Free Speech
I was on trial for praying for free speech
I was acquitted — but I should never have been arrested
Free speech: we should try it again
We must sweep aside today’s pervasive fearfulness. Instead we should feel free to offend — and not take offence when others treat us equally robustly
Public order and liberal doublethink
Disruption is enabled and peaceful activism banned
Criminalising prayer protects no one
Laws against so-called conversion therapy are threatening the freedom of belief
Censorship and the Holocaust
Silencing Bridgen for a poor choice of words is the real insult to the victims of totalitarianism
Beware the thought police
Britain is now a country where you can be arrested for what’s in your head
Don’t criminalise support
The government should change course on Clause 9
The silence of women
Shouldn’t a talk show host be good at listening?
In praise of incivility
Je suis Nicola
I reserve the right to upset you
Only idiots think we should succumb to the special pleading of intolerant majorities
Most Read
The establishment is still living in an immigration fantasy land
It is influential left-wingers, not the broader public, who have deluded themselves on mass migration
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
On Britain as a capitalist command economy
It is neither neoliberal nor socialist but a secret third thing
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
Beyond Carmen
Georges Bizet: The piano works (Hyperion)
What’s so illiberal about “illiberal democracy”?
Viktor Orbán has been a political pioneer in Europe
Bonfire of the fallacies
Two opposing ideas about hard power and foreign policy — legalism and nihilism — are being exposed by the Trump
administration
A case for Classics
Eager minds are being failed by a smug and short-sighted cultural establishment
An anti-gambling bonanza
Don’t expect a lot of objective and thorough research from a new “gambling harms” organisation
Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster
The local elections exposed a political class united mainly by its inability to feel embarrassment
Beef and Brexit prosperity
High beef prices are a symptom of a deeper problem—Britain has left the EU, but not its economic mindset.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
The meaning of Zack Polanski
The icon of geriatric millennials is one of life’s drifters
Carry on, matron
The crisis in nursing can be reversed by a return to Florence Nightingale’s vision of vocation and a rebuilt hierarchy on the wards
First time thrills
Most of all, it was a tournament of heroes and villains