No Debate

Is the murder of Charlie Kirk the end of peaceful discourse in America?

Towering Columns

For UnHerd, Sohrab Ahmari warns against the loss of faith in nonviolent disagreement the murder of Charlie Kirk heralds.

Ben Burgis, a prominent socialist writer, recalled his debate with Kirk as one of the best he’d done in recent years, not least owing to that same earnestness and courtesy, and notwithstanding profound ideological differences. Many a university president these days extols “civil conversations” across partisan barriers while narrowly circumscribing the range of acceptable views on campus. But Kirk meant it, and lived it. More recently, Kirk and I developed sharper disagreements. The substance doesn’t matter — but what I can say is that we left our final text-message exchange agreeing to disagree and with him inviting me to air out our differences on one of his shows.

It wasn’t to be. Kirk, as even his progressive critics have pointed out, was killed while practicing what he preached: fearless, robust debate, carried out “in real life,” rather than behind the veil of an online avatar. Unfortunately for those of us who write, debate, and speechify for a living, his assassination will likely mean greater securitisation and militarisation of public spaces and events (as if we didn’t have enough of that already).

But the far more appalling possibility is a loss of faith in nonviolent contestation — conversation, debate, even politics — as a means for stabilising 21st-century democracies and ameliorating today’s sharp polarisation. Western societies today are full of lonely, addicted, angry people reeling from the “blessings” of neoliberal globalisation. I’m not sure what becomes of such societies if we can’t talk things out. Kirk, though, found confidence elsewhere, frequently quoting the Psalmist: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

For The Times, Juliet Samuel says the ECHR was never intended as a tool to protect criminals or enable illegal migration.

Through a series of judgments, two articles of the original convention were used to lever open the doors of Europe to anyone who wished to come. Article 3 bans states from using torture. But since 1995, this has mutated into a ban on deporting people, even if they pose a threat to national security, to a country where they may be at risk of inhuman treatment, or even where they may not receive sufficiently good healthcare. Indeed, anyone looking for factors behind the astonishing influx of Syrians and Africans into Europe in 2015-16 could do worse than to look at a 2012 Strasbourg judgment against Italy. The ruling in effect made it illegal for a country to deny entry to any person if the group he was travelling in might contain one genuine refugee who might be at risk of inhuman treatment in a country he could be deported to, or in subsequent countries he might be deported to from there.

Add to that a similarly wild ride for Article 8, the modest and reasonable “right to respect for private and family life” mentioned by [Shabana] Mahmood, which was never intended to have any implications for immigration law. It has been transformed into an open-ended guarantee that, once you’ve gained entry to a European state, even on fraudulent grounds, almost no power on earth can make you leave. The quicker you can find a wife or produce a baby, the harder it gets for the government to deport you, no matter what you’ve done or how cynically you’ve played the system. Even more extraordinarily, British courts have overturned government attempts to bar entry for young foreign brides even if they may have been forced into the marriage.

To look at the whole journey from the original ECHR to the modern judicial bear trap, in which modern governments are explicitly barred from considering the rights and interests of their own citizens above those of anyone in the world who wishes to settle in their territory, is to observe a legal class drunk on the most extreme power and ideology. And their most potent spokesman in the UK is the man Keir Starmer has chosen as his chief legal officer.

For The Telegraph, Allister Heath says Israel is held to an unfair and unrealistic moral standard.

There is no empathy, no contextualisation, no historical knowledge, no interest in all the times Israel sought to agree a land-for-peace swap but was rejected. Israel must be perfect, more moral than anybody else, or else it will be demonised, vilified and sanctioned. The West projects upon Israel all of its own demons, every pathology of its own history, every one of its nihilistic ideologies. Our Western-centric, secular intelligentsia refuses to accept that Palestinian elites are rejectionists. They don’t want a two-state solution: they want control, from the river to the sea, with the Jews ethnically cleansed.

