Alex

Jai Gurkha and QOGLR. Strength & Honour. Destiny Is All. Arise, Riders of Théoden. Advance Britannia. Long Live the Cause of Freedom. God Save The King! 🇬🇧

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

When in Rome. In keeping with the latest Twitter craze, here is an action figure of Harold Godwinson. I’m sure TRIH gang would approve!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

the bird is freed

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

The BBC Has Ruled. Brexit Damaged The Economy. No Further Debate Required.

The BBC's editorial complaints unit has decided that the negative economic impact of Brexit is now a settled fact. Not a contested judgement. Not one side of a live debate. A fact, in the same category as man-made climate change, requiring no balancing view.

The ruling followed a Radio 4 Today programme segment featuring Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, alongside Liam Byrne and Sir John Gieve, both long-standing advocates of closer EU alignment. All three agreed Brexit had damaged growth. The presenter, Katya Adler, did not challenge the premise or introduce a dissenting voice. A complaint followed.

The ECU's response is the revealing part. It acknowledged the segment failed to "acknowledge the alternative case" for pursuing opportunities outside the EU rather than realignment with it. That part of the complaint was upheld. But the central complaint, that three pro-EU voices agreeing with each other on air is not balance, was dismissed. The reasoning given was that this reflected "the consensus among economists" and there was no "significant body of economic opinion" on the other side.

This is worth pausing on. The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist. The institution that is legally required to be impartial has ruled itself the arbiter of which questions are still open and which are closed, and Brexit has just been moved into the closed file.

The economics itself does not support the certainty on display. The headline figure driving much of this narrative, an 8 per cent hit to GDP since 2016, comes from an NBER paper built on a "synthetic control" model that constructs a hypothetical non-Brexit Britain from a basket of comparator countries. The largest weighting in that basket, over 60 per cent, is the United States, a country currently riding an AI investment boom and a separate fiscal stimulus. The model also weights Estonia and Greece more heavily than France or Germany. On a straightforward per capita basis against France and Germany, the actual comparators, Britain's performance since 2016 sits roughly in line with both. An 8 per cent gap simply isn't visible. This is a model producing a number that then gets reported as "the consensus," which the BBC then cites as the reason no alternative view is required.

That loop, model produces number, number becomes consensus, consensus becomes fact, fact requires no balance, is the mechanism. It does not require a conspiracy. It requires an institution that has decided which conclusions are respectable and which are not, and which then treats its own prior decision as evidence.

The same posture has been on display all week. A government department can decide its diversity targets are lawful without seeking legal advice to check. A police force can decide a book about dismantling "inner white supremacy" is leadership training. A broadcaster can decide an economic question is closed and that deciding so does not breach its own impartiality rules. In each case, the institution marks its own homework, and the mark is always a pass.

None of this requires Brexit to have been a triumph. Britain's economy has genuine problems, most of them unrelated to single market membership. But a state broadcaster, funded by compulsory licence fee under threat of prosecution, has now formally placed one of the most consequential political decisions in modern British history beyond the reach of its own impartiality obligations. Reform's Lee Anderson called it being "blinkered by groupthink." The more precise description is an institution that has stopped being able to tell the difference between its own assumptions and the facts.

"The BBC is not claiming it found balance. It is claiming balance was unnecessary because one side of the argument does not meaningfully exist."

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement.

Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier.

Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème.

Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs.

Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours.

La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@awb58 @andrew_lilico The act of Brexit has gone well overall, thanks. Power is now back in the hands of British institutions. Sadly, the government is useless: not the fault of Brexit. But at least we can vote them out.

[John Pitchford🌹💙 @Johnnypapa64]

Probably the best advert for football & beer in the world: recorded in Dagenham in 2005 this is the Carlsberg Old Lions advert including the talents of Alan Ball, Peter Beardsley, Terry Butcher, Bobby Charlton, Jack Charlton, Stuart Pearce, Peter Reid, Bryan Robson, Peter Shilton, Chris Waddle, and Des Walker, with Sir Bobby Robson as manager.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Tout le monde pense que le monde libre a gagné en 1989, à la chute du mur de Berlin.

C'est faux.

Et c'est exactement pour ça que le monde est aujourd'hui en feu.

Ce qui est tombé le 9 novembre 1989, c'est un appareil.

Une économie planifiée, un empire militaire, un mur de béton. Ce qui n'est pas tombé, c'est l'idée. L'idée que le monde se divise en oppresseurs et en opprimés. L'idée qu'il existe une égalité finale à atteindre, par tous les moyens. L'idée que tout ce qui existe (la famille, la nation, le mérite, l'héritage) est une structure de domination à abattre.

