The Spectator

The Online Safety Act is plumbing new depths of stupidity

As anyone who has endured a pointless argument on the internet probably knows, there’s a decidedly useful rule for such situations. It’s called...

The result? Not a safer internet, but a smaller, duller, more paranoid one. A place where freedom shrinks, innovation flees, and everything begins to sound eerily and deadeningly pre-approved, like Russian poetry under Stalin. It is already noticeable that the OSA is not being used to shut down Pornhub or xHamster for adolescents, but to silence discussion – or even basic news – about those topics most awkward for the world’s worst government: Pakistani rape gangs, illegal immigration, protests about asylum hotels, and all that dreadful jazz that soundtracks Britain’s decline. What’s more, the OSA threatens to destroy Britain’s AI industry – one of the few areas where we might actually be exploiting our post-Brexit freedoms. […] For example, next year the OSA will allow Ofcom to require companies to hand over any information about their algorithms as well as internal documents, data and software source code as part of its ‘regulatory functions’. https://archive.ph/uZO58

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/26/elite-police-unit-to-monitor-online-critics-of-migrants/ An elite team of police officers is to monitor social media for anti-migrant sentiment amid fears of summer riots. Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest. […] Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “Two-tier Keir can’t police the streets, so he’s trying to police opinions instead. They’re setting up a central team to monitor what you post, what you share, what you think, because deep down they know the public don’t buy what they’re selling. “Labour have stopped pretending to fix Britain and started trying to mute it. This is a Prime Minister who’s happy to turn Britain into a surveillance state, but won’t deport foreign criminals, won’t patrol high streets, won’t fund frontline policing. “Labour are scared of the public, Labour don’t trust the public, Labour don’t even know the public.” https://archive.ph/lgkq1

the Guardian

Russia’s Aeroflot cancels flights after pro-Ukraine hackers claim cyber-attack

More than 50 flights axed and 10 delayed as Silent Crow hacking group apparently claims responsibility

The Russian airline Aeroflot was forced to cancel dozens of flights on Monday after a pro-Ukraine hacking group with a track record of claiming responsibility for hacking targets in Russia said it had carried out a cyber-attack. Aeroflot did not provide further details about the cause of the problem or how long it would take to resolve, but departure boards at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport turned red as flights were cancelled at a time when many Russians take their holidays.

The Spectator

Sadiq Khan will wear his Trump insult as a badge of honour

The Trump Golf Course at Turnberry in Scotland looks like a middle-ranking complex for assisted living. It is all plastic double glazing, unfashion...

As soon as the Prime Minister and his wife arrived, Mr Trump turned his attention to Mrs Starmer, over whom he practically slobbered. ‘She’s a respected person over all the United States’, the President said, in one of his trademark mad reveries. This conjured the image of the Prime Minister’s wife being afforded that same respect across the United States. All Hollywood is a-chatter with tales of Sir Keir’s Missus. New York cab drivers affix a miniature of Lady Starmer on the wing mirrors. Drifters across the great truck routes of Appalachia tell tales of her beneath the stars. On the remaining reservations of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota when they rise to beard the new dawn, they do so by saluting Victoria, the Lady Starmer. https://archive.ph/uxAWy

I weeded the drive half an hour or so ago, and foolishly didn’t bother to go back and get my big leather anti-nettle gloves rather than my normal gardening ones. I’m not sure what’s caused this to suddenly come up, but I’ve had a thorough scrub and an antihistamine….

TikTok cashes in as gangs post videos of dangerous crossings | Daily Mail Online

Traffickers launching migrants across the Channel on small boats were promoting the crossings on TikTok - and being paid by the tech giant.

Traffickers launching migrants across the Channel on small boats were promoting the crossings on TikTok – and being paid by the tech giant. […] Migrants subscribed to live video calls with the smuggler. One account had 3,550 followers and another 22,300, so traffickers could be earning thousands of pounds. The subscription service is a widely used feature for TikTok which makes clear on its website that after app store fees, ‘TikTok splits the revenue up to 50/50 with you’.The Mail on Sunday contacted two subscription service users who promoted a new life in Britain on their profile.

https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-online-safety-act-comes-into-force/ And already, there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out. One example came on 25 July, the day the [Online Safety] Act came into force, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age.” […] What appears to be emerging isn’t just a two-tier internet, but something subtler and more insidious: a default-off model of speech and expression, where access to lawful content is no longer presumed but withheld until certain hurdles are cleared. On platforms like X, the door is currently closed before users even approach it. Elsewhere, full access depends on navigating a system of checks and classifications. Either way, the longstanding assumption that legal speech should be visible by default is being quietly dismantled.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/22/police-take-pro-migrant-protesters-to-asylum-hotel/ Police have admitted escorting pro-migrant protesters to an asylum hotel at the centre of days of volatile demonstrations. Essex Police initially denied that it had brought activists from the group Stand up to Racism to the Bell Hotel amid claims by anti-migrant protesters that the arrival of counter-demonstrators sparked the violence on July 17. However, the force backtracked after being shown footage of the protesters being escorted by officers from a nearby station to the hotel. On Wednesday, Essex Police will hold a press conference, at which is expected to explain its policing of the demonstrations. https://archive.ph/cNt8o

After a rodent hiatus, when they seemed to have learnt that the traps were only dangerous at night, I decided to move them to a manhole cover in the duck-free part of the garden. I’ve been baiting them for a few days, and set them last night. Nothing first thing, but I’ve just gone to put the washing out and needed to empty both!