The West has forgotten just how destructive wars of national survival, such as the Second World War, inevitably are. We have even memory-holed recent urban conflicts like Fallujah, and view the war in Gaza through inane, semi-pacifist lenses. Hamas pioneered a new form of warfare, squandering billions in aid to build a network of tunnels under homes, hospitals and mosques. This will be studied by military historians for centuries; Israel has so far only destroyed 35-40 per cent of all these tunnels. Gaza’s population is used as human shields, in the hope that as many as possible are killed to score propaganda points, while the terrorists hide in tunnels. It’s an obscenity, and the West falls for it…

…The Left, which used to see Israel as a case study in decolonisation and anti-imperialism, a beautiful story of the return of a dispossessed people to its indigenous homeland, has switched sides. It now falsely categorises Israel as a “settler-state”, like the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, countries that it deems to be axiomatically racist and guilty of “white supremacy” and “genocide”.

For The Critic, SDP leader William Clouston says Britain’s energy costs are the result of net zero policy.

We’ve found that, as of 2025, Britain’s productivity is 10.8 per cent lower than what it would have been had real energy prices remained constant since 2004. The output lost to this post-2004 productivity drag from energy price growth is an astonishing £3,060bn pounds. That’s roughly the size of a full year of GDP, or our total national debt. We’ve also shown that most of the post-2004 hikes in energy prices aren’t due to rising wholesale costs. The myth of “expensive gas” is just that — it’s played virtually no role in general energy price growth, aside from a few years of global supply shocks. Instead, 77.6 per cent of the growth in net energy prices since 2004 has been due to non-wholesale costs: mainly policy and network costs.

What caused this? To understand this, we must go way back to the 1989 Electricity Act. Along with privatising the energy system, it removed any centralised planning and forecasting body. It was this abandonment of planning that doomed us. Politicians allowed themselves to become indifferent to the realities of supplying reliable power, believing the market would sort it out. One consequence of this can be seen in our growing dependence on energy imports — a strategically catastrophic move. But an even worse consequence of this indifference can be seen through a distortion our political leaders created in the early 2000s: a drive to introduce renewable energy sources like wind and solar into our grid.

Politicians showered the industry with a series of carrots and sticks to introduce intermittent renewables at scale. At the same time, they refused to answer the most basic question — what happens when the sun isn’t shining, or the wind isn’t blowing? They consistently handwaved this fundamental problem away. They deluded themselves into thinking the market could solve this conundrum. The market did eventually find a solution, with a lot of help from Ofgem, Whitehall, and the global green lobby. Unfortunately for all of us, the market’s solution was to cook the books. Wind and solar are nominally cheap wholesale sources today, but to account for their intermittent nature the government and energy industry have had to create elaborate mechanisms to suppress energy demand. The post-2004 hikes in non-wholesale energy prices are a perverse, barely planned system of energy rationing that exists almost exclusively to reduce energy consumption and prevent grid failure.'…

In Compact, David Cowan says corporate chip manufacturers must be made to serve the US national interest.

Today, the priority must be the enhancement and enforcement of semiconductor supply chain security. To start with, Trump should reverse course and ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China. Beijing is currently restricting the export of rare earth elements, and Washington would be wise to respond in kind. The White House’s AI Action Plan clearly states, “the United States must also prevent our adversaries from using our innovations to their own ends in ways that undermine our national security.” We need to cut off China’s supply of advanced chips.

More can also be done to continue the reshoring and friendshoring of semiconductor supply chains and insulate the American economy from any potential global disruptions, such as a blockade of Taiwan. This should mean extending export controls to cloud services remotely accessed by China in countries like Singapore and overhauling the Bureau of Industry and Security’s enforcement arm. There is legislation in Congress that should be backed by the Trump administration, such as the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act, establishing a whistleblower incentive program for chip smuggling, the Chip Security Act, requiring export-controlled chips to have a location verification mechanism, and the GAIN AI Act to force chipmakers to prioritize domestic customers ahead of foreign orders.

