“O wicked child,” cried the witch, “what is this I hear! I thought I had hidden thee from all the world, and thou hast betrayed me!” In her anger she seized Rapunzel by her beautiful hair, struck her several times with her left hand, and then grasping a pair of shears in her right — snip, snap — the beautiful locks lay on the ground. And she was so hard-hearted that she took Rapunzel and put her in a waste and desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery.

In the story of Rapunzel, a girl is locked away by a controlling witch to punish the girl’s parents who stole salad leaves from the garden. Her hair — her glory, her agency, the rope by which love and the world might reach her — becomes the very thing the witch destroys to punish her. Shorn and exiled, Rapunzel is left in the wilderness, stripped of beauty and dignity in one violent stroke.

Why am I recounting a fairy tale?

This week, Armenian customs officers, working a checkpoint at Agarak, found something stuffed inside pillows in a truck arriving from Iran: 143 bundles of human hair, weighing 26 kilograms. It wasn’t an isolated find. Since January, there have been eleven separate smuggling attempts, totalling over 135 kilograms of human hair crossing that border alone.

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Where has this hair come from? Two explanations are circulating. The first is poverty: that impoverished Iranian women are selling their hair simply to get by. The second is darker. Some believe the hair may belong to women killed during January’s protests — protests the regime crushed, and whose dead it has a long record of refusing to return to their families.

We may never know for certain, thanks to a regime built on enforced disappearances and secret execution. The silence in Iran is so total that piles of woman’s ponytails can vanish across a border without anyone being able to say, with confidence, whether their owners are alive.

And there is a third possible explanation: it may be propaganda.

But if it is true, it is as dark as the Brothers Grimm. It is also grotesquely ironic.

In Iran, a woman’s hair must be hidden, by law, while she is alive. It is deemed so dangerous, so morally corrosive, so threatening to the social order, that women have been arrested, flogged, and even sectioned in psychiatric institutions for letting it show. Yet that same hair, once severed from a head that can no longer object, can apparently be smuggled across a border and sold to be worn, openly, by women in other countries who have never given it a second thought.

Hidden while alive, but trafficked once dead, or once destitute enough to sell the only thing left. Either way, the hair only becomes visible, a commodity no less, once the woman it belonged to has been erased from the equation entirely.

The Iranian regime is as tyrannical and monstrous as the witch in the fairy tale. Women have been arrested, flogged, deemed insane and incarcerated for revealing their hair. Iran’s constitution is built on Sharia, and the mandatory hijab is justified as both a religious and a legal duty. Opposition to the hijab law becomes, by definition, opposition to Islam itself. The judges and morality police can tell themselves they are not cruel dictators but servants of God.

Rapunzel’s fate is grim — a cautionary tale to warn against the insatiable desire of the lovers as much as the parent’s craving for salad. But it is also a story of the danger of strict controls. The witch locked Rapunzel away and cut off her hair as punishment. Iran’s regime locks women’s hair away by law — and may be cutting it from women it has already destroyed.

When Rapunzel expressed her desire and agency she was shorn and cast out into the wilderness, but she ultimately survived. The fear is that those women in Iran did not.

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The government has launched a consultation today on giving cohabiting couples automatic inheritance rights and financial protections on separation. Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy says it will “strike an important balance between tradition and modernity.”

It will do no such thing. It will strike marriage.

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If two people want legal protections, the options are not particularly obscure and they do not have to be expensive as he disingenuously made the case today on BBC Breakfast News. Marriage has been available in this country for centuries. Civil partnership has existed since 2004. You can take the vow, sign the document, and enjoy every protection the law can offer, and have change from £200.

People who choose to cohabit are exercising a choice not to have the same legal protections as marriage or civil partnership. Reducing the difference in outcomes is to remove some of the meaning of marriage as well to reduce the choice.

I say this as someone who has lived through divorce and knows its consequences at first hand. I am not starry-eyed about marriage. It is hard and it can fail. But the commitment itself — the deliberate, public, legal decision to bind your life to another’s — matters. It creates a different quality of intention.

And the evidence consistently shows that children do better with married partners. Studies repeatedly find that children of married parents outperform those of cohabiting parents on educational attainment, mental health, and economic outcomes. Marriage is a proven structure for raising children.

Paradoxically, this reform may create more instability for families, not less — by removing the incentive to make the harder, more deliberate commitment in the first place.