Cette idée-là n'était plus dans le bâtiment quand le bâtiment s'est effondré.

Il faut reprendre la chronologie, parce que tout est dans la chronologie :

Le communisme économique avait un défaut fatal : il était réfutable. Il promettait l'abondance, il produisait des famines. Il promettait l'émancipation, il produisait des barbelés. Budapest 1956, Prague 1968, L'Archipel du Goulag publié à Paris en 1973, les boat people de 1979 : à chaque décennie, le réel envoyait sa réfutation. Les boat people étaient une réfutation flottante, visible depuis les plages.

Alors l'idéologie a fait ce que fait tout organisme menacé : elle a muté.

La mutation a un nom, et j'en ai raconté la généalogie ici : la French Theory.

Foucault a déplacé la guerre du terrain des faits, où le communisme perdait à chaque fois, vers le terrain du savoir lui-même.

S'il n'y a pas de vérité, s'il n'y a que des rapports de pouvoir déguisés en savoir, alors plus aucune famine, plus aucun mur, plus aucun goulag ne peut réfuter quoi que ce soit.

La French Theory n'a pas enterré le marxisme.

Elle l'a rendu irréfutable.

Et la mutation a des dates. Toutes antérieures à 1989.

1934 : l'École de Francfort, chassée d'Allemagne, s'installe à Columbia. La critique de l'économie devient critique de la culture.

1964-1965 : Marcuse, exilé allemand devenu professeur américain, remplace le prolétariat défaillant par un nouveau sujet révolutionnaire (les minorités, les étudiants, les marginaux) et écrit noir sur blanc que la tolérance doit être accordée aux mouvements de gauche et refusée à ceux de droite.

Octobre 1966 : le débarquement a une date précise. Université Johns Hopkins, Baltimore. Derrida, Barthes, Lacan présentent la pensée française aux campus américains.

1967 : Rudi Dutschke lance le mot d'ordre, la longue marche à travers les institutions.

1968 : les révolutions de rue échouent partout.

Qu'importe. La révolution ne passera plus par la rue, elle passera par la salle de classe.

1975-1985 : Yale, Berkeley, Columbia absorbent la théorie, qui devient le système d'exploitation des humanités.

1987 : Allan Bloom publie The Closing of the American Mind pour donner l'alerte. Un million d'exemplaires vendus.

L'université le traite de réactionnaire et passe à autre chose.

L'Amérique avait son Aron, elle en a fait la même chose que nous du nôtre.

Puis arrive le 9 novembre 1989.

Le Mur tombe. L'Occident célèbre. Fukuyama avait déclaré la fin de l'Histoire dès l'été, avant même la chute. On démantèle les missiles, on encaisse les dividendes de la paix, on déclare le match terminé.

Nous avons célébré notre victoire sur une adresse vide. L'idéologie avait déménagé vingt ans plus tôt. Nous avons gagné contre les chars et perdu contre les chaires.

Pendant ce temps, l'autre empire communiste faisait la lecture inverse. Pékin avait écrasé Tian'anmen dans le sang cinq mois avant Berlin. Sinistre, mais lucide sur un point : la Chine savait que la guerre était idéologique.

Elle a choisi : abandonner l'économie marxiste, garder le contrôle du récit. L'Occident a fait l'exact opposé : il a gardé le marché et absorbé l'idéologie. Trente-cinq ans plus tard, regardez qui construit des centrales et qui déboulonne ses statues.

Vous voulez la preuve que c'est le même logiciel ? Faites la table de correspondance.

La lutte des classes est devenue la lutte des identités.

Les koulaks sont devenus les privilégiés.

L'autocritique maoïste est devenue le privilege checking. Les commissaires politiques sont devenus les DEI officers.

Le samizdat est devenu le compte shadowbanné.

La nomenklatura a quitté Moscou pour Davos et Bruxelles.

Et le paradis ne s'appelle plus la société sans classes : il s'appelle l'équité, l'égalité des résultats.

Exactement ce que je décrivais ici il y a quelques semaines.

On me dira : il n'y a pas de Goulag.

C'est vrai. C'est même tout le génie de la version 2.0.

Le communisme dur devait briser les corps parce qu'il ne tenait pas les esprits.

Le communisme mou tient les esprits : il lui suffit de briser les carrières.

