“You must be lonely,” he called over to us. Ours were the first English voices he’d heard in a while, he explained, and he assumed we were starved of company. Actually, we have each other, so not really. After talking to him for a while it seemed to me that he was the lonely one.

But that is how you fall into conversation with a stranger in a bar in another country, talking about anything and everything, unguarded in that peculiar way that comes with someone you’ll likely never see again.

Before I introduce him properly, a word about how these conversations usually go. The first time I met a fellow author for coffee, she asked me, delicately and not a little nervously, where I stood on the environment, before confessing she didn’t have much time for anthropogenic climate change. And I’d been braced for her to be a hardcore vegan until I spotted the vast quantity of chorizo in her shopping bag.

We are two confident women, both perfectly capable of tolerating a dissenting opinion, and still we circled each other before holding forth. If you are right of centre you will recognise the ritual instantly. If you are on the left, probably not. You see, people on the left tend to assume they hold the moral high ground, so they go straight in with their opinions. While those of us to the right tread carefully until we are sure of our company because we know from bitter experience we risk being pilloried or despised by those on the left.

The young man performed no such ritual. He was firmly of the left, and so he went straight in.

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In the hills of Minas Gerais we stayed on a fazenda whose owner had built his own chapel. He had constructed it from scratch, even applying the gold leaf himself. He opened its doors and showed us in with the pride of a man revealing his life’s work. He pointed out where the light switches were, including the spotlights on the Blessed Virgin Mary, and invited us to use it whenever we liked during our stay. A few days earlier, in a bar in Ouro Preto, we met a young man who had built nothing at all.

And so I have written two essays about Brazil. The distance between those two men is what this pair of essays is about.

The first is a window into an old world of Baroque churches on hilltops, mule tracks through the mountains, a country saturated in its own faith and confident in its own culture. This first essay is free.

The second was inspired by the young American man and it is a picture of something much more modern. He had a gentle voice, whimsical tattoos and chipped green nail varnish, and he gave me as much to think about as anything else in Brazil. It sits, with more about the young man, behind the paywall. Unlike him, I believe in finishing what I start and being paid for my work. Consider a subscription an act of resistance against the Peter Pan generation and a small vote for the world of finished things — more on that in the second instalment.

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The road

My husband and I spent our weeks in Brazil travelling the Estrada Real, the 1,630 kilometre network of royal roads built after gold was discovered in the streams of Minas Gerais at the end of the seventeenth century. The Portuguese Crown, which presumably never met a commodity it didn’t want to tax, decreed that gold and diamonds could travel to the coast only along official routes, littered with checkpoints to ensure that all dues were collected by its taxmen. Cutting your own path through the forest was a crime. The first route, the Caminho Velho, ran from what is now Ouro Preto, down to the little port of Paraty, where the gold was loaded onto ships for Rio and then Lisbon. When the sea leg proved irresistible to pirates, a second route, the Caminho Novo, was driven directly overland to Rio de Janeiro in the early eighteenth century.

In modern times it has been reincarnated as a tourist route, signposted, mapped and walked, ridden and driven by Brazilians rediscovering their own interior. You can even stamp an Estrada Real passport as you make your way round. But it would be fair to call it ‘off the beaten track’ for international visitors. In fact, entirely due to our own fault, we ran out of road, literally, a few times and had to make hair-raising U-turns. At one point we were nearly stuck, flummoxed and sweating in front of a cliff with just a horse for company.

We travelled short stretches of the old road, longer stretches of tarmac new road alongside, and stayed in Rio, Petrópolis, Santos Dumont, Ouro Preto, Tiradentes and Paraty.

Each town is its own small history lesson. Petrópolis is the imperial city in the mountains above Rio, built as the summer refuge of Emperor Pedro II. Santos Dumont is named for the Brazilian aviation pioneer born on a fazenda nearby. Ouro Preto, the old gold capital, is a jewel of steep cobbled streets, old colonial properties and many beautiful churches. Tiradentes is named after a soldier and dentist (Tiradentes was his nickname and literally means ‘tooth puller’) who led a failed uprising against Portugal and was hanged and quartered. Don’t let that put you off, it’s a historically important and quaintly beautiful town. And Paraty, where the gold once left the country, is now a perfectly preserved colonial port of whitewashed houses and painted doorways, pizzerias and souvenir shops.

The gold that turned into churches

The gold rush left beautiful churches in its wake. Minas Gerais took its eighteenth-century fortune and spent a remarkable share of it on God. One church in Tiradentes sags under the weight of the interior gold.

