BRITS, BANNERS, AND BALLOT BOX BLUNDERS

In the grand tapestry of British life, where the warp of tradition meets the weft of chaos, we find ourselves once again embroiled in a spectacle that could only be described as quintessentially British: the migrant hotel protests of 2025. Picture, if you will, the working-class Brit, that noble creature of calloused hands and indomitable spirit, standing outside a repurposed Travelodge or a four-star Britannia in Canary Wharf, waving a Union Jack with the sort of dogged determination usually reserved for queuing at a chip shop on a rainy Friday. 

These are not the baying mobs of dystopian fiction, nor the frothing zealots of some far-right fever dream. No, these are ordinary folk—plumbers, nurses, the odd retired postman—who have taken to the streets with placards and thermos flasks, politely demanding that their government stop housing asylum seekers in hotels that cost more per night than their weekly grocery budget. And, in a twist that would make even the most jaded satirist chuckle, they’re doing it with a civility that could only be British. One half-expects them to apologise to the police for the inconvenience before heading home for a cuppa.

Let us first raise a sardonic eyebrow to the peaceful nature of these protests. In an age where public dissent often descends into a pantomime of hurled bricks and Molotov cocktails, the British working class has opted for a different approach: the art of standing about, looking cross, and occasionally chanting something about “our country” that sounds more like a football terrace ditty than a call to arms. In Norwich, they gathered outside the Brook Hotel, waving flags and voicing fears about local safety, prompted by the inconvenient fact that two former hotel residents were jailed for sex offences. In Epping, the Bell Hotel became a focal point after an asylum seeker’s alleged indiscretion with a teenage girl, sparking demonstrations that were less riot and more resolute grumbling. These are not the actions of a mob but of a people who, having exhausted their patience with bureaucratic platitudes, have decided to make their point with the quiet stubbornness of a nation that once waited out the Blitz with a kettle on.

And yet, across the barricades—those literal and metaphorical lines guarded by weary coppers in high-vis vests—lurks a counterpoint that could only be conjured by the fevered imaginations of the far-left. Enter the government-sponsored counter-protests, a ragtag coalition of anti-racism activists, Revolutionary Communist Party flag-wavers, and the occasional Islington Labour councillor, all clutching placards proclaiming “Refugees are welcome here” with the sanctimonious zeal of a vegan at a butcher’s convention. These are the state’s anointed foot soldiers, dispatched to drown out the working-class murmur with a cacophony of moral superiority. In Islington, at the Thistle City Barbican, they faced off against the anti-migrant protesters, separated by police who must have wondered if their Saturday might have been better spent ticketing jaywalkers. Some counter-protesters, masked and dressed in black, decided that “anti-fascism” required breaching police lines, resulting in nine arrests and a scene that resembled less a principled stand than a performance art piece gone awry.

Oh, how the government loves its counter-protesters, those earnest souls who believe that shouting louder makes their cause truer. The Home Office, under the steely gaze of Yvette Cooper, has thrown £100 million at tackling people smuggling, as if throwing money at a problem were a substitute for solving it. Meanwhile, the Labour government, fresh from its electoral triumph, assures us that it’s “reducing expensive hotel use” while fast-tracking asylum claims with all the finesse of a toddler assembling IKEA furniture. One might almost admire the audacity of it all: a government that campaigned on “change” now finds itself defending the same creaking asylum system it inherited, while sponsoring counter-demonstrations to shout down the very electorate it claims to represent. It’s a masterclass in political sleight-of-hand, distracting from the fact that 32,000 asylum seekers are still languishing in 210 hotels, costing taxpayers more than a night at the Ritz.

But here’s the rub, and it’s where our tale takes a mournful turn. Had the British electorate, in its infinite wisdom, not treated the ballot box like a blunt instrument for bludgeoning the Conservatives out of power, we might not be here at all. The Labour Party, swept into office on a wave of anti-Tory sentiment, promised competence but delivered continuity. The Conservative government, for all its faults—and let us not pretend they were few—had at least flirted with ideas like the Rwanda plan, a scheme so gloriously absurd it might have worked if only for its sheer audacity. But no, the British voter, in a fit of pique, decided that Keir Starmer’s brand of earnest blandness was the antidote to 14 years of Tory chaos. The result? A government that’s less stringent on immigration than a sieve is on water, leaving the working class to take to the streets in protest when a more discerning vote might have pre-empted the need.

