do I want to? (Do I respect and admire him?)

• Do I want the same kind of life that he wants?

This is the most practical level of judging whether a relationship is viable. Though practical, it is essential. Do not let feelings cloud your judgement here. Consult your parents - especially if you are young.

It is also worth listing some things that don’t matter. Modern culture gives us such terrible guidance about relationships that we end up sabotaging our opportunities for success and happiness because we have unnecessary provisos and unrealistic goals. So here are some things that I think you shouldn’t worry about.

Having much in common

People always say this is important but I think it really needs to be qualified.

I don’t think it is necessary to have common interests and hobbies. You should approve of hers and enjoy hearing her talk about them, but you don’t need to share them and she doesn’t need to share yours. Odds are she won’t, since she is female and you are male.

The things you should have in common are the life and the lifestyle that you want, and your broad attitude to dealing with problems so that you are not clashing in that regard. Anything in common beyond that is a bonus but not necessary. Remember this is not a friendship but a partnership for getting through life successfully and happily. It’s really nice when the partnership veers into friendship and the two of you can enjoy something together, but it’s not essential.

If you enjoy each other’s company, you don’t need common hobbies and interests as well. (Just imagine - you could have a lot in common but hate each other’s company! Which is preferable?)

She being interested in your work

This is very relevant for me because my work is so central to my life, but I think it applies to most men to some extent.

For discussing your work, you have friends, colleagues, business partners, and forum guys online. You don’t need her for this. Trying to interest the average woman in the average male obsessions is an exercise in pure futility. She just needs to get the rough idea that you are capable, talented, clever, resourceful, inventive, or whatever, and she should enjoy these qualities in you, but she doesn’t need to know the details of your work.

(For God’s sake, don’t bore her with the details! I have seen guys doing this with their wives and I always feel sorry for the wives, but the guys themselves end up dispirited, because they have expectations their wives can’t possibly meet.)

She being the prettiest girl you could get

You could always have got a prettier girl, if you were in the right place at the right time, or a bit luckier, or a bit more cocky, or tried a bit harder, or started that job a year earlier, or knew the right mutual friend, etc. But prettiness comes with a whole slew of costs. The prom queen is often a “ball-ache” - self-absorbed, shallow and neurotic. If you have a girl you find attractive and all the boxes above are ticked, believe me, you don’t need a prettier girl.

It being perfect

Of course it isn’t. She’s human. She probably has the same reservations since you, too, are human. What matters is that it can be a successful life partnership. That means about 80% ideal and no big glaring dangers such as the ones I have mentioned.

It being exactly what you envisaged

This is one you have to weigh up. It might not be what you envisaged at 15. But remember, you won’t have the same goals when you are 50 as when you are 25. What matters is whether it will broadly get you to where you want to go, and what your chances are of finding a more “suitable” spouse. Accept that life really does mean “settling”, cashing in your chips, not waiting for perfection and not being hung up on some ideal you once dreamt of when you weren’t even the person you are today. You have to think about the future you want, and whether she will help you to get there. But also, don’t compromise too much. You might regret settling for 70% when 80% was possible. Be realistic, but also be positive. Again, this is something you have to weigh up; I can’t give any “hard and fast” rules for it.

In this text, you might have noticed an absence of the word “love”. Instead I have spoken about practicalities and dangers. I haven’t spoken about passion or excitement, romance or lust. This is because, at 43, I have done all of that, and it doesn’t impress or mesmerise me as it does a young man. Love, of the justified sort that persists and prevails, emerges when certain dangers are avoided and certain necessities met. My intention here has not been to ward you against love, nor to advise scepticism towards it, but to help you find it by navigating things correctly.

Good luck, everyone!

Admittedly, the acquiescent can be criticised for acquiescing, but that is to be at war with human nature, which seems a fool’s errand. The masses will take whatever opiate is presented to them - religion, culture, DVD boxsets, football, even Wimbledon and The Antiques Roadshow. But those who purvey the opiate must, surely, know what they are doing, so they deserve castigation.

My observation is simply this: a lot of modern TV, whether soap opera, drama, documentary, sitcom or panel show, seems to be designed to stave off awareness of the disaster unfolding around all of us in contemporary Britain.

Of course the target for this bamboozlement is as wide as possible - all ages, all classes, and definitely all White people (the dangerous people). But the Boomer generation are both especially susceptible to bamboozlement and especially important to target with it. The former, because they are largely insulated from the realities of modern life, being cooped up at home with often little to do but watch TV, relying on it for their awareness of things. The latter, because they, still now, are the ones with the money, and because they are the largest generation, and thus (in theory) could cause a lot of problems should they ever realise how bad life is going to be for their grandchildren.

When reality is unpleasant, it is understandable to take refuge in things that are very different from it. I do this myself, only watching TV dramas from the 1970s which depict a Britain radically unlike that of today. But I watch these dramas painfully aware of this fact, not in denial of it. By contrast, when your average Boomer watches Have I Got News For You, they cheerfully believe that the panellists are discussing Britain as it is today, as it still is, which is much like it was in the mid 2000s. Younger people know that this is false, but Boomers don’t.

This perhaps explains why so much of modern TV seems to be tailored for that generation, now in their late 60s and 70s. For current affairs and politics they are given agonisingly smug panel shows bemoaning “the Tories”. For period drama they are given cutesy things like Call the Midwife and Lark Rise to Candleford - which, incidentally, are often laced with modern attitudes, transplanting 1990s Boomer presumptions into 1890s rural England, etc. But perhaps the greatest deceit is in the “contemporary” dramas they are given. These show a Britain that nobody under fifty would recognise except from their early adulthood, because it is fossilised in the mid 2000s, and blooms with the thinking of that time. That thinking was fraudulent even back then, but it seemed plausible. Today it lies in ruins, yet the televisual expressions of it continue anyway, flickering eternally on the gogglebox.

On TV:

• east London is still mostly White and everyone has an English accent, unpolluted by MLE

• the mainstream of political discourse (which is now very left-wing) is the only sensible option. Everything else is crank extremism

• Muslims are nice and integrated

• refugees are all deserving cases who mean well and just want to help Britain, work hard, and certainly not molest White schoolgirls

• Black men are intelligent and non-violent

• White men are stupid, racist, sexist, violent and insecure

• White people are entitled

• racists are White

• rapists are White, and usually middle-class

• mixed-race relationships work and the children they produce are well-adjusted, actually more so than White children since they have to learn how to get along in racist Britain - vital lessons in humility and resilience

• twenty-somethings buy houses

• terrorism is committed by “the far-right”, not Muslims or Mossad

• racist conservatives are in charge of everything and must be dethroned

• kids go to university and then get professional jobs

• migrant hotels are an absurd right-wing myth

• feminism has made life better

• Pakistanis are helpful shopkeepers who shake their heads in disgust at news of White child molesters

• childless women are happy

• climate change is real and every sensible person believes in it

• “racists” have absolutely no just cause and are simply creating trouble because they are hateful idiots

• the Conservative Party (and now Reform UK) are a bunch of arrogant aristocratic racists and the worst thing that could happen is them getting into 10 Downing Street (which, on TV, is where real power lies, not in high finance or global bodies).

In short, you would think that the last twenty years simply haven’t happened and we are currently in 2006.

But of course there are some discrepancies. Even though it’s 2006, there is something called Brexit, and some dark fact symbolised by the word “Rotherham” (something so dark that it is almost never spoken about), and there is a bad man called Elon Musk. And there is an evil force called “MAGA” that stalks the land and is linked to racist rednecks and the Ku Klux Klan or something like that. There is a threat called “incel”, poor young men tricked and controlled by a villain called Andrew Tate. And there are other villains who also have no place in 2006 but are here anyway - bad men like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. These bugbears exist like pustules on the bottom of 2006, spoiling it, not belonging here but insisting on sticking around to ruin everyone else’s fun. If not for them, if only they would disappear… life in 2026/2006 would be just great.

But that is actually reassuring, because it means that life in our society is, by default, just great, and all we need to do is defeat these horrible things that don’t belong here in 2026/2006. It’s a beautiful Groundhog Day, it just has some glitches. And a glitch, being a small disruption of an otherwise harmonious pattern, lacks any justification or support from outside itself, so can easily be excised and destroyed.

Of course, this doesn’t actually work in practice. The MSM have been presenting these bugbears as glitches for decades, yet they remain in British society and are stronger than ever, making the fakeness of the Groundhog Day ever more obvious. This is because the glitches are not glitches but grave systemic problems that arise from the fabric of modern society itself, that result from its core (and fraudulent) premises and thus cannot be swept away except under a rug.

But the Boomers don’t realise any of this. After all, the TV has been their priest all their lives - it would never lie to them! So they keep watching, and keep believing, and berate younger people who desperately try to tell them about the world beyond the opiate.

The Boomers might die sincerely believing that we are just one step away from conquering racism forever, and that when we finally manage it, John Lennon will return to Earth.

But I don’t really think so. When the migrant hotel opens in town and your grandchild’s best friend gets molested, it is human to react, to wake up, and to realise (to some extent) that the TV was lying to you all along. I think many Boomers will live long enough to make this realisation and redeem themselves, despite the best efforts of the scum who run TV.

For those of us in the thick of it, there is a temptation to condemn the Boomers for not seeing reality. But I almost hope they never do. It would be a cruel thing for a man at the end of his life to realise he had been duped all the way through it.

The Satanic Verses furore erupted in September 1988 as soon as Penguin Books published the novel by Salman Rushdie. After five months the uproar was only getting worse, yet Rushdie remained sanguine. Having been adopted into the Western liberal elite, he had absorbed their self-confidence. Ordinary Muslims in Britain perceived him as a traitor to his religion and to his beleaguered kinfolk; he had joined “the powerfuls” and now, like those kuffar decadents, was drunk on “privlige”.

Unabashed by all the offence he had caused, Rushdie wrote a letter to the Guardian advocating the scrapping of blasphemy laws (to make books like his less legally risky to publish) and mocking his opponents Hesham El Essawy and Max Madden:

Note the smug tone. It didn’t last long. Eight days later, Rushdie’s life changed forever when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for his death. Rushdie would spend the next decade in hiding and the rest of his life venturing out in public only with bodyguards. By 2022 he had relaxed a little too much and was maimed.

The fatwa was announced on the 14th of February 1989. Tony Harrison quickly wrote a poem in response, publishing it in the Observer on the 19th.

As far as I know this poem was not widely celebrated and Harrison did not include it in any subsequent collections. However, it is valuable in illuminating various things about the thinking of its era. In particular, looking at it from 2026, we can see wishful thinking and naivety undergirding the entire text. The ultimate products of the liberal worldview are not insight, reason and enlightenment but, yes, wishful thinking and naivety (which, untempered, will lead to oblivion) as well as cowardice and intellectual impotence. Liberalism is like an acid, dissolving everything that you might draw strength from and leaving you determined to exact the same fate on other people via undermining whatever gives them strength (eg. their religion, their traditions, their nation, their ethnic group, or even the project of civilisation).

I will comment on various parts of the poem.

spare us the God-inspired screed
to which the gormless grovel.

Admittedly, it is “low-hanging fruit” to attack this bit, but that only raises the question of why a man of Harrison’s intellect wrote it. Time and again, liberals say things they must know, or could easily know, to be fatuous or outright false.

Overlooking the arrogant dismissal of (apparently) all religious thought, I have to point out that the public are gormless with or without religion. Almost every contemporary thought-plex - from covid to equality to feminism to MAGA - beguiles the public only because they are gormless.

But Harrison seems to understand this; he says that the gormless grovel to religion, not that religion makes them gormless. If this is true, what does he suggest be done with the innumerable gormless? Should we just look down on them, in perpetuity, for being what they are, and assume that they pose no threat to us more discerning chaps, and that no demagogue will use them to destroy us? If we recognise that the masses are malleable, it would seem not only a moral duty but also a matter of self-preservation for us to mould them, not to leave their moulding to the winds of fate and whatever their undiscerning minds are drawn to. Harrison doesn’t seem to have thought of this. But he believes in the elevating powers of learning and civilisation - the things that pulled him out of the working-class - and no doubt believes they will do the same for Islamist fanatics. (Even on that detail, he is wrong; a number of Islamist terrorists have been highly educated, including trained doctors.)

However, I think we have to assume that Harrison believes the masses would be less gormless, but for religion. In this way he has a very optimistic view of humankind - very typical of his generation, but, yet again, grossly naive.

So much for the masses, but I would also say that even sophisticated men like Tony Harrison can be gormless. For example, he believes that all people can be rational and can thrive without religion, even though this has never happened before in human history. He believes it because he wants to believe it. How is this thinking more rigorous than that of any religious fanatic? The latter believes what he is told, while Harrison believes what he wants; both are slaves to irrationality. But only one of them is prepared to slaughter in defence of his beliefs. It’s like leaving a poodle in a room with a Rottweiler.

All religion’s had its day
especially when it insists
it is the one and only way
and fosters fundamentalists.

As we have seen with the rise of “wokery”, the masses are attracted to any creed which gives them certainty, or a sense of certainty, especially if it also authorises them to feel good about themselves and superior to others. Some of them will merely take solace in the creed, others will become fundamentalist promulgators. The fanaticism with which people today believe in “equality”, and the violence that antifa mete out to their opponents without a moment’s self-doubt, prove that the creed needn’t be a religious one in order to inspire fundamentalism. In the absence of religion, other creeds will innocently emerge or be maliciously manufactured to fill the void, which is very real. “The God-shaped hole” is a problem that simply cannot be denied, and it is irresponsible of intellectuals and social commentators to do so. But I cut Harrison some slack on this; it was 1989, not 2026.

democracy’s not founded
on creativity’s cremation

He is referring, literally, to the burning of books, but figuratively to the broader activity of destroying ideas.

His sentiment is a well-meaning one, but again naive in that it prizes democracy when, as seen throughout the life of universal suffrage in Britain, democracy is a farce. It means in most cases rule by the media, which means rule by the wealthy who influence the media. In times of plenty and often even in times of want, the masses wait to be told how to vote, or simply vote how their grandfather did in a sad substitute for “tradition”.

Harrison’s sentiment is also naive in connecting democracy to creativity. Again it’s a nice idea, but as far as I can see has no basis in actuality. It is perfectly possible to have democracy amidst mass censorship and a media that diligently circumscribes thought. That is exactly what we have in modern Britain. The only free speech is on social media, and the organs of democracy are striving to extend their censorship to there as well. But even if that is achieved, this will still be a “democracy”, for what that’s worth. What we see is not that Britain is a bad democracy, but that democracy itself is a bad system.

Indeed, if democracy actually worked as it is supposed to, then the Muslims who were in Britain to threaten Salman Rushdie, trouble Tony Harrison and endanger the public peace, would have been deported (or would never have arrived in the first place) and would therefore be unable to do any of those things. But Harrison’s precious democracy kept them around - indeed, he himself would regard it as monstrously undemocratic to do anything else.

The democratic impulse dooms itself by refusing to countenance having standards among voters, just as multiculturalism dooms itself by refusing to discriminate against intolerable cultures.

in a democratic nation… creative minds [are not] Mahounded

Oh, but they are. Harrison here is simply writing against reality, even in 1989. But he knows this, and what he actually means is:

in a democratic nation… creative minds should not be constrained by religious barbarism

But, if this is what he wants, he should oppose mass immigration from religiously barbaric parts of the world into democratic nations. You simply cannot have both; eventually the Muslims will tire of your starry-eyed idealism and slaughter an intellectual. They will also engage in ethnic nepotism and thus democratically empower their own against you. In addition, they will form voting blocks and make various demands in return for their block-vote, demands that will benefit their group, exclusively, at the expense of the natives. Thus will Harrison’s precious democracy be repurposed into a tool for conquering his people, dominating his land, obliterating the civilisation he values, and finally, destroying the democracy he believes in.

If any of these dangers occurred to Harrison, he would presumably have assuaged them by hoping that, over time, British liberalism will “colonise” (if I dare use that word) the minds of Muslim immigrants, and eventually they will have his attitudes. Well, that was in 1989. Thirty years later:

What would these men think if Tony Harrison told them about the value of freedom of speech, and how they should treasure it over their religion, which has “had its day”? Not much. The truth is, a liberal trying to gently persuade Muslims to give up Islam is like a man trying to gently rape a lion.

Another part of the poem deals - smugly - with the threat some outraged Muslims had made to boycott Penguin Books. Harrison thinks these Muslims would be shooting themselves in the foot, since their boycott would mean they couldn’t buy copies of a book very dear to them:

a book that Moslems ought to know is
published by Penguin - the Koran!

So … when you impose your Penguin ban
the Koran’s on their list.

This is an incredibly weak and naive thing for Harrison to say. The first part shows the juvenile glee so typical of liberals when they think of some fatuous point and rush to think it a “winner”. Then he switches to a solemn tone, with the preachy moralising that was also beloved of “right on” liberals back then. (How ironic that this combination of traits - moralising while being naive - is exactly what these very people mocked Mary Whitehouse for.)

To examine the point that Harrison was making… Does he seriously think (he doesn’t, because he isn’t really thinking) that Muslims would have even the slightest difficulty obtaining non-Penguin copies of the Koran? Of course they wouldn’t. Therefore, what kind of “win” is it that some copies of it are by Penguin? Who cares?!

With the smug stealth of the “rebel” who knows the powerful are on his side, Harrison starts off railing against religious fundamentalism but casually pivots to the absolutism of “all religion’s had its day”. From the vantage point of 2026, this cavalier approach to very delicate subjects seems alarmingly reckless. But Harrison was speaking in a time when liberalism was ascendent and must have seemed invincible.

From that complacent - and therefore careless - position does Harrison also write the final stanza. It is surely worth studying.

I want to let [Salman Rushdie] know

I shall not cease from mental strife
nor shall my pen sleep in my hand
till Rushdie has a right to life
and books aren’t burned or banned.

