“The return of the Right in 2016 and again in 2024 was not an intellectual revival. It was not driven by theory or political philosophy, but by visibility and reach: Jordan Peterson debating feminists, Charlie Kirk confronting campus socialists, Donald Trump dominating the podcast circuit. The Right returned culturally, but with an intellectual vacuum at its centre: most notably, a lack of serious economics.

For classical liberals looking back decades from now, this revival of the Right is unlikely to inspire them in the way Thatcher and Reagan still do today. The politicians of the 1980s were what George Will called ‘conviction politicians’: figures who entered politics with a coherent social creed. Politics for them was not merely about remaining in power, but about pursuing a broader mission of prosperity. That mission was not to control the economy toward a collective goal, but to empower individuals to make their own decisions.

Today’s Right, by contrast, is dominated by political entrepreneurs: figures highly skilled at attracting attention and mobilising voters. By nature, they are populists, and populism is the direct translation of public emotion into government policy. Without intellectual grounding, politics becomes purely oppositional. Today, lacking any clear sense of direction in economics, the Right is often effective at identifying problems but incapable of solving them.”

– Mani Basharzad

“The richest person in the world in the 1830s was Nathan Rothschild, whose personal net worth was around 0.6 per cent of national income. Despite this vast fortune, Rothschild died at age 58 in 1836 of an infection that $10 of antibiotics could likely cure today. Similarly, the richest people in the world today, such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos, presumably have a marginal utility from additional consumption spending that is zero. Nevertheless, their utility still increases when new goods (smartphones or LLMs) are invented. These examples suggest that more consumption of a fixed set of goods eventually hits a marginal utility of zero while the invention of new goods or higher quality goods continues to increase wellbeing.”

As seen on a Students For Liberty comment on a Facebook page I follow. The quote was cited by this chap: Karthik Tadepalli, of the Becker Friedman Institute For Economics, University of Chicago. I don’t have the original link. There are some super-smart young classical liberals out there, and many seem to be coming from places such as Eastern Europe, India, etc.

The point about marginal utility reminds me of a comment from Perry Metzger on this blog on 2014, debunking the Thomas Piketty book that purported to claim that wealth rises faster than the overall economy and that the “rich” will eventually swallow up the world unless restrained by wealth taxes and so on. Perry M got in a reference to Douglas Adams, which is always the mark of a good article, IMHO.

What is still so lacking in these arguments [about Brexit] is even a smattering of emotional intelligence. No one fully understood the implications of Brexit but when so much of the establishment, the great and the good, the entire culture industry, told everyone to vote Remain then it was obvious that many would stick two fingers up.

That England never went away. That England is still continually being ticked off for expressing its identity incorrectly. Yet, as we have just seen in the local elections, both the Scots and the Welsh have voted for their own nationalist politicians. The Leave vote was an expression of cultural identity.

– Suzanne Moore (£)

On 7th May 2026 the Guardian published the following article by its regular correspondent, George Monbiot, a supporter of the Green Party: “Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’”

He says,

Further work by the same scientists along with other people’s studies show that persuasive methods do exist. They don’t change everyone’s minds, but they can make enough difference to win elections and build a kinder, fairer, greener country. These techniques are known as “deep canvassing”.

Deep canvassing works only if you have a large army of volunteers, ideally from the community you’re trying to reach. Instead of delivering a message then scuttling away, as conventional canvassers do, their role is to connect and listen. Across conversations that might last for 10 or 20 minutes, they let people discuss their feelings. Then, without arguing or judging, they share their own experiences and ask questions (“have you ever been treated unfairly?”) that might reveal common ground.

Done honestly, non-judgmental listening is an excellent idea. “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”, as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus once said.

Far though Mr Monbiot’s political beliefs are from mine, I acknowledge that on several occasions he has demonstrated both honesty and a willingness to listen, by publicly stating that he had changed his views in directions that made him unpopular with his fellow Greens. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident, he surprised many by saying that he had changed his mind in favour of nuclear power, and, so long ago that I cannot find the reference, he realised that the policy of autarky that the Greens then recommended for the UK was equivalent to the sanctions on Iraq that they were denouncing, and said so in public. Unfortunately, as it did for a lot of people, the Covid-19 pandemic de-magnetised his moral compass and in 2021 he came out in favour of censorship, writing an article called “Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”.