Would protections for unmarried couples risk any abuse of the system? Surely a three-year cohabitation threshold with asset entitlements is a gift to those who would exploit it. Does it risk possibility of cohabitations designed specifically to establish financial claims, or even residency claims? The most vulnerable person in many of these scenarios, paradoxically, is not protected by this reform. She, or he, is endangered by it. What happens to the woman whose partner moves in, waits three years, and then leverages newly acquired legal rights against her?

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The “banality of evil” is probably Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase.

In 1961, she sat in a Jerusalem courtroom and watched Adolf Eichmann — the Nazi bureaucrat who had overseen the logistics of the Holocaust — answer for his crimes. She had expected a monster, but what she found was a small, self-important, thoroughly ordinary man. He spoke in clichés. He was, she wrote, almost boring.

Arendt didn’t say Eichmann was not evil — he plainly was. What she said was that the evil he represented was thoughtless. He didn’t look at the human beings in front of him and calculate that their suffering didn’t matter. He simply never looked at them as human beings at all. He had a category — Jews, enemies of the Reich — and the category did all the thinking for him. The individual disappeared and the person ceased to exist.

Once that disappearing act is complete, almost anything becomes possible. This is what she called the banality of evil. She warned it was spreading like fungus. And perhaps she was right.

On December 3rd 2025, Henry Nowak was stabbed. He was just eighteen years old, a first-year student, walking home from a night out with friends. He had been at the Hobbit Pub. This young man had his whole life ahead of him. His father would later describe him as his “beautiful son”.

At some point on that walk home, Henry crossed paths with Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old man carrying a kirpan — a Sikh ceremonial knife with a 21cm blade. During a confrontation, Digwa stabbed Henry five times. One wound went into his chest and Henry’s lung began to fill with blood. Henry ran and was found lying face down on a gravel driveway when police arrived. A bystander pointed out he was bleeding.

What followed is now on camera. The bodycam footage was released by Hampshire Police after Digwa’s murder conviction at Southampton Crown Court, and you should watch it if you can bear to.

Henry told officers several times: “I have been stabbed” and “I can’t breathe.”

An officer’s response to a dying teenager is now one of those phrases that will stay with you: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Based on Digwa’s false allegation that Henry had racially abused and assaulted him, the officers treated the injured teenager as the suspect rather than the victim. Henry was read his rights, handcuffed and drowned in his own blood.

The judge in the murder case noted that “Henry Nowak dying alone, humiliated and handcuffed was a direct consequence of Vickrum Digwa’s dishonesty.”

That is certainly true. Digwa murdered and lied. He fabricated a story of racial abuse to officers who believed him and Henry Nowak died for it. Digwa has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum of 21 years. Justice has been served.

But the question remains: why did the officers believe him? And why didn’t they believe Henry?

Henry told them repeatedly he had been stabbed and could not breathe. The officers’ response required active disbelief. And that followed as a consequence of actively choosing to believe Digwa.

I want to be careful here, because I mean this carefully.

I don’t think those officers were bad people. I genuinely don’t. I feel sorry for them. Although I feel a great deal sorrier for Henry and his family. What I think — and what I find more disturbing — is that they are probably thoroughly ordinary people, caught inside a system that has trained them to process certain information before other information.

Put it this way. They arrived at a scene. One man was standing. He was claiming racial abuse. He was visibly from an ethnic minority. One man was lying on the ground. He was white.

Did the categories do the thinking for the officers?

It appears that Henry Nowak, bleeding on a gravel driveway, was not — in that moment — seen as an individual. People who have outsourced their moral judgement to an institution are the people Arendt was talking about.

While Arendt saw this as a political philosopher, CS Lewis identified something similar, as a theologian — the ‘Devil’s Strategy’. He warned that the devil rarely tempts you into evil directly, rather he relies on your intense dislike of one error to pull you into the opposite one. In this case, we might deduce that a fear of racism became an overcorrection that obscured individual accountability. And a commitment to protecting minorities cost a young man his life.

While Arendt drew on the incomparable horror of the Holocaust and Lewis was writing about Christian ethics, the observations are universal. When virtue is unmoored from a belief in the dignity of the human individual, it becomes its own kind of danger. Errors and tragedies will continue while human beings — complex, morally distinct, each carrying their own story and their own dignity — are sorted into categories and assigned a hierarchy of importance and credibility. Identity politics creates this trap at a civilisational scale.

