Who is Britain being run for?

Deference to Islamist extremism is now wired into the heart of the state

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says approving China’s new London super-embassy is a far too big a risk.

What seems likely is that the new embassy will allow the Chinese Communist Party to scale up its espionage and interference operations across Europe. As The Sunday Times revealed, China’s list of authorised diplomats, already among the longest in the UK, has grown 50 per cent since 2010, including a whole roster of education, policy and cultural officials no doubt helping to surveil and schmooze scientists, students, business contacts, activists and spies. And MI5 and others have explained repeatedly how Chinese intelligence banks upon its superior scale to extract the maximum commercial, military and diplomatic advantage from these operations.

Another favourite CCP hobby is showing it can harass and punish its critics wherever they are in the world. Again, this occurs at scale. Safeguard Defenders, a campaign group, found that Beijing has forced at least 12,000 people to return to China to face “justice” from 2014 to 2023, under the aegis of so-called “anti-corruption” operations. Consular officials in the relevant countries have been known to prepare the ground for these “persuasion” operations.

Perhaps they also help to manage the properties and recruitment of staff for Beijing’s foreign “police stations” or further its useful links to organised crime. In its annual assessment last year, after all, the National Crime Agency stated that “offenders linked to China currently pose the biggest non-British serious and organised crime threat to the UK”. Does that sound like a country you want building an iceberg basement within spitting distance of your critical internet cables?

For The Critic, Sebastian Milbank says the biggest divide in British politics is that of worldview and experience between generations.

If you grew up in the 60s-80s, and your career reached its peak sometime in the 90s to 00s, you experienced events and conditions that taught you that certain assumptions were true and historically inevitable. You witnessed the victory of civil rights battles on race, gender and sexuality, and formed your opinions about them at a time when they were vigorously contested by a powerful political right. You saw communism fall in your lifetime, and liberalism triumph. Throughout most of your working life you saw high levels of economic growth, technological progress and new industries and opportunities arise. Cultural and social change that was opposed by conservatives led, in your experience, to new artforms and exciting subcultures.

And, as an individual, for so many boomers and gen Xers, especially in the educated upper middle classes, you ascended a ladder that was about to be kicked violently away. People in older generations attended schools before the quality of teaching and discipline plummeted, and went to university whilst it was still free. They benefited from public services of the post-war era, then cashed in on the deregulations of the 80s and 90s. They got on the property ladder when it was still affordable, and just in time to see their housing equity explode in value.

And, crucially, you didn’t see the dark side of progressivism. When you were young, you experienced the civil rights fight as a positive experience, and at the time you were ascending the ladder, the ideal of a non-divisive, “comfortable” egalitarianism in which we would be sexually free, post-racial, post-class, and post-gender divides predominated. By the point that #MeToo and BLM arrived in anglophone offices, you had already reached the peak of your career. For liberal older white men, the idea that young white men are systematically disadvantaged for employment in much of the white collar world, especially some of the most elite institutions, simply existed outside of their experience. Younger colleagues were becoming “more diverse” and more politically militant, but this was just merit shining through from your cushioned perspective.

In The Spectator, David Shipley says London feels lawless as the types of crime most ordinary people are likely to experience are on the rise but under-reported.

The problem for Rowley is that the homicide rate is a poor indicator of how safe Londoners feel. While it is true that London’s homicide rate did fall last year, and that there are more murders in other cities around the world, thankfully almost no one is killed in the capital in the 21st century. There were 97 homicides last year, compared to 109 in 2024 and 153 in 2019. Of course, every such killing is a tragedy, but really they don’t happen anywhere near often enough for the typical Londoner or visitor to spend time worrying about whether they’ll be murdered in the city. What people worry far more about is crimes which they are likely to be victims of. There were 837,826 ‘victim based’ crimes recorded by the Metropolitan police in 2025. These crimes include robberies, phone snatching, sexual assaults and rapes. Such victim-based crimes have soared in London in recent years.

A decade ago, in 2015-16, there were 16,147 recorded sexual offences. Last year saw the Met receive reports of 27,694 such offences, and year-on-year reported rapes are up somewhere between 8 per cent and 12 per cent. Phone theft too is at endemic levels, with 117,211 stolen handsets reported to the Met last year. This morning Rowley was insistent that phone theft at least is falling, and I understand the official internal data supports this. The Met Commissioner also tried to encourage listeners to ignore reported crime in favour of ‘crime surveys’ which try to estimate the overall level of crime. Many politicians and senior police officers prefer these figures, perhaps because they have generally shown that crime is falling. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) has a number of weaknesses, not least that it tends to ‘oversample’ from low crime areas and ‘undersample’ from high crime areas. Even then, it has shown some crimes becoming dramatically more prevalent, with ‘selected knife offences’ up from 26,370 ten years ago to 53,047 in 2024-25.