Pas de camps, des services RH.
Pas de procès de Moscou, des excuses publiques.
Pas de Sibérie, la mort sociale.
Demandez aux émigrés du bloc de l'Est installés en Occident ce qu'ils ressentent en traversant une université américaine en 2026.
Ils reconnaissent l'odeur.

Et voilà pourquoi le monde est en feu.

Une civilisation a passé trente-cinq ans à enseigner à ses propres enfants qu'elle était le problème. Résultat : elle ne sait plus défendre ses frontières, transmettre son héritage, ni même nommer ses ennemis.

Quand la présidente de Harvard, devant le Congrès, répond que condamner un appel au génocide « dépend du contexte », vous voyez le logiciel tourner en production.

Et les prédateurs du dehors lisent cette faiblesse comme un livre ouvert : Moscou teste, Pékin patiente, l'islamisme avance dans les rues de nos capitales.

Le feu extérieur n'est que la conséquence du désarmement intérieur. On ne brûle bien que les maisons qui se sont vidées de leurs défenseurs.

Le Mur n'est pas tombé. Il s'est déplacé. Il ne sépare plus l'Est de l'Ouest : il passe désormais à l'intérieur de chaque institution occidentale, entre ceux qui construisent et ceux qui déconstruisent.

La première guerre froide s'est gagnée avec des missiles et du PIB. La seconde se gagnera avec des écoles, des médias libres et des modèles d'IA. Celui qui écrit les valeurs dans les machines écrira le prochain 1989.

Cette fois, ne nous trompons pas de victoire. Au travail.

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@MrTCHarris Narcissistic compassion…

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@almurray

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@CountBinface Sensible policies for a happier Britain! 👏🏻

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

Our country is run by people who believe that the best way to solve a problem is to pretend it doesn't exist.

[David Betz @DavidBe31099196]

It is pointless trying to understand the contemporary British media complex as ‘media’ in the conventional sense—journalism, reporting, or even opinion. The correct frame is propaganda: mood and sentiment management, with its sharpest tool today being crisis communications.

The dominant technique, visible daily if you still watch, is inversion—systematic reversal. It flips reality: victim into perpetrator, aggressor into defender, truth into falsehood, good into evil. It constructs Walter Lippmann’s ‘pseudo-environment’, an alternate reality in which the public is meant to dwell.

A key subtype is projection, or ‘accusation in a mirror’, neatly summarised by a Rwandan Hutu propagandist in a 1990s manual: impute to your enemies exactly what you and your own side are planning or doing.

When a genuine crisis erupts—such as the racially aggravated murder of Henry Nowak—the first imperative of the machine is to stall, dampen, and defeat the natural eruption of public outrage.

Call it ‘restoring calm’ if you like the euphemism. In practice, it means herding people back into anaesthetised normality so that inversion can resume.

Once the majority has been shamed, distracted, or bullied into silence, the remnant still angry can be ridiculed by the usual chorus—eye-rolling panellists on Have I Got News for You, columnists sneering at those ‘harping on’, and accusations of crypto-racism or worse.

Thus, the brutal stabbing of an unarmed 18-year-old student, the false cry of racism by his killer, and the police reportedly handcuffing the dying boy as he bled out on a Southampton street is repackaged as another ‘knife crime’ tragedy (note Shaban Mahmood’s flaccid parliamentary statement this afternoon)—preferably illustrated with a generic white face in the style of the BBC's so-called reality-based drama 'Adolescence' or the more recent but equally putridly manipulative 'The Capture'.

Real patterns (grooming gangs, crime disparities, two-tier policing) are airbrushed. This is projection at work: the actual sources of predation and institutional failure are recast, while legitimate grievance is pathologized.

The truth? The system enabled both the attack and the immediate inversion of its aftermath and that stands exposed to anyone with eyes and functioning brain by the video evidence. That’s the problem, your own 'lying eyes', that crisis communications has to handle before there can be a return to normal levels of public mood management can be restored.

This is precisely what Dan Hodges is performing when he labels people demanding we talk about the murder ‘scum’ for refusing to respect the family’s wish that their son’s death not be politicised. It is phase-one grunt work in the inversion protocol: shame the angry back into silence so the pseudo-environment can be restored.

Smart enough to know his role, malleable enough to perform it willingly—exactly as Noam Chomsky described the filtering process that keeps the right sort of voice prominent in the system.

The technique still works on some. But it is wearing thin. Every overplayed inversion, every *scummy* dismissal of raw public grief, prepares the ground for sharper identities and clearer grievances against the system itself. Normal people do not remain moderate forever when the machine insists their reality is the problem.