The less important groups are the people Arendt termed the “superfluous people”. Once you have decided that some people’s lives are less important, or less believable, than others, you are already walking into very serious trouble. In this case, it appears obvious which character was the “superfluous” person.

And if you want further evidence that some groups of people matter more than others, notice how the people who dropped to their knees for the criminal George Floyd are emitting mealy-mouthed useless too-little-too-late statements, blaming “knife crime”.

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So what do we do?

The solutions require more than any single article can provide, but I will say this: it doesn’t begin and end with the IOPC investigation or reviewing the training protocols at Hampshire Police and across every other force. Obviously, the question must be asked: has equalities and diversity training introduced a dangerous bias? If the answer is yes, that needs to change. And in that case, vigorous public debate, journalism that names things plainly, political accountability and retraining the police are all key.

But will that go far enough? I’m sceptical. It never has before. Institutions investigate themselves, reports are commissioned, inquiries burn from taxpayer pounds, well-meaning training is revised.

Free thinking is the deeper requirement. You need to be able to look at the person in front of you and see a person and refuse the pre-packaged category. This has been a preoccupation of mine since the Covid-19 pandemic and it’s why I wrote Free Your Mind after A State of Fear. Free thinking has never been more urgent.

There is hope. The most interesting thing about all those conformity experiments — Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo — is not that most conform but that some don’t. Still, even free thinking is not the firmest ground.

More and more, I think the firmest ground is older than any of this. I think we need to renew and return to the conviction that runs through the entire tradition of Western law and civilisation, that each human being carries an intrinsic dignity that must not be revoked or harmed by any institution, state, ideology, or group identity.

That conviction has a source. And I’m afraid that some of you might consider what follows to be a little bit old-fashioned. It is not a product of liberal democracy — rather, liberal democracy depends on it. It comes from the understanding that human beings are made in the image of God; that we are sacred. The source of the conviction is Christianity.

Whether you are Christian or not, whether you believe in god or not, nevertheless we built a civilisation on Christian foundations. More and more, I come to the conclusion that the true source of so many of today’s existential problems is that we have been have been enjoying the protection of a building while ignoring its foundations.

I keep going back to so many details of Nowak’s death. The “mate”, the apparent adherence to procedure down to the blue gloves, and the fact he was making his way home from the Hobbit Pub. Evil threatened the folk in the Shire, too.

Identity politics must have sounded to some people like a nice and kind thing, but truly it has been an instrument for the banality of evil.

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Happy Bank Holiday weekend. I hope you’re making the most of the glorious weather in the UK. Deck chairs out, cold drink in hand, perhaps a book. In my neck of the woods, we’re having the kind of morning that reminds you that life can actually be rather nice.

If only the authorities would let you enjoy it.

As temperatures across England climbed this week, the UK Health Security Agency did not miss the opportunity to issue its first amber heat health alert of 2026, warning that high temperatures “may put vulnerable people at increased risk”. That’s right, this sunny afternoon is a potential public health emergency. Yellow alerts were issued across the North and South West.

The nation must be kept in a perpetual state of low-grade alarm. Heaven forbid you should just pop on the sunglasses and listen to the birdsong.

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Climate catastrophism has been running hot — forgive the pun — for decades. The predictions have been vividly apocalyptic yet, with striking regularity, the appointed doomsdays come and go like damp squibs.

While collecting a Nobel Prize in 2007, Al Gore declared Arctic sea ice would be gone “in as little as 7 years”. Nineteen years later, the Arctic ice cap remains. Polar bears missed the fear-mongers’ memo and not only refused to go extinct, their population has roughly doubled since the 1960s. We’ve been told that the world will burn, freeze, turn to desert and drown. It never happens.

But while the predictions fail, the fear machine is in excellent working order.

The persistent deployment of worst-case scenarios as a communications strategy is itself harmful, both psychologically and behaviourally. Here is why:

1. It produces paralysis, not action.
   Research shows that when fear is high but people feel powerless to change anything, the result is not engagement but shutdown. Hopelessness, despair and inaction follow, not the behavioural change campaigners intend.

2. It backfires.
   Fear appeals that conflict with people’s lived experience, or that are not paired with clear, achievable solutions, can cause people to switch off, dismiss the message, or double down in the opposite direction.

3. It creates “apocalypse fatigue”.
   When every year brings a new deadline that passes without catastrophe, credibility collapses. The boy who cried wolf does not just get ignored — he makes it harder for anyone to raise a genuine alarm.

