Kristian knows this, but yes, this guy a moron. He confuses wealth creation with wealth redistribution, and inequality with theft. Because, wealth isn't a fixed pie. Someone becoming 40 times richer doesn't mean they've taken anything from you. And your claim that the average person is only 8% richer than in 1970 is contradicted by decades of actual economic data. If he wants to argue that people are being robbed, he has to demonstrate where the theft happend. Because someone else's prosperity isn't evidence of your exploitation. 🤦‍♂️

Okay well there's 2+ hours of my life I'm not getting back. A striking performance by Owen Jones. And it was a performance, there was no attempt at debate. But, I wasn't really interested in his politics, because I've heard it all before. But his use of rhetoric, now that's what I found really interesting. He's clearly intelligent, articulate and well informed. But watch how he argues. This is where the games begin, and @KonstantinKisin doesn't do a bad job here. He'll start with a perfectly legitimate fact, attach a much broader ideological conclusion to it, and then treat the conclusion as though it's been demonstrated. Even though it hasn't. When Konstantin challenges the causal relationship he'll broaden the discussion, redefine a term, introduce historical context or answer a slightly different question. It's a clever slight of hand often used by those on the left. His treatment of Venezuela was particularly revealing. When discussing Thatcherism, negative economic outcomes are evidence of ideological failure. When discussing Chávez, suddenly we need to consider oil prices, sanctions, historical circumstances and implementation. Why the different standards? Konstantin kept repeatedly bringing Owen back to the actual question. What are you claiming, and what evidence establishes that claim? I can tell it was incredibly frustrating for Konstantin. Owen knows a great deal. But knowing facts and reasoning correctly from those facts are two very different things. For him it's about being right at all costs, not finding the truth or understanding anyone else's position. I found his performance rhetorically predictable, but logically much less interesting. youtu.be/VqIByeaby7I?si=jb41…

I'm pro-immigration, but I support Nigel Farage's proposal to temporarily suspend the asylum system. To me, that stance is entirely consistent with an Objectivist view of individual rights. The basic job of government is to protect people’s rights. Successive British governments have failed at it, especially on borders. Right now, we have a setup where people arrive without checks, serious criminals dodge deportation, and fraudulent claims clog up the system. That isn't a strike against immigration. It's proof of a broken government. I've got plenty of friends who moved to Britain, worked hard, paid their way, and built good lives. I couldn't care less where someone was born, what colour their skin is, or what religion they follow. I judge people on their character and actions, full stop. However, nobody is entitled to another person's income. Rocking up in Britain doesn't give anyone a blank cheque on the taxpayer for housing, food, and cash. True charity is voluntary, and government shouldn't be forcing people to pay for it. Crucially, government exists to protect us from violence and fraud. When someone slips through without checks and commits a violent crime, the system has betrayed the victim. We can't brush those failures off as just "one of those things". That's why I back a temporary pause on asylum. We have to sort out border security, get proper screening in place, and ensure we can deport anyone who shouldn't be here. Will innocent people be affected? Yes, and that's unfortunate. But leaving a non-functioning system running indefinitely, gambling with public safety because fixing it is uncomfortable, isn't an option. Any pause needs to be temporary, evidence-based, and kept as short as possible. The goal is to get a proper system back on its feet, not lock the doors forever. If you're a peaceful person who wants to come here, work, and support yourself, you're welcome. But I won't accept British citizens' safety being compromised because the government can't be bothered to enforce basic controls. I'm not against immigration. I'm against a government that refuses to do its job.

Trump sanctions Russia, then turns around and buys its oil to try to bring fuel prices down before the midterms. So much for America First. He’s handing Putin a win for a short-term political advantage. It’s utterly irrational.

I find Andy Burnham’s comments deeply concerning, not because I doubt Russia attempted to interfere in the Brexit referendum, but because of the implications for democracy. I’m quite prepared to believe Russia engaged in disinformation campaigns, cyber warfare and other attempts to influence British voters. That’s hardly surprising. Foreign governments attempt to influence one another’s politics all the time. But attempting to influence an election and actually changing its outcome are two very different things. Burnham says he’s been told Russia interfered in the referendum. Fine. Show us the evidence. What exactly happened? What was the scale of the operation? How many voters were influenced? And, most importantly, what evidence is there that it materially affected the result? The 2020 Intelligence and Security Committee report didn’t establish that Russian interference changed the outcome. Burnham hasn’t publicly provided evidence that it did either. So where’s the smoking gun? And here’s what really concerns me. If a Prime Minister can use allegations of foreign interference to cast doubt on a democratic result he politically opposes, what’s to prevent the same argument being used against any other election? Are we really going to establish a precedent whereby politicians can question the legitimacy of elections based on undisclosed intelligence, without demonstrating that the result was actually compromised? Investigate foreign interference by all means. Expose it, prosecute wrongdoing and protect our democratic institutions. But don’t confuse an attempt to influence voters with evidence that those voters made the wrong decision. That’s an extraordinarily dangerous precedent for a democracy.