If Nvidia continues to sell advanced chips to China, put pressure on officials, and evade export restrictions, then the Trump administration should take full legal and political action, just as Roosevelt did with the robber barons. Doing so would powerfully assert the primacy of the national interest over corporate interests. If the federal government retreats and does not confront Nvidia, it puts America’s AI ambitions at risk, weakens the position of the US tech sector, and could give China the vital breathing space it needs to race ahead of the United States.

At ConservativeHome, Maurice Cousins says environmentalism and climate activism are not the same.

Properly understood, environmentalism is about stewardship. It is about conserving landscapes, protecting wildlife, honouring inheritance, and maintaining the bonds between past, present, and future. By contrast, climate activism is about turning emissions into a proxy for capitalism. As realists, conservatives must resist this conflation – or else we risk signing up to a very different project: one that hollows out our economy, undermines our democracy and liberties, and weakens us in a new era of great power competition.

Let me explain why.

First, as the Jobs Foundation has shown, Britain cannot run a modern industrial economy on weather-dependent energy. Wind and solar are intermittent, storage is costly and inadequate, and the subsidies designed to prop them up have helped make Britain’s industrial power prices among the highest in the developed world. Manufacturers here now pay more than double the costs faced by their European rivals and up to four times those in the US or China. Energy-intensive sectors such as steel, chemicals, aluminium and fertilisers are shrinking or closing as a result. A serious conservative energy policy must rely on a pragmatic mix – domestic hydrocarbons, nuclear, and market-driven innovation – not the illusion that prosperity can be built on the weather.

Second, climate policy should not be insulated from democratic scrutiny or market forces. One contributor argues that Parliament should do more to scrutinise delivery, but also that Ministers should be bound by the courts and the Climate Change Committee to “meet their own legislation or else overturn it.” That may sound like accountability, but in truth it is a constitutional sleight of hand. Statutory climate targets – the framework that makes judicial overreach possible – should be repealed for precisely this reason. At the same time, the Contracts for Difference regime is held up as a policy success. In reality, it is a Liberal Democrat invention that fixes prices and locks in subsidies for renewable developers at the expense of consumers. This same CfD regime is being weaponised by Miliband today to push up energy bills. None of this is conservatism. It is continuity Blairism. Conservatives must always insist that policy is accountable to Parliament, and that technologies prove themselves in the marketplace, not behind a wall of subsidies.

Wonky Thinking

The Council on Geostrategy published a report, Towards a New Climate Aid Strategy, by Jack Richardson, calling for a new approach to International Climate Finance (ICF).

It is worth stating at the start of this Report that climate aid, if resources allow, is worthwhile. Given the fiscal pressure which the United Kingdom (UK) is under, however, some policymakers may ask why His Majesty’s (HM) Government should spend any money on International Climate Finance (ICF) in the first place, notwithstanding commitments made at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Arguments relating to ‘soft power’ are often provided, but overrated. Core national interest is the primary reason, but the logic should be kept precise in order to be valuable.

The Strategic Defence Review of June 2025 was correct in stating that climate change and environmental degradation will ‘create new geographic realities’. 1 Due to the insufficient progress of climate diplomacy under the UNFCCC, it is best to assume a global temperature increase of 2° Celsius (°C) or more. There is a weight of evidence suggesting greater environmental pressures are occurring now, that they will increase with further temperature rises, and that they will have a larger detrimental impact on countries with low resilience and state capacity to deal with those pressures. 2 This could, for instance, increase the risk of exacerbating both internal and international migration. 3

It will always be true that there are other opportunities for tax cuts or increased spending which miss out as long as the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget exists. The fact remains, however, that Britain is an island nation dependent on supply chains stretching across the world, including to regions and countries which will likely be heavily affected by climate change, and with insufficient resources to prepare for it.