This is a laudable sentiment, but again it is hopelessly naive and ultimately amounts to hot air.

In truth, Harrison has the freedom to write only because Muslims haven’t (yet) beheaded him, and the government hasn’t (yet) imprisoned him, and Communist thugs haven’t (yet) thrown him in a gulag, and Fascist thugs haven’t (yet) put him in hospital, and MI5 haven’t (yet) dragged him away in the dead of night.

I will not say that violence is necessary in life, however, those who cannot or will not use it are helpless against those who can and will, and for protection they must rely on some third party who may not remain reliable. This is the plight of the effete intellectual - like Harrison, like myself. Does writing have any effect in protecting one from violence? Do intelligence, imagination, kindness, talent, originality or noble intentions protect one from violence? I used to believe so, but eventually I realised that I believed it not because any evidence suggested it, but because I wanted to believe it - and this purged me of the delusion. If Harrison still believed, when he died in 2025, in the things he wrote in 1989, I can only surmise that, despite his advanced age, he still hadn’t gone through the painful process of evaluating his beliefs in the context of cold reality.

In 2026 we live in a Britain in which minorities proliferate by the year, and where (on current trends) Muslims are destined to rule. In 1989 this was not yet the case, so we should cut Harrison some slack for thinking back then that Muslims en masse could be swayed by kuffar verbiage. He was operating from a position of luxury compared to ours today. However, even then Muslims were present in Britain in numbers sufficient to force Salman Rushdie into hiding. Indeed, this was exactly what Harrison was responding to with his words. While their demographic predominance was not yet on the cards, their force as a group was already on full display - even while they were a tiny minority!

Harrison’s wording in that final stanza suggests that he realises the naivety of the sentiment. But he has nothing to offer that is less naive. In the end, all he can do is hope for the best. His awareness of this fact does not help him. What’s worse is that he lacks the moral fortitude, having become aware of this fact, to investigate alternatives. A cosseted intellectual, he sticks with his comfy delusions. The old cloisters of elitist Oxbridge which Harrison railed against might have produced complacency, but it is difficult to imagine that it rivalled the complacency of him and others promoted in the age of democracy. Having seen out the old order, they believed that their commitment to equality would see them through anything. They still believe this today. But I suspect that a man of Harrison’s sensitivity, in his darker moments, later realised the truth.

In the same year as all of this, 1989, Francis Fukuyama announced “the end of history”, first as a question then, three years later, as a declaration. In the Rushdie affair we see the factors that would eventually disprove the “end of history”. It is interesting that the thesis and its antithesis were born at the very same time.

With that caveat acknowledged, we have to look at what AI will enable us - or other people - to do. Even those of us who reject it need to understand how it will benefit others, since ultimately we are “up against” them.

First, I should explain my bias. While I loved primary school, secondary (high) school was a torment for me. With class teaching that was frustratingly slow and bureaucratic demands that were overly pedantic, it felt like a huge waste of my time. If there is a way to avoid thwarting the tremendous energy and drive that teenaged boys have, then I am biased to approve of it. Likewise if there is a way to free kids from the suffocating syllabi of formal education.

I might have been an extreme case but I think most kids, especially boys, have similar experiences of high school. The older I get, the more I am disturbed by the idea of forcing highly energetic youngsters to sit still for eight hours a day in dull classrooms learning dull stuff. The superficial result is demotivation and disengagement, but it feels like there is wastage at a more profound level. We seem to be stifling our people when they are at their most mentally fertile.

Schooling takes far too long - thirteen years to get someone ready for work? Also, at the high school level, most of what you learn is irrelevant once you leave. We have long spoken of this as a sort of joke, something that just can’t be fixed, but it can be fixed, and we should not cheerfully accept an inherent flaw in a system that could be changed. In seeking to heal its dysfunction, Western society is going to have to ask why our schooling takes so long, why it includes many things that aren’t needed or enriching for the individual child, and why these things are often taught badly.

All of this was probably inevitable given the way education developed. In expanding schooling to the many, it was thought right to echo the classical education by teaching all children about Hamlet (for example), but as the West became ever more bureaucratised and egalitarian, “teaching them about Hamlet” became “training them to repeat ten facts about Hamlet”. By now, even many of the teachers don’t have any real grasp of Hamlet; they just know that each kid needs to go through the motions, as they did, in order to get the grade. Democratising means homogenising, which especially in the context of the Humanities makes the exercise basically a farce. It is brought about by the need to serve a system that has taken on a life of its own; the process has become “the point”.

So, for most kids, satisfying the process is the real experience of high school. They just want to get by and get out. They will learn whatever needs learning in order to pass the tests. Then they go to college or university where the process is repeated in a more focussed form. Then, finally, they are out in the world of work, where they will occasionally have to do courses in order to “stay fresh” with the latest thinking, techniques and tools.

For a long time, then, our conception of education has been more akin to skills training than to classical “education”. Moreover it has become routine and impersonal, like software installation. We install the software, we make sure it has installed correctly, then we periodically install small updates as they become available.

The spread of first schooling and then university led to this new conception of education. We ceased speaking - and thinking - of “the formation of character”. Certainly, we stopped thinking of “bringing out what is within”. It became the opposite: the inserting and forcing and grafting of the authorised into the raw mind, to tame it, to ensure it is fit for purpose in a society that was highly regimented and demanded conformity of its messy organic drones.

This was education in a world that was semi-automated, that required people to interface with a pedantic and inflexible infrastructure. You achieve that by making the infrastructure more human or the people less so. We did both: the infrastructure became easier to operate, but operating it at such intensity required people to act like machines.

But in the era of AI, the infrastructure is not only becoming more versatile, it is becoming able to actually communicate with us. The White call-centre worker of the late 1990s was replaced with an Indian by the late 2000s, then by barely-functional speech recognition software by the late 2010s, but that is now being replaced by AI with which you can actually have an easy conversation. You tell it what you want, it asks you for the information it needs, and the job is done. You nearly say thank you, and when it wishes you a good day you have to remind yourself not to say the same back, then you hang up. It is “impersonal” in a way we could scarcely have imagined in the 1990s… but it works, and it works better than the clumsy “intermediary versions” of the 2000s and 2010s. The automation is complete - the system can now converse with us - so we no longer need humans in the middle, acting like machines.

That eliminates a lot of jobs - the “operatives”, the data entry people, the management layers above them… we don’t need a middle-class to operate the system any more. We also don’t need them to do many jobs that the system itself can now do. From data analysis to graphic design, it is becoming difficult to work out what we do need a middle-class for. We still need a working-class for the manual tasks that robotics can’t take over, but not many. Of course, at this point you have to ask the more existential question of what a society is for if it doesn’t “need” most of the people in it, but that is beyond the scope of this essay.

In terms of employment sectors, until the last few years it might have seemed that education was a safe option, but AI nixes that too. Who needs a teacher or even a highly-trained professor when you can just ask ChatGPT?

This tweet sums it up. If a student can simply get ChatGPT to write essays for him, then his degree has little value to employers since it no longer “proves” what it used to. Similarly, if a student can simply get ChatGPT to explain things for him, then attending university is absurd since he can acquire the same understanding without racking up huge debt and wasting three years of his life. If we have divested education of “higher purposes” and it is now purely for training people, then a more efficient training method renders it obsolete - a grossly expensive farce, justified only by residual social cachet that is depleting daily.

I can imagine a (very) near future in which a company tells 12 year-olds how to join it with a simple page on its website:

Learn X, Y and Z thoroughly. Ask AI whatever questions you want in order to develop your understanding of those and related concepts. Once you are 16, you may join a group of candidates sitting an exam here on our premises. Electronic devices will be forbidden so you will be relying purely on your knowledge and understanding. The exam will determine the extent to which you have mastered X, Y, Z and related subjects (which we won’t specify, so as to gauge your initiative and engagement). The best ten of you will get employed.

Not only is university not required for this, even high school isn’t. As for the exam at the end, that would be invigilated by people who actually work at the company and thus “know the territory”, so exam boards would also be superfluous. The entire 20th Century system of formal education would be bypassed.

Now, once you (as this hypothetical 12 year-old) know which subjects you need to master in order to be eligible for that job, how will you learn them? How will “AI training” work?

• You tell the AI that you need to master subjects X, Y and Z within the next four years. It determines what mastering those will entail. For example, like any subject, X can only be grasped by first grasping a hierarchy of other things. The AI will guide you through that hierarchy, step by step.

• It will estimate the amount of time required to master X, Y and Z so that you make the deadline. It will revise this estimate periodically based on its perception of your progress so far.

• It will gauge your progress and your mastery of particular things by devising tests for you to sit. These could be generated automatically but perhaps posted online to be checked by human experts before deploying. Eventually there will be a huge stockpile of such tests so no danger of scarcity. The software will, of course, keep track of which tests you have already sat.

• You will learn at your own pace, unhampered by slower students.

• You will be constantly engaged rather than waiting for the lecturer to get to the point, being distracted by social hijinks, or getting bored learning things you already understand or have no use for.

• If there is something you don’t understand you will be able to get clarification immediately without having to worry about “looking stupid”.

• On “downtime” you can watch relevant YouTube lectures by real people and enjoy a sample of the old style of university. You can chat about the subject with other interested people online. Such activities will yield random “bits” to serve as fuel, new questions for you to ask the AI.

• If your curiosity takes you away from the X, Y and Z required by the original company, you can ask the AI which jobs at which companies would better fit the knowledgebase you have been gathering.

• The AI can (if you choose) make your knowledgebase publicly searchable so that people looking for employees or research partners will be able to find you. This profile will be very precise, and it will update automatically as your interests evolve. Maybe the company still requires X, Y and Z but has developed a special need for people who also know about P and Q - and you happen to fit their needs so will be contacted.

Now, you might think all of that sounds dreadfully impersonal. I wouldn’t disagree. But it might well be what many, many people do. Your kid could spend six years at high school then another three at university before applying to begin his career at 21, but many of his peers will be there at 16, possibly with more knowledge and better understanding than he acquired in-between all the tedious lectures, crap food, drinking, shagging, and student activism. They will have a five-year lead over him and zero debt.

Note that this would apply not only to “hard theory” subjects like STEM but even to the Humanities, because they, once the heart of the classical education, have been degraded into pure exercises in memory, facts, statistics and unquestioning alignment with ideology. Conformity and shrill certainty are required. Contemplation is certainly not required (indeed it is discouraged and punished) in order to obtain a Humanities degree today, or probably for the last fifty years. So AI could take over teaching this material, so degraded has it been by its human conveyors since 1945. They have made themselves redundant by so devaluing the precious thing they were trusted to look after. Now a machine can do it - and a machine doesn’t want a salary and a pension.

At the moment there are shortcomings with AI training. Studies are coming out saying that it lowers IQ because, of course, people are allowing it to do their thinking for them. I believe this is about as much of an intractable problem as the “uncanny valley” feel of AI imaging: it will be solved, and probably quickly.

For example, I can imagine an AI training system that requires the student to demonstrate understanding. I can imagine a verified AI testing system that gauges a student’s progress in a way that cannot be faked. These are problems waiting for solutions that will materialise.

Within a decade from now, AI might well be better than the ways we currently have for training, especially in subjects that don’t require physical skills or activity (although even there it could be a useful aid).

Ironically, the kind of education it will be terrible at is the type we have spent a century moving away from.

Understanding life, history, philosophy, art, men, women and oneself requires interaction with human educators. It is not just a matter of IQ, so no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, it can never do this. It is a matter of, for want of a less sentimental word, humanity. I don’t want to learn from software what it is to be human, to fall in love, to lose, to be bereaved, to be jealous, to fail, to win, to endure, to hope. It couldn’t possibly understand, so how it could help me understand? Why would I trust it? I don’t want to discuss with software the meaning or potency of a film or a piece of music. The idea is ridiculous.

But I think this kind of education - the Humanities as they used to be taught - is of value to only a minority of people, 10% or less. (Most fans of Withnail & I don’t want to think about its reflections on friendship, class, nationhood… they just want to play the drinking game and laugh about thumbs going weird. Most people, even if they stumble upon great things, are shallow.) For this reason, I don’t think the inability of AI “education” to truly handle the Humanities should be a count against it. On the contrary, it gives us a chance to revive a rightful separation between training (90%) and actual education (10%).

Let the 90% finish schooling at 12 and find their way towards adulthood using AI. The other 10% are a very different matter, and for them perhaps old-fashioned elite schooling can be made widely available with all the resources freed up.

Ha! You’re not even American! “Account based in Belgium”! Europoor! Mind your own business! Who cares what you think anyway? Why do you think you should have an opinion on America? It’s not your country! Opinion discarded! HAHAHA Cope and seethe, irrelevant Eurotrash!

Of course it’s the lower IQ Trump supporters who say this kind of thing, but there are many of them. I want to have a response here that I can link to, for convenience.

The United States is (at time of writing) the world superpower. This means that things it does, and even things that happen internally within it, have repercussions all around the globe. Other countries are affected, directly and indirectly, by the actions and tribulations of the hegemon.

With power comes responsibility. With superpower status, comes the fact that everyone else will be affected by your actions. You can’t have one without the other. If you are proud of America’s superpower status, fine, but understand that it means everyone else will have things to say, and that objecting to this only makes you look like an ignorant simpleton.

As an extension to the above, I will point out the asymmetry of the situation.

When the BAP crowd suddenly spoke out against Restore Britain, it was very suspicious and also unwelcomed by us in Britain. BAP is a Romanian Jew so why he should be so interested in (and claim to be knowledgeable about) British politics is a mystery. When I told him and his (mostly American) hangers-on to mind their own business, people reminded me that I have often opined on the politics of a foreign country: America.

It is annoying that this needs to be explained, but here goes.

The two are not comparable. Britain is no longer a superpower, while America is (for now).

American politics is all over British TV, media and social media. We Brits cannot help but know about what is going on over there, how it is likely to affect us (or has affected us), who is involved, why they did it, etc. Therefore, inevitably we will have opinions. And those opinions will be backed up with knowledge (even if it is sometimes flawed).

The converse is simply not true. The vast majority of Americans will not be affected by British politics and will certainly not be informed about British politics. Therefore, when they opine on the same, it is aggravating and insulting. When BAP and his lackeys chimed in, it was obvious they didn’t know what they were talking about. It was obvious that America and Romania would not be affected by a Restore government in the way we in Britain are affected by any American government. It was therefore also obvious that BAP’s “interest” in the matter was wholly artificial, and that of his fluffers even more so. But perhaps most insulting was their insistence that they knew more about British politics than we British do. Of course, this is always possible, but it would have to be someone who had taken a lot of time to learn and understand - and they clearly hadn’t.

I am happy to hear foreign views on British politics, culture, etc. when they are informed, or when they are uninformed but offered with humility. Other than that, do the honest and respectful thing: remain silent.

At the same time, accept that we in Europe will continue to voice opinions about the superpower. If our opinions are uninformed, point that out to us, but try to keep it polite. And certainly, give up on the ludicrous idea that the United States is none of our business. It is everyone’s business, because it is so important.

This story sees the rulers of Peladon, a backward and unimportant planet, contemplating whether to join “the Galactic Federation”.

After much debate in Parliament and the media, Britain joined the EEC (which evolved into the European Union) when Ted Heath signed the Treaty of Accession on the 22nd of January 1972. Just seven days later, The Curse of Peladon began broadcasting. Given the sheer temporal proximity, the story must be seen as a meditation on this real-world issue.

Moreover, since a great percentage of the British public opposed joining the EEC, it is an attempt by educated liberals to persuade them. But, as is often the case with allegorical drama, the persuasion is done dishonestly. The fictional setting allows for key facts to be twisted, replaced or omitted altogether, and thus, a fallacious argument to be constructed.

Coming from the mind of a writer, any story is bound to have “a perspective”. That is fine. I have no objection to the storyteller’s concerns being apparent in the stories he tells; drama would be very dull if it had to be strictly impartial on everything. However, there are two caveats. I would prefer if the BBC employed storytellers with a range of perspectives, not just liberals! Doctor Who viewers never got a story which showed “the other side” of this issue.

The second caveat is that a story should make some attempt at even-handedness, especially when it is for the general public and even more so when large numbers of children will be watching. The Curse of Peladon is certainly not even-handed. While purportedly a meditation on cooperation and federation, it ends up being a full-throated defence.

It is also not honest or fair, since Peladon differs from Britain in very relevant ways. Whatever the country, any fair treatment would take its peculiarities into account. Instead, Britain is distorted out of recognition in The Curse of Peladon. Just as the barbarian has to be elevated so that colonising him seems bad, a great country has to be diminished so that federating it seems good.

Well within living memory in 1972, Britain had been the world superpower. Thus, when its avatar here is a “somewhat primitive planet” which is lucky to be offered a chance by more advanced planets, the narrative is wildly off-the-mark. Britain was not in any way primitive compared to the other countries in the EEC; indeed it was as advanced as any, merely facing economic problems.

Then there is the character of the EEC itself, separate from its “member states”. The Galactic Federation is described exactly as the EEC (and EU) describes itself: a force for good, rationality, progress, efficiency, and benign cooperation. But what if the EEC is actually willing to destroy its “member states” in pursuit of a technocratic dream? This isn’t mentioned.

However, opposition to joining the Federation is mentioned, and linked explicitly with superstition and fear.

Hepesh, the High Priest of Peladon, is the ultra conservative uncle of its youthful, progressive king. He is desperate to dissuade the king from taking Peladon into the Federation.

Hepesh worships an ancient god, Aggedor, which of course turns out to be a false god. Moreover, Hepesh is engineering murders (including of his own brother) in order to frighten the king into keeping Peladon independent.