Imagine, if you will, a world where the electorate had cast its ballots with the precision of a darts player rather than the abandon of a toddler with a crayon. A government—perhaps led by Reform UK, or even a reinvigorated Tory party with a spine—might have implemented an immigration process that didn’t involve housing asylum seekers in four-star hotels while locals fret about their daughters’ safety. A system that processed claims swiftly, deported those without merit, and didn’t leave communities feeling like their concerns were being drowned out by megaphones wielded by state-backed ideologues. Instead, we have a Labour government that seems to believe the answer to public discontent is to lecture it into submission, while the Home Office churns through asylum claims with the efficiency of a sloth on sedatives.

So, hats off to the working-class Brits who’ve taken to the streets, not with pitchforks but with placards, not with violence but with the quiet resolve of a people who’ve had enough. Your protests are a model of restraint, a testament to the peculiar British knack for being furious without being feral. But let us not pretend that this is the optimal solution. If only you’d wielded your vote with the same clarity you’ve shown in your demonstrations, we might not be here, watching the government play whack-a-mole with public discontent while counter-protesters wave their flags like extras in a low-budget revolution. 

The migrant hotel protests are a symptom, not the disease—a reminder that democracy demands more than just showing up; it requires thinking, too. And as the Union Jacks flutter and the thermos flasks are drained, one can only hope that next time, the ballot box will be treated with the respect it deserves, lest we find ourselves back here, politely protesting the inevitable.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRUISES & COMMON SENSE

Let me take you back, dear reader, to a time so idyllic it might as well have been a sepia-toned advertisement for broken bones and unfiltered tap water. I grew up in an era devoid of safe spaces—those cushioned havens where today’s youth retreat to knit their feelings back together after a harsh word. Trigger warnings? We didn’t need them; we had gravity, and it was a stern teacher. I drank from the garden hose, a practice that, in retrospect, might explain my current obsession with antibiotics. Peanuts in class? Tossed like confetti at a particularly nutty wedding. Helmets? Oh, please. We wore our scars like medals, signing each other’s plaster casts with the enthusiasm of autograph hunters at a circus of the maimed.

In those days, children fell down. Frequently. It was practically a national sport, second only to arguing over who got to be Mario when the Nintendo—yes, the original, with its charmingly blocky graphics and zero save functionality—finally graced our lives. Before that, we battled on Atari, a console so primitive it made modern gaming look like a PhD in quantum physics. But let’s not kid ourselves: we spent more time outdoors, scuffing knees on concrete, or indoors with a book, squinting by lamplight because energy-saving bulbs were a dystopian fantasy. Board games reigned supreme, and if the power went out mid-Nintendo epic, well, you prayed to the gods of electricity and hoped your parents didn’t notice the controller-shaped dent in the wall.

Television was a communal affair. No pausing, no streaming—when the commercials ended, you bellowed “It’s on!” like a town crier announcing the plague’s retreat. Families gathered, glued to the set, watching shows that didn’t require a degree in cultural studies to decipher. Delivery? Next-day was a pipe dream; you waited weeks for a mail-order catalogue, then months for the item to arrive, slightly damaged and smelling of regret. Skip the Dishes? We skipped to the kitchen, where fast food was a rare treat, not a lifestyle, and eating healthy was less a choice than a consequence of having no other options.

Communication was an art form. Home phones ruled, their curly cords a battlefield for teenage privacy. Texting? We wrote letters—yes, with pens—and waited days for a reply. Social media was the chatter over the backyard fence. To find friends, we pedalled our bikes through the neighbourhood, a quest as perilous as any medieval pilgrimage, yet undertaken with the carefree abandon of youth. Sleepovers on the trampoline, under a sky unpolluted by Wi-Fi signals, were the norm—parents leaving the back door unlocked, a gesture of trust now unthinkable in our age of perpetual panic.

Chores were non-negotiable. No pocket money, just the grim satisfaction of a job well done—dishes washed, lawns mowed, all under the watchful eye of discipline. Spankings were administered with the precision of a Victorian governess, and somehow, miracle of miracles, we survived. Lessons were learned, character was forged, and we didn’t need a therapist to unpack the trauma. Lunches were packed, teachers taught rather than preached, and the school library housed no porn—unless you count that one National Geographic with the topless tribeswoman, which we ogled with the innocence of anthropologists in training.

Ah, but the world has turned, hasn’t it? Once a place of relative calm, it’s now a circus of outrage, where people glue themselves to roadways as if tarmac is the new canvas for protest art. Gender, once a simple binary, has become a labyrinthine debate—women with penises, men with pregnancies, and female athletes pitted against biological males in the name of inclusivity, a policy that sounds noble until you realize it’s just bad sportsmanship with extra steps. Underage girls lose healthy breasts to surgical zeal, children are medicated into submission, and obesity stalks the land like a particularly sluggish plague. Immigration, once manageable, now strains under unsustainable waves, while diversity is heralded as salvation even as it fractures cohesion. Muslim values, once foreign, are repackaged as Western, and the government—bless its meddling heart—hands out drugs to addicts and freezes accounts of dissenters with the enthusiasm of a tax collector on overtime.

