The Right Finally Wakes Up

From the ECHR to Islamism, only now are conservatives accepting hard truths

Towering Columns

For The Times, Juliet Samuel says the ECHR sits at the top of a judicial culture that has badly lost its way.

In Britain’s case, the problem is not just Strasbourg. We tie ourselves in plenty of legal knots and leaving the ECHR won’t untie those automatically. But it’s all exacerbated by Blairite legislation that draws our courts directly into Strasbourg’s net. An entire generation of British officialdom and judges have been conditioned to act as its enablers. The Human Rights Act enshrines the principle that you can never go wrong if you extend newly invented rights, but limiting or even delineating their scope may be a breach of one’s legal duties. This case law, by the way, is not required to be consistent with itself or even to be clear about the legal principle it’s establishing.

The result is judges, especially in first-tier tribunals, making bizarre decisions to “protect” convention rights that may not even exist. For example, a lower tribunal found that a Kenyan national was estranged from his daughter but couldn’t be deported because of his relationship with her. Another found that a serial child rapist could stay, in part because an expert said he had post-traumatic stress disorder. Both rulings were overturned, but at the cost of God knows how much time and money.

Conversely, after a lower tribunal ruled that a Pakistani convict could be deported, the upper tribunal said he couldn’t because his children might face “stigma” in Pakistan for their mental health conditions. And for every case we know about, there are probably dozens that go under the radar and never get corrected. In short, it isn’t just about what the law says, or even just about what Strasbourg says. It’s about a judicial culture that has badly lost its way; in which, almost by design, all too many judges have only the foggiest understanding of the actual laws they’re interpreting but operate under the clear impression that their job is to keep pushing forwards the bounds of human rights law in a relentlessly “progressive” mould.

On his Substack, Neil O’Brien shines a light on the Government’s enabling approach towards Chinese espionage, including the collapse of the prosecution of two alleged spies.

When [the prosecution against two men accused of spying for China] was dropped on 15 September, Ministers said they were surprised, and said they had only become aware of this decision that day. But we now know this is not true, and there had been extensive discussion in government. Minister Dan Jarvis told the Commons and that this decision had been an “entirely independent” one.

But we now know this is not true, as Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public prosecutions (DPP), has now said he spent months in discussion with the government, trying to get them to release evidence. At least until recently Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been claiming that the CPS were unable to prosecute because of the failure of the last Conservative government to “designate” China as an enemy in some sense. But this idea of “designation” is a complete red herring. As various leading lawyers have pointed out, this is not how the law works. We don’t “designate” countries as enemies. In fact the only test in the official secrets act is your ability to convince a jury that the country in question was “an ongoing security threat”. The last government said repeatedly, in terms, that it regarded China as a “threat”. But even if it had not done so - which it did - the government could have presented evidence that China was a threat. Or they could have got the CPS to approach people who were Ministers in the last government to say China was a threat…

…The wider China strategy of the current government in turn raises wider questions – we now know about the extensive China connections of Jonathan Powell [Starmer’s national security adviser]. But there are also wider questions about the involvement of Treasury and Foreign Office ministers. It has been reported that the Treasury played a critical role in preventing the publication of the government’s China Audit. Despite all this, ministers are claiming they knew nothing of any of the government’s interactions with the CPS over months. This is implausible. In particular, there remain big unanswered questions about what the PM knew of this and when.

On his Substack, Sam Dumitriu makes the case for Britain following the Dutch approach towards reforming environmental planning barriers.

The requirement to produce environmental impact assessments (EIA) for major developments comes from an EU directive. However, there is no specific definition in the directive over how many homes count as ‘major’. When Britain was part of the EU, Brussels was often blamed for overregulation. In many cases, however, problems emerged from our government’s decision to ‘goldplate’. This is true of the EIA regulations. While we require a screening for any development of 150 homes or more, other EU nations take a substantially less burdensome approach.

Let’s take the Netherlands for example. Not a single of Brent’s ‘major’ developments would have been screened for an EIA under Dutch rules. While we draw the line at 150 homes, they set a much higher bar: 2,000 homes or 100 hectares. Some London developments would still be screened under Dutch rules – Hackney’s 5,500 home Woodberry Down Estate regeneration for example – but most wouldn’t.

In the case of Brent, the new homes in these big schemes were overwhelmingly on brownfield land in one of the best connected parts of Britain. If homes have to be built somewhere – and they do — then there’s scarcely a better place to build than on brownfield land in one of the best connected parts of the country. Yet at the moment redeveloping 1960s office blocks and derelict industrial land in the capital is made unnecessarily difficult by badly designed regulations. The Dutch take a more proportionate approach – for brownfield sites, we should copy them.

For UnHerd, Jacob Howland illustrates the pathology of anti-Israel hysteria.

The machine nevertheless promotes insane allegiances and feeds fantasies like those of “Queers for Palestine”, or of prime ministers whose pledges to recognise a Palestinian state assume that Israel can continue to live alongside an enemy dedicated to its annihilation. Most important, it targets the people of Israel for the same reason the Revolution attacked the Catholic Church in France: because they founded, along with the ancient Greeks, the ancien régime it seeks to overthrow — the Western civilisational order that emerged in the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The Jews’ survival for more than three millennia, to say nothing of their present flourishing in the Land of Israel, constitutes an intolerable rebuke to the revolutionary consciousness.