4. It disproportionately harms the already anxious.
   Fear messaging is not received equally. For psychologically resilient people, it may spur mild concern. For those predisposed to anxiety — particularly young people and adolescents — it can be genuinely destabilising.

5. It manufactures the very condition it claims to address.
   ‘Climate anxiety’ is now recognised as a clinical phenomenon. But is it caused by a changing climate, or by the relentless weaponisation of worst-case scenarios about it?

Points 4 and 5 are endangering people.

Young minds are relentlessly bombarded with a single, terrifying message: the planet is dying, and it is their responsibility to fix it. A 2025 Yougov survey commissioned by Greenpeace found that 78% of children under 12 are now worried about climate change. But how could they not be? The media hammers climate disaster non-stop. It is woven throughout the school curriculum. Extinction Rebellion has produced videos called “Advice to Young People as They Face Annihilation”. Soap operas are purposefully threaded with eco-panic. One might also ask a rather different question: what does it mean that the survey measuring children’s fear was funded by Greenpeace — an organisation with a direct financial interest in stoking that very fear?

As Sir Humphrey Appleby demonstrated in Yes, Minister, surveys can be crafted to produce the results you want. A study grandly titled “Young People’s Voices on Climate Anxiety, Government Betrayal and Moral Injury” asked respondents only to agree with negative statements such as “the future is frightening” and “humanity is doomed”. No neutral or positive statements were included. If children weren’t frightened at the start of the questionnaire, they probably were by the end.

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This is a grotesque inversion of the adult-child relationship. Children’s psychological well-being is sacrificed to serve the aims of at best biased and at worst ill-informed and exploitative adults. The fear is created, the fear is polled, and the fear is then used to justify even more fear. It is a sick dog eating its own tail.

‘Climate anxiety’ is now formally recognised as a psychological condition, characterised by persistent fear, grief, and guilt about environmental change. It sits on a spectrum from mild worry to clinical severity. A 2024 study published in Climatic Change found a direct association between climate distress and suicidal ideation, mediated specifically by the feeling of being trapped with no way out. This can result in devastating real world consequences.

In April 2018, David Buckel, a lawyer and environmental activist, set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote.

In 2021, seven climate activists aged between 18 and 27 — members of Germany’s Last Generation movement — went on hunger strike for 27 days in Berlin. Several were hospitalised. One of them said: “I am very weak, and get dizzy when I stand up. But this is nothing compared to what we can expect when the climate crisis unleashes a famine here in Europe in 20 years.”

A young person, hospitalised from self-starvation, dismissed their own suffering because of a famine they have been told is coming in two decades.

Is that sound political conviction or the product of a mind shaped by unchecked catastrophism?

There are a disturbing number of suicides and hunger strikes by people who are frightened or depressed about climate catastrophe.

This month, the Daily Mail reported the tragic suicide of Georgina Owen, a 21-year-old University of Swansea student described by her family as “vibrant, full of enthusiasm”. Georgina had been following a plant-based diet since 2016 “stemming from her environmental concerns”. In the months before her death in September 2019, she developed serious psychological symptoms. A coroner’s inquest concluded that a vitamin B12 deficiency, brought on by her restrictive vegan diet, played a role in the acute delusional episode from which she did not recover.

Suicide is complex. It is never caused by a single thing, and nothing in this article should be read as a simple or conclusive account of Georgina’s death. Her family have spoken movingly of their grief and of their commitment to research in her memory. But what is worth naming is the pattern: human damage caused by controversial climate claims. In this case, whatever else was a factor for Georgina, it seems that a pincer movement of excessive fear and the resulting dietary choices may have both contributed to her death.

The cruelest irony of climate catastrophism is that it causes catastrophe.

A 2025 study of agricultural producers in Brazil found that those most exposed to climate shocks were less likely to adopt protective strategies, not more. Overwhelmed by fear, they made choices that increased their long-term vulnerability. One farmer put it with terrible simplicity: “The problem is: does he [the farmer] die now, or does he die later? Now, he dies of hunger. Later, he dies of thirst. Right?! He prefers to die later of thirst.”

There is a serious conversation to be had about how human activity affects the climate. That conversation requires honest, proportionate and evidence-based communication. It does not require amber alerts for a warm Bank Holiday. It does not require telling children they are facing annihilation. It does not require hunger strikes and self-immolation as the logical endpoint of decades of escalating terror.