We didn’t live with fingers poised over the outrage button, ready to shriek at every slight. Anger was rarer, life simpler. There were no apps, no endless scrolling, just the rhythm of days unburdened by digital noise. Sticks and stones were real, and hurt feelings were a badge of resilience, not a call to arms. Today’s children, poor mites, inherit a world where common sense is an endangered species, and I can’t help but wonder if we’ve traded our bruises for a padded cell of our own making.

So here I sit, a relic of a bygone age, typing this on a device that would have seemed like witchcraft in my youth. The past wasn’t perfect—far from it—but it had a certain rough charm, a grit that’s been polished away by progress. Or so I tell myself, as I sip my filtered water and adjust my helmet for the short walk to the mailbox. Nostalgia, it seems, is the last refuge of the curmudgeon. And I, dear reader, am its willing prisoner.

JAMES WHALE (1946 - 2025): AN OBITUARY

James Whale, the broadcasting bruiser who turned late-night radio into a verbal cage fight, has shuffled off this mortal coil at 74, leaving behind a trail of outraged callers and a legacy as Britain’s original shock jock. Diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2000, he dodged the reaper’s first swipe only for the disease to return in 2020, spreading to his spine, brain, and lungs like an unwelcome houseguest who refuses to leave. He faced the end with a grin, slipping away “very gently” in a Kent hospice, as his wife Nadine noted, proving that even death couldn’t dim his knack for exiting on his own terms.

Whale, who began his career spinning discs at Metro Radio in 1974, stumbled into talk radio like a man tripping over a goldmine. Bored of playing records, he invited callers to spar, pioneering the art of “confrontainment” with a voice that could cut glass and a wit sharper than a butcher’s cleaver. His James Whale Radio Show, simulcast on ITV in the late ’80s, was less a programme than a cultural car crash, complete with scantily clad “bimbos,” celebrity spats, and jingles like “Fart (wet).” He revelled in the chaos, once storming off his own set, only to steer the ship with a rogue’s charm.

Whale’s stint on GB News was like tossing a Molotov cocktail into a room full of damp squibs. Joining the fledgling channel in 2021, he brought his radio-honed brawl to television, hosting a show that was less a broadcast than a verbal demolition derby. With a raised eyebrow and a sneer, he skewered politicians, pundits, and the perpetually offended, delighting in the sparks. His GB News tenure, though brief, was a masterclass in poking the bear—whether railing against “woke” nonsense or championing free speech with the zeal of a man allergic to silence.

A man of contradictions, Whale despised racism, homophobia, and vegetarians with equal gusto, his prejudices as eclectic as a jukebox in a dive bar. He championed tougher sentences but scoffed at the death penalty, proving he could argue both sides of a coin while pocketing it. His 2016 Celebrity Big Brother stint saw him warbling nursery rhymes in pink drag, a spectacle that suggested either fearless showmanship or a cry for help.

His final act was pure Whale: podcasting from a hospice, bantering with Nadine, and urging fans to fund the place that eased his exit. “I’m happy to go now,” he said, with the calm of a man who’d already told the world to sod off. Survived by Nadine, two sons, and a legion of listeners who loved or loathed him, Whale’s voice—part growl, part smirk—leaves a silence no one else can fill. Au revoir, not goodbye, as he’d say, with a wink that could start a riot.

DOUBLE-D DEJA-VU

In the grand carnival of human folly, where the pendulum of cultural obsession swings with the predictability of a metronome, we find ourselves once again fixated on the female form—specifically, the breasts of Sydney Sweeney, which have, through the alchemy of a 2025 American Eagle ad campaign, become the improbable battleground for the soul of Western civilization. If you believe the tabloids, the culture warriors, and the frothing commentariat on X, Sweeney’s 34DDs are not merely a physical attribute but the harbingers of a seismic shift, a voluptuous repudiation of the dour pieties of “woke” culture. 