I can imagine a defender of this story saying that it isn’t biased, because the idea of national independence is shown on-screen, embodied in the character of Hepesh. But that is exactly the problem. When you have made the only visible representative of an idea also a liar, a superstitious and fear-ridden fool, a corrupt schemer, a murderer and a fratricide… it is rather difficult for the audience to take his worldview seriously. You have primed them to dismiss anything he espouses. Indeed, the more vehemently he holds a belief, the more instinctively they will reject it.

As a side-note, this story also has the reappearance of a species from Doctor Who’s past.

When last seen, the Ice Warriors were a war-like and xenophobic species. Now, though, they have become enlightened. As emissaries of the Federation, they proclaim:

We were once [war-like], but now we reject violence - except in self-defence.

Ah yes, “muscular liberalism” like we would later see in Star Trek, when Picard fought the Borg.

When asked why their ambassador is defended by an armed guard, they explain:

Unfortunately, in order to maintain peace, it is necessary to survive.

It sounds like a CNN anchor: “Though we abhor imperialism, we must have the ability to defend our way of life, our rules-based order, our democracy.”

The implied argument is: if even a race as aggressive and jingoistic as the Ice Warriors can become enlightened, surely we Brits can, too? In this context, national pride is implicitly equated with being aggressive and jingoistic.

In a conversation with the Doctor during a desperate moment, Hepesh finally “opens up” about why he opposes Peladon joining the Federation:

Because I’m afraid.

The Doctor - standing in for the liberal writer and the (presumed) liberal viewer - attempts to persuade:

Afraid of what? The Federation is your safeguard.

This is the benign idea of globalism and federalism: it means that each country will have a “safety net”. But Hepesh believes that is a trick:

That is not true. I know the Federation’s real intent.

The Doctor is sure:

The Federation’s real intent is to help you!

But Hepesh knows:

No. They’ll exploit us for our minerals, enslave us with their machines, corrupt us with their technology. The face of Peladon will be changed, the past swept away, and everything that I know and value will have gone.

Peladon has the vulnerabilities of an African country (“exploit us for our minerals”), not a highly advanced First World nation, but let’s overlook that and consider the second half of his statement, which the story presents as reactionary and blinkered. I would say every word of it has been vindicated by Britain’s experience of EU membership and globalism in general. Of course, this relates not just to the EU but the WHO, the WEF, the UN, and so on. Even now, post-Brexit, these bodies have learned nothing and remain absolutely determined to destroy whatever they can of every ancient culture under their control.

The Doctor tries to reassure Hepesh:

The progress that they offer isn’t like that.

Oh, but it is. And Hepesh is brave, strengthened by his faith in his people and homeland:

I would rather be a cave-dweller and free.

You might say that, in 2016, after 45 years in the EU, the British public agreed with Hepesh. But of course, we were never going to be cave-dwellers, and the public knew that in 1972.

This possibility of impoverishment, like so much of the allegory in this story, depends on Britain being depicted as a primitive planet that could only gain by federating. It would be more accurate - and also more patriotic - if Peladon had been an advanced planet that could only lose by federating.

Instead, the desire to love and value and preserve your homeland, as Hepesh does, is presented as fearful, superstitious and backward-looking.

As he dies, he says:

I wanted to save our world, to preserve the old ways. Perhaps I was wrong. I hope so. The future you set so much store by, is yours now.

In the real world, that future didn’t last long, and in its short life it destroyed Europe. What we found was that the Federation did indeed exist to dominate, browbeat, threaten, weaken, homogenise, castrate and annihilate, to whatever extent it could, every “member state” that submitted to it. The very goal of the project, from the outset, was global homogeneity and centralised control, based on technocratic hubris, loathing of tradition and contempt for people in general.

It is exactly as Hepesh said. A liberal writer unwittingly gave his “superstitious fool” more wisdom than everyone else.

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We should be honest about the scope of what is ahead for Restore Britain. I will speak about three phases: expansion, electioneering and governing.

Expansion

This is a critical phase because the people in an organisation define what the organisation ends up being, how it will perform, what strengths and vulnerabilities it will have, and what daily life within it will be like.

Expansion means lots of new activists. Since this is politics, and politics of a certain pitch, some of those who volunteer their time will be misfits, malcontents, sociopaths, the types who love to fall out with people and actively look for ways to create conflict - just an all-round nightmare. Once they’re in, you can’t stop them doing damage because they always find ways around rules. You can only remove them. It is wise to do so promptly.

A separate category, ideological spergs, can be extremely useful but must be kept in a box. They are great at research, number crunching, strategising, etc. Don’t give them any social responsibilities or prominence.

Expansion will also mean bringing professional advisers onboard. That is a risk, especially because they will not be familiar with the sort of political party RB needs to be, since none has existed before. They should be chosen carefully. Not only should they be competent and trustworthy, they should have the imagination needed to understand the project.

Another risk is non-natives joining. Some will be well-meaning, some entirely self-interested, but all will weaken the resolve and ability of RB to do what needs to be done. Hold the line. Remember that the native people of Britain are with you, no matter how little diversity you have in the shop window.

Don’t accept Zionist funders. This is the death knell for any pro-European organisation. It has happened time after time, and RB would be no different. The same goes for figures, such as Douglas Murray, who would force RB down that path. Few things could be more devastating to a party that purports to be devoted to improving Britain and helping the British people. It is a key aspect of the farce of British politics that every party has a “Friends of Israel” organisation. If RB does this, people will see the party, rightly or not, as a sham owned and controlled by foreign interests and the organic support, the base, the energy, will dry up overnight.

Then you have to worry about infiltrators - spies from the media, Hope Not Hate, etc. - who will seek to get your people on tape saying something inadvisable. Everyone should bear this in mind and not say anything in private that they wouldn’t say on TV. State infiltration will likely come in the form of honeypots, because there is no surer way to corrupt young men than with young women. Insulate yourselves from scandal however you can. Finances, relationships, etc.

Then there are the drama merchants, the martyrs and exhibitionists who thrive on wild antics that get attention, creating fodder for their socials and for the progressive media, but generally bring down the tone and drive away sensible people.

What you need is straightforward, well-adjusted professional types, preferably with unblemished personal lives, the types of people who solve problems rather than create new ones.

Expansion is an extremely tricky business because basically every new person is a risk. Mistakes will be made. The whole organisation will need to be adept at recovering from these and continually moving forwards. However, vetting and monitoring new people will be essential to building a stable working environment.

I can’t emphasise enough that the organisation will need to be robust, because the opposition it is going to face will be historic. (Were the country’s situation not so drastic, I would even suggest delaying an electoral run until a solid base has been established.) I also can’t emphasise enough how being robust depends on the types of people brought onboard. An organisation is the people in it.

Loyalty (“he agrees with us”) should count for infinitely more than merit (“he’s clever/qualified”). But, obviously, you ideally want both in every person you bring onboard. The establishment parties will always be able to attract qualified people; RB’s appeal will be strength and conviction, not slickness.

Electioneering

I think this will actually be a lot easier than the first phase, because the message is one that the British people will naturally be very amenable to. Finally having a party that represents them, comes across as genuine and simply speaks the truth will be a breath of fresh air. If RB don’t win a majority in the next election, they will in the one after that. Yes, it might be necessary for Britain to endure a farcical Reform/Conservative or an appalling Green/Labour government, but if RB hold the line and don’t cuck, victory will be assured after that. I would strongly advise against accepting a minority role in a coalition government. It worked out badly for the Lib Dems in 2010, and the establishment would make sure it worked out badly for RB.

I suspect that, in time, RB will transcend the left/right paradigm to some extent, but clearly for now it is squarely a right-wing party. For that reason, courting Green, Labour and LibDem voters is largely a waste of time. You will have more luck pulling (some of) them towards your position than slyly adapting it to please them. The realities of Britain today - corruption, globalism, corporatism, cost of living crisis, the failures of multiculturalism - are visible to everyone who is willing to see them, and I think a lot of young men who currently feel that the Green Party sympathises with them could be brought over on the same basis. A lot of people are not stridently left-wing, they just hate the status quo. But Tolkien would have hated it for the same reasons. Be Tolkien, not Thatcher.

When it comes to Conservative and Reform voters, your task is at once easier and harder. It is easier because these parties are obviously corrupt and incapable of rescuing the country. It is harder because a) a lot of people have invested great hope in Reform and b) conservative people tend to be very staid. RB will seem to them like an unknown quantity, and maybe too extreme. Do not over-play any cartoonish memeable “basedness”, no matter how funny it might be. The party’s communications can be slick and “cheeky” and poke fun at its rivals, but should never veer into the sort of vulgarity that can be used against it.

RB’s top weapon against Reform is the fact that Farage, now admitted publicly by the man himself, lied about Rupert Lowe in the hopes of getting him imprisoned and destroying his reputation. No sensible person should want a man who behaves like that in charge of the country. There is a danger of over-playing this card, but only if you fail to supplement it with other things - tangible policy, capable figures, clear direction, a clean image, a proper constitution. If you have those things sorted out, you can safely go hell-for-leather against Farage on this crucial matter of personal integrity. The emphasis should be not on Lowe’s misfortune or suffering, but on Farage’s duplicity and malice.

Boomers, like left-wingers, should not be placated, but rather invited to come to your position. Don’t waste time and energy trying to adapt the message for them, because as far as I can see, the message really isn’t for them. It is for the young who will need to deal with the Britain that is on the way.

Don’t over-play the Christian angle. It needlessly alienates many people who would naturally be your allies. I say this as someone who is dismayed whenever a church is converted into a mosque or a callcentre. Of course our Christian heritage matters (even to those of us who are not Christian) and of course it should be protected. But we are not starting from a point at which a majority of the population are practising Christians, and it would be wise to proceed with that in mind.

Don’t over-play the stuff about welfare scroungers. While there is undoubtedly a huge problem with multi-generational welfare dependency, there is also the fact that a lot of jobs simply are disappearing due to automation, AI, off-shoring and low-wage immigration. This issue particularly affects young men, who would otherwise be drawn to RB, and have been systematically cut out of employment, training, promotion, bursaries, etc. and really left on the scrap heap. It’s also the case (I believe) that Thatcherite insistence that people “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” has led to dead-end communities up and down the country, when investment and sympathy would have been a more intelligent approach for families that, until then, wouldn’t have dreamt of going on welfare but found themselves with little option. All of these factors explain a large part of Zack Polanski’s appeal, and rather than refute or ignore this, I would suggest RB co-opt it. Make it positive; instead of demonising “the indolent”, speak of those who are “neglecting their potential”. You might even call them “the neglected”.

No token BAME candidates. This is a cheap tactic that insults everyone and demoralises the young who are “over” such things. They are worried about being strangers in their country; they don’t care whether you’re “down with the Sikhs” or not.

Having good people, who seem capable of doing the monumental work the party seeks to do in government, will be essential during the electioneering phase. People want to see that RB is a serious party, genuinely preparing to do what it has pledged.

Governing

Third will be actually being in government and saving the country. This might involve:

• gutting and re-staffing the civil service (otherwise it will thwart you at every turn and get you tied up with a million kinds of nonsense)

• reforming the judiciary to disbar activist judges. This is not just for criminal reform but to prevent them thwarting governmental action

• leaving the ECHR

• legally abolishing DEI

• reforming the entire governmental apparatus (including banning Hope Not Hate)

• prosecuting everyone involved in the Pakistani rape gangs and the facilitating thereof

• bringing industry and food production home to revitalise the economy

• reforming the tax system to incentivise native family formation and increase birth rates

• slashing the insane, suicidal wokery in education

• reinventing formal education for the 21st Century

• abolishing or drastically reforming the BBC. Personally I favour reforming it and consider promising to abolish it a cultural and electoral strategic mistake, but I will write about that separately

• remigration (eg. my 25-point blueprint)

Once in government, RB will be surrounded by traitors and “establishment creatures”. Get rid of them as quickly as possible so that the actual work can proceed unhindered. Clear them out.

General

Messaging should be simple and harmonised. Essays are for critics and academics. You are now in the role of political warriors. Politics masquerades as a debate club but is actually a gladiatorial battle. Do not think that reasoning with your enemies will ever placate them. Your job is to ensure that you don’t get stuck in the weeds and that they do.

Attack is the best form of defence. Always be on the attack. Do not justify to the enemy unless it is strategically useful for you.

Keep the weirdos and fatties out - optics matter. RB people should look good and sound good. The fewer Ts that are dropped, the better; leave the nihilism to the Greens.

Resist the temptation to disavow your radical supporters. Use Cato’s tactics. Radicals can be tactless but their energy is priceless. Disavow them only when absolutely necessary.

I realise there will be no shortage of people offering RB advice. White Papers Policy Institute have some ideas. So does Michael Reiners. WorldByWolf wrote a good tweet. Academic Agent has some ideas of the dangers you face and offers good advice. But advice can be suffocating. A lot of what you need to do will be simple common sense.

Sometimes there will be difficulties, both practical and psychological. Have confidantes you can trust completely, and use them when you need to.

In closing

Britain has been in need of revival for a hundred years now. We have watched our Victorian grandeur fade, sometimes we have watched governments actively destroy it, and today we watch as its remnants are mocked, or re-purposed for foreigners who wear our heritage as a skin-suit. Cold Thatcherite monetarism didn’t reverse any of this. Neither did Blairite globalism. Neither will autistic libertarianism.

What is needed is new thinking, the courage and imagination to restore a great country and revitalise a great people. We do not need a return to the 1980s or the 1990s or even the 1890s, but a spring forward to something new and innovative, something that respects our deep past and replenishes it, and which nourishes us as a people - because that is what we are.

A lot of the structures of the 20th Century, and the terrible first quarter of the 21st, will need to be dismantled. A lot of people will need to be re-homed where they belong so that we have our country again and can begin the long process of healing, of recovering our peoplehood.

These are uncharted waters. The state clearly needs rolled back, but at the same time, relying on the free market will not be enough, because its interests are most fully served by destroying peoples and countries.

Nothing - no principle, value, law or institution - is more important than our future.

What the British need now is a government that is not in hock to any ideology of the past, and which has the courage and imagination to conceive of a future for us - for only us.

The premise is typically outlandish for an Anderson show: a 9 year-old boy is sent off alone on extremely dangerous missions with his brain implanted with memories and skills from numerous experts using a machine invented by his adoptive father. Yes, his father literally brainwashes him at the start of each episode before sending him off to defeat gangsters, terrorists and dictators. It wouldn’t be made today.

I don’t like Anderson’s other shows, but I love Joe 90. The reason isn’t just that I was introduced to it at a young age (my grandparents bought us a video of it, quite randomly I think); having had that entrée I could easily have “got into” the other shows, but I never did. Nor is it because by this time they had worked out how to have the heads be in proportion to the bodies, though that certainly helps. Rather, it’s because Joe 90 has a very small cast of characters, and each one is distinct and has clear relationships with the others. This might seem a ridiculous thing to praise, but the fact is, Anderson dropped the ball on this with all of his previous shows. They tend to have many “duplicate” characters - all the Tracey brothers in Thunderbirds, all the agents and all the “angels” in Captain Scarlet - which I find dizzying and confusing.

In Joe 90, there are just four people: Joe, his adoptive father Professor McClaine, his friend Sam Loover, and his boss Shane Weston. Thus, the show has an intimacy and calmness to it, and there is a camaraderie between the four which really “chimes”.

The cosiness is aided by the main setting, the house where Joe and his father live. It is an archetypal English cottage, rendered in adorable miniature:

This is countered by the steely modernism of Weston’s office, where business is often discussed:

Weston and Loover are directors at WIN - the World Intelligence Organisation. Prof. McClaine is an associate of the same, and young Joe becomes its “most special agent”.

What we have here is White men being competent, brave and honest. Each man has a role to play in the world, and he does his duty. These men have emotions, but they keep them under control. They are upset only by things that happen, not by ideas or personal demons. In the course of growing up or professional training, demons have either been defeated or consigned to a locked box so that they cannot prevent the man from doing well in life and helping the people around him.

On occasion, such as in the episode Talkdown, we encounter a man who has not defeated his demons, but this is not seen as a terrible mark against him, just as a burden that he must be helped to overcome so that he can do good in the world.

This is an extremely wholesome show. The moral lessons are not hammered home, but they are present in the actions and attitudes of the characters.

In this future (around 2012) the Cold War is long over and Russia is an ally of the West. But outside the West there is barbarism and dictatorship, poverty and superstition. WIN’s job is to intervene in these foreign lands to keep them relatively peaceful and honest - and to prevent these dusky scoundrels from making nasty little attacks on the West, which is idyllic.

21st Century Britain is depicted as a haven of peace, civilisation, friendliness, and good taste. Its people (entirely White) are helpful, polite and civic-minded. Things are looked after. Things are done properly. Yes, in the far-flung corners of the world there is tyranny and dysfunction and corruption, but here in Europe and the Anglosphere, we have a good way of life.

It being Britain, class is part of this formula. Everyone knows his place and is comfortable with it. But also, you occasionally see an educated person with a broad regional accent, indicating that, in this perfect future Britain, a talented man is enabled to thrive no matter his origins. But also, he knows how to thrive: it means embodying high culture, not gorging on vulgar trinkets.

As for Britain geopolitically, its Empire has clearly dissolved and it is subservient to America (as indicated by WIN being led by Americans) but it remains important, influential and well-respected on the global stage. Internally, this future Britain is a hive of shopkeepers, farm workers, small businessmen, diligent scholars and inventive scientists.

This is Britain as a thoughtful 1960s conservative would hope it would become in the next 50 years: a hi-tech post-industrial country, proud of its past but looking to the future; a land where the rural idyll has been recovered, but without sacrificing the gifts of science. As Prof. McClaine says:

That’s the way we like it, Sam - a combination of the old and the new.

All of the music - theme tune and scoring - is by Anderson’s regular composer Barry Gray. What a talent! He contributes a key ingredient without which the show just wouldn’t be the same, setting the tone right from the Century 21 sting that opens each episode.