Taking its cue from the 1619 Project, the delegitimisation of Israel imputes to it the sin of systemic racism. By invoking the memory of white-ruled South Africa, the widespread accusation that Israel is an apartheid state adds the stench of fascism to its target. (Wikipedia, a reliable arm of the machine, provides 25,000 words on “Israeli apartheid”; 16,000 on “Racism in Israel”; and 10,000 on “Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany”.) Convincing people that the world’s only Jewish state is as genocidally racist as the Third Reich doesn’t just give comfort to antisemites. It helps make the case that the West, built on foundations rotten with chauvinism and hypocrisy, is well and truly irredeemable.

Ignored and suppressed for too long, however, reality always has the last laugh. Run mostly by intellectually lazy people, for whom radicalism is a fashion, not a cause worth dying for, the Israel delegitimisation machine may nevertheless hasten the collapse of the brittle civilisational order on which it rests, and which it so thoughtlessly despises. The French diplomat Talleyrand is said to have remarked to Napoleon, “One can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.” Have the mandarins who run the machine considered that they, too, need a place to sit, and maybe even think?

Also on UnHerd, Aris Roussinos says the collapse of both Labour and the Tories reflects the end of liberalism and its 1990s overreach.

If European philosophy, as A.N. Whitehead claimed, consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, British politics is now merely a series of hesitantly defiant ripostes and sassy fact checks to Reform. From late-life TikToker and Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s bizarre claims that Reform will import America’s culture of school shootings, to noted Labour intellectual and Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy’s hurriedly retracted assertion that the younger, and presumably time-warping Farage once “flirted with the Hitler Youth”, the waning forces of British Left-liberalism have retreated onto the comforting plane of fantasy, as their worldview crumbles into dust.

For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial centre. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalisation would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.

But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalisation was always just a superficial Americanisation, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialised nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”. It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterised the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centred on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.

Wonky Thinking

Damon L. Perry wrote Britain’s Defence Against Islamist Subversion: Eleven Recommendations, laying out a practical plan for a government response to Islamism. An edited version was published on Matt Goodwin’s Substack.

Yesterday’s car-ramming and knife attack in Manchester was the latest in a steady flow of Islamist-related terror attacks the country has suffered over the past two decades. The city is no stranger to Islamist violence. In 2017, 22 were killed and hundreds injured at the Manchester Arena by Salman Abedi. In 2003, “the first domestic casualty in the U.K.’s fight against Islamic terrorism”—Detective Constable Stephen Oake—was stabbed and killed in a house raid in the city by Kamel Bourgass. Islamism presents the greatest terrorist threat to Britain—responsible for the vast majority of terrorism-related deaths since 2003 and, appropriately, comprises 75% of MI5’s caseload.

Islamist terrorism — whether conducted by individuals or groups, using rudimentary or sophisticated weapons — is always both grievance-laden and ideologically driven. Whether it is attacks on Jews, aggravated by the belief that Israel is carrying out a genocide of Palestinians—a narrative pushed in the mainstream media and an increasingly activist academia—or attacks on ‘infidels’ whose political representatives are believed to be waging war on Muslims and Islam, the basic grievance is the obstruction to an Islamic world order and the pre-eminence of the Muslim umma. That grievance is framed ideologically by a fundamentally different worldview and set of aspirations in which Islam provides the solutions to the problems it ascribes to Western civilisation.

There is a bigger picture. The liberal democratic social and political order of Britain and the West is the ultimate target not just of Islamist terrorism, but also by a lattice of non-violent strategies. These different approaches to the revolutionary goal of replacing the Western system of nation states present a multi-pronged assault on our civilians, institutions, cultural traditions, collective memory and identity, and even our scientific method and relationship to knowledge. Revelation is privileged over reason. Collectively, these threats constitute Islamist subversion.

Sir William Shawcross rightly said that “Prevent is not doing enough to counter non-violent Islamist extremism”. But non-violent Islamist extremism is not just a conduit to violence, as I have argued elsewhere. It is fundamentally a matter of subversion.

Islamist subversion is an organised but decentralised programme of cultural propagation that transforms and weakens liberal democratic values and institutions — in education, politics, cultural propagation that transforms and law, media, prisons, charities, and within Muslim communities themselves. Its promoters are partly visible, partly covert, determined and resilient, disguising sources of funding, ideology and affiliation in a coordinated and highly networked fashion. The consequences of their success would be disastrous for the future of Britain.

To understand this, we require a radical reframing of the concept of subversion, away from a Cold War-era focus on state overthrow, and toward the cultural and political modes of infiltration and influence that characterise the Islamist challenge.

For too long, governments have treated the problems presented by Islamism as a series of disconnected issues — Islamists influencing school curricula, infiltrating politics and local government, expanding sharia tribunals, and exploiting charities and financial networks. The result is growing social and cultural segregation, driven by a form of supremacism that feeds on liberal progressivism, which no longer believes in England or Britain, or in its heritage, culture or future. It is the accumulative effect of these apparently disparate problems that allows Islamist activists and institutions to spread their influence.

