Reporting News and opinions
The theory behind all of it, gas, telecoms, water, rail, was called popular capitalism, and it rested on a wager: that if enough ordinary Britons held shares directly, they would develop a stake, literal and psychological, in the fiscal health of the nation. Capitalism would stop being something done to people and start being something done by them.
It wants to celebrate Britain as the greatest country in the world while simultaneously proposing policies that would make large parts of Britain less British.
When a political movement cannot quite explain where Britain should go, it apparently finds comfort in explaining where Britain used to be.
The slogan gained prominence in the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings and the subsequent conviction of six Irish men the now infamous Birmingham Six. Their case quickly became a lightning rod for allegations of coerced confessions, police misconduct, and a justice system more interested in closure than correctness.
There is a particular kind of political confidence that is indistinguishable, to the untrained eye, from clinical detachment from reality. It is the confidence of a man who, having just won a hand at poker, concludes that the laws of probability no longer apply to him. It announces itself loudly, dresses in a flag, and mistakes the echo of its own voice for the applause of nations. Ladies and gentlemen, Reform UK Ltd has had a good week at the local elections, and the results are as instructive as they are alarming, not merely because Nigel Farage’s vehicle of nationalist ambition has won council seats, but because winning appears to have emboldened the party to say the quiet parts of its manifesto even louder, with the serene self-assurance of people who have never had to read a treaty.