The climate will do what it does. What we choose to do with fear is on us.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the Samaritans are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, on 116 123 — free, confidential, and always there.

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There is a basic morality litmus test I’ve played with my children for years. It’s called ‘God or Devil’. No rules, no caveats, simply assign everything its proper place. Sun? God. Chocolate? God. Wine? You may disagree, but I’m going with God. Heroin? Devil. Spiders? Bring on the debate.

Eurovision, like so much of modern life, is now completely unrecognisable from the one I grew up watching. I’m not claiming there was some lost golden age of high brow musical distinction. It was always a gloriously sub-par carousel of regionally influenced pop songs, the leaderboard shuffled by political regional allegiances.

But genuine gems did emerge, like Abba’s Waterloo in 1974, or the 1958 Italian entry Volaré, which only placed third but went on to be immortalised by Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

However, the good-natured cheesey pop wouldn’t have triggered the ‘Devil’ response until quite recently.

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I watched in 2024 specifically to support the Israeli entry, amid the escalating media furore over whether Israel should be permitted to participate at all. Irish entry Bambie Thug (they/them and fae/faer pronouns) delivered a horror film-adjacent screeching performance daubed in pro-Palestine messages sneakily written in Irish Ogham script.

I’m not suggesting that people who support Palestine are necessarily on the Devil’s side, but Bambie Thug’s lyrics speak for themselves:

“Avada Kedavra, I speak to destroy
The feelings I have I cannot avoid
Through twisted tongues a hex deployed on you
That all the pretties in your bed escape your hands and make you sad
And all the things you wish you had, you lose”

Avada Kedavra is one of the killing curses in Harry Potter.

I scored it nul points and Devil. Eden Golan’s Hurricane, the Israeli entry, was beautifully sung and genuinely moving and she wasn’t dressed like one of Satan’s minions. It scored douze points and God in this household.

In 2026, I watched to support my friend’s daughter, Antigoni, representing Cyprus. She didn’t win, although she turned in a great performance of a song. But I’m no longer sure that ‘great performance’ is the qualifying criterion.

And here is where this Substack becomes one of those what on earth has happened to us pieces. Bear with me.

Romania’s entry was called “Choke Me”, glamourising strangulation, which has migrated from the darker corners of online pornography into mainstream sexual practice with depressing speed. Roughly half of sexually active young adults now report having tried it and around a quarter of reported sexual assaults involve strangulation. (Kids, sex never used to be this way.)

The Romanian group was dressed accordingly — somewhere between an underground fetish night and a very committed Halloween party.

They were not alone. Several entrants appeared to have come direct from the kind of gathering that requires a password, a very particular dress code and a live animal sacrifice. God or Devil? You know the answer.

When performers weren’t dressed for Satanic ritual or BDSM clubs, quite a few were simply overweight. As were a number of the national presenters. I say this not to pick on or ‘body shame’ individuals but as a commentary on Western public health. Something has softened and become unhealthy in the collective physique, as much as the psyche. We have, culturally speaking, let ourselves go.

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And now I will sound rather old, but do you remember when men looked like men and women looked like women? The manicured and made up men entrants were not pictures of masculinity. Soft around the edges, I wondered whether they were pre-emptively administered oestrogen in the green room, like geese prepared for foie gras?

The BBC presented the UK’s segment via a drag queen. The BBC is inexplicably obsessed with drag queens. The UK entry itself was a pink boiler-suited manifesto of performative self-loathing, its singer stomping about to a synth-pop complaint about how tedious Britain is, sung partly in German for maximum signalling:

“Countin’ in English doesn’t cut the mustard
So sick of munching roly-poly with custard
I’m so bored with it, bored with it
Oh, what’s the point of it, point of it? (oh ja, ja, ja)
I’ve always been a fan of aviation
I’m jumpin’ on a plane to another nation
All my pounds, they feel counterfeit
I need some euros to count on it”

Britain has been on the Eurovision naughty step since Brexit but this particular act of self-flagellation was never going to cut the Dijon mustard either.

The political dimension has transmogrified into something genuinely sinister. Five countries boycotted this year’s contest in Vienna over Israel’s participation. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez released a solemn video explaining that Spain could not, in good conscience, participate in a song contest while Israel remained eligible — citing the same principles the EBU applied to Russia after Ukraine. Except Spanish athletes competed in the World Athletics Championships, where Israel also participated, without anyone in Madrid experiencing a crisis of conscience.