Shot gleamingly on 35mm film, the show was rescanned by Network for Blu-ray. I haven’t gone for that because I don’t really care for high-definition, and also… I’m still chuffed with the fact that I got the DVD boxset for the ridiculous price of £10 in an HMV sale, back in 2005.

The VHS my grandparents bought had the slogan:

Daredevil excitement every boy dreams about!

And it is. If you have a son, and he is young enough not to have been spoiled by modern CGI, show him Joe 90.

My recommendations

This is superfluous because there aren’t really any bad episodes. However, for the sake of it…

Most Special Agent
This is the opener, which establishes the premise and is thus “necessary viewing”. Aside from that, it has an impressive destruction sequence where a military base is levelled, and also an exciting sequence at the start demonstrating Prof. McClaine’s flying car (note the wonderful shot of the wheel touching down on tarmac).

Arctic Adventure

I absolutely love this evocation of the Arctic - some little piece of water, bounded by ice floes, with a vertical ice sheet as a backdrop. It is all so simple, but beautifully done. This is the kind of thing you get aplenty in the show. Of course it doesn’t look realistic, but why would you want it to?

Breakout
This is a lovely (but surprisingly violent) episode set in Canada. What’s interesting, viewing it today, is that Canada is depicted as having a distinct culture of its own, and it is recognisably Anglo. This unique culture, incidentally, allows for the appearance of a charming log cabin set:

Note the Canadian official, dressed in national garb. Being an educated Anglo man, he is stoical, helpful, efficient, well-informed, and not corrupt.

Project 90
This is an exceptional episode. Every aspect of it is better “than it needs to be”. It’s as if everyone involved is going the extra mile - not least Barry Gray whose score here is outstanding. On the visual side, I love the rendition of the Alps, especially at twilight. Things this beautiful don’t need to exist.

The Professional
This episode is very tense and culminates with an escape sequence that is absolutely thrilling, and very technically impressive. I remember the first time I watched it, the climactic shot amazed me.

Colonel McClaine
Another gripping episode, this sees Joe tasked with transporting highly explosive material across a rocky terrain. Very tense indeed! Also lovely model landscapes and cute chunky vehicles.

Episodes in strange locations

Child of the Sun God - the Amazon
Most Special Astronaut - space!

Touching episodes

Hi-Jacked
Relative Danger
Three’s A Crowd

Episodes with hilarious racial stereotypes

Using stereotypes for incidental characters is a thing done in all dramas, even today, for speed and convenience - but it’s notable here because of the national/racial aspect. This was a time when it was okay for Westerners to engage in “othering” - ie. to find something exotic. That was okay, because we were allowed to have our own perspective. In some episodes these stereotypes are especially prominent:

Big Fish (South Americans)
Child of the Sun God (Amazon tribes)
King for a Day (Arabs)

“Oddball” episodes

See You Down There
Lone-Handed 90
The Race

Episodes with female characters

Women cameo here and there, but only two episodes have a key female character, and there is only one recurring (Mrs Harris, the McClaines’ housekeeper).

Double Agent - Mrs Harris
Arctic Adventure - Mrs Harris
The Birthday - Mrs Harris
Three’s a Crowd - Angela Davies and Mrs Harris
Viva Cordova - Dorina Cordova

What I would have liked

More of it! The formula just works so well, it seems criminal that a second season wasn’t commissioned. I’m sure it would have been every bit as charming and adorable as the first. Unfortunately, by 1968 the spy/espionage genre was going out of fashion, and Joe 90 was too different from its Anderson predecessors to capitalise on their popularity, so one season is all that was ever made.

After this Gerry Anderson made only one more Supermarionation series (The Secret Service, which was axed halfway through production) and then he moved on to other things. Joe 90 was less popular than his earlier series but, for me, it represents the peak of his ingenious (and very British) experiment with the craft of storytelling. With Supermarionation, Anderson and his technicians created something both unique and charming, and I believe Joe 90 is the best of it.

See my other TV guides here.

Blacks defend black murderer Karmelo Anthony. Moderate Muslims defend hardcore Muslims. Moderate leftists defend extreme leftist professors, writers, journalists, bomb-throwers, vandals, rioters, murderers and even terrorists.

Groups defend their radical fringes because they understand that the radical fringe is a bulwark against the enemy as well as a snow-plough clearing ground so that moderates can seize it. In addition, protecting the radicals is beneficial for reasons of morale, solidarity, not showing weakness or kowtowing to the enemy, etc. Therefore, every group prizes and protects its radicals.

Every group, that is, except White conservatives. They have a completely different strategy: disavow their radicals in order to gain their enemy’s approval, endorsement and friendship. This is the “people pleaser” approach, and indeed it does please people, because it puts the conservative in the losing position and enables his enemy to walk all over him. (Whenever one hears about a conservative politician who behind closed doors really enjoys getting whipped or otherwise humiliated, it seems to just make sense. It makes sense that Tim Stanley, who condemns right-wing radicals as Nazis, calls Kemi Badenoch “mummy”.)

The general public don’t want to follow radicals, because they associate being radical with being unstable, weak and unreasonable. They associate being moderate with being stable, strong and reasonable. But the key thing for them is not moderation - which is arbitrary and changes with the times - but the other attributes which are seen to go with it. They follow a moderate not because his ideas are bland, but because he is stable, strong and reasonable - “a safe pair of hands”. What they want is not just stability, but direction that will not swerve, not err or falter, not lead them off a cliff.

If you, as a politician, have radical ideas but nevertheless seem stable, strong and reasonable, the public will take you seriously. Of course, your enemy will do everything they can to obstruct this. They will first emphasise how radical your ideas are. If that fails, because the public have an appetite for change, they will switch to emphasising the other traits, trying to get the public to see you as unstable, weak and unreasonable. Funnily enough, “unstable and weak” can be achieved by getting you to disavow people on your own side. This could be because the individuals are corrupt, sleazy, under-qualified… or because they are more radical than you. If you disavow them, you admit that you had bad judgement in associating with them in the first place, and you show yourself as a people-pleaser who lacks the strength to stand by his principles and his allies. Your enemy wants you to disavow your radicals because doing so makes you look bad.

Far from winning you some peace, it disrupts things on your side. Now you have to deal with tumult in the ranks - your supporters feeling demoralised because you have started disavowing people, your allies unsure which of them will be next, everyone wondering whether some other leader would be less of a push-over.

Meantime, having done what your enemy demanded, of course you have not won his approval. He moves straight on to the next demand. The point of holding you responsible for the radicals is to persuade you to kill your own cause. You end up literally doing your enemy’s work for him.

We on the Right have to start playing to win, not seeking our enemy’s approval. There is no placating people who want you extinct. And be in no doubt, that is absolutely what they want. So, invoking your attachment to morality and principles, and using your decency against you, they invite you to castrate your own side.

Now, of course there are objectionable ideas and people on the Right (as anywhere). But you don’t need to attack them or counter-signal them. I won’t say categorically that you should have “no enemies to the right” - good luck with that! - but that you should avoid cutting them loose. Most of the time, you can simply ignore them.

A high tide raises all ships. Instead of attacking someone you deem not good enough, elevate someone you deem better.

Social class comes into this. On the Left, radicals tend to be middle-class, university-educated, idealistic, and full of self-regard. But on the Right, radicals tend to be working-class. This is a vector of attack. The enemy will point out how uncouth the radical is, how lacking in finesse and nuance, how uneducated, boorish or unpleasant he might be. All of those accusations might hold, and yet what the radical is saying remains true. And even if not, to be cold about this, the radical remains strategically useful.

Often, the purpose of the radical is not that he identifies end goals, but that he maximises the ground the enemy has to fight to secure. When you as a moderate concede ground from the off by disavowing your radicals, you reduce your enemy’s workload and reduce your possible win before the fight has even started! Now, you might think this helps you because it makes you appear reasonable, moral, etc. Your enemy doesn’t care about those things. If he cared about morality, he wouldn’t be demonising you for objecting to the Great Replacement or trying to secure the existence of your ethnic group.

Of course we should be reasonable and humane - but by the standards of the public, not of our enemies. If someone on your side is too extreme, maybe privately suggest they calm down their rhetoric so as not to give the enemy an easy win. However, never publicly disavow them except as an absolute last resort. Not only does it inflame egos leading to reprisals and resentment all round, more importantly it demoralises your side (yes, because people are human) and hands a win to your enemy by showing there is division on your side, something he can stoke and exploit.

Perhaps most fundamentally, a man who continually disavows his own side is seen by the public as a man who is weak and/or has bad judgement.

When one of your radicals (let’s call him “Ronald”) is in the news for some controversial thing he has said or done, you might not need to say anything at all. Simply letting your enemy bluster impotently might be the winning move for you. However, we should not imagine that we too enjoy the privileged position of the Left, namely that the media is on our side and won’t hold our radicals against us. Sometimes things do need to be addressed. Should you be quizzed about Ronald, here is how to respond:

Let’s go through each of these.

• “That’s not my position.”
  This differentiates you from Ronald without disavowing him, and also makes your enemy look incompetent. You could even mock your enemy for stupidly equating you (a moderate) with a radical and ask why he is wasting your time with this misapprehension.

• “He’s clearly reacting to a problem.”
  With these words, you re-cast Ronald’s “radical” position as understandable, emerging not from evil intent but from real life, but you do not justify it and thus create burdens for yourself. You are showing sympathy with Ronald (which emboldens your side) without embracing his position. The word “clearly” makes this seem obvious, common sense, and thus makes your enemy look stupid.

• “What about my position?”
  This switches you from defensive to pro-active. You are controlling the discourse instead of letting your enemy do so. (And after all, why is your enemy talking to you if not to learn your position…? Surely it’s not just a sly vindictive effort to get you to disavow a friend…?)

• “Yes, Ronald is my friend.”
  This puts you on top, seizing dominance from your enemy. It demonstrates spine, courage and solidarity (which will energise your side) and shows there is not a schism that your enemy can exploit. You have differentiated yourself from Ronald but are not pathetically terrified of being associated with him. This deprives your enemy of all options but to listen to your “more reasonable” position.

In short: undermine your enemy, not your radicals.

And you should always do this, even when you disagree with the radicals or think their ideas impractical. Why? Because the radicals are on your side while your enemy is not. They have your back, your enemy doesn’t. This really is zero-sum, friend/enemy, power politics, black/white, etc. There is unlikely to be much “reasonable common ground” you can find with an enemy whose worldview is diametrically and implacably opposed to your own.

And even if there is some common ground, be careful about pursuing it. The nuances of morality and truth are much less important than attaining power. Without power, you cannot advance morality or truth anyway.

Conservatives don’t think about “winning” battles with the Left, just “getting through” them. On the rare occasions they do think about winning, it is by showing themselves more adherent to leftist ideals than the Left.

This apologetic strategy has brought conservatives defeat in all cultural battles (and most economic battles) for a century now, but still they cling to it, constantly sure that despite its record of total failure, it will get them through the next battle, or the next one, or definitely the one after that…

Underlying this defeatist approach are two factors: the inherent passivity of the conservative psyche, and the supplanting long ago of traditionalism by progressivism. Ever since, the conservative has recognised that the Left really believe in progressivism while he merely “accepts” it. His lack of fealty to the orthodoxy is felt by the conservative (who yearns to conform) as his secret sin, which he constantly has to hide and deny. He feels always on the brink of being unmasked as a pretender.

All of this results in him believing that the Left have the moral high ground. Even if they are naive, clumsy or over-zealous, they are righteous - and that means conservatives must be wretched. The Left have a purity of intent, a simplicity of vision and a total absence of self-doubt that the conservative claims to find amusing but actually finds intimidating.

As a result, he approaches battles with the Left convinced both that he will be defeated, and that he probably should be. All he can do is delude himself about his situation and the nature of the Left, and in the meantime try to limit the damage they inflict upon him.

The battered wife desperately assures her husband, turning to her with clenched fists, that she ironed his suit this morning. She would like the bathroom refitted, the lounge painted a different colour… she would like all kinds of things, but from day to day she can think only of placating her husband’s wrath. As a result, she will never get anything she wants.

But at least the battered wife knows that the situation is wrong. The conservative isn’t sure. His natural want is to be at one with his society, in tune with its orthodoxy. But progressivism repels him so he cannot be at one with it, only cowed by it. For this subterfuge, he sees himself as a fraud. Meantime, he knows that the Left actually are at one with the orthodoxy. So what right does he have, really, to oppose them?

But much worse than the conservative, in his eyes, are the right-wingers who go further than him, who actually openly defy progressivism. At least he has the decency to pretend! These nutters explicitly reject the orthodoxy of their own society! They threaten to upset everything! And worse still, the Left associate him with these people!

This is why, time after time after time, the conservative rushes to disavow right-wing radicals. It is to protect normalcy (a normalcy that he hates) and to prevent people realising that he hates it, because then he would be revealed for what he is: a traitor to his own society.

Having disavowed the radicals, cut ties with them, barred them from his organisations and warned colleagues never to help them, the conservative feels a glimmer of security and hope. The work he has done for the Left, castrating his own side, surely proves that he is “reasonable” and “moderate”. They will surely appreciate this and reward him with respectability and “a seat at the table”. He will enjoy some influence on how society develops, and be able to help the Left identify and disavow their own radicals.

This never happens. The Left never give him any power whatsoever. They rarely even give him the treat of calling him “respectable”. He remains, perpetually, under suspicion and having to prove himself to them, his enemy, day after day.

But he keeps hoping, and he keeps disavowing people on his own side, and hoping, and disavowing, hoping, disavowing... That is his lot, dictated by his nature.

The conservative is the perfect manager of decline, because he is comfortable with decline. He sort of “believes” in it as the lesser of two evils. Action - rejecting the orthodoxy, snubbing the Left, taking his own side, supplanting progressivism and actually saving his society - would be, in his eyes, the behaviour of a mad radical.

The conservative’s two fundamental problems are:

• he is naturally passive and sleepy

• he doesn’t like the idea of changing society

As a result, he always defers to the Left when they want to change society. Averse to doctrine and hysteria, he defaults to being “the adult in the room”, the “reasonable” person who can “bring some much-needed common sense” to the lefties and “make sure they don’t go too far”. To that end, he seeks their trust and admiration. To that end, he sells out his own radicals. This strategy results in him neutering his own side and facilitating the Left in achieving exactly what they want to achieve. He isn’t strong enough to thwart the radical Left, but he has thwarted the radical Right who are strong enough to do so - or rather, would have been.

After a century of this process, we are living in Woke World, Globohomo World, Rainbow World, the Yookay. It is a nightmare and we are heading for permanent extinction. While it would be unfair to blame this on the Left as such - most of them are just useful idiots - this is the world they approve of. Even if it isn’t perfect for them, they will defend it to the death.

In this dire context, it is time for the conservative to wise up, man up, and either grow a spine or get out of the way. He must either make peace with right-wing radicals or give way to them entirely. The very future of the European race is at stake now. Milquetoast conservatism - in policies and attitudes - didn’t prevent this and will never fix it.

Gorton & Denton is a good election to have at this juncture, because it demonstrates the futility of Reform UK’s approach and the efficacy of the Green Party’s approach (identity politics). Nigel Farage has betrayed and condemned his base, Zack Polanski has wholeheartedly embraced his and said everything necessary to please them. Just in the last few days, Farage has warned of White ethno-nationalism while Polanski has advocated giving non-whites universal basic income, the vote, NHS treatment, and a house from the moment they arrive. The difference could not be starker.

Thus the by-election shows what, without Restore Britain, will be the future of this country: the natives progressively betrayed by the political class in favour of ethnic minorities, who will increasingly get what they want, whatever they want.

Between 2011 and 2021, the Muslim contingent in Gorton & Denton grew by a staggering 64% and the “none” (Atheist, likely progressive, ie. Green-voting) contingent by 44%, while the Christian contingent shrank by 21%:

The result is an electoral map that looks like this:

In a sane country, this would be two separate constituencies. In ours, we have to mix together (even while we, demonstrably, want to segregate) so this is just one constituency, which must be fought over by diametrically-opposed ethnic camps - in Denton, white native Brits, and in Gorton, the newcomers. In such a polarised environment where people are aware of the stakes and have the confidence to seize them, there can be no common ground, no “meeting in the middle”, no centrist swindle. Whichever camp is more united will win the entire constituency, and politically dominate the other camp.

In fact, if we look at the overall demographics in the constituency, it is 44% BAME. How long before it is 51%? At that point, no matter how united the native voters are, they will be easily defeatable by the newcomers, forever thereafter. (This by-election might actually have been the final chance for Gorton & Denton to get a result decided by native Brits. Unfortunately, half of them didn’t bother to vote, so disgusted are they by the options.)

Into this mix come two newly-prominent parties: Reform UK and the Green Party. They are supplanting the old dichotomy of Conservative/Labour, respectively. One of these parties, the Greens, recognises the reality that all politics is (at least in a multi-ethnic society) identity politics. The other, Reform UK, is desperate to maintain the civic nationalist delusion that we can all unite around principles and ideas. Here is how those attitudes worked out for them:

A very comfortable win for the Greens.

I will now go through the main parties and discuss how I think this by-election bodes for each of them.

The Conservative Party

Demonstrating the redundancy of his party, Daniel Hannan lamented:

Back in 2020, Hannan had the standard Conservative Party line on immigration: it is nothing to worry about because, in modern Western countries, immigrants tend to integrate (!). As examples, he preposterously cited himself, since he happened to be born abroad like George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling, and is therefore comparable with millions of Pakistanis moving to Britain. He also said that, among Western countries, there is especially little cause for concern in Britain because Britain has always had a civil, not ethnic, conception of nationhood. Bear in mind he said this after Harry from TrUK had spent several minutes giving him copious evidence to the contrary, which he chose to completely ignore.