This is our PM. 🤡 Time for school. Thanks Andy! So nearly half the price of petrol is tax, and your solution to high fuel prices is to get motorists to shop around on Google Maps? At £1.75 a litre, approximately 82p goes to the Treasury in fuel duty and VAT. The government could reduce that burden directly, but instead we're being told that comparing petrol stations might save us £40 a year. I'm all for market competition, but asking markets to compensate for excessive taxation whilst celebrating it as a government achievement is beyond absurd. Perhaps tackle the tax burden rather than congratulating yourselves for helping people navigate it. I don't imagine it will be long before HMRC classifies this as a tax avoidance scheme.

I just recently discovered the mute button. This means I can stop listening to morons, but I don't have give them satisfaction of being blocked.

I think part of the problem is that we keep calling this socialism, which sounds all kinds of warm and fuzzy. But we're increasingly seeing politicians advocate ideas that attack the principle of private property itself. Not just taxing property, regulating it or providing public services alongside private ones, but claiming that the state has the moral authority to take property from its lawful owner because politicians have decided somebody else has a better claim to it. If I legitimately buy a house, a business or any other property, ownership has to mean something. It can't mean, "You own it until the government decides you are not using it in the socially approved way." If that's the case then you don't really own it. You merely possess it with conditions, and it's subject to the permission of the state. And I'm not painting some caricature of communist philosophy. Marx and Engels wrote that communist theory could be summed up as the "abolition of private property". Engels described replacing private ownership with communal ownership as the central transformation. Of course there is a legitimate distinction between personal possessions and what Marx called bourgeois productive property. But the underlying principle is still enormously important. Do I possess a right to property, or does the collective have a claim whenever it decides that property could serve some supposedly social purpose? Once the state claims that right, the argument isn't simply about the size of the welfare state or whether your taxes should be 35% or 40%. It's a fundamental argument about whether private property is actually private and belongs to you. So when politicians suggest confiscating lawfully owned property, abolishing private enterprise in whole sectors, or transferring control of productive assets from individuals to the state, I think we should stop sanitising the principle by casually calling everything "socialism". There's an older and considerably more accurate word for the systematic abolition of private property in favour of collective control. Communism. Let's call it what it is so everyone knows what a shameful and malevolent ideology it is. Especially given how much death it has left in its wake.

Nothing to add on this. She said the quiet part out loud. The might was well scrap the HRA now and send me to the gulag.

She nailed it, spot on. Modern British politics is run on pure moral blackmail. We've swallowed the idea that our lives and property belong to some collective group, and that questioning government overreach makes you a horrible person. Once feelings replace logic, nobody cares about basic rights or hard facts. Politicians just wave Captain Tom or the NHS in your face to shut down any real debate, hiding endless state control behind fake empathy. If you demand to be looked after, you'll end up being ruled. Britain isn't being taken over by some grand tyrant. We're giving our freedom away because too many people prefer the easy comfort of the nanny state over taking responsibility for their own lives. All we need is an excuse to cancel elections, perhaps say.. a nice little war and there you have it.

So for the avoidance of doubt, I don't believe any polling data from anyone. The only the poll that matters is the one on the day of the election where we get to vote. Like any rational person I base my vote on policies, and their impact on my life, not on what polling data says about which party is popular. In short, I don't care about polls, because it doesn't influence how I will vote.

Apparently people don't understand what capitalism is, or they think there are different versions of it. So let's clear this up for the uneducated. The IMF defines capitalism around private ownership and control, voluntary exchange, decentralised markets and freedom of choice. That's as good a definition as any. In classical liberalism, individual rights are rights held by the individual against coercion by other people and, crucially, against arbitrary coercion by the state. That means the individual must be free to own property, enter contracts, sell their labour, invest their capital and run an enterprise without the state arbitrarily overriding those choices. That is the philosophical foundation capitalism rests upon. Capitalism therefore isn't simply the existence of businesses, money, prices, profits or trade. All of those things can exist under systems that are not capitalist. China is an obvious example. It has private businesses, international trade, markets, prices, investment and people making enormous profits. Yet China officially describes its system as a “socialist market economy”. Market mechanisms operate within a system where the state retains enormous control, state owned enterprises dominate strategically important sectors and the financial system remains heavily state directed. Trade does not equal capitalism. Markets do not equal capitalism. Private companies do not automatically equal capitalism. Even nominal private ownership does not necessarily equal capitalism if the state ultimately reserves the power to determine how that property is used. Capitalism requires that ownership actually means ownership. You control your property. You decide whether to sell it, retain it, invest it or use it. Exchange takes place voluntarily between individuals rather than according to political direction. The same applies to corporatism. Government working with favoured corporations, shielding them from competition, directing markets or granting privileges through political power is not capitalism. It is political power interfering with capitalism. You can have trade without capitalism. You can have markets without capitalism. You can have companies without capitalism. You can have profits without capitalism. What you cannot have is capitalism without individual rights, genuine private property and voluntary exchange. Those aren't optional variations of capitalism. They are the things that make it capitalism in the first place.