My friend’s daughter Antigoni was, I suspect, simply too pretty, too feminine, too straightforwardly positive about her own country. Cyprus and Moldova were the rare entries that still seemed to like themselves. Wrong energy entirely. Next year, she might consider arriving in sackcloth, donning devil horns, performing a live invocation to Hecate, and releasing a single about how much she despises Cyprus. That should get the televote moving.

The honourable exception was Croatia. Lelek’s “Andromeda” drew on its own history, with powerful female harmonies, old Slavic melodies and interestingly, visual motifs rooted in Croatia’s turbulent past. The female singers were adorned with ‘šicanje’, the traditional tattoos of Catholic Croats living under Ottoman rule, done partly to declare their faith, partly to prevent abduction and conversion to Islam. Apparently, this has caused considerable upset in Turkey, which tells you everything you need to know about who was doing something right. Croatia, I’m sorry I didn’t send you any points on the night, I didn’t know the fascinating back story, but you definitely win the ‘God’ score.

The thing is, Eurovision used to be a harmless mirror held up to Europe — a charming and sequin-framed reflection of who we were, or at least who we wanted to be on a cheesey Saturday night. What it reflects now is something rather different. We are fatter and less embarrassed about it. The distinctions between men and women — distinctions that most of human history considered beautiful — have been incrementally blurred. National pride has been rebranded as something to apologise for. Politics has curdled from the merely petty into something that deploys the language of genocide to justify acting like anti-semitic bullies. And I appear to have become Mary Whitehouse. Still, God, not Devil.

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Today is VE Day. Eighty-one years ago crowds spilled into the streets, bunting festooned the streets, the young Princess Elizabeth slipped into the jubilant crowds on the Mall and was carried anonymously on the tide of a nation’s relief. The country had endured six years of war, rationing, destruction, blackouts and grief, and emerged victorious.

What they won, beyond the obvious, was a particular idea of Britain. A country that could disagree within itself and still act as one when it mattered. A country with shared institutions, obligations, culture, language and a shared vision of the future.

I sat at lunch a couple of weeks ago with some journalist friends, listening intently to a debate about whether the era of two-party politics was over. The answer, even as they argued, was obvious to me.

Today, on the anniversary of VE Day, the results are in. If we do still have two party politics, they are not the same parties any more. The ballot box has fractured along lines that would have been unrecognisable to the generation who queued to use it in 1945.

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Those hoisting the flags for ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ said they were expressing national pride. Opponents called it racist. My heart still cheers when I see them flying. If nothing else, we have very pretty flags. What’s wrong with a bit of patriotism?

YouGov dipped its finger into the swirling pot of UK sentiment and discovered that 52% of ethnic minority adults now consider the St George’s flag a racist symbol. If that’s hard to wrap your head around — that people who chose to move here for everything this country offers find England’s own flag offensive — brace yourself for this: so do 36% of white adults.

Oh well. At least they’re honest, unlike Sir Sneer Starmer, who is particularly illiterate when it comes to reading the room. He tweeted:

“St George’s flag stands for unity over hatred and decency over division. Those are the values I will always fight for. Some try to hijack our flag to spread hate. I reject their plastic patriotism.”

I’m sorry — when exactly did our national flag come to stand for “unity” and “decency”?

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It is, first and foremost, a red cross: a Christian symbol, reflecting our Christian heritage. The red on white was the colour scheme of the Crusaders — funny how the Prime Minister neglected to mention that. And St George himself is bound up in the chivalric ideals of Christian faith, courage, honour, and the protection of the weak.

Back to school, Keir.

Rather than watering down — or, to put it plainly, lying about — the flag’s symbolism to make it more palatable to those who find it troubling, why not simply tell the truth? The values our flag actually represents are rather magnificent. They don’t need softening. They need championing.

But the richest irony of all is Starmer’s use of the word plastic. Sir Polystermer himself could not be more plastic if he tried — hollow, synthetic, and moulded into whatever shape the room requires.

We’ve been debating whether to fly the Union flag outside our house. We haven’t quite managed it yet — which is, I know, rather feeble. We live in an ethnically mixed area, and we have a nagging anxiety that some of YouGov’s 52% or 36% might take it the wrong way. That fear alone tells you something has gone badly wrong.

As it happens, I was rather relieved last week that we hadn’t hoisted the colours.