One might be forgiven for thinking we’ve stumbled into a time warp, back to the 1990s, when Pamela Anderson’s surgically enhanced bosom bobbed across the Baywatch sands, dictating the aesthetic terms of an era. The parallels are uncanny, yet the differences are instructive, and as we stand at this absurd crossroads, it’s worth dissecting the matter with the weary precision of a coroner tasked with autopsying a particularly overinflated myth. Let us begin with Sweeney, who, at the tender age of 27, has found herself hoisted onto the pedestal of cultural iconography, her breasts thrust into the spotlight by American Eagle’s latest campaign. The ads, a glossy parade of low-cut tops and artfully tousled hair, are less about selling jeans than about selling a fantasy—one that, to hear The Spectator tell it, heralds the triumphant return of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack.” 

The campaign’s imagery, all soft lighting and suggestive décolletage, has been catnip for a certain breed of conservative pundit, who see in Sweeney’s curves a middle finger to the body-neutral, pronoun-obsessed killjoys of the 2020s. The National Post, with the restraint of a toddler in a candy store, went so far as to ask, “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” One can almost hear the ghost of Marshall McLuhan choking on his martini, marvelling at how the medium of denim ads has become the message of cultural revanche.

Rewind three decades, and we find Pamela Anderson, the ur-blonde of the 1990s, whose own augmented assets were the stuff of legend. Her Baywatch swimsuit, a red Lycra shrine to the era’s obsession with pneumatic femininity, was less a garment than a cultural manifesto. Anderson’s breasts, first upgraded to 34D in 1990 and later to a gravity-defying 34DD, were not just appendages but totems of a time when Playboy was a coffee-table staple and the Wonderbra was a feminist flashpoint. As she quipped in her 2023 Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, “My boobs had a great career, and I was just tagging along for the ride.” The line is pure Anderson—self-aware, disarming, and tinged with the melancholy of a woman whose body was both her fortune and her cage. Her breasts were the currency of an era that worshipped at the altar of “raunch culture,” where embracing one’s sexuality was sold as empowerment, even as it fed the leering appetites of a male-dominated media machine.

The similarities between Sweeney and Anderson are so blatant they practically demand a PowerPoint presentation. Both women, blonde and curvaceous, have been reduced to their décolletage by a culture that loves nothing more than to fetishize what it claims to celebrate. Anderson’s Baywatch slow-motion jogs are the spiritual ancestor of Sweeney’s American Eagle poses, each frame engineered to maximize ocular fixation. Both have been politicized, their breasts weaponized in ideological tug-of-wars. In the 1990s, Anderson’s implants were a lightning rod for third-wave feminist debates—were they a bold assertion of sexual agency or a capitulation to patriarchal fantasy? Sweeney, meanwhile, finds herself cast as the Joan of Arc of anti-wokeness, her natural 34DDs hailed as a return to a prelapsarian era when women were allowed to be, as one X user charmingly put it, “hot without a side of sanctimony.” The irony, of course, is that neither woman asked for this mantle. Anderson was a victim of her era’s limited media landscape, where her image was controlled by TV execs and tabloid editors. Sweeney, by contrast, navigates the digital maelstrom of 2025, where every Instagram post and SNL sketch (who could forget her Hooters-themed turn in 2024?) is dissected by a million armchair semioticians.

Yet the differences are as telling as the parallels. Anderson’s breasts were a product of the 1990s’ love affair with cosmetic surgery, a time when breast augmentation was as aspirational as a Beemer in the driveway. Sweeney’s, we are repeatedly assured, are the real deal—a fact that seems to matter immensely to those who equate “natural” with “authentic,” as if silicone somehow invalidates one’s cultural capital. Anderson’s era was one of monolithic media narratives, where Baywatch and Playboy could dictate beauty standards with the authority of a papal encyclical. Sweeney’s 2020s are a fractured funhouse, where TikTok trends, X rants, and Vogue think-pieces collide in a cacophony of competing dogmas. Her American Eagle campaign, for instance, was both a marketing triumph and a cultural Rorschach test: to some, a celebration of unapologetic femininity; to others, a cynical regression to the days when women were judged by their cup size rather than their character.

The American Eagle campaign crystallizes this absurdity. Unlike Anderson’s Baywatch swimsuit, which was a cultural artefact as indelible as the Rosetta Stone, Sweeney’s ads are ephemeral, swallowed up in the endless scroll of social media. Yet their impact is undeniable, if only because they’ve given the chattering classes something to chatter about. The campaign’s aesthetic—Sweeney in plunging necklines, her breasts framed like the crown jewels—plays to the same primal instincts that made Anderson a household name. But where Anderson’s image was a product of a top-down media culture, Sweeney’s is a collaborative fiction, amplified by her own social media savvy and the internet’s insatiable appetite for outrage. When she posted behind-the-scenes shots from the campaign on Instagram, captioned with a coy “#AEJeans,” the likes rolled in like votes in a rigged election, proving that the oldest marketing trick in the book—sex sells—still has legs, or rather, cleavage.