The recommendations below form part of a new national approach that a new, likely Reform government could take, from taking back control of prisons and classrooms, to regulating charities and mosques, to building a new Department for Civil Resilience with the authority to lead. Consider this an opening salvo in a serious conversation about how we fight back…

The Foundation for American Innovation published Web of Dependencies: A History of American Tech Companies’ Complicity in China’s Techno-Authoritarian Agenda by Luke Hogg, Edward Cimerman and Elsa Johnson. The report exposes the degree of strategically critical US tech companies’ involvement in enabling Chinese surveillance, censorship and anti-American subversion.

The United States has formally recognized the challenge posed by China’s use of technology for authoritarian control, enacting policies to curb Beijing’s human rights abuses and to protect U.S. national security. Yet American technology companies with deep ties to the federal government, including some of the nation’s largest and most influential firms, have continued to operate in China in ways that conflict with U.S. strategic interests and values. This report examines the conduct of these companies—Apple, Amazon, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Qualcomm—in the People’s Republic of China and documents how their actions are misaligned with America’s national security strategy and human rights policy. Drawing on open-source information, this report is organized flowing down the tech stack: online edge platforms, operating systems, cloud hosting and data services, and hardware. The goal is to illuminate broad patterns of behavior and ongoing misalignments between corporate actions by entities that are deeply intertwined with the U.S. national policy.

The report finds that many leading U.S. tech companies, despite having received significant federal funding and working with the American national security apparatus, have contributed to China’s techno-authoritarian agenda. In particular, multiple firms have engaged in practices that directly conflict with U.S. policy goals. Several companies have complied with China’s censorship and surveillance demands, with some even helping develop tools or platforms that reinforce Beijing’s digital authoritarian regime. Other firms have transferred advanced technology and know-how to Chinese entities linked to the military or security services through research partnerships, investments, or the sharing of intellectual property, thereby aiding China’s development of critical emerging technologies. Still others remain entwined in supply chains tainted by forced labor and other human rights abuses, continuing to source products or components from entities implicated in coercive labor programs despite clear U.S. prohibitions and warnings. Taken together, these behaviors highlight a persistent misalignment between the actions of American tech firms and the broader strategic and moral objectives of the United States.

This misalignment is not merely a series of isolated corporate lapses, but a symptom of deeper structural problems. Commercial entanglement with China has introduced significant vulnerabilities for the U.S. and conflicts with America’s foreign policy. Because these companies have become so integrated into China’s market and industrial base, they face intense pressure to conform to Beijing’s dictates in order to maintain access. In the process, American firms risk becoming conduits for authoritarian influence and espionage. Deep integration of supply chains and technologies means that economic shocks in China, or coercive leverage by the CCP, can directly affect U.S. economic and national security. Moreover, operating under Chinese regulations has sometimes required concessions such as code inspections or encryption compromises that undermine Americans’ cybersecurity, creating potential backdoors and vulnerabilities that hostile actors can exploit. In short, years of unfettered engagement have built a web of dependencies that now complicates U.S. efforts to protect and promote its interests and values.

This report provides a factual foundation and highlights critical questions for stakeholders and policymakers. The intention of this report is to inform oversight and encourage a reexamination of the status quo. American policymakers and the public must grapple with how to realign corporate behavior with national imperatives in this new era of geopolitical competition. By bringing to light the extent of U.S. tech companies’ complicity in China’s techno-authoritarian agenda, the report aims to contribute to ongoing debates over how the United States can better secure its long-term technological leadership and uphold its values in the face of a rising authoritarian power. Ultimately, this study affirms a guiding principle: American technology and public resources should not subsidize or strengthen an authoritarian regime’s repressive capabilities.

Podcast of the Week

At Conservative Party Conference 2025, Onward hosted Fuel Britannia: Achieving UK Energy Abundance. Lord Houchen, Nick Timothy, Juliet Samuel and Rian Chad Whitton discuss in detail Britain’s ruinous mistakes in energy policy and urgent changes necessary to save the UK economy.

Quick Links

The IDF commenced moving its forces back to the agreed deployment lines under President Trump’s Gaza peace deal.

Lord Wolfson, the Shadow Attorney-General, published a 179-page report explaining in detail why and how Britain should leave the ECHR.

The Manchester synagogue killer pledged loyalty to Islamic State.

It was reported that he attended a synagogue where the imam called Jews “treacherous”.

The Taliban issues £40 fake “death threats” to asylum seekers to strengthen their case for entering the UK, it was revealed.

A man arrested for burning a Quran was cleared of charges.

A poll in Northern Ireland found significant increase in interest in Christianity among 18-24 year-olds.

The Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, claimed to have identified 30 judges with links to open borders charities.

A new poll showed younger voters feel on average more ashamed of Britain’s history (44%) than proud (32%).

The Church of England covered the interior of Canterbury Cathedral with graffiti to represent the voice of “marginalised communities.”

2.8 million over-55s say they would move or downsize if Stamp Duty were abolished.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the US granting permanent normal trade relations to China.