Baroque churches stand on hilltops, punctuate the streets of towns and villages, and sit nestled in valleys, their towers visible for miles. In Ouro Preto the lay brotherhoods competed to outbuild one another, and the result is an astonishing concentration of Baroque and Rococo architecture. Some were designed and built by Aleijadinho, the mixed-race sculptor son of a Portuguese architect and an African slave, who continued to do his own carving after leprosy took his fingers, with tools strapped to his wrists.

Faith is not confined to the churches. Homes have shrines in their gardens and shops keep icons by the till and in the windows. One church had a fire truck outside with a statue of St Christopher holding the baby Jesus. I can’t tell you why. We pulled over to take photographs, as you can see here.

Regular readers will know I am on my way into the Catholic Church, a road that began with an unscheduled epiphany on a hilltop in Santiago (Saint Laura and the Hilltop Epiphany). So yes, of course I loved it. But you would not need to be a catechumen to love it. It is simply too pretty and too interesting not to appreciate.

A place that knows what it is

What you feel, travelling through Minas Gerais, is the deep comfort of a religiously and culturally coherent place. Everyone is speaking the same language, worshipping (broadly) the same God, cooking recognisably the same food. I appreciate that this homogeneity may not appeal to everyone. For instance, closer to home, Sadiq Khan likes to boast that more than 300 languages are spoken in London — as if people visit our capital for the Tower of Babel rather than the Tower of London. But I prefer to holiday in a distinct culture. If I am honest, I prefer to live in one, and I suspect most of the world, which arranges itself into distinct cultures wherever it is permitted to, feels the same.

The interesting thing about Brazil that our politicians should take note of is that it is spectacularly multi-ethnic and yet not, in a meaningful sense, multicultural. The population is a mixture of Portuguese, African, Indigenous, Italian, German, Japanese, Lebanese and more. Surprisingly, São Paulo holds the largest Japanese community outside Japan and one of the largest Lebanese diasporas on earth.

But these groups did not settle into siloed ‘communities’ (as they are uncritically labelled here in the UK) with parallel languages, laws and loyalties. They became Brazilian. Some of that will have happened naturally, and some of it was policy. In the 1930s the Vargas government decided assimilation was not optional, imposing immigration quotas and launching a 'nationalisation campaign' that shut down foreign-language schools, made teaching in Portuguese compulsory, closed newspapers and dissolved ethnic associations. About 2,500 immigrant community schools were closed by the state. Perhaps this all seems heavy-handed by today’s standards, but the result three generations on is a country where a Brazilian of Japanese or Lebanese descent is simply a Brazilian.

Brazil chose one culture built from many peoples. We have chosen many cultures and, increasingly, no shared people at all. Even Keir Starmer called us an Island of Strangers.

One faith

The most apparent homogeneity is religious. Brazil is nearly entirely Christian. The 2022 census, published last year, found 56.7% of Brazilians are Catholic and a further 26.9% are Evangelical. So that’s already well over 80% Christian before you count the Spiritists (1.8%) and the roughly 1% who follow the Afro-Brazilian religions of Umbanda and Candomblé. Islam barely registers. The 2010 census counted around 35,000 Muslims in a country then of 190 million, less than 0.02%. Brazilian Muslim associations suggest much higher figures that would still not reach 1% and are contested. In all our weeks on the road I saw one hijab and not a single mosque.

In the areas I visited there were countless Catholic churches, wayside shrines and icons, one Candomblé altar, and a scattering of Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist chapels. For all the impression of Brazil as a carnival of diversity, its religious landscape is about as diverse as mediaeval Somerset.

It is not all plain sailing though. Catholicism has declined from over 90% in the 1970s and has lost ground fast to the Pentecostal churches and to no religion at all. The Evangelical surge which comes largely out of favelas and urban areas has brought its own tensions, including violent harassment of Umbanda and Candomblé worshippers and attacks on their terreiros, and that appears to be framed as partially racial and cultural in origin.

A holiday in Brazil doesn’t make me an expert on the country. Still, my impression was of a country of 200 million that overwhelmingly shares a faith, a language and a culture, forged deliberately out of extraordinary human variety.

The young man in the bar in Ouro Preto found it beautiful too, as it happens. He loved Brazil’s melting pot. He just had no idea what he was looking at, in rather the same way that he thought the Saxons were Vikings. But that, and his chipped green nails and his green-card scheme all belong to the second postcard.

Part Two is for paid subscribers. He might tell you to cheat the system. I’d politely ask you to subscribe.

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We drove to the funeral through the sort of summer that only lives in childhood memories.

The early morning promise of the school holidays. Leather car seats sticking to your legs. Running through the…

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When we stepped out of the car on Wednesday at a service station outside Warwick, we expected to be hit by a nasal-singing wall of heat. We were met with a balmy warmth and an effective breeze. Only a snowflake would have had trouble with the weather on that particular tract of the motorway.