I arrived home to find a man kneeling on the pavement outside our house, shoes off beside him. “What are you doing?” I asked, in my best school-ma’am voice and took a photograph.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably not the sort of person who needs much persuading that honest, independent thinking is in short supply. The Free Mind exists for exactly that reason.

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The parish office door was right on the pavement. A laminated sign with the address assured me I was in the right place.

The intercom had two options: Parish Office and Presbytery. I pressed both. No answer. I called the office. No answer. I tried the administrative assistant’s mobile. Still nothing. I began to wonder whether I was in the wrong place or simply at the wrong time.

I called my husband, whose appointment had been the week before. He explained there was a “funny situation” with the door. Following his directions, I discovered an alleyway a little further down the pavement, where a recessed glass door waited, unmarked, almost secret.

If this was your first visit, you would almost certainly not find it. Yet the intercom now offered a third option: Marriage Tribunal. I rang, and eventually someone let me in. For someone who prizes punctuality, being ten minutes late for an important appointment was a stressful start.

When I recounted this story to my RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) group, a fellow catechumen said he had been told he was one of the few ever to find the right door on the first try.

It struck me that if the door is so difficult to find, the Tribunal could at least provide directions or signage. But they don’t. Perhaps this is a test — of faith, patience, intelligence? I failed all. The difficult door felt like a metaphor for the existential questions this process has raised for me.

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The most powerful challenges to ideological systems often come from the people who have lived inside them — and left.

In Britain, the government has recently adopted a non‑statutory definition of ‘ant…

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Fear is generally considered the steam that drives the human emotional engine. Thomas Hobbes argued that fear of violent death underpins social order. Niccolò Machiavelli observed that rulers often govern more reliably through fear than love. Charles Darwin framed fear as a vital, evolved response to danger — an essential survival mechanism.

Modern neuroscience, notably Joseph LeDoux’s work, shows how fear circuits rapidly prepare the body for action. This dynamic operates politically as well. In A State of Fear, I argued that behavioural scientists and government messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic deliberately amplified public fear to increase compliance. Fear thus becomes not only biological fuel necessary for survival, but a tool of governance.

There is another emotional experience that fogs our view and ruins our society: self-hatred.

This is a peculiar form of self-hatred. It has metastasised from a hatred of the West’s prosperity, democracy and Christian legacy. The sufferer seeks to differentiate themselves from the country and culture of their own birth — to signal that they are different, they are better, they stand with the ‘opposed’, whoever the opposed is. This hatred of the West is de facto hatred of the self, since they were born of the West, enjoy its relative safety, peace and wealth, and yet choose to undermine its solidity rather than acknowledge its foundations.

In a similar way, fear and self-hatred are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

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Fear was dressed up in social responsibility — if you can save just one elderly person’s life, it justifies closing schools, shutting down manufacture and retail, interfering with every aspect of life. People shamed others for not wearing face masks. This shame was actively encouraged by the state, turning citizens into monitors of each other, enforcing compliance with what was at best symbolic and at worst harmful.

Self-hatred wears equally pernicious clothing. Those who hate our way of life, our democracy, safety and prosperity pretend they care more for humanity, equality, justice. But their actions often signal alignment with regimes and ideologies that actively suppress these values. Virtue signalling replaces moral clarity. They put outrage above careful and honest discernment.

Consider an example overheard at the orthodontist, one of the epicentres of middle-class posturing. Sandwiched between a mother and a receptionist’s small talk about holiday destinations, the mother proffered her daughter not a sandwich, but a Lebanese takeaway “to support the people of Lebanon who are being bombed.”

A few things were happening.

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How should the Green Party maintain momentum after their historic win in Gorton and Denton? Easy. Legalise polygamous marriage.

Green Party candidate H…

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On 15 February, Barack Obama, former President of the United States, disclosed in a podcast that aliens are real.

Asked whether aliens were real, he replied:

‘They’re real but I haven’t seen them. They…

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It is now genuinely hard to remember when Life Celebration was optional. Harder still to recall that it was once known by the funereal phrase ‘assisted dying’ — a name so glo…

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On several of the most important questions of our time, Britain has lost its grip on reality. We are wrong about power, wrong about morals and wrong about religion, and the confidence with which this…

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I used to be one of those English people. The kind who innocently and proudly believed, without much reflection, that England did everything best. London was the greatest capital city in the world — …

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