Freedom News

The spectacular demise of Boris Johnson and what comes next

Boris Johnson’s demise as prime minister was destined to be spectacular. At the start of the year, I wrote that it was likely that he had already done something that would court controversy and so it proved. Ultimately it was his style of denying everything in the first instance and then backtracking, if necessary, that

Boris Johnson: the King Midas who turns everything to shite

No sooner than Boris Johnson tried to look statesmanlike, it all fell apart. Some prime ministers get to retreat from national issues by bursting onto the world stage. He wanted to be world king as a child. It turns out he’s King Midas but instead of turning everything to gold, he turns everything he touches

Why Boris Johnson still isn’t a libertarian

Monday has been dubbed ‘Freedom Day’ by the Prime Minister. Despite being urged to focus his pandemic response on data rather than dates, he set the 19th of July as the date by which the UK would remove most Covid restrictions – regardless of what the virus does. People are being instructed that they must

Incompetence, Cronyism, Repression: One Year On, What is the Covid State?

Last year, I wrote in this blog that the UK government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis was one of ‘callous incompetence’.[1] In hindsight, that was no surprise: their incompetence stemmed from the deliberate underfunding and privatisation of public health services; their callousness was baked-in to the structurally violent principles of Tory ‘austerity’. That analysis