Ross Meurant: Civil War

After a week of escalating violence (1), UK is on the brink of an enduring civil war.

Latent as it may have been, since German Chancellor Angela Merkle and other paragons of virtue (Sweden another standout), adopted a “woke” approach to not just thousands but millions of Muslims and non-Muslims, fleeing the various “Spring Revolutions” in the Middle East, the cauldron of racial and religious conflict in UK, has simmered.

Melanie Phillips: The real lessons for Israel from the Good Friday Agreement

Biden's Irish tour demonstrates yet more US arrogance, hubris and magical thinking

People often wonder whether the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which has brought a 25-year respite from Irish sectarian bombings in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, provides lessons for the war between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

The visit to Ireland by US President Joe Biden suggests, however, that the comparison is far more baleful than many suppose.

NZCPR Weekly: A Changing of the Guard

On Thursday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he would be stepping down as leader of the ruling Conservatives in the face of mounting pressure from the party.

While he will remain prime minister until a replacement is chosen, his resignation has triggered a contest within the party to find a new leader and PM.

Boris Johnson had led the Conservatives to a landslide election victory in 2019 on a platform of delivering on the Brexit referendum and orchestrating Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Matt Ridley: The Madness Of Our Worship Of Wind

They despoil our glorious countryside, add £6 billion a year to our household bills and are arguably the most inefficient solution to our energy crisis. So why is the Government planning to make it even easier to build them?

Take a wild guess at how much of the UK’s total primary demand for energy was supplied by wind power in 2020.

Half? 30 per cent? No, in fact, it was less than 4 per cent.

That’s right, all those vast wind farms in the North Sea, or disfiguring the hills of Wales and Scotland, give us little more than one-thirtieth of the energy we need to light and heat our homes, power our businesses or move our cars and trains. Just think what this country and its seas would look like if we relied on wind for one-third or half of our energy needs.

Simon Ruda: Will nudge theory survive the pandemic?

State propaganda can flourish in times of crisis

In 2015, during a public debate on behavioural science in Lucerne, I was accused of supporting tactics befitting an unsavoury authoritarian regime. At the time, knowing how well-intentioned my colleagues were, I thought this was, quite frankly, nuts.

I remain a supporter of the use of behavioural science in public policy, and of the Behavioural Insights Team, more commonly known as the Nudge Unit. However, witnessing how the UK and other governments have responded to the pandemic, I can now appreciate the vulnerabilities of well-intentioned, democratic regimes, and the potential for behavioural science to be used inappropriately.

I was a co-founder and leading figure within the Nudge Unit. Since its inception, in 2010, the unit has been a success story for the Government. When I joined we were a team of seven within what was called the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. In 2014, we were able to “spin out” of government. We became an independent, profit-making social purpose company, a third owned by the Cabinet Office. We could sell our services to the whole of the UK public sector and any other government or organisation seeking to improve people’s lives.

Melanie Phillips: Stranded on the political zip-wire

BoJo isn’t why the Conservative party’s in trouble. He became PM because it already was - first published Dec 20.

Boris Johnson’s current multi-pronged political crisis is consuming Britain’s media. It’s not just that journalists detect an imminent prime ministerial fall from the dizzy heights (although Boris has escaped tight spots before now on the zip-wire of his career). It’s also because, with many journalists riven with jealousy or dislike of their former comrade-in-ink, they would like nothing better than to see him brought down.

However, Boris Johnson is not the real story. Despite the often foul-mouthed apoplexy of Conservative MPs who blame him for behaving exactly as anyone who knew him could have predicted he would behave (and many did indeed so predict from the start) Johnson is not the reason the Conservative party is in trouble. The reason it elected him party leader was because it was already in trouble.

Matt Ridley: The Government is still fighting the wrong war on Covid-19

Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action this time, punishing the poor South Africans for their molecular vigilance. But nothing was going to stop the delta going global, and the latest set of government measures to stop the spread of the new omicron variant are about as likely to succeed as the Maginot line was to stop General Guderian’s tanks.

The cat is already out of the bag. Just because we can take action does not make it the right thing to do.