The Met doesn’t police all of London. British Transport Police are responsible for mainline trains terminating in the capital, and for the underground network. Their last annual report described ‘an overall challenging environment of increasing crimes ranging from higher reports of anti-social behaviour to our highest ever number of homicides’. That report also states that sexual offences increased by 10 per cent compared to the previous year. Meanwhile the City of London Police, responsible for the Square Mile, reported an increase in thefts, violence, public disorder, criminal damage, sexual offences and robberies.

In The New Statesman, former Downing Street adviser John Bew says the world is now re-entering a “hemisphereist” approach towards foreign intervention.

[A] new paradigm is emerging for how the military power is deployed, in an age when defence technology companies like Palantir and Anduril are the darlings of the Department of War. It is one that places a premium on information and technological superiority – often associated with the use of special forces and set up in contradistinction to the idea of long campaigns and “forever wars” in godforsaken parts of the world. It is not an unpopular argument with the American population given the long tail of those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the costs paid in blood and treasure. So far the distinction is enough to keep the splits within the Maga movement under control, given the considerable distaste for any type of foreign interventionism that exists in the base.

Unconventional as it is, the commander in chief and the maker of deals inhabit the same strategic brain. Thus, the use of the military instrument is repeatedly used to buttress an unsentimental and hyperactive realpolitik. Witness the situation in post-Maduro Venezuela. Here the early signs are that Trump would rather cut a deal with the chastened remnants of the old regime than usher in some colour revolution in which the democratically-elected opposition takes the reins and the credit. To be clear, he is not solving for a queasy Western liberal audience who would be better able to stomach the political decapitation of Maduro if there followed the anointment of the highly palatable Maria Corina Machado, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As we have seen in the administration’s Middle East policy, being a person with whom one is able to do business, not trade in virtue, is the order of the day.

The second and most interesting aspect of what happened in Venezuela, is what it reveals about a new form of brutal mercantilist logic that underpins the administration’s broader approach. A major reason why the trajectory of Venezuela was deemed so unacceptable was that it saw one of the most oil-rich nations in the world – in addition to having vast reserves of gold, gas and iron ore – flaunting its assets to Chinese and Russian bidders in ways that cut across American commercial interests. This was understood in Washington and Florida as a direct affront to American dominance of international finance and commodities markets in its own backyard. The icing on the cake, and the casus belli, was Maduro’s tolerance of drug running and destabilisation of more pro-US neighbours in Guyana and Colombia, who also host vast US investments.

For UnHerd, Paul Sagar says the number of students being diagnosed with ADHD is exploding due to “looping effects”.

To understand the complexity of the issue, it is helpful to consider the work of the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, who spent much of his life trying to untangle this sort of thing. One of the most important lessons that Hacking taught us is that when it comes to medical diagnoses with behavioural aspects, humans are “moving targets”. This is because of what he termed “looping effects”: that when people receive a label, they respond to it by changing their behaviour accordingly. But because their behaviour has now changed, the label itself must evolve to capture the very thing purportedly being labelled. This then sets off new kinds of behaviour in those receiving the label — and thus the looping continues.

Hacking’s work on autism helps to illustrate the point. When autism was first established as a diagnostic criteria in the Forties, it applied only to the severely mentally impaired — typically those who were non-verbal and highly socially dysfunctional (they were unable to live without extensive support provided by parents and professional carers; many were institutionalised). Over time, however, the criteria were relaxed, in particular the (controversial) introduction of Asperger’s syndrome in the Eighties, which applied to “high functioning” autistic people especially: those who were not only fully verbal, and often living independently, but crucially were diagnosed as adults (previously autism was something identified almost exclusively during childhood, precisely because it was so severe).