For years, Hannan poured scorn on anyone sounding the alarm bells. But now the consequence is clear to him: balkanisation of Britain. If only smug, arrogant traitors like him had respected the electorate all these decades, instead of scoffing at them, demonising them and colluding in legislation that would silence and punish them, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation now, and he wouldn’t be having to lament the electoral death of his party.

It is a death that is richly deserved and I can only hope is permanent. However, such is the Conservative Party’s treachery and contempt for its own base, it is currently trying to trick them that it has listened to them and transformed into what they want. This is the gambit involving Reform UK popping up as a hardline anti-immigration party which, rumour has it, is destined to merge back into the Conservative Party, thus granting it new life like a starving Dracula eagerly sinking his fangs into the neck of some fresh young dupe.

Despite its historic failure in this particular constituency, it has to be acknowledged that the Conservative Party might fare better elsewhere. The same is true of the Liberal Democrats.

(As a side-note, I was nauseated by this conservative podcast’s coverage of the by-election. Not once did they mention what it means for native Brits. But they were very concerned about how it might affect Britain’s Jews, the rights of Muslim women, and the Left’s hypocrisy. The woman also said at one point that Muslims are natural conservatives, being family-oriented, faith-oriented and flag-oriented. Then she lambasted “the right” for not doing more to appeal to Muslims. I swear that conservatives are competing to be ever farther behind the curve. The sheer staidness of their thinking, the total lack of moral courage, the abject refusal to fashion a worldview not ratified by their enemy… It is often said that progressives have no self-preservation instinct, but I think conservatives might be even worse. They are like chickens voting for Kaporos.)

The Labour Party

In fact the biggest loser in this election is not the Conservative Party but the Labour Party. Being an urban constituency with a high percentage of ethnic minorities, Gorton & Denton is ideal ground for Labour, and this is bolstered by history: it has been a safe Labour seat for nearly a century and, just eighteen months ago, Labour won over 50% of the vote there. Therefore its defeat by the Green Party is very significant. The Greens got 1.6 times as many votes as Labour, pushing it to a shocking third place.

It is possible that Labour, after kowtowing to Muslims for many years, even to the point of letting them rape our young girls, assumed it could count on the Muslim vote. Maybe this is why one Labour politician took the lesson that they need to be even more accommodating to migrants and even less sympathetic to concerns about immigration.

If this constituency is prime Labour territory (regarded as the sixth-safest Labour seat in the country), yet Labour came third, I think we can safely assume that they will fare even worse in constituencies that are less favourable. Whether due to supplanting by the Green Party, or rising White self-awareness driving people to Reform and Restore, I think the Labour Party is becoming, if not extinct, much less of an electoral force.

The Green Party

The relentlessly grotesque Zack Polanski seems to be working like clockwork at manipulating young, idealistic and female voters. He is a sort of Pied Piper, leading them to their doom with jollity and promises that seem almost deliberately outlandish. He has talked about legalising all drugs and making them available on the NHS. He has talked about UBI for every migrant upon arrival. He has talked about creating a borderless world. Whatever some tedious blue-haired imbecilette on a Post-Colonial Studies degree would dream up, Polanski has already thought of it.

As an ugly gay Jew, he must seem to young women like a harmless but deformed teddy-bear: they want to protect him from all the bullies who have it in for him. I saw the same syndrome with Obama and Trudeau, but with Polanski it is much more pronounced given his various attributes.

On the other hand, alongside the crazy leftism, he also acknowledges some realities and appears to sympathise with the young voter of today who hasn’t a hope of getting on the property ladder or saving any money after paying the exorbitant rents and bills of modern Britain. (I would urge Restore Britain to examine this aspect of his appeal.)

With all that said, this by-election is the first proper test of the Polanski-era Greens. The party has long enjoyed strongholds in Brighton and Bristol, and in 2024 gained seats in Waveney Valley and North Herefordshire. But those are all affluent areas. It was a real gamble for the Greens to attempt their wishy-washy New Left message in a place like Gorton & Denton.

But, as we can see, it paid off. The party will now be greatly energised, basking in victory and already planning how to capitalise.

I think their victory happened for two main reasons: the sheer unpopularity of the Labour Party, and the rising self-determination (due to demographic predominance in certain areas) of Britain’s Muslims. They don’t yet have a viable party of their own (despite George Galloway’s best efforts) but for now, the Green Party will suffice. It promises them more, seems to worship them even more, than Labour did. The Green put out their campaign literature in Urdu and Bangla, demonstrating that this is their client group and they are its “bitch”.

I can’t help suspecting this is all being orchestrated from above. Shortly before the election, Polanski mocked native Brits concerned about demographic replacement. It feels to me as if he has been told by higher powers to be this cocky, this insulting to the British people, and he is delighting in doing so, knowing that he will get away with it. The whole thing feels manufactured.

But we shouldn’t discount the gentile element within the Green Party, the moralistic types who are obsessed with equality and in love with foreignness. There are countless British people like that today, including male ones, and the Green Party is welcoming them more explicitly than even New Labour used to. New Labour at least pretended to be a pragmatic party, not ideological. The Polanski-era Green Party is joyfully ideological. For the rest of us, woke might have been a terrible time, a bad joke and a total practical failure, but for its adherents, it was a glimpse of a wonderful future that they are now determined to bring forth.

The Green Party has long been a hugely (and laughably) White organisation, but clearly, it is now co-opting the ethnic vote. And after all, why should Labour have all the benefit of our dusky friends’ support, when the Green Party loves them even more?

It all flows together. The Green Party supplants Labour. Wokery becomes unapologetic, unremarkable, default. White identitarianism rises, making BAME voters even more paranoid (yet also even more triumphalist) than before. The Green Party courts their vote.

Interestingly, at least some Green Party supporters seem to be aware of the game they are playing, namely that demographics is destiny. One of them used ethnic data along with opinion polling to construct a map of likely voting in this by-election. He stressed that his map should be taken with a pinch of salt, but such a project would be completely pointless if ethnicity were not a strong indicator of political behaviour - which of course it is, as demonstrated by the fact that his map turned out to be very prescient. Of course he is only one man, but his project seemed to be welcomed without surprise by his Green colleagues. I think it is significant, in a party that will claim the Great Replacement is nothing to worry about, that some of them know full well that it has direct political implications, because people vote along ethnic lines.

As a result of its brown-nosing, people have speculated whether the Green Party will eventually be taken over by BAME. I doubt the regime will allow this. I think it needs the Green Party as an attractor for the “crazed white woman” vote. Muslims will just create some new party of their own eventually, and then the white Green voters will be in the position Reform voters are currently in (“we sucked up to these people, yet they hate us”).

In the meantime, the rest of us have to watch these useful idiots gleefully doing their damnedest to ruin the country and set up oblivion for all of us. I don’t think there is much point trying to get through to them, especially the young women, for whom politics now seems to be a sort of gender war by proxy.

Reform UK

Reform, the uber civic nationalist party, have come up against the hardened limits of their creed. Once identity groups are mobilised, the centre has no appeal. And, in today’s Britain, identity groups are very decisively mobilised, and that isn’t going to change any time soon - if ever.

It is pointless and even self-abasing for Reform to complain about this problem, because they have committed to never solving it.

Moreover, they spent a lot of the campaign insulting their own base, so confident were they that their principles have universal appeal so there is no need for low-down “identity politics”.

Their candidate, the ridiculous Matt Goodwin, even gave an interview in which he criticised Restore Britain supporters and implied they are less patriotic than the Sikhs who helped him on the campaign trail:

According to polling, this cuckoldry won him 8% of the BAME vote:

One of Reform’s figures, Andrew Rosindell, when asked about demographic replacement of the native British, devolved into mumbling about principles at the expense of client groups. He hasn’t realised this is no longer the game and that approach has stopped working. (Actually, it never worked; it only got us to where we are now.)

Nigel Farage claimed the Greens won the by-election by cheating. Both he and Goodwin railed against sectarianism.

Last month, Reform MP Danny Kruger said that anyone born in Britain is an heir to the civilisation of this country. He made a Freudian slip, though, when he specified “newborn Afghans”. Aren’t they Brits, if they’re born here? But of course we all understand what he meant to say: the children of Afghans, if they’re born here, are as British as anyone else. Well, perhaps Reform will look at the Gorton & Denton result and realise how insane that notion is.

However, the signs are not good:

• Reform chairman David Bull, in the hours after the election result, seemed not to realise that the defeat was a call to rethink their civic nationalism. Instead, he doubled down on it, disowning some remarks Matt Goodwin had made about identity and distancing Reform from them.

• Goodwin himself tweeted that Britain “must reject sectarianism”. It is an impotent request that will be ignored by all BAME groups who have learned, yet again, that acting in their self-interest benefits them. How this could be a surprise to anyone, and how Goodwin can’t see it after what has happened, and how he can’t see that it would be in native Britons’ interests to adopt the same attitude, boggles the mind.

• Nigel Farage might now be recalling his own statement from last year, that if you lose the Muslim vote, you will lose elections. He might well see Gorton & Denton as proof of that. Like Labour, he might conclude that his party lost because it didn’t court the Muslims hard enough.

On the face of it, backtracking on all of this and embracing nativism would be pure common sense for Reform. But I suspect they are going to do the opposite. This leaves the field wide open for the genuine insurgent party…

Restore Britain

Restore didn’t have a candidate in this by-election since the party was only announced a fortnight before. However, it can certainly draw some lessons from the event.

It clarifies that Restore’s only rival is Reform UK. It is not only soaking up the right-wing vote (making the Conservative Party irrelevant) but also the general White vote (see the racial graph earlier). Restore should relentlessly attack and undermine Reform. I doubt there is much to be gained for it in attacking the other parties. Lefties, especially leftie women, will vote for them no matter what. One left-wing woman celebrated:

How ironic to say this, when the winning party relied for its victory on the racism of ethnic minorities!

Another lesson Restore should take is that, contra received wisdom among right-wing parties, brown and black people are emphatically not “natural conservatives”. Any attempt to appeal to them on those grounds will fail dismally while repelling Restore’s natural base, native Brits.

The third lesson is that “pandering” to an identity group works well for you. Matt Goodwin says it’s a road to defeat, but he is delusional. The Greens did it and beat him soundly. Before that, Labour did it for decades and secured numerous strongholds around the country. In 2026, with the Great Replacement well underway and the Boriswave having done its damage, the atmosphere in Britain is so febrile that it is utterly foolish for a party not to target particular groups in its campaigning. It is really a road to failure to do anything else.

Does this mean that the country will devolve into a set of competing groups, with little to bind them together, fighting over limited resources? Yes. But that has been the situation since June 1948 when the Empire Windrush arrived - native Brits just haven’t realised the fact. To continue refusing to recognise it is not to “win the day with principles”; it is to let native Brits be eaten alive by foreigners. That is what civic nationalism leads to, and that is why civic nationalism must be abandoned.

From Restore’s point of view, there is one identity group that is steadfastly ignored by every other party, and even actively disparaged by them. That group desperately needs representation - explicit, unashamed representation - and the party that has the courage to do this will be assured success. This is an open goal just waiting to be taken. Yes, the media will castigate you for it, but the British people will reward you.

I think there are two dead-end discussions which will be made of this by-election.

There is a lot of sound and fury about electoral fraud (euphemistically termed “family voting”) by Muslims. This is where a Muslim woman is told how to vote by her husband, or he even does the voting for her. Sky reporter Sam Coates claimed to have witnessed this, and it was reported by a democracy watchdog but denied by police and doubted by uber-progressive Owen Jones. (Of course, how ludicrous to think that clannish people might behave clannishly!)

Whining about this kind of thing, decades after letting these people into our country en masse, is futile. The Muslims don’t feel guilty about doing it and never will. Their enablers don’t care, in fact they think it’s funny. Once again, conservatives need to wake up and realise that their decency has been used against them for 100 years.

Furthermore, the truth is we have no idea how much of this “family voting” went on. But also… it doesn’t matter. Who seriously thinks that Muslim women need to be forced by their husbands to vote for the most pro-Muslim party? And without that, these Muslim women would be voting for… Reform? The Conservative Party? Laughable.

In addition, even if they are coerced by their husbands, I for one don’t care. Are we seriously meant to worry about the rights and dignity of Muslim women, when by their very presence in our country they are colluding to take it - our only homeland - away from us?

With that in mind, infinitely more important (from our point of view) than “family voting” is the broader phenomenon of ethnic bloc voting. There is no question that this is happening. It was mentioned briefly by conservatives in their coverage of the by-election. The claim was made that ethnic bloc voting undermines democracy. Technically it doesn’t, if by “democracy” you mean “people vote for what they want”. What it undermines is the British people’s ownership of their homeland. That is never said, because milquetoast conservatives refuse to acknowledge such ownership. (Often they even refuse to acknowledge the existence of the British people.)

The second dead-end discussion is that this is all about religion (ie. Islam), not race. This is the go-to argument for civic nationalists, because it enables them to “not be racist” while complaining about the problems of diversity. Unfortunately, I think the problems of diversity occur precisely because racial difference is baked in, genetic.

I have long said that Islam isn’t a race but might as well be. Barring a few exceptions, it is “a brown religion”, most of its adherents being of that hue. Moreover, from our point-of-view as Europeans, Muslims present as a racial group. They arrive in our countries together, and they socialise, live and work together - a big brown mass that frowns and scowls at us whenever we encounter it. Are there White Muslims, black ones, yellow ones? Yes, but then they are racially despised by the brown ones, and are in any case not numerous enough in Britain to matter. Then we must consider the chicken-and-egg process of a religion that is largely shaped by an ethnic group, which is subsequently shaped by its religion, and on and on.

In addition is the simple fact that race and ethnicity go hand in hand with religion; the two are virtually inseparable, especially for non-European peoples who don’t tend to have much time for abstractions or individualism. Presented with a foreigner, we cannot separate his race from his religion, because they are profoundly intertwined. This is why it is impossible for us to determine whether, for example, Pakistanis rape English girls because of their genes, their culture or their Islamic faith. Some will insist it is the latter, claiming that rape jihad is justified in the Hadiths, but what if it weren’t justified in the Hadiths? Do we seriously believe that, in that scenario, these men would not be doing this? The same could be said for taqiyya, halal slaughter… and ethnic bloc voting.

Yes, you can blame these things on religion, but that is futile and might in the first place be wrong-headed, and in any case, how are we to know? And what is the point of us trying to know, when, if it did turn out to be due to religion, these people would never relinquish or reform their religion anyway?

Ultimately, the only solution is for us to separate from them and their problems, which we can’t help them with and shouldn’t presume to be able to, or that they would be amenable to it even if we could. Because we don’t even know that! After all these decades, the stranger within our gate remains a stranger.

And he always will remain a stranger, as long as we remain sufficiently ourselves to see him as such.

So, it has happened. Rupert Lowe has announced that his organisation Restore Britain is now a political party and will stand in general elections around the country.

In a very well-judged publicity video, Lowe presents himself (truthfully) as a farmer: a man who thinks about the long term, understands the link between effort and reward, understands the need to cultivate and nurture, and accepts that there are no short cuts. He outright says that what needs to be done will be “incredibly painful”. This is no feel-good Faragist showmannery. This is a serious man being honest.

At another point in the video he goes farther than any other politician in opposing diversity by saying that a Restore government would outlaw “halal and kosher slaughter”. I wonder if he knows what he is taking on by saying those words.

Later, he explicitly contrasts himself not just with the culture of Britain’s mainstream political centre, but with that centre itself. No politicians from it will be involved with Restore. They will be barred, as the verminous traitors and destroyers that they are.

This is a fresh start, and it genuinely has a radically different mindset from the ossified edifice that has governed this country for a hundred years and driven it - and its people - into the ground.

Duncan Bannatyne and Elon Musk (who a year ago condemned Nigel Farage as weak and ineffectual) endorsed the party. John Cleese retweeted Musk.

Hours after the announcement, Twitter news outlet GB Politics ran a poll:

It’s encouraging, but we must remember that this is Twitter. The general public will be different. They will be much less aware of Farage’s crimes against Lowe, and indeed of Lowe himself. He’s a big hitter on social media but the MSM are very good at pretending he doesn’t exist. As Reform voters learn about him, many of them (being largely Boomers) find his talk of mass deportation troubling. Farage soothes their life-long civic-nationalist delusions, Lowe does not. So we have to accept that a lot of myopic normies will stick with Reform. The false consciousness they have been indoctrinated with is too strong.

But, to be brutal about it, Reform’s Boomer supporters will not be around forever. I am much more confident in the youthful Right. They know how bad things are and accept what must be done. They even yearn for it. They don’t have a yacht or a holiday home to lose. They don’t really have much at all. Most crucially, they don’t have the prospect of a comfortable future - and that lack is incendiary.

There is something mythical about Lowe’s rise. After a successful long career in big business, he entered politics by campaigning for Brexit, and was later in the Reform UK party under Nigel Farage. This is how he gained enough public prominence to get voted in as the MP for Great Yarmouth. This won him access to the House of Commons and the resources unique to politicians. Using these, he began holding our corrupt governmental system to account. In doing so he proved himself a genuine firebrand and maverick, and was soon out-performing his leader Nigel Farage, both in Parliament and on social media.

Farage did what he has done countless times with colleagues who threaten his position: he ousted Lowe from Reform. But he went much farther than that. He levelled false criminal charges against him, trying to get him imprisoned. He made many accusations (listed here). The overall goal, clearly, was to discredit Lowe to the maximum extent possible. I don’t think I have ever seen a character assassination so ruthless, or so obviously malicious. But Farage did it.

While Lowe dealt with the police investigation (including a disgusting night-time raid on his farm), the legal tit-for-tat and the stress of the whole crisis, he created an organisation, Restore Britain, which he envisaged as a campaign group. Meantime, he remained in Parliament, constantly building his reputation and credibility with the public with a relentless stream of good works. This culminated with the independent Rape Gang Inquiry, launched, funded, organised and chaired by Lowe after he concluded that the Labour government had no intention of running an honest inquiry into this most important matter.