This pandemic has mocked public-health experts. They told us to wash our hands and then realised it was spreading through the air. They told us masks were useless and then made them mandatory. They sent Covid cases to ordinary hospitals where they infected patients.

Charles Moore: The Cost of the West’s Unilateral Eco-disarmament

Cop26 is a problem for Boris Johnson. It is unlikely to reach consensus, and voters at home are wary of the implications of ‘net zero’

As it happens, I shall be 65 on the day the Cop26 meeting opens in Glasgow. So I am old enough to remember during my adult life the genesis of the Cop (Conference of the Parties) process which sees itself as the way to save the planet. The occasion also makes me reflect on what causes the public to wake up to any issue.

Melanie Phillips: Downing Street's green emperor has no clothes

Boris Johnson's government is in denial over the crisis it has created

In a hole, Boris Johnson is still digging — oblivious to the toxic rubble he’s piling up in the process.

Off to the US to persuade the Biden administration to stop dragging its feet over “climate change” targets at next month’s COP 26 climate summit, Britain’s prime minister played down the chances of world leaders agreeing to a $100 billion fund to help the developing world “go green”. Said Johnson:

It's going to be tough. But people need to understand that this is crucial for the world.

Ye gods! How can such an intelligent man be so bone-headedly…dumb?? It’s Boris Johnson who needs to understand that the policy he is promoting of Net Zero carbon emissions is leading his country and the world off the edge of an economic and social cliff.

Melanie Phillips: Challenging the falsehoods about white supremacism

One of the most striking features of today’s culture wars is that some victims of the cancel inquisition are nevertheless producing evidence which proves that their persecutors’ claims are the reverse of the truth.

Nigel Biggar, professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford university, has been venomously attacked for suggesting that the British empire was not all bad. Now, in a magisterial review for The Critic of Dan Hicks’s book Brutish Museums, Biggar has punctured the myth of “brutish” British colonialism by educating his readers in facts which are all the more startling for being almost never acknowledged in general debate.

Matt Ridley: Bio-Britain is Leading the World in the Science of Covid

The list of our achievements in biology is extraordinary for a country with just one per cent of the world's population. Here is my latest article, for The Telegraph:

Britain probably leads the world in self-criticism. So maybe we don’t always notice when the country leads the world in something a bit more useful. During the pandemic a lot has been done badly here – the modelling, testing and lockdown policies have been harmful, clumsy, and chaotic – but it’s worth reflecting on what we have done well, especially in science.

Rt Hon Sir John Redwood: Politically Correct Speaking

Wokeish is not my mother tongue, but I feel I can usually speak and write it fluently because it is all the opposition parties in the Commons speak all the time. It is prevalent on the BBC and mainstream media, so news is dominated by its tropes and preoccupations.

It is stifling much debate and creating a divide with the informal conversations of some parts of the social media and of life when permitted in many clubs, bars and homes. 

Matt Ridley: Six Reasons the New Lockdown is a Deadly Mistake

I was in favour of a national lockdown in the spring. I am not now, for six main reasons.

Covid is not a very dangerous disease for most people. The death rate is probably around 0.2 per cent of those infected, and most who die are elderly and suffering from other medical conditions. The mortality of those in hospital with Covid has almost halved for the over 80s since the start of the epidemic as treatment has improved.

Lockdowns are lethal. They cause more deaths from cancer, heart disease and suicide as well as job losses, bankruptcies, social disintegration and mental illness especially among the young, who are at least risk from the virus.

Melanie Phillips: Revolt against coerced conformity

At long last, some Conservative MPs are raising their standard for conservatism. The Times reports today that up to 40 Conservative MPs will refuse to accept the “unconscious bias training” intended to tackle racism in the Commons, accusing the parliamentary authorities of “pandering to the woke agenda”.

Such training has existed for parliamentary staff since 2016 and is now to be extended to MPs. Said one of the rebel group:

“I would really rather gouge my eyes out with a blunt stick than sit through that Marxist, snake oil crap.”

