Scotland is leading the way in promoting trans rights – again, and long after the debate was assumed to be over. It pays lip service to the Supreme Court ruling that sex means real biological sex, while doing its best to thwart it in practice. Not unlike Starmer’s Labour government, in fact. Alex Massie in…

Over the past few days. Thursday: pollarded plane trees on John Islip Street, behind Tate Britain. Yesterday: dancing hornbeams in Queen’s Wood. This morning: planes in Finsbury Park.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: In the popular imagination, revolutions are made by brave crowds that storm palaces and fortresses, but that is an illusion. It is extremely hard for popular movements to overthrow tyrannies that command loyal and brutal security forces – as long as they are willing to use maximal violence. There are fewer examples…

Jenni Russell in the Times – It’s time for Keir Starmer to exercise his power: Since the Cold War ended we have been happily extracting our crocodile teeth, shredding our armed forces, assuming Europe didn’t face much risk or that, if we did, America’s military would save us. Both those securities have been shattered, first…

Back then, it was Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre cheering on the Khomeinists in Paris, with Foucault even romanticizing Khomeini’s Islamism as “political spirituality.” Today, the pattern repeats. The same rotten ideology, recycled by the same privileged, bored, white Western men, is now flooding the internet with the same propaganda. Not this time, Satan. We’ve…

Boom boom.

“…., ordinary acts turned into resistance because freedom is forbidden.”

An interview with Robert Winston – the man whose BBC invitations ended after he dared to suggest, on Question Time, that people can’t change sex: In this wide-ranging and candid conversation, we are joined by Professor Robert Winston — one of the UK’s most distinguished scientists and public communicators — to discuss what happens when scientific reality…