Yet this expansion of autistic criteria and the birth of the idea that autism is a spectrum, rather than a single category of psychological impairment, inevitably set off looping effects. An Asperger’s diagnosis, for example, changed not only the way certain kinds of adults (i.e. those receiving the diagnosis) viewed themselves, but how they behaved. Rather than being shamed and shunned for being “weird” (the fate of earlier generations), they could now (justifiably) protest that they were simply different, as validated by science, and deserving of relevant accommodations. Indeed, many advocated for precisely this distinction, refusing to suppress their non-typical behaviours simply to accommodate “normal” people. (This is one important origin of the modern distinction between the “neurotypical” and the “neurodivergent”.) Such a development has quite clearly benefited, in real and important ways, many people, allowing them to access better resources in a world of reduced stigma. Yet, as the criteria was relaxed, more and more adults started to see themselves as possessing features enveloped within the ever-growing “autistic spectrum”. Ever-growing, because the spectrum diagnostics kept changing to incorporate and accommodate the growing range of correlated symptoms. Which led to more people meeting the criteria, and so on.

On his Substack, Andrew O’Brien says Britain has addressed inflationary pressures by subsidising consumers rather than raising production.

Outside of war, the usual approach in Britain (or much of Europe) was targeted financial support for those that need it to help afford the essentials (e.g. tax credits). However, since the financial crisis, we have started to drift towards a consumer subsidy model which is closer to developing countries in Latin America, like Venezuela, or Asian countries such as India or Iran. These are attempts to manipulate prices and household incomes for political ends. Just like in developing countries, our consumer subsidies not particularly well targeted and risk becoming hard to shift in the future (as we have seen from the fuel duty freeze). Directly subsidising the cost of something makes any price rises ‘political’ in the future. Already, too much of our economic attention is being taken up by how to maintain what we already have in place (e.g. fuel duty).

The real solution to the cost of living crisis is, as I have argued before, two-fold. Firstly, it is boosting domestic production (if we want cheaper food, provide support that grows more of it here, if we want cheaper energy, produce more of it) through long term investment. Secondly, we need to rebalance our trade (e.g. reduce imports, increase exports) so that inflation is not made artificially higher through the weakness of our currency. The billions spent on the measures in this Parliament alone could have been used to invest in these measures that would have long term benefits.

Mass consumer subsidies are attractive because they are a lever that can be pulled immediately and are perceived to provide ‘credit’ to politicians. The latter is particular dubious and has a very low opinion of the public. The Conservatives efforts to offer pre-election tax cuts (and introduce the energy price cap) did not boost their popularity in the last election. Moreover, I’d argue that giving people something temporarily that will create losers when you take it away is a recipe for political disaster. I am sure that is what Treasury officials advise when these measures are considered.

Wonky Thinking

Policy Exchange published A False Compromise by Sir John Jenkins and Andrew Gilligan. The report explains why a definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” is at least as bad as “Islamophobia” and should be resisted.

According to leaks, a government-appointed working group to devise an official definition of “Islamophobia” has proposed a draft which avoids the word “Islamophobia,” substituting instead the term “anti-Muslim hostility.”1 Members of the working group have sought to present this as a compromise which will “resolve” opponents’ concerns.

A definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” is, in fact, at least as broad and dangerous as one of “Islamophobia,” possibly more so. And because the term lacks (for now) the same negative political connotations, it is also more deployable by activist groups.

The dictionary definition of “hostility” includes “not liking” something, “not agreeing” with it or being “opposed” to it. It is perfectly accurate, for instance, to describe the National Secular Society as hostile to the growth of Muslim (and other religious) schools. No hatred is present here, merely opposition.

This note details multiple other examples where the term “hostility” has been used, including by members of the working group, to attack legitimate criticism or scrutiny of Muslims, Islam or religion.

We show that even as the police now propose to scrap “non-crime hate incidents,” an official definition of “anti-Muslim hostility” risks giving this enormously controversial practice a new lease of life – if only for “non-crimes” against Muslims.

We have also learned that the leak was incomplete. Not disclosed was that the proposed definition includes examples of speech which would not be deemed “hostile” to Muslims. These examples of permitted speech are narrow – for instance, they include theological criticism of Islam, but they do not include saying that disproportionate numbers of British Pakistanis are involved in group-based sexual offending (one key instance where speaking the truth has been attacked as “Islamophobic.”)

Also not disclosed, the definition states that public bodies and companies will be free to adopt their own definitions of “anti-Muslim hostility,” even broader than the one proposed – effectively carte blanche. We show how the term “hostility” has been used to further the second goal of many of those involved in campaigning for a definition – to bring about political change by the back door, including weakening counter-terrorism and immigration laws.