So, is Sydney Sweeney’s breast-centric impact in the 2020s a match for Pamela Anderson’s in the 1990s? The answer, like a good bra, is supportive but not definitive. Anderson’s bosom was a singular phenomenon, a cultural monolith that defined a decade’s fantasies and insecurities. Sweeney’s, while undeniably prominent, are but one thread in a tapestry of competing narratives, where body positivity, diversity, and “wokeness” jostle for supremacy. The conservative claim that her American Eagle ads signal the “death of woke” is as risible as it is predictable—a culture war fever dream that mistakes a marketing campaign for a manifesto. Yet the fervour itself is telling, a reminder that we remain as obsessed with the female form as we were 30 years ago, just with better hashtags.

In the end, both women deserve better than to be reduced to their anatomy, but the world, being what it is, keeps score in cup sizes. Anderson, now in her late 50s, has reinvented herself as a makeup-free activist and indie film star, her breasts no longer the main event. Sweeney, still in the flush of youth, may yet chart a similar course, using her wit and talent to outlast the leering headlines. For now, though, her American Eagle campaign stands as a monument to our enduring idiocy—a shiny, airbrushed reminder that, in the grand sweep of history, the breast remains mightier than the sword, or at least the tweet. And so we march on, gawking and arguing, forever doomed to worship at the altar of the obvious.

VPN'S, VOWS, AND VERY BAD IDEAS

Ladies and gentlemen, gather round the flickering glow of your screens, where the brave new world of freedom awaits—if by "freedom" you mean the right to choose between oat milk or almond, delivered to your door by a harried UberEats driver who’s probably freer than you are. Yes, we’ve been sold a bill of goods, a dazzling mirage of liberty that turns out to be about as substantial as a Netflix binge-watch hangover. The powers that be have lied to us, and I, your self-appointed sardonic sage, am here to puncture the illusion with a well-aimed dart of wit—because if we can’t laugh at the absurdity, we might as well start polishing the boots of the next tyrant.
Let’s start with the basics. Freedom, my dear scrolling friends, is not the gentle hum of a delivery drone or the soothing glow of a true-crime documentary. No, freedom is a wild, untamed beast—dangerous, raw, and earned through the sweat of defiance, not the click of a "subscribe" button. Yet here we are, leash in hand, prancing about on a retractable lead, convinced we’re living the dream because we can mutter a cheeky opinion over a pint—provided it’s the right cheeky opinion. Try laughing at the wrong joke in a pub these days, and you’ll be un-personed faster than you can say "cancel culture." Speak your mind at work? Good luck keeping that job. Post a truth online without a side of fear? You might as well wave goodbye to your digital existence. This, my friends, is not liberty—it’s permission with a smiley face emoji.
And now, the plot thickens. Whispers are afoot—oh, such delicate, bureaucratic whispers—about banning VPNs, shackling encryption, and licensing speech itself. For "misinformation," they say. For "harm." For "the greater good." Where have we heard that before? Every tyrant worth their salt starts with a policy paper, a clipboard, and a sanctimonious nod to public safety. Before you know it, we’re queuing up for the gulag, clutching our content moderation certificates. I can see it now: a cheerful sign reading, "Welcome to the Re-Education Centre—Please Present Your Approved Opinions at the Desk." It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the days when the worst censorship was a stern librarian shushing you for giggling at a naughty limerick.
But let’s not kid ourselves—this isn’t some dystopian fantasy. It’s the logical endpoint of a society that’s traded its spine for a smartwatch. We were born of fire, not forms—sons of longbowmen who’d skewer a tax collector at fifty paces, daughters of Boudicca who’d rather burn Rome than fill out a permissions slip, and the steelworkers and Blitz survivors who laughed in the face of bombs. Margaret Thatcher herself, with her handbag of iron, would’ve had a field day with these nannying ninnies. We wrote the Magna Carta in ink and defiance, stood alone in 1940 not because it was safe but because it was right, and built an empire on the back of people who didn’t ask permission to speak their minds. And now? We’re debating whether a VPN ban is "reasonable." Oh, the indignity!
The truth is, they fear our words because they fear our power. Every time we raise our voices, it’s a war cry that rattles their polished desks. Every unfiltered post is a protest against the beige conformity they’re peddling. And yet, here we are, begging for liberty like it’s a handout at the benefits office. Well, I say enough! Freedom isn’t managed—it’s seized. It begins the moment you stop asking for it and start demanding it, preferably with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.
So, what’s the plan, you ask? Simple. Speak freely. Post like it’s 1776 and you’ve just tossed the tea into the harbour. Laugh at the absurdities, mock the censors, and never, ever grovel for the right to be human. This is our time, our movement—a glorious, messy rebellion against the clipboard-wielding guardians of "safety." They can ban our VPNs, encrypt our silence, and license our tongues, but they can’t extinguish the spark of defiance that’s been burning since we told King John where to stick his taxes.
In the end, we don’t want freedom handed to us on a platter, garnished with disclaimers and terms of service. We want it back—raw, unapologetic, and a little bit dangerous. So, let’s raise our voices like a chorus of sardonic longbowmen, aiming straight for the heart of this nonsense. Because if we don’t, we might just find ourselves kneeling forever—polishing boots, sipping oat milk, and wondering where the hell our courage went. And that, my friends, would be the greatest tragedy of all.