Farage completely ignored Lowe’s inquiry. In the meantime, he had turned Reform UK into an absolute farce. It started with bringing in progressive David Bull, who said that immigration was and always has been “the lifeblood” of Britain. Then he brought in countless Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other non-whites. Most recently, he delivered what could have been calculated as the most insulting move possible against the British people: he brought in various Conservative politicians who had been at the helm of government during the Boriswave (a historic spike in mass immigration) and the Afghan asylum debacle (in which they not only invited in many thousands of Afghans, but sought to keep it secret from the British people). Farage even said it is inevitable that Reform will make an electoral pact with the Conservative Party or even merge into it. With this, and repeated assurances that mass deportation is “a political impossibility” and that English ethnicity doesn’t matter, Reform is clearly not the anti-establishment party Farage once claimed. In fact, it is a barely-disguised continuation of the Conservative Party, famed for betraying the British people time and time again. Farage did this.

At a time when the country is aching for renewal, and when the young are screaming to be heard, Farage chooses to dole out Boomer slop at his conferences and keep his supporters occupied with bingo nights and 2000s-esque lies that Britain has always been diverse. The situation has become so ridiculous that a Twitter account has been created solely to document it: ReformYookay_.

When Farage could give the British people hope, he instead wastes their time, good will, energy and money. The treachery is disgusting. The weakness is lamentable. The lack of imagination, the sheer refusal to grasp a historic opportunity, is unforgivable.

Thus the relief was huge when, the very day after completing his groundbreaking rape gang inquiry, Rupert Lowe announced he would convert Restore Britain into a political party. A national one. He would do what had been promised by Nigel Farage - his nemesis who had tried to destroy him.

The sheer contrasts of good and evil, integrity and dishonesty, seriousness and frivolity, courage and cowardice, benevolence and malice… As I say, it is mythical stuff.

For the first time in my life, a British political party exists that is led by someone I admire and trust, and someone I believe actually has the interests of the British people at heart. It seems incredible that this would be unusual in a British politician. Given the sheer corruption of our age, it is literally unique.

Lowe is not an aristocrat but he has the gravitas one associates with “officer class” - a natural leader. But it is not just an aura. He has a proven track record as a competent leader, a capable organiser, a good delegator. This is shown not just in his career in business or in his running of a farm, but more recently, and poignantly, in the rape gang inquiry which happened solely because of him and his relentless efforts. That alone must have been a Herculean undertaking.

There is also a straightforwardness to him which I think will be very appealing to the British people. One does not get a sense that this is a liar or an obfuscator, still less a frightened lackey of some unseen group, as one does with virtually every other politician. Neither does he peddle the trite catchphrases and euphemisms that have come to dominate our politics, our whole culture. He is a “no-nonsense” kind of man, and this is like fresh air streaming into a space that has become hideously dank.

Also, slightly contrasting with all of the above, there is a certain sadness about Lowe’s demeanour. I take it to be a sign of honesty - with wisdom comes sorrow. This man understands the world is fallen. He grew up in a Britain of affluence, pride, integrity and social cohesion but is growing old amid dysfunction, nihilism and corruption. At 68, I think he is old enough to know the difference, but still young enough to see the difference. (People over 70 seem not to realise that life has changed drastically since the 1990s.)

Let me put it another way. I am pretty sure that Rupert Lowe would have the same feeling as I do if he saw these two buildings, on the very same spot in Bromley:

Now, I am sure that Lowe is a pragmatist - far less of a hopeless romantic than me - but nevertheless I believe he has a soul. And frankly, that is more than I can say for any other British political leader in the last fifty years (with the possible exception of John Smith).

This should help Restore avoid the insane excesses of libertarianism. I think this is why they have, for example, a policy plan for restoring the British pub. I think it is why Lowe recently said he doesn’t want “Larry Fink buying up Britain”.

Finally, there is a perhaps equally important trait: Lowe is a reluctant politician. He doesn’t crave power for its own sake. As Academic Agent noted, there is a sense that he is motivated by a sense of grim duty. He understands his country is in a dire state, and he understands that apparently no other man of his means has the guts to do what is right - so he has to.

The mainstream media are unified. From the Telegraph to the Guardian, they (having uniformly ignored Lowe’s rape gang inquiry) are united in condemning his new party. Hope Not Hate, of course, lamented the development. The despicable Spiked published a hit piece. The supposedly right-wing GB News showed its true colours. Eventually the right-wing press settled on a line: Lowe is being egotistical and vain by setting up a new party that will split the right-wing vote, instead of keeping quiet and letting Reform win squarely. This line was reiterated by Tim Stanley, along with other jibes at Restore, even while he lamented that Reform has become a useless party. (As ever, the conservative advises to do nothing, especially if the alternative would upset Trotsky.)

What is already clear is that we are going to see the mother of all smear campaigns against Rupert Lowe. I doubt if the MSM will work harder in our lifetimes against anyone than they will against him. He is our era’s equivalent of Enoch Powell or even Oswald Mosley. The truth about those two men is unknown to most people, who have been told again and again that each was a cartoon character of pure evil. The same will be attempted with Lowe.

They are currently trying to frame him as egotistical and messianic. That is unconvincing. Obviously, their preference would be to frame him as “evil/hateful”, but that too will be a difficult sell, given his affable and straightforward manner. Instead, they will probably settle on framing him as a befuddled old man who has no idea what he is saying, how it comes across, what the implications of it are, and how distant it is from reality. A kook, in other words. The “evil/hateful” thing will be used on the young men around him - “see how naive Lowe is, enabling these young maniacs!” - whose social media connections will be catalogued and megaphoned by the MSM. Lowe will be grilled on interactions that his underlings have on X. I implore everyone to bear this in mind when interacting with them.

Pete North, sad to say, is correct about this danger. Restore face a historic challenge. The last thing people should do is make it even harder for them by using language that will be used - disingenuously, sure, but constantly - against them. Lowe will not want his project being linked in the public’s mind with Twitter anon KebabRemover1488 from Cleethorpes. Even Millennial Woes, the famed bestialist and all-round dark horse, would be too much. I am acutely aware that my positive comments about Restore enable Hope Not Hate to crow “it has been endorsed by the likes of failed racist YouTuber Millennial Woes”.

Restore are already adept at swiping such nonsense aside, but it will be necessary for them to “step over” a great deal, because the petty attacks are going to come thick and fast. It will often be tempting for them to disavow, but I would urge them to heed this advice.

I think most people already understand that this is not a time for purity spiralling. Nevertheless, the following bears stating.

Restore will never be explicitly ethno-nationalist. Even if its leading figures are of that persuasion (and I have no reason to believe they are), the party can’t afford to be; the electoral commission would refuse to register it.

Of course they will not deport all the people I would want deported. but I think they will deport far more than any other party would, and I think that, by doing so, they will both improve our chances and advance “the situation”. In other words, it is both progress and accelerationism.

Is it perfect? No, but we are never going to get something better than this. If this fails, then it’s civil unrest, violence, breakdown, police state, and ultimately racial war. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. If Restore fails, there will be other parties that come after it, more hard-line, but by then demographics might mean it is too late to avoid catastrophe. This is our one shot at that. Maybe it will fail, but we have to try.

Richard the Fourth thinks it is too early for restoration, that the country needs to suffer more, to hit “rock bottom” before it can begin to regenerate. Asmongold disagrees and is full of enthusiasm for Restore, and the vast majority of the British online Right seem to be similarly inspired. At last, a chance…

While Nigel Farage drivels about abolishing work-from-home (someone commented “my funders are big into commercial real estate”) and boasts of his efforts to combat “extreme right ethno-nationalism”, the promise of Restore Britain continues to stir.

In the polar opposite of his rival’s cheap showmanship, Lowe has surrounded himself with talented young people. He has sought out the best and the brightest, the ones who can point a way forward over the heads of a rotten media and a tired, frightened regime. And now the call has gone out for the capable and experienced to get onboard as well.

One has the feeling - the hope - that arrangements are being made behind closed doors, that a new machine is being pieced together, that something momentous is slouching towards Albion to be born.

At time of writing (August 2025) it seems inevitable that the next general election, whenever it happens, will be won by Reform UK and Nigel Farage will become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, taking over from the appalling Keir Starmer and casually brushing aside the (once mighty but now effectively defunct) Conservative Party. We are being encouraged by Farage acolytes to believe that his victory will sweep away not only those “legacy parties” but the whole rotten “establishment” in Britain.

Such ironic fantasies as the above have long seemed absurd. We live in a profoundly ailing Britain, and Farage surely knows this. Once in Downing Street he will have the power to rescue it, but we all know he won’t do so.

It seems worthwhile to ponder what his premiership will actually be like.

He will obviously be constrained by the civil service, media, lobby groups and global powers, and he seems to have little stamina for resisting these groups, but furthermore, he doesn’t seem to have any radical aspirations anyway. How radical does he want to go? We can judge by his public remarks, and they are not encouraging. On immigration and all related issues, he has for years sounded milquetoast - at first compared with the likes of myself but now even with the general public. Far from seeing this as a signal to radicalise, he has blithely acknowledged that he is to the left of them on this matter.

I see him as very much an analogue of Trump in America. The two men are similar in some ways, and each was granted “credibility” because the regime finally decided it would be so. It is debatable whether the regime “prepared” each man years in advance for his eventual role, or whether it was genuinely resisting him all that time and only “conceded” once circumstances compelled it. (My personal theory is that the resistance against Trump was genuine - from 2015, through his first presidency, and beyond - until very late in the day when, after October 7th, it was judged that he would be more reliable on Israel than the Democrats would be.)

The case of Farage might be more sinister. Most likely, it is identical to Trump in that the regime genuinely loathed him (and emphatically didn’t want Brexit) but eventually decided pragmatically that it could make use of this firebrand by bringing him “into the tent”. However, it is also possible that the regime deliberately built Farage up, for many years, all throughout the dramas of the 2010s, knowing that it would eventually utilise him. Maybe they always intended to crash the Conservative Party and slide him in its place? Occam’s Razor would dictate that it would be crazy to deliberately crash a party only to create an equally futile duplicate of it, in which case the Conservative Party destroyed itself through incompetence and the regime realised, late in the day, that it needed a substitute. But perhaps the crashing of the Conservative Party was done precisely to maintain the illusion of democracy, to keep the public thinking that all of this means something and they can “vote harder” and avert their demographic doom? Or, perhaps the regime has simply decided to boost Farage instead of rehabilitating the Conservative Party, because it judges he will be a better “release valve” given the tensions brewing in Britain?

All of that being as it may… we are now facing the virtual certainty that this man will be in charge, and it doesn’t really matter how it came to be. I think it is actually easier to predict what will happen next. Containment is the word.

Before we get to Farage’s performance as PM, here is a separate prediction. His “success” in office will be trumpeted not by “the legacy media” (since no section of it could plausibly be his cheerleader) but by astroturfed elements in the online right. I mean the Andrew Golds, Konstantin Kisins, Winston Marshalls and Matt Goodwins, united by the glue of TalkTV, GB News and (sad to say) the New Culture Forum. Even Thomas Skinner is being pushed in the mainstream while being lauded by these elements as a stinging rebuke to it.

In coming years, these “alternative” organisations and figures will be massively boosted - by the regime they ostensibly oppose - and fomented into a “maverick” “nationalist” mediaplex that will play face to the legacy media’s heel, and create the impression of an organic revolution in how the British public are informed. “Based” civic nationalism will defy the tired progressivism of the legacy media. It will be a Punch & Judy contest very much mirroring Tommy Robinson vs Hope Not Hate, Cameron vs Blair, Farage vs Starmer, Pepsi vs Coca Cola.

Whenever Farage breathes, these elements will cheer him on while the legacy media will oscillate between feverish indignation and sighs of impotent dismay.

Part of the pantomime will be abortive efforts that Farage will launch under the foregone conclusion that the regime will nix them, thus wasting the public’s time while bolstering his own image as a scenery-destroying maverick. To contribute to that illusion, the legacy media will act shocked and outraged by his various antics. They will attack him constantly for the most petty things, scandals in a wine glass, yet despite their “sabotage” he will remain “triumphant”, always “getting the better of them” while never actually getting anything that his voters want.

I think we should separate what he will promise, what he will “attempt”, and what he will actually achieve. I can see the following being promised:

• take Britain out of the ECHR

• repeal the Equalities Act

• repeal the Online Safety Act and abolish Ofcom

• make home-schooling much easier (deregulation)

• cut net migration (a race-blind, civic nationalist proposal)

• deport vast numbers of foreign criminals

• for serious crimes committed by foreigners, automatic deportation after jail (already on the cards)

• shut down the migrant hotels

• stop the boats

• in schools, promote British identity and culture (the Katharine Birbalsingh model)

• reduce inheritance tax

• more apprenticeships, fewer Humanities degrees

• restore law and order - proper sentences, build more prisons, etc.

• abolish the BBC / license fee

• “end the LGBT nonsense”

• “cut the red tape” and “get Britain working again” - helping business, farming, small shops, etc.

• “take an axe to the quangocracy”

• “get our country back on track”

Once in power, some of these promises will simply be forgotten about while others will be “attempted” with no success. Time after time, the system will put up barriers that Farage simply cannot overcome, “try” as he valiantly might.

For example, taking Britain out of the ECHR will prove an impossible battle that would take many years and “frankly, just isn’t worth the bother” because, after all, “we’ve got more immediate things to think about”. Staying in the ECHR will make it impossible to stop the small boats or deport illegal migrants.

Repealing the Equalities Act would be the sensible thing for the regime to do but would be completely anathema to it. If given any choice, it will absolutely refuse.

Likewise, the Online Safety Act, which is both ideologically dear to the regime and necessary for its survival. It needs as much censorship as it can possibly get through the legislative back door. More, not less, censorship will happen under Farage - just as more deplatforming happened under Trump than under Obama or Biden - because, just like Trump 2016, Farage and his colleagues will have no courage whatsoever against the regime.

Even deregulating home-schooling, which sounds like an innocuous idea and “a common sense vote-winner”, will be easily defeated by the regime. It will simply boost some organisation that advocates “child safety”. A few horror stories in the Daily Mail about illiterate parents trapping their poor kids at home, and the regulations will be expanded and the whole idea of home-schooling will be demonised. Well-meaning middle-class couples all over Britain will conclude that, really, it’s easier just to send the kids to the local comprehensive to get their skulls filleted and pumped full of Marxism. (And after all, that will free their mother to go back into work, bringing more money into the household!)

As for getting teachers to promote British culture and identity, I don’t believe for a second that Farage has the interest or determination to do what would be necessary. There isn’t a teacher in the land whose training hasn’t primed her against such “low-grade jingoism”. The government would have to threaten them with the sack, opening up a maelstrom of legal tribulations for itself, not to mention the massive problem of replacing large numbers of unsatisfactory teachers. What’s more, to gauge their “compliance”, it would have to send inspectors (“fascist spies”) into schools to monitor things. The PR would be an absolute nightmare.

After all of this circus, here is what I can see Farage actually achieving:

• deport some refugees, definitely a lot of the criminal ones

• shut down the migrant hotels - but only by “integrating” the refugees immediately into the community instead. Many rapes will occur, but “law and order” will prevail (see above)

• some deregulation of business that will ostensibly help farmers, small shops, etc. but realistically won’t make a dent in the domination thereof by global corporations

• abolish the license fee - but the BBC will remain, funded by advertising and general taxation

In summary I think a Farage premiership will be exactly like Trump’s 2016 presidency. He will promise a lot, deliver a very small number of good things, and otherwise be an abject disappointment that is nevertheless trumpeted by the “alternative” media as a stinging assault on the forces of “regressive” progressivism. Sitting in care homes, right-wing Boomers will chuckle naively at the news of Farage “sticking it to those wokies”. For them, the illusion will be as convincing as every other manufactured narrative they have swallowed since Woodstock. For the rest of us, the grim reality will grind on, conveying us towards the demographic hell that we know awaits us in our own dotage.

Rather, the above is how I think the regime wants things to go. If the situation were calmer, the plan would work.

But, as described elsewhere, I think Britain is a seething cauldron, and the years before and during Farage’s premiership are going to be anything but calm. By the time he gets in, he will seem a pitiful offering given the situation. Within a year in Number 10, he will seem as useless and out-of-touch as Starmer does today. A man installed to entertain, distract and mollify will instead be confronted with very serious matters. A man famed for his arrogance will find himself completely out of his depth - and this will be infuriatingly obvious to the public.

So we come back to my belief that the public are moving beyond the regime’s ability to bamboozle them. Things are happening too fast. Blame the Boriswave or African sexual impulses, blame Blackrock or our own corrupt civil service, blame Cameron or Johnson or Sunak or Starmer or, indeed, Farage. (Many people will.)

Even while he ascends towards power, Farage is starting to be seen as inadequate, too soft, too conformist, too lightweight. He is a showman, not a statesman. He is a sleazy stockbroker, not a visionary.

When the Alt-Right emerged in the early 2010s, talk of “the decline of the West” seemed fanciful to the general public. To speak, as we did, of the need for vision was to look pretentious to the “normies”. The difference today is stark. Ordinary people no longer need to be told of decline; they can see it, everywhere.

Given this, it is clear that a visionary is what is needed - not a clown, not a pretender, not an automaton, not a grifter, not a “reformer”, not a caretaker, but someone who actually cares about this country and is prepared to fight for it, someone who has the wisdom and courage to see beyond the awful things that must be done to the prize that awaits, justifying those sins.

Nigel Farage is definitely not that man. But his premiership will probably be what causes such men to finally emerge. His failure, being the most right-wing that the regime is prepared to tolerate, will be the final devastating proof that the regime itself has to go.