A Labour MP thinks it's okay to seize private property. She's turn off comments though, so she isn't interested in what you think about her tyrannical views. Be careful what you vote for, the tyrants don't hide their intentions anymore. Next I'll be evicted because I have spare rooms in the house I own, and "it's a crisis". Reminds me of the "fair share" laws from Atlas Shrugged. Fiction becomes reality for these people.

Democracy is a tool for selecting a leader or representative, but does not guarantee individual rights.

Every time I hear politicians talk about everyone taking their “fair share”, I’m reminded of Atlas Shrugged. In Rand’s novel, the “Fair Share” Law dictates how much Rearden Metal Hank Rearden can sell to any one customer. It is presented in the language of fairness: nobody should be allowed more than their “fair share”. The principle is that the state decides what your fair share is, then imposes it. Fast forward to Piddington. The Government plans to accommodate up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at a former military site near a village of around 350 people. Andy Burnham’s response has been that poorer communities cannot take all the burden and that “all parts of the country need to work to play their part”. His immigration minister has been even more explicit: “It’s about their fair share.” Different policy. Different circumstances. But I find the underlying political language very familiar. Who decides what my “fair share” is? Who decides what Piddington’s “fair share” is? And why does declaring something a collective burden automatically create an obligation on particular individuals or communities to accept the share the state assigns them? That is precisely why the phrase “fair share” should make us ask questions rather than simply accept the premise. I don't consider that I am means to anyone else's ends than my own. Ayn Rand understood the true meaning of those two words "fair share" incredibly well, because she lived under Soviet rule.

When I talk about a nation, I don't mean a race, a bloodline, an ancestry group or a tribe. I mean a political community of individuals living under a common legal order, and nearly everything I think about immigration follows from that. Collectivism starts with the group. It asks who "our people" are, which ancestry belongs here, which demographic group ought to stay dominant, what the population should look like in fifty years. Individualism asks a completely different set of questions: does this person respect the rights of others, obey the law, support themselves, live peacefully alongside everyone else? That's what membership of a nation should be about. I think of a country a bit like a house. Believing people should be allowed in doesn't mean I think the front door should be propped open permanently. You still have a door, you still decide who comes through it, and you still protect the people already inside from anyone who means them harm. Borders do a real job on that basis. They mark out the jurisdiction where individual rights are protected, and they let you look properly at the people asking to come in. What none of that requires is a racial test. If someone is peaceful, self-sufficient, law-abiding, respects other people's rights and wants to build a life here, I don't much care whether they're white, black or brown, because skin colour tells me almost nothing about the person in front of me and their beliefs and conduct tell me nearly everything. Citizenship is a bigger ask than entry. It means committing to this political community and accepting the principles that make living together peacefully possible, so scrutiny is fair enough at that point. Trust isn't automatic, and anyone wanting permanent membership of a legal system should be expected to respect the principles holding it up. What matters is that the scrutiny is individual, objective, applied the same way to everyone, and aimed at the person rather than at where their grandparents came from. That's also why I've no time for demographic engineering by government. It isn't the job of politicians or civil servants to decide what society ought to look like and then nudge the population towards it. The state shouldn't decide Britain ought to become more multicultural, and it shouldn't decide Britain ought to stay predominantly white either, because both come from the same place: the idea that society belongs to government and is theirs to design. Society isn't a government project. It's what happens when millions of people make their own choices, form relationships, start businesses, raise families, join things, and trade with each other voluntarily. Government doesn't create any of that. At best it maintains the legal framework that lets people get on with it peacefully. The moment it starts asking what racial mix or cultural mix or family structure it would like the population to have, it has stopped protecting rights and started treating people as raw material. Government doesn't own the population, and it has no business designing the make-up of future generations to suit somebody's preferred outcome. Its job is narrower than that: protect individual rights, keep the law objective and equal, defend the jurisdiction against force and fraud, and then leave people alone. Which cuts both ways, and it's why I end up arguing with people on both sides of this. Opposing uncontrolled immigration has never once required me to think Britain needs racially preserving. Strong borders are a matter of jurisdiction rather than bloodline, so the ethnic nationalism that usually travels alongside them is an add-on I've no use for, and wanting serious scrutiny of the people coming in is perfectly consistent with refusing to treat ancestry as evidence of character. Those positions sit together well enough once you notice that the thing I'm concerned with is the individual and the protection of rights, not the preservation or manufacture of a collective identity. There's no percentage of ancestry at which someone becomes properly British, and no quantity of white DNA that produces British values. Whatever Britishness is, it lives in people, in institutions, in laws and customs and habits and the relationships between us, none of which are carried in melanin. That's the difference, in the end. The collectivist looks at a person and wants to know which group they belong to. I just want to know who they are.

He said it's not a priority. But, he is reversing Labour's changes to farms. I still think it needs to go completely, there is no justification for it at all, and it smacks of "Tax the rich". We will raise far more by having the rich here in the UK than moving their assets abroad to protect them.