CORBYN'S DOOMED DREAM MACHINE

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, those twin titans of the British left, have decided to fling themselves once more into the political fray, brandishing a new party that’s as yet unnamed, unformed, and, one suspects, utterly doomed. It’s a venture so steeped in idealism and so bereft of pragmatism that it could only have sprung from the fevered dreams of two people who believe the answer to Britain’s woes lies in a good old-fashioned Marxist sing-along. Let us, with the weary resignation of those who’ve seen this pantomime before, dissect this latest attempt to resurrect the corpse of Corbynism, skewer its absurdities, and mourn the workers it claims to champion but will surely alienate.

First, let’s address the pièce de résistance of this fledgling enterprise: the name, or rather, the lack thereof. In a move that screams strategic genius, Corbyn and Sultana have launched their revolutionary movement under the placeholder moniker “Your Party.” Yes, Your Party. It’s as if they’ve taken a leaf from the book of a particularly uninspired marketing intern, tasked with naming a generic brand of breakfast cereal. “What shall we call it, Jeremy?” one imagines Sultana asking, her eyes aglow with the fire of rebellion. “Oh, I don’t know, Zarah,” Corbyn mumbles, stroking his beard as if it might yield answers. “Let’s ask the people. They’ll decide. Democracy, you see.” And so, they’ve outsourced the naming process to the masses, via a website that’s already creaking under the weight of 70,000 sign-ups and the inevitable squabbles over whether “Arise” sounds too much like a self-help seminar or “The Collective” too much like a Soviet tractor factory. The result? A party that’s not so much a movement as a focus group gone rogue, destined to be christened something like “Votey McVoteFace” if the public’s puckish sense of humour prevails. Truly, this is the stuff of revolutions.

But the name, or lack thereof, is merely the first symptom of a deeper malaise: this party’s raison d’être as a magnet for the far-left protest vote. Corbyn and Sultana, with their fists raised and their rhetoric dialled to eleven, have positioned themselves as the standard-bearers for every disgruntled socialist who ever scrawled “Capitalism is Theft” on a placard. Their manifesto, such as it is, promises “a mass redistribution of wealth and power,” an end to arms sales to Israel, and a foreign policy that might as well be subtitled “Peace, Love, and Nationalization.” It’s a wishlist that would make Karl Marx blush and Fidel Castro nod approvingly from the great cigar lounge in the sky. 

But here’s the rub: the voters they’re courting—those disillusioned souls who feel Labour has betrayed them by daring to govern rather than agitate—aren’t exactly a silent majority. Polls suggest this new party could snag a respectable 10% of the vote, particularly among the 18-24 crowd who think tweeting is activism and Corbyn is Che Guevara with a bus pass. Yet, in their zeal to outflank Labour on the left, Corbyn and Sultana are blissfully ignoring the elephant in the room: the working-class voters who’ve already defected, not to their banner, but to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

Oh, the irony! While Corbyn and Sultana dream of a proletarian uprising, the actual proletariat—those gritty, no-nonsense workers in the Red Wall seats—have been quietly slipping away to Reform, lured by Farage’s plain-talking populism and a promise to stick it to the elites in a language they understand. Reform’s recent surge, polling at a whopping 27-34% in some surveys, owes much to its ability to channel the frustration of those who feel ignored by Westminster’s chattering classes. Meanwhile, Corbyn and Sultana are offering what? A lecture on Gaza, a sermon on wealth taxes, and a party name to be determined by committee. It’s as if they’ve mistaken the British working class for a sociology seminar at SOAS. The workers, dear comrades, aren’t clamoring for your “real change”; they’re voting for Farage because he promises to fix the potholes and keep the migrants out, not because they’ve read Das Kapital and found it lacking. By splitting the left-wing vote, Corbyn and Sultana are handing Reform a gift-wrapped opportunity to consolidate their gains, leaving Labour to fend off attacks from both sides while the Tories sip champagne and watch the chaos unfold.