The motorway signs had repeatedly warned us about “Extreme Heat”. Perhaps that should have read “Extreme Cheat”?

I am not a climate denier, God forbid. I know we have climate. I know it’s changing. And I know we’re in a heatwave. It just wasn’t particularly hot that day. And I wasn’t quite sure what the warnings were implying. What sort of extra care? Stay off the motorway? Stay home? Drink (water) while driving?

The reason I think the signs really should have read “cheat” is that I am afraid what is really hotting up is the nudge.

Nudge is a concept from behavioural economics, in which the choice architecture of an environment is manipulated to steer people towards a desired behaviour. For the nudge to really work well it happens without their necessarily being aware of it. In principle, a nudge doesn’t forbid or compel, t simply makes one course of action feel like the obvious and reasonable response. There are many types of nudges and you can read Free Your Mind: The new world of manipulation and how to resist it among other books, if you want to know more.

During Covid, the UK government’s behavioural science unit SPI-B deployed it systematically: the motorway signs telling us to stay home, the social distancing stickers in supermarket aisles, the daily death counters on the news. The messaging wasn’t primarily informational, it was motivational.

And you cannot miss the same playbook as Covid now, even down to the motorway signs. Those signs were one of the last lingering symptoms of a state which sought to interfere in every aspect of our lives during the pandemic.

You are likely to be aware that the extent of man-made climate change is contested. No, the science is not settled — that phrase is itself a rhetorical nudge. And the impact of proposed net-zero changes is also hotly contested.

But June 2026 has indeed been notably warm. However, notable is not the same as unprecedented in Earth’s long history of climate variability. And exceptional weather is not self-evidently proof certain catastrophe.

I wrote at length in A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic about the systematic deployment of fear by the British government during Covid-19. The pandemic became a laboratory for social scientists and behaviouralists: how much could you modify public behaviour through messaging, social pressure, and the engineering of anxiety? The answer, it turned out, was rather a lot.

My blood had chilled. I had not asked Clifford Stott, Professor of Social Psychology and SPI-B member about climate change. I had asked him how the social scientists had planned to help the population to climb down from fear and return towards normality.

I hadn’t imagined that a SPI-B advisor would segue from how to end lockdown to the next major project requiring population compliance. But Stott was far from alone. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle put it rather more baldly at the G7 Speakers’ Meeting: “What surprised many of us in the UK was how engaged most of the population became once the seriousness of the situation was made clear. People were prepared to accept limitations on personal choice and lifestyle… No one could ever imagine that we would be wearing masks so readily and that we would all be so compliant.”

I was asked to write the climate equivalent of A State of Fear. I gathered a dossier of nudges for many months. Reader, I didn’t have enough stomach left. But it seems some of the tactics are hotting up — so to speak — and the moment demands revisiting.

Let us go through it.

My stepdaughter’s Duke of Edinburgh expedition has been cancelled. The dangers of heat could have been mitigated by the fact that the participants are young, fit, and they could have taken extra stops to rehydrate along the way. Being in a tent in a heatwave would have been unpleasant, but it would probably not have been dangerous for this cohort. Unpleasant should not be grounds for cancellation. The dangers have perhaps been exaggerated. I don’t suggest there is a deliberate intention on the part of the teachers of Duke of Edinburgh scheme to crank up climate anxiety, it’s just that our safetyist culture is now primed to climate anxiety.

You see, this is merely the tip of the melting iceberg. While school kids are being told not to camping, there are much more significant proposals.

There are calls to introduce maximum workplace temperatures. The National Education Union has said that a maximum indoor working temperature of 26°C is appropriate for schools, and the Climate Change Committee has called for a “national maximum temperature” for workplaces. There is, as yet, no legal upper limit. But the campaign is underway.

Hospitality businesses across the UK have closed or adjusted their opening hours as a result of what the Met Office calls “uncomfortably hot” working conditions — and that is entirely their prerogative. But the calls for legislation are intensifying. Bakeries and cafés have shuttered or reduced their hours and menus this week, including Greggs. A popular pub closed during the heatwave after temperatures behind the bar reached more than 34°C. Separately, France banned public alcohol consumption in “red alert” zones, ordered 845 schools to close, and cancelled trains, concerts and sporting events as temperatures reached 40°C in some areas.

Then there are the schools. A handful of schools in the west of England confirmed to the BBC they’d be finishing lessons early as a result of the heat. Calls are growing for closures to become policy.

I wonder, would the same public health professionals calling for school closures in southern England also advocate ending all education south of Rome? Or indeed for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa? Or does this logic apply only to people who have become accustomed to operating within a very narrow thermal band?