Melanie Phillips: Sanctimonious bullying, double standards and sheer absence of humanity

The public hysteria over Dominic Cummings, who held an unprecedented press conference today in the Downing Street garden to explain why he appeared to have broken the spirit if not the letter of the lockdown rules, is far more troubling than anything Boris Johnson’s controversial chief adviser may have done. 

By Cummings’s own account, several media claims about what he supposedly did in the 14 days at the end of March and in early April, claims which did so much to incite public feeling against him, were false. With his wife sick with what looked like Covid, leaving her almost unable to care for their child, with Cummings himself likely to go down with the virus and hounded within his London house by a hostile and threatening public, he drove his wife and son to a house on his parents’ farm in Durham to isolate there, with his sister and other family members leaving food on the doorstep.

Matt Ridley: Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed. Perhaps he should have been dropped for a more consequential misstep. 

Details of the model his team built to predict the epidemic are emerging and they are not pretty. In the respective words of four experienced modellers, the code is “deeply riddled” with bugs, “a fairly arbitrary Heath Robinson machine”, has “huge blocks of code – bad practice” and is “quite possibly the worst production code I have ever seen”.

Melanie Phillips: Why so many “experts” make such disastrous errors

If you want to discover why so many of our experts are getting things so terribly wrong, Giles Fraser’s interview on Unherd’s “Confessions” with the former Bank of England governor, Lord King, is essential listening.

King asks what it means to be rational in an age of deep uncertainty. Many experts, he says, have come to believe that mathematical calculations and computer modelling provide us with an authoritative representation of reality.

This is hopelessly wrong because such calculations can never encompass the uncertainties that help form human behaviour. Yet these experts have come to believe that everything can be thus quantified and explained. So anything that can’t be quantified is therefore useless; and anyone who challenges the quantification model is somehow suspect and is disregarded or even disrespected.

Matt Ridley: As research progresses, the nature of our enemy is becoming ever clearer

‘This pestilence was so powerful that it was transmitted to the healthy by contact with the sick” wrote Giovanni Boccaccio of the Black Death, in his preface to The Decameron. The trouble with the coronavirus is almost exactly the opposite – it is transmitted to the sick by contact with the healthy. The people most at risk of dying are those who already suffer from underlying illnesses. And evidence is accumulating that the virus is passed on very early in the progression of the disease, often when you are still without much in the way of symptoms.

The arrival of fast and reliable mass antibody testing, this coming week with luck, should be a game changer. It will enable those who have had the virus and recovered to be identified and licensed to resume normal life. How long their immunity lasts is unknown, but there is a good chance it will be many months at least.

Melanie Phillips: “I need to check your thinking” said the English police officer

At long last, an English court has struck a blow against the cultural tyranny of thought-crime and in support of freedom of speech, reason and sanity.

In the High Court, Mr Justice Julian Knowles ruled that the police had been disproportionate in the action they took against Harry Miller, a former police officer and a shareholder in a plant and machinery company in Lincolnshire, when they recorded as a “non crime hate incident” a series of disobliging comments he had tweeted about transgender issues.

It’s worth reading the judgment in full here, not just for the judge’s full-throated defence of freedom of expression, nor his often sardonic turns of phrase, but to understand the jaw-dropping and terrifying state of authoritarian imbecility to which our once-robust culture has descended.

Matt Ridley: Britain needs to rediscover failure if it wants to prosper

What was Brexit for? After finally taking Britain out of the European Union, the Prime Minister can now start to give us his answer — and the opportunity in front of him is pretty clear. He could speed up, perhaps double, the rate of economic growth by unleashing innovation. After leaving the slow steaming European convoy, Britain must not chug along but go full speed ahead. That means rediscovering trial and error, serendipity and swiftness — the mechanisms by which the market finds out what the consumer wants next.

The stifling of innovation by vested interests in the corridors of Brussels has held Britain back for too long — but it is not the only reason for our sluggish innovation capacity. We can also blame creaky infrastructure, neglect of the north, a glacial-speed planning system, the temptations of a speculative property market, low research and development spending, and a chronic inability to turn good ideas into big businesses.