I went to the service of the Order of St Michael and St George and accidentally discovered a bit of espionage history. Now The Telegraph has written about what Oleg Gordievsky, CMG was doing in Godalming. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05...

Canadian doctor assesses a man for 'MAiD' in the car park of a coffee shop, then drives him to a morgue, where he kills him. The man had inflammatory bowel disease and a history of mental illness. The regulator rules that he can continue to practise. nationalpost.com/news/ontario...

What’s in a pronoun? | A video featuring Joshua Rozenberg and Michael Foran. Michael Foran speaks to Joshua Rozenberg about 'Sex, Gender Identity, and the Law' 📚 https://cup.org/4tLfSIj #humanrights

I guess thank you university email for sending peer review requests to the spam folder ???

Happy Victoria Day!

Glad to co-author this important paper with the great Geoff Sigalet and Kerry Sun on the overreach of judges under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with a foreword by the Honourable Jack Major, former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. macdonaldlaurier.ca/unseating-re...

Glad to co-author this important paper with the great Geoff Sigalet and Kerry Sun on the overreach of judges under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with a foreword by the Honourable Jack Major, former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. macdonaldlaurier.ca/unseating-re...

Congratulations to the Benn family, as Viscount Stansgate returns to the Lords on a life peerage!

Starmtroopers: Starmer can't be bothered to deal with child sex abuse because he is busy dealing with the economy (he is dealing with neither).

Having bounced around academia and politics, the best advice I can give is to never take advice from someone who would never, ever vote for you.

When there is a strong two party system promoters of PR say that we need to have PR to break the two party duopoly. When there is a fragmented party system promoters of PR say that we need PR to reflect the reality of the party system. It is an unfalsifiable position!

Catherine West has more spine than the entire cabinet.

Drawing a black judge who grew up in the segregated American South as a Klansman is a Choice.

If my backup plan for politics is civil war I would make sure my side is the side with lots of guns and people who know how to use them.

As this site's unofficial eeyore, I can tell you: Rs see the grey hair at No Kings rallies, and the collapse of BLM, and are confident that any liberal protests will be ineffective (waving signs around) or will backfire (violence against Rs)

Bluesky is a bit tricky because it's a cesspool but there are about ten people I respect who poast here so I can't quit yet.

I personally think Labour peeps ought to panic more about their own party and less about how the Tories are allegedly doing worse which isn't true anyway.

I mean your 2nd biggest city is named after the worst Oxford college so

Until this month, the House of Lords decided peerage claims. In this month's issue of The Critic I look at how the fourth baron Moynihan re-entered Parliament by proving that one Filipino boy was illegitimate and another was not his drug dealing half-brother’s son. thecritic.co.uk/issues/may-2...

She is better than Julie Payette. Then what? My write-up on Louise Arbour, Canada's next governor general. thehub.ca/2026/05/05/l...

But it also did facilitate the rise of a diversity consultant class that inevitably included grifters. It also injected some "fringe" ideas about proper terminology, causal mechanisms, and the like into the mainstream.

Unpopular opinion: the non-grifter academics who study "woke culture" are correct to understand these dynamics in terms of cultural capital, i.e., the use of stigmatization around (apparent) norms transgression as means of opportunity hoarding.

The number of antisemites this brought out of the woodwork is vile. To be clear, if you think anything Israel does justifies stabbing Jews in Britain, you're the same scum who think 9/11 justifies fire-bombing mosques, or Channel crossings justifies burning asylum hotels.

It's been clear where this has been going since one started to detect rising antisemitism - a comment here, a post there - in maybe 2013 or 2014. The evil then metastasised continously downwards and outwards. That's how it works. How it always works. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c3...

Utterly vile set of quotes, which even this example can't quite show the extent of. And this is someone who makes 'soft animal toys' for a living...

Can YOU help Fund A Farage? Every little helps, even if you can only spare ten grand... thecritic.co.uk/nige...

It was anachronistic to say the least, but was it really worse than Mone, Mandelson and all the other snouts in the trough? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Thinking of colleagues hounded out of academia for saying perfectly normal things; and this nasty man.

Yesterday saw the abolition (for now) of the House of Lords' last remaining judicial function, namely that of determining peerage claims.

Banning race-based gerrymandering is worse than involuntary sterilisation or race-based internment without trial. American law schools are truly a wonderland.

I mean, can you say about this? On a moral and ethical level it's shameful stuff Big 'let's not forget about the real victims' energy.

Farewell to arms 🫡

Academics instinctively siding with management because they don't like the person management's kicked around is why academics get walked over.

The Scottish Parliament, which has no lords, has rejected assisted suicide. The Welsh Senedd, which has no lords, has rejected assisted suicide. David Lammy, who is not a lord, has withheld royal assent to the Isle of Man assisted suicide legislation.

The Magnificient Seven.

Many supporters of the bill have said that assisted suicide wouldn't come at the expense of good palliative care. Now that assisted suicide is dead - having been rejected by the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd, and Westminster - I hope we can focus on improving palliative care.

Lord Falconer having withdrawn his motion to commit the assisted suicide bill to committee, the bill is dead.

Mark Elliott: "to argue that it is incumbent on the House of Lords to wave through Bills approved by the Commons, and that for it to do anything else is unconstitutional or undemocratic, is very far wide of the mark." publiclawforeveryone.com/2026/04/24/t...

It's not in the manifesto. It doesn't fall under the Parliament Acts. What is the constitutional outrage here, exactly? Answers on the back of a postcard (it isn't).

It's a good day to bury the Leadbeater-Falconer Bill once and for all!

Happy St George’s Day from the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution! We’ve got a lot of be proud of and a lot to look forward to, here in the best country in the world 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

I think Peter (Lord) Hennesey is the first political scientist to become a Knight of the Garter.

As an early Starmer hater, I feel vindicated. Not that apologies will be forthcoming from those who got him wrong.

Does anyone know whether OperaShare has a replacement?

Yeah, the real take-away from this para is that Ruth Ginsburg was an originalist.

The Conversation was/is really popular for op-eds in Asian newspapers: Academic credibility and I assume very cheap syndication for subscribing papers. I think some Australian websites also republish them. It's probably a neoliberal answer to China Daily, perhaps. Hence the cheapness.

The Conversation has always been weird to me. A lot of the stuff is just not very good punditry whose value proposition is *the author has an university affiliation*; and the audience is tiny compared to what you can get in a mainstream outlet. Also, they don't pay.

Fulford was a lord justice of appeal.

Even as someone who supports the principle of assisted dying I find this type of political manoeuvring abhorrent and dangerous (and it’s not just limited to assisted dying). Disagreements are an opportunity to refine and fix blind spots, dismissing it out of hand leads to unintended victims.