And if schools don’t close, can you refuse to send your delicate darlings? And in a classic example of no-news propaganda, the BBC asked readers: “Can you refuse to work or send your kids to school during a heatwave?” This is a headline that does the nudging work merely by posing the question.

The economy and education are from recovered after the lockdowns of 2020-2021. It is astonishing that some people want to shut up shop and school all over again.

And on one hand, we are not supposed to work without air conditioning. On the other, we mustn’t install it at home. You cannot win.

The Met Office social media account has been in a state of barely suppressed horrified rapture this week. A deluge of warnings, red maps, and alarming statistics has poured forth. The maps are a deepening gradient of red — they are going to run out of a sufficiently crimson pigment at this rate.

A torrent of Met Office tweets ask “What’s the difference between an Extreme Heat Warning and a Heat Health Alert?” and “An exceptional spell of hot and humid weather is expected across this region, with impacts to the general population highly likely”. Just as Covid was falsely presented as risky for the entire population rather than discrete vulnerable groups, weather is now being positioned as dangerous for everyone, when it is not.

And none of this hysteria is matched in the winter when cold-related deaths vastly outnumber heat-related deaths. One kind of temperature death merits red maps and emergency legislation. The other merits embarrassed silence and prim instructions to turn the thermostat down for the climate emergency.

All this reminds me of another SPI-B advisor who told me anonymously that “Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.” The same person, also a psychologist, confessed that “psychologists tend to be more on the neurotic end of the spectrum.” I suspect that the staff at the Met Office are not immune to a similar occupational enthusiasm.

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Bernie Spofforth is a British entrepreneur and writer with more than three decades of international experience building, scaling and leading companies across consumer goods and technology, IP and pat…

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Over 15,000 of you from 126 countries subscribe to The Free Mind. Some of you have been reading this Substack for nearly five years.

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I caught up with Nina Power at the Substack Fête last night. We talked about writing, academia, religion and poetry — which is exactly the kind of conversation I like to have before I’ve even found a drink. Nina is as allergic to small talk as I am, which made for a very good evening.

The poetry conversation reminded me that I wrote some during lockdown. I use the word loosely. You can judge for yourselves below.

Finding them again reminded me of the sheer misery of those years — and how comprehensively that misery has been revised out of the official memory. Ed West, who was also there last night, told me he remembered the lockdowns as lasting about six months. The lockdowns and other restrictions lasted two years.

Some time distortion is to be expected. Patrick Fagan and I wrote about it this peculiarity in Free Your Mind. We had Christmas sandwiches in summer 2020, the Olympics were emblazoned with the wrong year, and of course the normal rhythm of daily life was interrupted.

January 2021 was the lowest point for me. I was finishing A State of Fear, typing my little fingers to the bone in a cold garden office during the third lockdown, after a cancelled Christmas, cut off from everyone, watching every source of income disappear. Freelancers were, to use the technical term, absolutely stuffed. Paying the bills was becoming an obsessive preoccupation.

I’ve been asked several times whether I’ll produce an updated edition of A State of Fear. I won’t. Everything still stands. The facts are correct and the argument holds. It’s a record of a genuinely ghoulish strategy — the deliberate frightening of a population into compliance — and it doesn’t need updating because I got it right.

What has changed is where that book led me. I’ll write about that soon. My new book is something I am sinking into nervously, excitedly and gratefully — and it begins, in a way, where A State of Fear ends. I’ll be sharing what I am doing here with subscribers first.

For now: the poems. They are behind the paywall, for two reasons.

First, if you read The Free Mind and value it, a paid subscription is the only thing that keeps it going. I give away more for free than most writers on this platform. The paid tier is how the lights stay on.

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Second — and I will be honest — I am not entirely sure whether I am proud of these poems or utterly mortified by them. There is only one way to find out, dear reader, and it involves subscribing.

Bubble was written after the introduction of “bubbles” — one of the more surreal and stupid pieces of social engineering of that period. Slavery was written when the same people who had been disinfecting their shopping bags and snitching on their neighbours took to the streets in their tens of thousands. The cognitive dissonance was, as they say, quite something.

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“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 b…

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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 t…

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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 mor…

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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…

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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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“Where is racial hatred coming from?” An audience member on Question Time put the question to Rachel Millward, deputy leader of the Green Party. He was persistent. Impressively so, given the usual se…

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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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There is a moment in every institution’s decline when the desperation becomes visible. York Minster has just had one of those moments. The Minster has partnered with lo…

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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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At a recent Ben Gurion University Foundation event, Noa Argamani appeared in conversation with journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti. She is slight, composed and softly spoken. If you did not know who she wa…

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

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