We are coming apart

How asylum, multiculturalism and contempt for the masses turned Britain into a tinder box.

Asylum, in particular, is becoming the defining issue of our globalised, hyper-mobile, increasingly war-torn times. And yet the way our careless establishment has handled it seems almost designed to generate social conflict. The most impoverished communities in the UK have been forced to shoulder the burden of the small-boats crisis, purely because the hotel rooms there are cheaper, all while concerns about crime, safety and integration are ignored. You don’t need to be a fire-breathing bigot to recognise that some of the young men willing to enter a nation illegally, and unvetted, languishing for years on handouts and black-market employment, might commit other crimes. Nor do you need a PhD in social cohesion to recognise that the arrival of people from more misogynistic, violent cultures, into a nation uninterested in integrating them, will breed fear, tension and very real risks for citizens.

Woohoo!

Nick Timothy

Help me to defeat Labour's rigged 'Islamophobia' consultation - Nick Timothy

Please see a message from Nick Timothy MP below: I am campaigning to stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws, and I need your help. Angry mobs ...

I am campaigning to stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws, and I need your help. […] And now Labour plan a new definition of “Islamophobia”, which will kill our free speech and embolden extremists. Even worse, their “Islamophobia” consultation is rigged. The Government has sent it to handpicked organisations to get the results it wants. Ministers even refuse to say who was invited to take part. So I have produced a suggested response to the consultation. If you agree with me that we need to fight back, please use my suggestions — or anything else you think — for the answers. It should take no more than three minutes.

Any idea what these are on my kale? Cabbage white eggs for scale.

The Spectator

We’ll all pay for Ed Miliband’s zonal pricing folly

Philosophers have debated the concept of ‘fairness’ for centuries. Intellectual heavyweights like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Aristotle have ...

Electricity isn’t like other markets. When the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy guaranteed high prices for butter and wine, we ended up with butter mountains and wine lakes. Wasteful? Yes. Absurd? Entirely. But an excess of these products didn’t cause any other problems. When you have too much electricity though you end up with Spanish-style blackouts. Put simply, our grid needs to balance. Put too much power in it and bad things happen. The lights go off. Expensive equipment blows up. So when supply is on course to outstrip demand, urgent intervention is needed. At the moment this means wind farms in Scotland that have been paid an artificially high price to produce electricity are then paid again – at the last minute – to switch off. This, to be clear, isn’t a hypothetical scenario. In 2024 billpayers handed companies such as SSE Renewables a collective £393 million in ‘constraint payments’ to stop their blades spinning. They then paid gas plants near where the demand actually was £1.23 billion to fire up at uncompetitive rates. National Grid warns these combined payouts could hit £8 billion a year by 2030. Off the coast of Angus, sits Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm Seagreen. Since it came fully online in 2023, almost two-thirds of its potential output has been dumped. https://archive.ph/IxV08

I know these staged photos always look a bit awkward, but this one is really bad:

You what, Aldi?

London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about

Twenty years on, we have still failed to reckon with the threat posed by homegrown Islamist extremism.

Both of these easy answers to the central question that haunts 7/7 suffer from the same problem. They look almost entirely over there for the answer as to why this gang visited death on the country in which its members were raised. They point either solely to their Islamic heritage, or they blame the Western wars in the Middle East and its near abroad for driving them to atrocity. But the problem of homegrown jihadists isn’t just over there, it’s here in the West, in Britain, too. These young second-generation Muslims growing up in a down-at-heel suburb in Leeds were shaped by their own situation, not that of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan – of which they knew very little. As Kenan Malik argues in From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) the root of their embrace of a militant form of Islam lay in a profound estrangement from and resentment towards mainstream society. A curdling sense of grievance. A sense that life in Britain was not offering them what they felt entitled to. A sense that mainstream society was alien to them.

Phew: quilt show all done, everything put back how it should be in the hall. Getting the stands back up into the attic was actually easier than getting them down, weirdly. My mum came over to see it (and ended up helping to move the lighter stuff, bless her), and she’s just headed for home after having dinner. Very flattering the number of people who wanted to know how one of my quilts was made: it was a bit experimental / technically interesting, which is why I put it in. Apparently the woman from the Big House in the village wants to buy it, not yet decided whether I’m willing to part with it or not. I might tell her it’ll be £500 or something daft and see if she still wants it…. My cakes were also very well received, especially the savoury one that I forgot to put the baking powder in: it was all gone before lunchtime on the first day.

The Telegraph

The shocking truth about slavery in the Islamic world today

Up to 17 million people have passed through the slave trade in the Muslim world since the 7th century. Tragically, the practice lives on

What is remarkable today is how one version of slavery and the slave trade continues to dominate Western public consciousness. To take just one example, A Short History of Slavery, by the historian James Walvin, was published in 2007. Of the book’s 235 pages, 201 focus on the Americas. By contrast, the history of slavery in the Islamic world – so long, various and controversial – has been neglected. That is starting to change: a new generation of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and (in particular) Turkish researchers are poring over the archives and asking uncomfortable questions. Among other things, their work will demonstrate that, although it has become fashionable in some quarters to vilify the West as the supreme historical villain, such a stance is historically and factually incorrect. https://archive.ph/31b2y