Censorship and seeking to listen “without arguing or judging” are matter and anti-matter; they cannot coexist. To censor is to judge certain opinions as so pernicious that they must be suppressed. In the world that Mr Monbiot has said he wants, if one of the people “exhausted with politics” to whom he is listening were to express the anti-vax views that a lot of such people hold, his next action would be to report them to the police. In our world – in our Britain – there are plenty of opinions about migrants and transgender people that are widespread among the alienated masses that when expressed have resulted in state punishment, ranging from sending the police round to issue a “friendly warning” (for most of my life I thought that sort of thing only happened in dictatorships), through people being forbidden to access social media without the permission of their police minder and having their devices seized, up to arrest and jail. Even if Mr Monbiot were to bind himself during his radical listening sessions by something like the seal of the confessional, the mind that holds it to be desirable to legally suppress certain bad opinions cannot hear expressions of those opinions without categorising them as crimes that it is not convenient to punish right now.

Three quarters of a century ago in 1956, Chairman Mao Zedong – whose name was then usually romanised as Mao Tse-Tung – launched the “Hundred Flowers campaign”. Under the slogan “Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”, the communist authorities proclaimed that from now on they would no longer punish critics. All would be free to speak, the better to promote new ideas to improve China.

Tentatively at first, some did offer their criticisms. When nothing bad happened, the trickle became a flood. Then, having established who their critics were, the communists arrested them and sent them to labour camps.

Ten seconds after I wrote a comment to this Guardian story, “Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’”, it was gone. Oh well. My comment was no great loss to the world (I forget the exact words, but it was something about how the New York Times and the Guardian didn’t report it when Biden fell asleep in meetings either) and, of course, a newspaper has every right to delete whatever it wants from its comment section.

But the sheer speed of its deletion made it obvious that it was done by A.I. That happens a lot these days, and not just at the Guardian. Some people on Twitter write “unalive” when they mean “kill” to avoid having their post automatically censored. Cens*red. Cenrosed. There are so many other instances of workarounds to avoid the robot censor that I begin to think we may be evolving something like the avoidance speech that is a feature of languages that originate as far apart as Australia and China.

The current state of Artificial Intelligence is particularly likely to result in pervasive stupid censorship; censorship that does not even serve the objectives of the censors. Four or five years ago the programs caught single words. “Unalive” dates from this period. Sometimes the algorithm caught utterly harmless instances of a given word, for example when a mention of a blue tit – the bird – would be deleted for obscenity. But one could work round it. In five years’ time, or maybe sooner given the speed at which this technology is developing, the A.I. will no longer mistake a blue tit for a tit. We’ll still have the political censorship, of course, and the system will be cleverer than we are when it comes to spotting evasive wordplay. Pray for Elon Musk’s health.

For several years the Guardian automatically deleted any reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop. As I said in this post, for some reason they briefly lifted the prohibition in January 2025:

What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop in a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”

MJuma2018’s comment is still up, but when I have tried mentioning the laptop on a few occasions since then out of a maternal concern for the imprisoned brains of Guardian readers, my comments did not get through.

However in my experiments during those four, now five, years it was always comments relating to Hunter Biden that got the chop. My comment of today only referred to “Biden”, as dozens of other comments in the thread also did. For such a general comment to be deleted is a new development. Before you ask, no, they do not delete all my comments. Nor do they delete all my comments that refer unfavourably to Joe Biden. It looks like the AI is just sophisticated enough to recognise a criticism of the Guardian’s own coverage.

We have, of course, been laughing at this for decades. ‘Yes Minister’ is regarded as perhaps the finest British sitcom ever made precisely because it is devastatingly accurate. Sir Humphrey is not a caricature; he is a documentary subject lightly fictionalised. ‘The Thick of It’ is funnier and darker, but its portrait of an institution that treats elected politicians as an irritating management layer to be managed, delayed, and where possible redirected is not satire but observation. The reason these programmes land is that everyone who has encountered Whitehall at close quarters recognises the creature.

There will be much pearl-clutching.

– Gawain Towler