The UK is not invulnerable to climate change, including from its effects overseas. If the fiscal situation allows, investment in resilience and adaptation to, and the mitigation of, climate change is warranted to attenuate the second order effects of climate change on Britain’s economy and citizens.

Aside from mitigating climate change and dealing with its consequences, UK ICF could also be used to promote Britain’s wider interests. As aid, it could be made conditional upon cooperation on other priorities, such as security and immigration, for example. As a tool for economic development, it could be deployed to check the growing influence of strategic competitors in the politics and economies of strategically important developing states.

The Social Democratic Party published Energy Abundance: A green paper on energy, laying out a plan for a new approach to UK energy policy.

Britain is experiencing a multi-decade energy crisis, which began at the latest in 2005. This energy crisis has seen net electricity supplied continuously decrease year-on-year, which has caused real prices to rise by over 250% over the past two decades.

The true costs of this energy crisis arise through the suppression of economic activity and the reduction of productivity. We estimate that energy price growth has reduced British productivity by 10.8% over the past two decades. This has reduced economic output by a total of £3,070bn, or £146bn on an annualised basis.

We argue that the origins of the energy crisis lie in the abandonment of a planned state energy system in the early 1990s. This caused energy decision-making to be decoupled from the national economic considerations with which it is necessarily entwined.

Without a planning and coordination authority, there has been no body able to veto a catastrophic experiment that began in the 2000s: the shift en masse to intermittent renewable generation. To enable this new generation capacity, the state and energy sector converged towards a strategy of suppressing energy demand through a system of price rationing. Primarily through a system of policy and network costs, energy prices have thus risen to bring demand down to match the realities of supply that is backed by intermittent renewables.

To resolve this, we propose an emergency ten-year plan to fix Britain’s generation mix and dismantle the energy rationing system. To do this, we shall create a new vertically integrated state-owned energy monopoly named “Central Energy.”

1. For the first part of the ten-year plan, Central Energy will construct 40GW of new natural gas generation and 20GW of coal generation at a capital cost of £60bn. The government shall finance this by repealing the Climate Change Act of 2008 and redirecting funds currently earmarked for “net zero” investments.

2. For the second part of the ten-year plan, Central Energy will construct 40GW of new nuclear generation at a cost range of £100-140bn. The government shall finance this by issuing a tranche of 30-year bonds.

Following the ten-year plan, Central Energy will assume a key position in British economic life. It will issue annual five-year demand forecasts and capital plans for new generation capacity, working in close concert with the Bank of England and the Treasury.

Critical to this new system will be a permanent energy price identity: Central Energy will be obligated to guarantee that 10p will always entitle a bearer to 1kWh of grid electricity. We dub this permanent nominal price fix the energy credit system, since the value of the pound sterling would be tied to the provision of energy. The energy credit system will encourage growth in energy efficiency, guarantee continued reductions in real energy prices, and make it politically impossible to neglect long-term energy abundance ever again.

Podcast of the Week

On Triggernometry, historian Tom Holland discusses Christianity’s legacy in the West and argues that Islam is uniquely unable to escape textual literalism.

Quick Links

President Trump said the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.

The Oxford Union condemned social media posts by its incoming president appearing to celebrate Kirk’s death.

The economy showed zero growth in July.

Ineos Energy pulled out of the UK, calling it “one of the most unstable fiscal regimes in the world.”

The chief economist of Panmure Liberum said investors do not accept the political rhetoric that there is no trade-off between net zero and growth.

Transport for London has the power to require 40% minimum service requirements during strikes, but the Government gave instructions not to use them.

US drug manufacturer Merck scrapped a planned £1 billion drug research centre in London, saying the UK is “not internationally competitive”.

Documents showed software made by Landasoft, the US tech company, had been used in China’s mass surveillance programmes.

Undersea cables in the Red Sea were cut, disrupting internet access in the Middle East and Asia.

A randomised control study found smart phone bans help school student performance.