We raise concerns that one of those who devised this expansive definition has already been given a government-funded role which, in effect, makes her into an arbiter of what constitutes “anti-Muslim hostility.”

We argue that giving Muslims special protections not available to others will be disastrous for them, and for everyone else. It will fuel, not diminish, hostility towards Muslims. It will empower divisive extremes – both in Muslim communities, by creating new opportunities for challenge, grievance and attack in every institution and workplace; and on the nativist right. It will increase, not reduce, social tensions.

In The Spectator, Lord Nash lays out the conservative case for an under-16 social media ban.

Before discussing a ban, it is worth keeping in mind what our children are being exposed to on their social media feeds every day. One study found that 70 per cent of children had seen real-life violent content online, with only 6 per cent seeking it out.

Algorithms which are designed to reward attention constantly push videos of stabbings and beatings into young people’s feeds. What kind of effect is this content having on them?

When you speak to police officers, battling hard to keep the public safe, it is clear that there is a clear link between social media use and criminality for young people. Drugs are glamourised, leading to early experimentation. Gangs use social media to recruit children as young as seven and control their movements. Social media sites are the backbone of the county lines networks which force children to sell drugs.

They are also having a radicalising effect. That’s why the heads of MI5, Counter Terror Policing and the National Crime Agency took the unprecedented step of issuing a joint warning about online safety to parents last summer, and likely why young people are being arrested for terrorism offences among the highest on record. We picture radicalisation happening in backstreet corners of formerly industrial towns. We imagine shadowy but charismatic figures recruiting vulnerable young men in person. No longer – young people are being groomed in their bedrooms, on their phones and tablets, while their parents sit downstairs completely unaware.

And then there is the exploitation we do not talk enough about. Predators don’t just lurk in the shadows; they operate openly on platforms grooming vulnerable children in plain sight, with ‘com groups’ blackmailing teenagers into sharing explicit images or harming themselves.

On mental health, the statistics could not be clearer. There has been a 15-fold rise in eating disorders amongst 17 to 19-year-olds in recent years.

Beyond the human tragedy, this terrifies me economically. What hope do we have of turning this country round if we have an entire generation warped by social media? A generation too anxious to form relationships – too unwell to work or too distracted to achieve. Our public services are already buckling because they are fighting a mental health epidemic – all while social media inflames the crisis.

And yet I hear the understandable lament of The Spectator reader: this is just basic parenting – parents should just refuse to let their children use social media. But that effectively means making your child a social pariah when everyone else in their class is already online. There is a reason 86 per cent of parents want this ban. They’re not asking the state to replace them, they’re asking for intervention to break the network effects of social media.

Others worry that a social media ban for under-16s will be used by governments to stifle free speech. But this is nonsense. We don’t let a 12-year-old get behind the wheel of a car and drive up the M1, or let a ten-year-old buy a couple of pints at their local. The state, for very good reason, bars children from doing certain things while their brains develop and they acquire the knowledge and experience to navigate them wisely.

Conservatives believe in law and order, in strong families, and in a state that knows when to act and when to get out of the way. We trusted parents with academies, and we were right to do so. We should trust them now when they are crying out for a line in the sand. This is the moment to act, not out of moral panic, but to give children their childhood back.

Podcasts of the Week

Nick Timothy and William Clouston appeared on the SDP podcast discussing Britain’s need for a new economic model.

Greg Jackson, founder and CEO of Octopus Energy, appeared at The Spectator’s energy summit explaining the flaws in Britain’s system of pricing and taxing energy.

Quick Links

Nick Timothy, our founder, was made Shadow Justice Secretary.

The chief of the West Midlands Police has been “allowed to retire” instead of being sacked over the Maccabi Tel Aviv football ban.

The police used unregulated AI when taking their decision to ban Israeli away fans - but denied this several times, it was revealed…

…and the Home Secretary was informed about the likely ban eight days in advance.

Pro-Palestine activists plotted to “spy” on Israeli football players, it was revealed.

The West Midlands police and crime commissioner (PCC) has been accused of offering to give the controversial Green Lane Mosque a “blank cheque” for public grants.

The UK was ranked third globally for FDI projects between 2022 and 2025.

The Government rejected calls from the automotive industry for Chinese-manufactured EVs to be eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

Data from the US showed radical expansion of housebuilding caused rents to plummet.

The birthrate plunged to just 1.4 children per woman.