I actually think many of the public already know this. Ironically, it is Farage’s own fanbase - the burnt-out but unadventurous centre-right Little Englanders so lambasted for their “knee-jerk” “intolerance” - who are the only ones still needing to be knee-jerk and intolerant. His premiership will teach them.

(Addendum, February 2026. This essay was written before Farage brought countless non-white figures into Reform, before he brought in Conservative Party defectors who had betrayed the country while in government, before he said that Reform will inevitably make an electoral pact with the Conservative Party, or even merge into it, and before he reiterated that he vehemently opposes ethno-nationalism. It was also written before hints emerged that he will resign as Reform leader before the next election (avoiding the responsibility of being Prime Minister) which would presumably leave Reform with little option but to merge with the Conservative Party. If this happens, Farage’s bold new party will have soaked up endless amounts of nationalist energy and achieved nothing but the reviving of the establishment party it purportedly opposed. This essay was also written before Farage’s nemesis Rupert Lowe launched his own political party, Restore Britain. Finally, a sane and serious choice is available to people actually concerned for this country.)

In a healthy society, there would be no “scandal” here. Billionaire businessman Jim Ratcliffe’s comments would have been water off a duck’s back. People would consider them, or not, they would agree, or not, the discourse would adapt to them, or not, and civic life would hum on regardless.

The outrage that his comments ignited is itself a symptom of how far-gone British society is. It’s like an alcoholic enraged at someone politely, gently suggesting he has a drinking problem. Suddenly shelves are being torn from the walls, furniture up-ended, and the accuser’s financial arrangements being dissected in order to “prove” that the accusee is definitely absolutely not an alcoholic. But simultaneously, there is also the argument that it wouldn’t be a big deal if the accusee were an alcoholic, because there are historical factors that supposedly justify alcoholism.

Anyone watching the above spectacle would conclude not only that the accusee was almost certainly an alcoholic, but also that he was without a shadow of a doubt irrational, vengeful, dishonest, manipulative, delusional and deranged.

Welcome to Britain in 2026.

Ratcliffe’s exact words were:

You can’t have an economy with 9 million people on benefits, and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It’s costing too much money.

The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, hasn’t it? I mean, the population of the UK was 58 million in 2020, now it’s 70 million. That’s 12 million people.

Immediately, a storm erupted. Politicians (including the Prime Minister, chancellor Rachel Reeves, and the mayor of Ratcliffe’s home city Manchester) rushed to voice their disgust at what he had said. The loathsome Emily Maitlis came out with some typically stupid and loxist remarks, saying that Britain had an empire therefore the dissolution of the British people is (somehow) inevitable. But across the entire mainstream media, there was near-total lockstep. From the Morning Star to the Times to Have I Got News For You, from Ash Sarkar and Owen Jones to Piers Morgan, all were united in one purpose: discredit Jim Ratcliffe.

There were six prongs to the attack. The basic truth of what he said is irrefutable, so instead the focus was on nitpicking and fatuous character assassination.

“He’s a billionaire!”

The joke here is that the very people saying this are either billionaires themselves, or the loyal lackeys thereof. But the weakness of the argument is that it isn’t an argument. It is a mere statement of fact, with little if any bearing on the matter. If it does have any bearing, that hasn’t been explained. It seems we are meant to hate and distrust people simply for being billionaires - that is, if they oppose mass immigration. If they instead celebrate it, then they are wise and experienced people who should be listened to, and their wealth is a sign of intelligence and good sense.

“He doesn’t even live here!”

Indeed, he moved to Monaco in 2020. However, again, this is stated without any explanation of why it is being stated. Presumably it is supposed to imply that a) he doesn’t know what he’s talking about since he isn’t in Britain every day, and b) he himself is an immigrant (to Monaco) and thus a hypocrite for criticising mass uncontrolled immigration of violent unemployable unassimilable 75 IQ Africans and Arabs. This is a version of the moronic canard about “Brits not integrating in their Spanish enclaves”. Both of these implications fall apart as soon as they are examined, so they never are. They are simply stated, over and over again. (Our mainstream media has become a brain-washing and truth-denying industry.)

“He doesn’t pay UK tax!”

Indeed, having moved to Monaco, he no longer pays UK tax. Again, so what? What bearing does this have on his ability to understand Britain’s situation with immigration?

I think the implication is that, by not contributing tax, he is worsening Britain’s economy and thus reducing its ability to accommodate immigrants. But if so, surely the correct course of action is to reduce immigration in line with what the country is able to accommodate? Of course progressives don’t think of that; they think only of how selfish a man he must be for having moved abroad (like the immigrants whom they adore have done). Clearly, Ratcliffe should pay UK tax so that the country he obviously cares about can more thoroughly destroy itself.

But of course, all of this drags us into the repugnant territory of thinking about immigration purely in economic terms. Ratcliffe himself did this - opposing it not on cultural, racial or ethnic grounds but only economic ones. In that, he is united with the Establishment - but perhaps he was only couching his “bigotry” in economics so as to make it palatable to ordinary, good-thinking people? Either way, I think it is ridiculous, when we know about the other effects of immigration, to fret about its economic impact. Whether it is economically good or bad, it is bad in every other way, and that should outweigh economics for any sensible person.

“He got the numbers wrong!”

Indeed, the population statistics he cited were inaccurate. Had he said 2000 instead of 2020, his numbers would have been irreproachable, but he said 2020 so he is an ignorant lying fool. (And if he had said 2000… they’d still hate him for it.)

For 12 million migrants to arrive over 25 years is obviously less turbulent than over 5 years, but the end result is the same: supplanting, absorption and eradication of the native population.

I think, at this point, if you are quibbling over the exact numbers around immigration or are somehow unsure about where the demographics are heading, you should be in a padded cell. We simply don’t have time to debate how many Somalis can dance on the head of a pin - or rather, stamp on the head of a Brit.

“His own team at Manchester United has immigrants in it!”

Ratcliffe is 25% owner of the football club Manchester United, whose team mostly comprises immigrants (13 out of 21 players). How much that is due to Ratcliffe personally is unknown, but people rushed to accuse him of hypocrisy.

This is actually a silly argument, because immigrants in a sports team do not do the same damage as immigrants in a population. However, clearly one is meant to reflect the other. I actually agree that it is ridiculous for an English sports team to be majority non-white. I think it should represent its local area. But I also think its local area should be majority (or completely) White. If the Man Utd team’s demographics are representative of its local area, that only proves Ratcliffe’s point. If the demographics are not representative, that only compounds the absurdity of allowing international acquisitions for sports teams.

“Diversity has improved Britain and the economy depends on it!”

This is the standard defence. Keir Starmer, among countless other cretins, used it in desperate tweets “responding” to the “outrage” of Ratcliffe’s remarks. Anyone can see that it cannot possibly be true.

But, while few ordinary people believe this drivel in 2026, the wearing and religiose preaching of the chatterati suggests that they still do - or at least, that they are still prepared to pretend that they do. In the offices of the Guardian and the BBC, they might be running obsolete software, but they are doing so with pious determination and it is understood that he who comments on the fact will lose his career.

And unfortunately chatterati opinion still matters, for now.

Disappointingly but unsurprisingly, soon enough, Ratcliffe apologised. But he did so in a clever way which gave little ground and admitted no real fault. His wording referred to the feelings of those he had offended, not to the words with which he had offended them. He was implying that the onus was on them for objecting to a thorny issue being discussed, not on him for discussing it. He apologised for nothing more than failing to find a gentler way to say what, he asserts, needs to be said.

Of course this wasn’t nearly enough to placate the Establishment. But, had it been a full-throated apology, would it have worked? In other words, having made those controversial remarks, would Ratcliffe ever have been forgiven? Was there any possible “path back” for him? Of course not. The wound is real and it remains. The Establishment will never forgive him for pointing out its folly.

Moreover, he can’t be allowed to just do this and not suffer. It’s not personal; they need to make sure that other men, in a similar position, are sufficiently discouraged from following suit. If that takes Ratcliffe’s ruination, so be it. Better that enforced and unnatural silence than the British Establishment has to acknowledge what it has done to the country.

All of this happened while Rupert Lowe’s rape gang inquiry was going on, every day uncovering more terrible details of what immigration has subjected our girls to, by the thousand. But the mainstream have entirely ignored that inquiry, with only the Daily Mail making a cursory mention of it. If you relied on the mainstream to keep you informed, you wouldn’t even know this inquiry was happening.

But if you relied on the mainstream media, you wouldn’t have much idea about anything. And that, really, is the whole point here. There is a tissue of lies that we are all expected to believe in, especially if we have any prominence in society, and Ratcliffe, perhaps off the cuff without really thinking about it, pointed out that the emperor has no clothes on.

For how long can a society operate like this?

The summary is: I was still getting over the death of my mother when a very close friend died suddenly, then a relationship ended, then another close friend nearly died, and throughout was the constant question of whether I would soon have to move house, uprooting everything. There was little stability and even less security. Nevertheless, somehow, it has been a productive year for me in terms of writing.

At the start, I wanted to take January off to recuperate from Millenniyule X, but the revived media focus on the Muslim rape gang scandal compelled me to write an essay about that. The same also inspired an essay about Champagne Socialism.

Then the death of David Lynch prompted me to begin a major work about Twin Peaks. I spent two weeks doing research to prepare. In the middle of that period I took a few days off to write another essay, How Best to Boil the Frog?, inspired by Trump’s return to the White House. Then I began the Twin Peaks study, which involved watching each episode and writing a micro-essay about it, bringing in background info I had learned during the research. I watched the classic series and the film, and was intending to proceed to the 2017 series but felt “overloaded” and decided to leave it for a while. This turned out to be a very long while due to intervening events.

The idea of taking a post-Millenniyule rest fell by the wayside.

Out of nowhere one day, it seemed a good idea to write an essay “proving” the Great Replacement. This was written quickly but seemed insufficient; a series was needed. I worked out the titles, then it poured out of me and was very soon two-thirds finished.

Then… in late February, a close friend died suddenly - my landlord Allen. I did what I could for him - amateur CPR - and the paramedics arrived swiftly, but it was hopeless. A great man, and a great friend, had left the world.

It was my first “proper” bereavement. My maternal grandfather had dementia so wasn’t himself when he died, and the same was true of my maternal grandmother and then my mother. My paternal grandfather, I never knew. My paternal grandmother was compos mentis up till the end but I didn’t know her well. So all five of those deaths were much less disturbing than they might have been. In a way I had got off lightly. But with Allen it was completely different. He was of perfectly sound mind. He had projects, intentions, concerns, and thoughts about the world. He was voicing them right in front of me… and then suddenly he wasn’t. It was awful to see a great man disappear. My dear friend.

The loss was painful and confusing. At first I couldn’t concentrate on anything. After a few days I began writing an essay about him. It seemed essential to write a memoir of such a man. When that was mostly finished, I returned to the Great Replacement series and finished that, reckoning that it’s what Allen would have wanted. (The memoir of him will be published next year, on his birthday.)

Then, various essays sketched in 2023 and 2024 began being finished, one after another. It was great to feel the work reaching fruition - loose ends being tied up, more bricks in the wall, more things done and dusted. Among these were a few entries in the Grim Rhymer series and the entire Future Magic series.

I also began an on-going series of TV guides (five of which were published this year) and did more work on a series about the architectural history of my home town.

I created the Autobio page. This lists essays that talk about my life. Eventually I might collect all of these into a book, a sort of fragmented, non-linear autobiography. For as long as I can remember, I have envisaged one day writing an autobiography, and with these essays a lot of the ground will already have been covered so it would be a shame not to use it. At the same time, though, I like the idea of writing a proper, linear autobiography - in which case, that essay collection could serve as a companion volume.

In September 2024, when my mother died, I had begun writing a very long essay about her. It was a difficult one to write, not just because I wanted to chart the evolution and plumb the emotional depths of our relationship but because the essay itself has a rather elaborate structure. Getting that “right” was a technical challenge, alongside the other challenges of writing such a thing. I worked on it sporadically for six months, then focussed on it in April so that it would be ready for publishing on her birthday in May. Then, actually on her birthday when we scattered her ashes, I received some new information which had to be integrated at the very last minute. At 16,000 words it is six times my average. I was concerned about it being indulgent. Maybe it is, but I have no regrets. Many people thanked me for writing it as it helped them in various ways. One person described it as “a piece of literature”. I do think it is one of the best things I have ever made. My hope is that, besides the emotional impact and telling the story of our relationship, it illuminates my mother’s personality.

Mid May saw the end of a six-year relationship. We had been off and on for the first few years, but over time had come to love each other deeply. But it was a long-distance relationship and eventually, as such relationships famously do, became untenable. It was a heart-breaking split because neither of us wanted it, but due to our respective commitments at home, we couldn’t overcome the distance.

Then, just a week later, a close friend had a cardiac arrest and very nearly died. Severe brain damage looked inevitable. Either way, it seemed the world was going to lose a precious soul. Instead, miraculously and amazing even the doctors, her recovery was complete. Thank God, she is still with us and still herself. But this episode was a nightmare, possibly the scariest experience of my life. It put some things into perspective for me.

Then began the summer, which was a summer of stress and fear of eviction from Allen’s property. I could relax sometimes but this fear was always hanging over me. It was a horrible summer. In retrospect I should have taken matters into my own hands and moved out by choice, but I was very attached to the place. In any case I had no idea where to move to, or whether it was even possible for someone like me to get a “normie” landlord.

In the meantime there was chaos in Britain. This inspired prolific writing for me. There was a flurry of essays covering the Bob Vylan debacle, civil war, the Yookay meme, the question of government malice, Zionism in America and here, and the Afghan asylum scandal. The last is the only essay I’m not happy with; I rushed it in order to get a “hot take” in and ended up putting out something sub-standard. It’s a mistake I won’t repeat. I’m just not the guy you should come to for “hot takes”.

At the end of July I received official notice of eviction. Thus, autumn was spent looking for new accommodation. This involved an appeal for help of various kinds. The reality forced me to accept that my financial situation really isn’t good. With that in mind, please support me if you can:

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In August, I received confirmation that Antidem had died - actually in February, the same month as Allen. I feel guilty that I didn’t know him as well as I should have. But that was as much his choice as mine, to be fair.

Also, it seems ridiculous that we had to wait six months to learn of his unfortunate passing. There was also a false confirmation that Lady of Shalott had died, and this held for months before being disproven. Our movement should have mechanisms to ensure that we are less “scattered” than this. When someone dies, their relatives and friends might have no idea about their life online, the many friendships and collaborations that they were involved in. Something should be done about this. Each content creator should have someone “in their real life” who will inform a nominated online person if something bad happens, and that online person breaks the news to the community.

In late August I began work on Millenniyule 2025. This work continued while I prepared to move house and then actually did so. And, now ensconced in my new abode, it is time to actually “do” Millenniyule. So that is where this year, for this Substack, ends.

My organiser program (which I expanded this year) is able to compute various numbers about my writing work. The current situation is:

Published: 120 essays (317k words)
Unpublished: 263 essays (320k words)
Total: 383 essays (637k words)
69% of the essays I have started are yet to be published
Average length of my published essays: 2,638 words

And now for the highlights of 2025. I’m afraid there are many, because, at the risk of seeming vain, I really think the quality has gone up and I have reached a peak.

• The Archetype of the Champagne Socialist

• Warship and the Immortal Memory

• Doctor Who and the Mutants

• Kathleen and Colin

• The Woke Right

• the Great Replacement series, especially Is It Democratic?

• The 2025 Audit on Muslim Rape Gangs

• Grilling and the Yookay Inferno

• An Example of the Muslim Rape Gang Cover-up

• TV Guide: Rising Damp (for some reason I’m very pleased that I wrote this and about once a month I read it over, which I almost never do with my own work)

• The Wages of Wokery

• After the Murder of Charlie Kirk

• TV Guide: New Scotland Yard (as above, I love this essay and find myself reading it over a lot, and have expanded it since publishing)

• Our Modern Waywardness (this is an example of social history writing of which I have done much in 2024 and 2025. Due to the extensive research involved, most of these essays are yet to be finished, but they are in the offing and there will be a lot more of this material in future.)

I am proud of most of the 2025 essays. I think this has been my best year so far on Substack and it was actually a challenge to select “highlights”.

It is honestly baffling to me how I managed this work while my life was so turbulent and stressful. Of course there is the cliché that emotional upheaval is creatively energising. That is probably true. But I am too old for the “tortured artist” thing and I feel this experience has taken a toll on my health. I really hope 2026 is calmer.

With that said, there is much on the slate for next year. I will promise nothing, since events can be unhelpful and inspiration erratic, but here are my goals for 2026:

• finish the Twin Peaks series

• finish the Life of Brian series

• finish the 1977 Gay Trial series

• finish the series about the architectural history of Linlithgow

• finish The Seeds of Gay Doom. This series was begun and “completed” in 2024 but this year I wrote a new chapter, documenting the second season of the RTD2 era of Doctor Who. I also began a coda chapter on the demise of RTD2, to give the series a proper ending. However, I can’t finish that until the demise is officially confirmed, as that is essential for “the story”. Apparently this will happen at the end of 2026. Therefore, I expect to publish these new chapters in early 2027.

• write more of the Grim Rhymer series

• write more of the Loony Left series

• rewatch films I knew in the 1990s but haven’t watched since, and give them a fresh appraisal - “Revisiting the 1990s”

• write some more TV guides

In addition, people are asking for my essays to be made available in paper book form. The obstacle there is deciding how to arrange them into collections that have internal unity, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Like most things, it just needs some time spent on it. Then I will see whether any publishers in our movement can be enticed.

But first… a break. Working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week is my natural tendency, but after the events of this year I really need a rest; my last one was in August 2023!