And then there’s Corbyn himself, the cuddly grandpa of British politics, whose avuncular charm and allotment-tending demeanour belie a rather less wholesome record. This is a man who, with a twinkle in his eye and a jam jar in his hand, has repeatedly cozied up to groups that make the average voter’s skin crawl. Let’s not mince words: Corbyn’s long history of sharing platforms with apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah, his reluctance to unequivocally condemn the IRA, and his steadfast support for regimes like Venezuela’s—all while cloaked in the rhetoric of “peace and justice”—paint a picture not of a kindly old socialist but of a man whose moral compass points firmly toward the nearest picket line, regardless of who’s holding the sign. 

His defenders will cry context, but context doesn’t erase the fact that Corbyn’s brand of radicalism is less about uplifting the downtrodden than about cheering for anyone who hates the West. And Sultana, for all her fiery eloquence, is cut from the same cloth, railing against “genocide” in Gaza while conveniently ignoring the complexities of a conflict that doesn’t lend itself to hashtag activism. Together, they’re not so much a political party as a traveling roadshow for every grievance the far left holds dear, from Palestine to public ownership, with a side order of sanctimony.

The tragedy here is not just that Corbyn and Sultana are out of touch—though they are, spectacularly so—but that they genuinely believe they’re the answer to Britain’s fractured politics. They see themselves as the vanguard of a new dawn, when in reality they’re the architects of a cul-de-sac. Their party, whatever it ends up being called, will likely fizzle out faster than a Momentum rally in a rainstorm. The Greens, already wary of this upstart, are circling like vultures, ready to absorb any disaffected lefties who realize that “Your Party” is less a movement than a midlife crisis with a website. And the workers? They’ll keep voting for Reform, not because they’re crypto-fascists, but because Farage speaks their language—blunt, unpolished, and free of the jargon that Corbyn and Sultana seem to think passes for inspiration.

In the end, this new party is less a threat to Labour than a gift to Nigel Farage, who must be chuckling into his pint at the thought of the left eating itself alive. Corbyn and Sultana, with their unnamed party and their unmoored ideals, are like two people shouting into a void, convinced it’s an amphitheatre. They’ll rally the faithful, sure—those 70,000 sign-ups aren’t nothing—but they’ll never win back the workers who’ve already decamped to Reform’s simpler, angrier vision. As for the name, I suggest they go with “The People’s Front of Islington,” if only to avoid confusion with the “Popular Front of Islington.”.

AGE GATES AND SINISTER STATES

In the grand, creaking machinery of the modern nanny state, where every citizen is presumed a toddler in need of a firm hand and a sippy cup, there emerges a new contraption so exquisitely absurd it could only have been forged in the fevered dreams of a bureaucrat with too much time and too little imagination: age verification for the internet. Oh, how the left wing’s heart swells with pride at this latest triumph of meddlesome governance, this digital chastity belt designed to save us all from ourselves. The blog post at Pornbiz.com—a source, I confess, I never thought I’d cite in polite company—lays bare the scam of age verification with a clarity that shames the obfuscatory drivel of its proponents. But let us not merely nod along to their exposé; let us, in the spirit of relentless inquiry, dissect this farce with the dry, surgical wit it so richly deserves, and peer into the darker currents that swirl beneath its sanctimonious surface.

The premise, as Pornbiz so bluntly puts it, is simple: age verification is a solution in search of a problem, a bureaucratic boondoggle dressed up as moral necessity. Governments, particularly those of a certain progressive bent, have decided that the internet—a vast, untamed wilderness of ideas, filth, and cat videos—must be tamed, lest the delicate minds of the young be exposed to the horrors of, say, an unfiltered nipple or a rogue opinion. The mechanism? A requirement that users prove their age before accessing certain corners of the web, typically those deemed too spicy for the under-18 set. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Who could object to protecting the children? Only a monster, surely. And yet, as Pornbiz points out with the kind of bluntness that makes one wince with admiration, the whole enterprise is a sham—a costly, invasive, and ultimately futile exercise in control masquerading as compassion.

