THERE can’t be a more recognisable symbol of the British countryside than a thatched roof. Like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thatched_roofs_at_Selborne_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4564859.jpg There are estimated to be 60,000 thatched roofs in the UK, mainly in England (which has the most in the world), though there are a few in all the home nations. The history of thatching goes back […]
WRITING recently in TCW, I told how the new Steven Spielberg / Tom Hanks television series Masters of the Air highlights the allegedly fraught relationship between American and British bomber crews during the Second World War. Undoubtedly there were such transatlantic tensions. However, with their troops pouring into this country from 1942 onwards to prepare for D-Day, officials at […]
I VERY much enjoyed Theodore Dalrymple’s Spectator article on the state of ‘mental health’ in modern Britain earlier this month. He is among my favourite contributors to the Spectator and it’s always a pleasure to read his take on current affairs. However, as an NHS psychiatrist myself, and one born into the millennial generation of which he so despairs, I […]
THIS is something I never expected to feel: ashamed of my country. There are individual incidents that have taken place under the banner of the UK that one could be ashamed of, or particular groups that are shameful for our country. But this is neither of those. It is shame that I am a citizen of the […]
First things first: I say this with great regret, but the Tories are toast. When the next general election hits–as it must by January of next year (as a parliamentary system, the elections are called by the ruling parties, but there is a requirement to hold elections no more than 5 years apart), the Tories […]
IT’S BEEN announced that Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s former chief scientific adviser, has joined the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, appointed to their ‘team of expert Strategic Counsellors’ with former chief of the defence staff General Sir Nick Carter. What benefits they will receive, in kind or otherwise, the TBI’s press release did not elaborate on. Sir Patrick, who according to […]
WHO would fight for the United Kingdom? This isn’t so much a rhetorical question as a practical one, as senior figures in the armed forces wrestle with the fact that we have a comically small military for a nation with world-power pretensions. What is in it for the demographic who traditionally spilled their blood for […]
I HAVE just sat through 47 minutes of a satanic death cult gleefully committing the most unimaginable butchery on innocent men, women and children. All while chanting the name of their prophet. Jittery and excited with spittle in the corners of their demonically possessed and crazed mouths. Their eyes lit up in ecstasy, as if they had […]
WITH the growing possibility of people in Britain being imprisoned for their political, moral or religious beliefs – ‘hate crimes’ perceived to be ‘motivated by hostility based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity’ are already offences carrying jail sentences – reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel The First Circle over Christmas proved a disturbing experience. Some reflections on it seem timely. Set […]
WHEN we think of the Russian Revolution of 1917 we think of Lenin and Trotsky, the storming of the Winter Palace and the dissolution of the Duma. The tumultuous events of February and October 1917 not only overthrew Tsarism and then democracy but plunged a great country into 80 years of totalitarianism and bloody oppression. […]
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