Gawain Towler explains the ongoing campaign by the British establishment to destroy the existential threat The Reform Party poses to them.

The first aim, the one they would toast if they achieved it, is to take Farage down altogether, to force a resignation. They will not be so lucky. The second aim is subtler and in its way just as dangerous. It is aimed at the rear echelon. At the Reform leaning voter, the not sure but interested, the undecided man or woman who is being told, day after day, that these people are chaotic, tainted, not quite safe. Frighten the reserves and the front line starves.

If Farage were to resign, which he will not, Burnham would call a general election the next morning, before the smoke cleared. Since he will not, there will be a delay, and the pounding will continue. That is the nature of the thing. Preparatory bombardments do not stop because the defenders are steady. They stop when the attacker runs out of shells or out of time.

So what is required of us is not cleverness. It is resilience. We have been shelled before, in 2016, in 2019, in 2024, and we have remained undimmed. Morale is the true objective of every barrage, and morale is the one thing entirely within our own keeping. Courage under fire is not a slogan, it is a discipline, and it consists mostly of not doing things. Not wavering. Not sniping at our own. Not mistaking noise for damage.

If you are even vaguely considering supporting Reform, then you are the target of this carefully orchestrated campaign to convince you to do otherwise. I urge you to read the entire linked article: The Guns Before the Whistle.

Thucydides famously observed that “the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.”

Take courage.

Lots of news today. Nigel Farage has stood down as MP for Clacton, stating he will seek to be re-elected in the resulting by-election. The Daily Mail has defeated Prince Harry and several other high-profile claimants in a phone hacking case brought against it in the High Court, a result that Lord Dacre, the Mail’s publisher, has hailed as a victory for press freedom.

The papers were no doubt equally full on this day twenty-one years ago, before the 7 July 2005 London bombings wiped everything else off the front page.

Every party in trouble prays for the same miracle, which is amnesia. The Conservative Party’s entire strategy for the next four years rests on the hope that the British people will misremember the last fourteen. Kemi Badenoch has said as much, remarking that it is unhelpful to churn over every incident of those years. Unhelpful to whom, one might ask. Yesterday Reform UK answered her with a website, and I want to spend a few paragraphs telling you why donotforget.co.uk matters rather more than a campaign microsite usually does.

– Gawain Towler

Markets are discovery mechanisms. In war adaptation and discovery are a matter of survival.

By introducing clear incentives at every step of the process, combat units are motivated to provide results, manufacturers to improve quality and the Ukrainian military machine becomes ever more effective.

– Samuel Williamson

This is a fine article by Nina Roberts, but it might have been nice if Guardian readers and their US equivalents had thought about the disproportionate burden of “equality” laws on small businesses (as opposed to large businesses who have whole floors full of hotshot lawyers) forty years ago.

Slew of lawsuits over disability access frustrates US cafe and shop owners

Rodrigo Nogueira was met with a surprise in April 2025 when lawyers contacted him out of the blue. They asked whether he needed legal assistance over a summons his restaurant received for violating Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

It was the first he had ever heard of it. The lawsuit listed 35 violations against No More Cafe, his restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village.

One violation alleged a table outside the restaurant was not ADA compliant, an accusation that puzzled Nogueira: the cafe had no outdoor tables. Other alleged violations were about infractions inside the restaurant, yet the plaintiff said he was unable to enter the restaurant.

When Nogueira researched the lawsuit, he discovered that the plaintiff who sued him and the plaintiff’s lawyer had filed complaints against dozens of small businesses. The attorney who filed the lawsuit against him alone had filed more than 100 ADA lawsuits over the past nine years against storefront businesses.

Nogueira, sitting at a table in his café, said: “The [plaintiff] that’s suing me – he’s got 67 cases.”

Before possibly hiring a lawyer, Nogueira filed a motion to dismiss the case himself. But the judge said a company cannot represent itself in court. For small businesses, thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to just file a motion, can be prohibitively costly.

Frustrated with the process, Nogueira sought to speak with other small business owners. He went through public court records and found nearby businesses that were also being sued for ADA noncompliance.

“Every business owner I spoke to had opened within the last year or two. Every one of them was an immigrant,” Nogueira, who is from Brazil, wrote in a post on his website about the lawsuit. “None of us had any idea how to navigate the federal court system. Most were already several thousand dollars into legal fees by the time we talked. Several of them did not realize they had been sued until the deadline to respond had already passed.”