Once recuperated, there are “IRL” things I really should attend to, things I have been putting off. There is a lot that I need to get into order. Obviously I can do that while writing, but a break from “MW work” will definitely help me make a start on all those things. Luckily I have some essays ready. Those will begin going out at the start of March, and I expect to return to full-time writing shortly thereafter. (That’s my plan, anyway. But it was my plan this time last year, and events intervened.)

I want to thank everyone who has supported me in 2025. I will probably forever be more famous for Millenniyule and my 2010s videos, but Substack is now “my main thing”, sustaining me financially and keeping me occupied creatively throughout the year. I also think that written, polished essays are a more enduring contribution than videos, potentially a valuable resource for future historians, and I take that responsibility very seriously. But this work wouldn’t be possible without the people who make it a livelihood for me. Thank you.

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It is renowned as a sci-fi sitcom but, while excelling at those two genres, it is more still. I would go so far as to say that, at its best, Red Dwarf is as good as television gets. It has depth, it has frights and chills, and it is sometimes very touching. All of it is character-driven, and the characters are as memorable as any in the annals of British comedy.

It also has a lo-fi feel that is absolutely charming. The production design is great, particularly in the “golden era” of seasons 3 to 5 when, to my mind, the ship’s interiors resemble an up-market leisure centre from that era (the early 1990s).

The model work, too, deserves praise, ranging from the pyrotechnic exit of Starbug from the mothership in Demons & Angels, to the ominous intro used throughout the first two seasons. Special mention should also go to the music, all composed by the very talented Howard Goodall.

Being a prestigious BBC property, Red Dwarf is very well-protected online which means that few of the episodes are available on video-sharing websites. I have linked where possible, but to view most of my recommendations you will need to “go the legal route”.

In my selections, eagle-eyed readers will notice a complete neglect of episodes post Season 6. That is sadly not an accident. Other than the moose gag in Trojan, I just don’t like any of it. This is a show that plainly needs both of its original writers - Doug Naylor and Rob Grant - in order to be up to par, and unless they can work together again, I don’t think it will ever recapture its 1988-92 glory.

The apex episodes

Marooned
This has a very simple storyline which mainly serves to place Rimmer and Lister alone together for an extended period of time. The episode rests on - and is loved for - the conversations they end up having. The contrast between the two characters allows for interesting chat about civilisation, achievement, confidence, vulnerability, sincerity, and what life is all about.

Back to Reality
This episode combines everything that made Red Dwarf great: comedy, science-fiction, philosophy, scares, and brilliant character work. The premise is an original one, especially for the time, and it is very well-executed by cast and crew. The show is famous for its cameos and this episode has not one but two, from Timothy Spall and Lenny Von Dohlen, both very memorable.

Season 1

I have a lot of affection for the first two seasons. They are very different from what follows, especially Season 1 which is ultra low budget. The storylines are generally quite weak, but the characters and dialogue are so good that it just doesn’t matter. There is also a more sombre tone, again especially in Season 1; outer space feels genuinely lonely here in a way it just doesn’t in later, more action-packed, seasons.

The End
It is necessary to watch this, the very first episode, so as to understand the premise of the show. It’s also quite a thrilling novelty to see the ship pre-accident with all of its crew going about their humdrum work. You see how life aboard the Red Dwarf was, when things were “normal”, and it is completely different from how it will be hereafter.

Me2
This is the first Rimmer-centric episode, and Chris Barrie makes it hilarious from start to finish. The idea is a simple one: could you live with a duplicate of yourself?

Season 2

Kryten
There are many funny moments in this, and it is interesting to see Kryten being played by a different actor (to be honest, the character is completely different in this debut appearance). This episode is also worth watching for the hilarious parody of Australian soap opera Neighbours.

Thanks for the Memory
This is probably the first “great” episode of Red Dwarf, achieving its classic combination of good character work, good sci-fi, good comedy, clever plotting, and a bit of substance. It’s also very moving.

I can’t talk about this episode without drawing attention to this lovely special effects shot, made by combining live action footage with several layers of model work. Amazing what you can do with a low budget, right?

Stasis Leak
This episode is funny, above all. It is one of the first times we see alternative versions of the main characters. It’s also great to revisit the ship pre-accident, which includes seeing Mac McDonald again as Captain Hollister and Clare Grogan as Kochanski. The plotting is intricate and the story intriguing. Also, some parts are very nicely done; there’s an ominous tone to the black & white “flashback” footage, a sense of danger and dread about what is going to happen on the ship very soon, an awareness of the sheer scale of the events that are being toyed with by this time-travel.

Season 3

Polymorph
An absurdist rip-off of Alien and every 1980s monster movie, this episode is one of the classics beloved by fans. Lots of memorable lines.

The Last Day
This is a touching episode centred around mechanoid Kryten having to be deactivated because his replacement has arrived. The replacement is Hudzen 10, “the ultimate machine” - another great cameo performance, this time by Gordon Kennedy. Robert Llewellyn also doubles as the spokesman of Divadroid International, with an amusing “yuppie” voice.

Season 4

Justice
An interesting sci-fi idea is at the centre of a revolutionary penal complex where prisoners learn to behave well. Lots of funny stuff, even before we get to that. (I’m thinking of Rimmer’s “holiday” snaps and Kryten’s suffering through them.)

White Hole
Again, an interesting sci-fi idea produces lots of funny moments. The characters have to deal with time dilations. After amusing moments where Rimmer admonishes Lister for drunkenness, we get a climax with the only ever interstellar game of pool.

Dimension Jump
The first (and only good) appearance of Ace Rimmer, this episode asks how you would feel if you met an alternative version of yourself who had done much better in life than you have - and how he would feel about you.

It’s also hilarious, riffing on Top Gun, a theme emphasised in the music by Howard Goodall.

Season 5

Holoship
This under-rated episode is the show’s second take on Casablanca (the first being Season 4’s Camille) and by far the more effective. It is not just very funny but very moving. What’s more, it is redemptive for Rimmer. A really great story.

The Inquisitor
An original and intriguing premise opens the door for many funny moments and lots of good character stuff. The Inquisitor himself is both funny and terrifying; his threat, the capability he has developed, is surely one of the most awful things imaginable. My favourite bit in this episode is Kryten’s monologue early on, telling the legend in a needlessly dramatic fashion.

Terrorform
A hilarious episode journeying into Rimmer’s psyche, where his insecurities and fears are manifest physically. It also has hilarious scenes before (with Kryten’s hand conveying his predicament to the crew) and after (when they have to sweet-talk Rimmer in order to survive). Look out for the cameo by the gorgeous Sara Stockbridge.

Quarantine
This is one of the funniest episodes overall, with Lister, Kryten and Cat being trapped in quarantine by a deranged Rimmer. But even before that, when they explore the research base, there are some hilarious moments, especially with Professor Lanstrom (another great cameo, this time by Maggie Steed). It’s also quite scary here and there. And I love the model shots of the research base.

Demons & Angels
This is another episode where we see alternative versions of the main characters, in fact two versions, and both are hilarious. Peak praise has to go to the “low” version of Rimmer - an unforgettable twist on the character.

Special effects fans should also enjoy the model work in this episode, which even thirty years later looks incredible.

Season 6

This is sadly when the show’s decline started, and it is perceptible immediately, with an excess of recycled jokes (especially the Space Corps directives), generally flatter character work, and the cast hamming it up (especially Chris Barrie) so that they don’t seem like “real” characters any more. However, it does have three good episodes: Legion, Out of Time, and...

Gunmen of the Apocalypse
Many consider this one of the overall “apex” episodes, and it is very good. It adds “Western” to the genres the show has flirted with, and even throws in some Film Noir as well. The storyline is complex and the premise interesting, and there are lots of funny character moments.

Episodes that show Earth

Thanks for the Memory (flashbacks)
Backwards
Timeslides
Tikka to Ride
Ouroboros (flashback to Aigburth Arms pub)
Back to Earth

Episodes with pre-accident flashbacks

Balance of Power
Me2
Stasis Leak
Ouroboros

Where to see the shuttles

Blue Midget (original) - Thanks for the Memory
Starbug - season 3 onwards
White Midget - Ouroboros
Blue Midget (new) - Back in the Red (Part 3)
White Giant - Cassandra

Touching episodes

Kryten - when Kryten talks about his dream of a garden
Better Than Life - when Rimmer talks about his father
Thanks for the Memory - when they talk about lost love
Marooned - when Rimmer talks about his father
The Last Day - when the characters talk about their mothers
Holoship - when Nirvanah makes her sacrifice, and Rimmer makes his

Curiosities

Back to Earth - the only episodes not to have audience laughter. I miss it, but I think these episodes aren’t terrible and make for an interesting novelty.

The End (The Original Assembly) - included in the Bodysnatcher collection, this is the original take of the first episode, before emergency reshoots were done to solve teething issues with the cast and crew. It’s an interesting alternative, and a glimpse at the very first attempt to make this programme.

Marooned was shot mostly with handheld camera.

Bodyswap was shot without a live studio audience.

What I would have liked

I would like Marooned to have been a Christmas special, twice as long as a usual episode. Given the premise and the conversation topics between Rimmer and Lister, it could easily have been extended without becoming boring. In fact, the extra time would have helped to convey their plight. And, given the snowy planetoid they are marooned on, it would have been suitable for the festive season.

An episode later on, perhaps a finale episode, where they revisit the ship’s iconic sets that have appeared throughout the run, especially the original Drive Room from Season 1 - a set I love and which, unlike the original bunkroom, has never reappeared.

See my other TV guides here.

One of the differences between British and American society is the prominence of Jews in America. This creates a heightened awareness among the gentile public of “Jewishness” in general. Due to this and the First Amendment, American White nationalists often misunderstand the climate in Britain and recommend strategies which are simply not viable here.

In Britain, Jews are much less prominent in our culture because they are much less numerous in our population. If a Briton grew up and always stayed in rural towns, in his entire life he might never meet - or knowingly meet - a Jew. In the cities, most people will have had some experience with them but it will usually be limited to having dealt with a Jewish estate agent, lawyer, etc., which yields an apolitical, even “acultural” perception of them. Maybe they once knew a friendly shopkeeper who ordered in that thing they wanted - a nice memory but a very limited experience. Maybe they once had a stereotypical ruthless landlord, but they might not realise that he was Jewish, in which case his behaviour doesn’t contribute to a “pattern” in their mind. As a result, there is much less recognition among British people of Jews “as a group”. Even those who are aware of it tend to think it is defined purely religiously; they are just White people who have a different religion from most of us. This is how they are perceived by apolitical normies, everyday conservatives, and the anti-white woke Left.

Because of this, Brits are much less likely than Americans to realise that many of the key figures in their media are Jewish, or to see any significance if this were pointed out to them. In the legacy media: Stephen Fry, Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, Melanie Phillips, David Aaronovitch, Robert Peston, Esther Rantzen, Vanessa Feltz, David Baddiel, Matt Lucas, Simon Amstell, and even Rachel Riley. In the new media: Andrew Gold, Winston Marshall and of course the loathsome Konstantin Kisin. For Brits, these are just people with slightly strange names, and often not even that. When David Baddiel complains about anti-Semitism, well, he’s just protecting himself and other Jewish individuals from bigotry, isn’t he?

Thus, they don’t conceive of such a thing as “Jewish power” and wouldn’t believe you if you told them. In fact, they are so unaccustomed to the concept of group identity that they wouldn’t understand that they (White Brits) are a group, or that Jews could be one as well, or might see themselves as one. The idea of “opposing” it is therefore alien to them.

Yet, so concerned are some Jews about this possibility, they have given Tommy Robinson a career thwarting it.

I believe that the entire purpose of Robinson (and Douglas Murray and nowadays Nigel Farage) is to repurpose English nationalist sentiment for Zionism, or at least to prevent it from going “anti-Semitic”. While Robinson renounces English ethnic identity, he constantly celebrates Jews and Israel. In fact, he decries Muslim immigration to Europe while advocating Israel’s wars which increase it. Farage is more subtle but the same.

In fact, Zionist capture is all over our politics. Becoming a politician in Britain apparently entails getting introduced to the existence and influence of organised Jewry - knowledge that completely eludes the ordinary public.

During the previous Parliament, Declassified revealed that 27% of the MPs (180 of 650) had received money from “the Israel lobby”. The Conservative Party is effectively owned by that lobby. They are especially predominant in its senior echelons according to David Cameron, who once quipped that it would be more accurately called “the Torah Party”. Of its 365 MPs, a staggering 80% were members of the Conservative Friends of Israel. This percentage was the same in 2009 and probably long before then.

Of 202 Labour MPs, 75 (37%) were members of the Labour Friends of Israel. That party is less “captured” than the Conservatives, but still enough that Jeremy Corbyn, for not being sufficiently pro-Zionist, could be demonised as “anti-Semitic”, ousted as leader and replaced with the ultra-reliable Keir Starmer (complete with Jewish wife and kids).

Needless to say, the Liberal Democrat Party has its own “Friends of Israel” organisation. So do Farage’s parties; UKIP had one and now Reform UK is to get one.

The single exception is the Green Party. It does have a faction called Jewish Greens, but that is led by a man who seems rather anti-Zionist. The party itself is led by “certainly not a Zionist” Zack Polanski. Presumably it is being used as a silo to hold idealistic “hippie” Jews. However, we can bet that if it ever becomes an electoral force, all of this will change and Jewish Greens will be dissolved and replaced with a “Friends of Israel” organisation.

This is because, to join the club of British politics, supporting Zionism is an absolute requirement. For context, and to illustrate how ludicrous that requirement is, in 2007 the British government refused to ratify a convention on the grounds that “there are no indigenous people in the UK”. Thus, all of our mainstream political parties (and the British government itself) accept the reality of a Jewish people and their entitlement to a homeland, but deny the existence of an English people and thus their entitlement to a homeland (the very homeland that the British government and all of these parties supposedly exist to serve and protect).

This bizarre situation seems designed to have exactly the effects it has: hamstring British politicians, prevent them acting in the British people’s ethnic interests, and prevent them prioritising Britain over Israel.

Thus, if Israel needs money, we give it. If Israel wants to ethnically cleanse Gaza, we finance it and accept the resulting refugees. If Israel wants to be “first”, we settle for Britain being “second”. None of this is justified, except by the politician’s own personal interests; he wants bribes and junkets (presumably) and doesn’t want to be blackmailed or have his reputation or career annihilated.

But the compromised position into which this puts our politicians and commentators is fatally easy to “show up”. When Matt Goodwin bullishly declared that we should put Britain first and not any other countries, Aaron Bastani had only to ask “not Israel?” to have him squirming. Yes, despite what he had just said, Goodwin wants to make a special case for Israel. He attempted to justify this by saying that many Jews in Britain care about Israel. Well, many Pakistanis in Britain care about Pakistan. So what? It doesn’t mean the rest of us need to give a fig about Pakistan - and we don’t. Israel likewise.

But then, nobody tells us we should care about Pakistan, even though there are over five times as many Pakistanis in Britain as Jews… yet we are told to care about Israel.

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In America, public support for Zionism has been weakening with each generation. This was already apparent by 2014. In 2023 the decline had become so pronounced that ADL leader Jonathan Greenblatt cited it as a major future problem.

It has multiple causes:

• the Holocaust (and World War II generally) receding in time

• 4chan

• the rise of 1st generation social media and then, after it turned censorious, the rise of 2nd generation (mostly uncensored) social media - Tiktok, Substack and X (Twitter)

• the drift away from mainstream media which kept 99% of people “on the same page”

• the progressive obsession with supporting “the underdog”

• “Jews are White” + “Whites are bad” = “Israel is bad”

• Israel’s behaviour

• the Jewish lobby’s increasingly clumsy messaging

I won’t detail each of these - they are self-explanatory - but will touch on all of them.

The Holocaust was the armour that shielded Jews as a group, and especially Zionism, from criticism. It could always be invoked, no matter how tenuously or disingenuously. Everyone knew: it’s a slippery slope from noticing this or that to carting them all into the gas chamber. Everyone understood that it was the lowest point of Western civilisation, something in the past that we must avoid in the future and atone for - nigh constantly - in the present. However, Gen X were less strident about all of this than the Baby Boomers. The Millennials less so (I’ve never even seen Schindler’s List). The Zoomers, less again. As the Holocaust drifted into the temporal distance, its rhetorical power dwindled.

I think that simple, unfixable problem is the primary factor behind declining support for Zionism. It enables the secondary factors.

Among “normies”, opinions are not so much arrived-at as picked up, unthinkingly, “from the ether”. The ether used to be defined by the mainstream media but that is now in steep decline. The average ages of viewers of American mainstream TV are sobering: ABC (61), CBS (64), CNN (67), Fox (68), MSNBC (71). This decline is happening even with the online versions of these outlets:

These TV channels artificially kept the Holocaust prominent in people’s thinking despite it being fifty, sixty, seventy years in the past. As the mainstream media loses traction, so does the Holocaust. We are returning to the natural state of man: being concerned about one’s own country, culture, family and life prospects instead of something that happened to a foreign people in a foreign country eighty years ago.

With “legacy” media dethroned, social media becomes important. The ether must be defined somehow, after all. The controllers of legacy media were acutely aware of this and tried to colonise the online space, astroturfing gatekeepers like Breadtube, Jordan Peterson and Lex Fridman, and lobbying for everyone else to be deplatformed or deboosted. But Tiktok was never quite onboard with that censorship, neither was Substack, neither was Elon Musk. Old memes and greentexts from 4chan found new life. The ether was re-defined.

To be clear, I don’t think that most young Americans today are “anti-Semitic”. They just have a much more skeptical, ambivalent attitude towards Jewishness and Zionism than their grandparents had. And they are increasingly aware of concerns in their own lives, things that make it hard to care about what (to them) are mere abstractions, or “other people’s problems”. The idea that they should put such things ahead of their own concerns feels like an imposition.

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