Let us begin with the practicalities, which are, as is so often the case with nanny state initiatives, laughably impractical. Age verification, we are told, will involve users submitting personal data—credit card details, government-issued IDs, perhaps a retinal scan or a lock of hair—to prove they are of sufficient maturity to gaze upon the forbidden fruits of the internet. The Pornbiz piece notes, with a refreshing lack of euphemism, that this process is not only cumbersome but also a data breach waiting to happen. Imagine, if you will, a database containing the names, addresses, and proclivities of every adult who ever dared to click on a site that might raise an eyebrow. Now imagine that database in the hands of a hacker, or worse, a government with a grudge. The left, ever so keen to lecture us on privacy when it suits their narrative, seems curiously unperturbed by the prospect of such a treasure trove of personal information being mishandled. One might almost suspect they relish the idea of having such a leash on the populace.
But the impracticality is only the beginning. The deeper farce lies in the assumption that age verification will actually work. Teenagers, as anyone who has ever met one can attest, are not exactly known for their deference to authority. If they can outwit parental controls, school firewalls, and the occasional overzealous librarian, does anyone seriously believe they will be thwarted by a pop-up demanding their birth date? The Pornbiz post rightly mocks this notion, pointing out that VPNs, fake IDs, and the sheer ingenuity of youth will render such measures as effective as a paper umbrella in a monsoon. The left’s faith in technological solutions to human nature is touching, in the way one might find a toddler’s belief in Santa Claus touching—charming, but utterly divorced from reality.
And yet, to focus solely on the incompetence of the scheme is to miss the forest for the trees. For there is something more sinister at play here, a creeping agenda that Pornbiz hints at but does not fully articulate, perhaps because it is too grim even for their unvarnished prose. Age verification is not merely about protecting children; it is about control, pure and simple. The left, with its unerring instinct for sniffing out opportunities to regulate, has seized upon the internet as the final frontier of human freedom—a place where ideas, however base or noble, can still flow without the heavy hand of the state. By cloaking their ambitions in the rhetoric of child safety, they seek to normalize the surveillance of every click, every search, every fleeting curiosity. Today it’s pornography; tomorrow it’s political dissent, or perhaps just a blog post that dares to question the orthodoxy. The infrastructure of age verification, once in place, is a skeleton key to the digital lives of every citizen, a tool that can be wielded with chilling precision by those who believe they know best.
the rhetoric of the nanny state’s champions. They speak of “harm” and “vulnerability” with the fervour of revivalist preachers, as if the mere sight of a risqué image will send the youth of the nation spiralling into moral decay. Never mind that children have been sneaking peeks at forbidden material since the days of scribbled graffiti on Roman walls; never mind that the internet, for all its flaws, has also democratized knowledge and given voice to the marginalized. No, the left insists, we must be saved from ourselves, and if that means handing over our privacy to faceless corporations or government agencies, so be it. The Pornbiz post, with its sardonic tone, captures the absurdity of this moral panic, but it stops short of naming the true cost: a society where every step is monitored, every choice scrutinized, all in the name of a nebulous “greater good.”
And who, pray tell, decides what constitutes harm? The same bureaucrats who once banned books for their subversive ideas? The same politicians who clutch their pearls at the sight of a swear word but turn a blind eye to their own hypocrisies? The left’s vision of a sanitized internet is not just impractical; it is a power grab disguised as altruism. By demanding that we prove our age, they demand that we prove our compliance, our willingness to submit to their ever-expanding web of rules. It is no coincidence that the loudest voices for age verification are often the same ones calling for speech codes, content moderation, and the de-platforming of those who dare to deviate from the approved script. The nanny state does not merely want to protect; it wants to control, to shape a world where every thought, every desire, is subject to its approval.
Clive James, that master of the barbed pen, would have seen through this charade in an instant. He would have skewered the sanctimonious posturing, the faux concern for the children, with a quip so sharp it would leave the architects of this scheme clutching their wounded egos. “The nanny state,” he might have written, “is like a maiden aunt who insists on checking your pockets for sweets before dinner, only to eat them herself when you’re not looking.” And he would have been right. Age verification is not about safety; it is about power, about the left’s insatiable need to impose order on a world that stubbornly refuses to be homogenated. The Pornbiz post, for all its bluntness, is a clarion call to resist this creeping tyranny, to laugh in the face of those who would bind us in their digital chains while claiming it’s for our own good.
So let us raise a glass to the internet, that glorious, messy bastion of human freedom, and to those who, like the irreverent souls at Pornbiz, dare to call out the emperor’s new clothes. The nanny state may have its algorithms and its databases, its pious rhetoric and its earnest crusaders, but it will never fully tame the human spirit. Age verification is a scam, yes, but it is more than that—it is a glimpse into a future where every click is a confession, every search a submission. Let us mock it, resist it, and, above all, refuse to hand over the keys to our digital souls. For if we do, we may find that the nanny state’s embrace is not so gentle after all.