[Iceland Cricket @icelandcricket]

But what about James Anderson?

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

"You are not likely to see Henry Nowak’s words stenciled on a mural. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made a few words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same words, spoken by a white boy dying on a British street, with what can only be described as a determined, institutional silence. That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts, and whose does not."

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@Gurkha_Brigade Jai QOGLR! ⚔️

[Alex @Alex_Paschim]

@Gentleman_Ways Standard 12 Brigade behaviour ♠️

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Overall, the UK’s total global exports have grown faster than those of America, second only to Canada in the G7 over the last decade – as Britain has shifted trade away from Western Europe, the slowest growing continent on earth apart from Antarctica, and towards the world’s most dynamic economies.

Just the 12-nation TPP bloc alone now commands a bigger slice of the global economy than the EU – a share set to double to well over 30pc over the next twenty years.

Since Brexit, the UK has not only avoided the annual £10-15bn contribution to the EU budget – much of it channelled into the salaries of faceless, unelected bureaucrats.

Outside the protectionist racket that is the EU’s customs union, we also no longer send £3-4bn a year to Brussels in tariffs paid by hard-pressed UK shoppers on non-EU imported food, clothing and footwear.

Rejoin the customs union and, as well as losing the 70-plus trade deals we’ve since negotiated, those tariff payments, which hit poor Brits the hardest, would also start again.

A lot has gone wrong since Brexit – and given that lockdown began just months after we formally left, followed by Russia’s war with Ukraine, disentangling its impact isn’t easy.

And it was clearly ridiculous that Boris Johnson’s Tories responded to the June 2016 vote by allowing net immigration to soar above one million, almost three-times its pre-Brexit peak.

🧵6/7

[Joanna Williams @jowilliams293]

Adding VAT onto private school fees looks to be one of the worst education policy decisions of recent decades. Forced closure of good schools, disrupted children's education, and likely to cost taxpayers more than will ever be recuperated. Terrible.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

The trial has concluded, the facts have been confirmed. As the prosecuting counsel put it, Digwa used his “trump card” by alleging he had been the victim of racist abuse when police officers arrived.
DEI has again proved lethal - literally lethal. Henry Nowak, like the victims of Valdo Kalocane, of Axel Rudakubana, of the rape gangs, was failed by a public sector that treats anti-racism as its supreme value.
Unlike the death of George Floyd, his death plainly did reveal institutional bias - a bias deliberately cultivated across state bodies by years of training sessions and seminars.
Where are the protests? Where are the knee-takings? Where are the corporate boycotts?
Sod it, let’s be more modest. Is anyone even calling for an overhaul of the police?

[Giles Udy @GilesUdy]

As a Soviet historian who has spent years writing about the extreme, repressive control Soviet Communism exercised over its unfortunate citizens, I find it really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.

But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid that conclusion.

We have no Gulag or death penalty, admittedly, but what Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to the total control over all those who do not share their worldview.

And like the Soviets of old their tools of control are the same…

- legislation and co-opted courts and civil service to apply it

- the policing of dissent, by hate crime orders, arrests (@glinner), the long term seizure of electronic appliances (@CF_Farrow) to intimidate even those against whom no charges are finally brought.

- controlling free speech (12,000 arrests annually for social media posts in 2025). George Orwell’s ‘thought crime’ persecution has become a reality under Labour.

- framing dissent (the Unite the Kingdom participants) as racism and far right fascism (Stalin started that in the days when Labour was his captive party, the 1930s, and ‘fascist’ has remained their favoured mantra ever since)

- attacking and weakening the family (because the family is so often a place where small ‘c’ conservative values are transmitted down the generations), including the promotion of trans ideology to confuse children in their understanding of the roles of men and women, mothers and fathers. In their eyes women can have penises and ‘heteronormativity’ must be ‘smashed’.

- education, wrested as Marx decreed, from the middle class (private schools and VAT), and used as a vehicle for the state propagandising of children and youth at their most vulnerable age.

… and much more.

In short, I can reach no other conclusion. Under Labour, Britain is becoming a repressive state which is, incredibly, echoing the very characteristics of repression that any former resident of the Soviet Union or its satellite states would recognise today (and they do and tell us so)

And with every opportunity Keir Starmer has to rein that in, he instead doubles down. Month by month things get worse.

This is 2026. I can’t believe what I am seeing. Or what I’m saying. But, yes, it is going on. And only a majority government of either Tories or Reform (and I do have reservations about both) of a coalition of two can reverse this.

… or we are sunk