The New Age Patriots Protecting Indigenous English Society (A.K.A. the NAPPIES) are forever in a lather about foreigners coming in and "diluting" English culture. Which ought be laughable, because Englishness is basically the cultural equivalent of a particularly badly arranged smörgåsbord where everybody's chucked a...

Social media is the biggest con-trick played on the human race since organised religion. It's gone beyond just writing on walls and worshipping cats, now it's like a proper highly organised mega-cult. It purports to inform us about stuff whilst feeding us disinformation. It involves massive peer pressure about how we...

It seems I offended a particular political tribe on a social media platform the other day. Their response reminded me of a piece I wrote quite a while ago. Welcome to the strange death of the asterisk... It used to be that the asterisk served as a modest shield, a polite veil over language deemed too offensive for...

Getting out of bed in the morning is a political decision. It sounds daft at first glance, doesn’t it? How can possibly the most innocuous decision of the day have anything to do with politics, at least for ordinary, sensible folk? The problem starts with the fact that most of us think politics is something it isn't....

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Socialist."Niemöller's words echo across history as a warning about complicity and silence in the face of rising authoritarianism. Originally a reflection on the moral failures of German society under the Nazi regime, Niemöller's words feel...

Note: This was originally written and published elsewhere, before ICE raids, before Maduro's kidnapping, before Iran. I saw no real need to edit it here.There was a time when America’s idea of a man was a square-jawed hero who stood tall in the saddle, squinted into the horizon, and muttered something gritty about duty...