It wasn’t the first time Rasmus Paludan had set fire to the Quran. The leader of “Hard Line”, the far-Right Danish party, he was temporarily banned from entering Sweden in 2020 because he was planning to commit his habitual stunt …
The Chechens fighting for Ukraine
“I am here in Ukraine fighting because first the Russians came to my motherland, Chechnya. Now they want to do here what they did to us.” Kazbek has just picked me up from Dnipro station to take me to his …
Labour’s lost love for Leave
Bregrets? I don’t have many. I still believe leaving the European Union was the right decision, however difficult and imperfect the process has thus far been. This belief, admittedly, puts me at odds with a growing majority of the British …
Inside the Catholic civil war
In the early hours of January 2, the fully robed body of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was transferred from the little monastery in the Vatican where he had died on the last day of 2022 to St Peter’s Basilica. There …
The books that made me
“Where do you get your ideas from?” In the days when I wrote for children, I went into schools to talk to them, and this was a stock question. In replying, I used initially to say, “well, quite a lot …
Boston and the tragedy of Brexitland
The disco started at 8pm. Pints were poured, game soup was served and, as 11pm drew near, the music stopped so the landlord could play Land of Hope and Glory. A few people started to cry. It was January 31, …
Gandhi hasn’t aged well
Gandhi, poor fellow, had his ashes stolen on the 150th anniversary of his birth. “Traitor”, scrawled the Hindu supremacist malcontents on a life-size cut-out of the Mahatma at the mausoleum. That was a couple of years ago, but it’s a …
The truth about Germany’s levelling up
Whenever Britain starts talking about decentralisation, Germany is reliably trotted out as a shining example of how to do it right. In 2004, for instance, the Guardian’s Matthew Tempest called Germany “perhaps the most advanced example of decentralised government”. And …
Is the Government spying on you?
“Government cracks down on spread of false coronavirus information online,” announced a UK Government press release on March 30, 2020. “Specialist units” are tackling dangerous misinformation, disinformation, criminal fraudsters, and “false and misleading narratives”, we were told.
But, as Big …
Introducing UnHerd Britain 2023
The political geography of the UK is on the move again. Barely three years since the realignment of the 2019 General Election, which upended decades-old ideas of traditional Conservative and Labour areas, a new poll by UnHerd and Focaldata reveals …
Labour is winning the Brexit revolution
Three years after Britain finally left the European Union, Brexit has not only lost its popularity, but also, it seems, its power. Today, according to new UnHerd polling, not only does a clear majority think the decision to leave …
Why are excess deaths still so high?
Around the middle of last year, researchers in several countries started noticing something disturbing: despite the fall in Covid deaths everywhere, excess deaths (compared to the pre-pandemic five-year average) were actually rising. Even more worryingly, a disproportionate number of those …
Starmer isn’t working for women
He can’t say he wasn’t warned. Sir Keir Starmer’s embrace of gender ideology was always unwise, and made worse by his refusal to listen to dissenting voices. He has ignored pleas from feminists in the Labour Party, refused to show …
Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …
In defence of deepfakes
Philosophers of knowledge sometimes invoke a thought experiment involving “Fake Barn Country”, an imaginary land which for some reason is scattered with lots of convincing barn facades but very few real barns. Somewhat unusually, a man in Fake Barn Country …