“Right now we have a nominally meritocratic system in which it is illegal for women to lose.”

This may be the key sentence in what could well be one of the most important essays of the decade. Its author is Helen Andrews, and its title is “The Great Feminization.” The essay, which appeared in Compact magazine, is based on a speech Andrews gave at the September 2025 National Conservatism Conference.

As far as I can see, Andrews is relaying the thesis that in 2019 was presented in the book, The Great Feminization: Women as Drivers of Modern Social Change. The book was published as an e-book under the pseudonym of J. Stone. The key event prompting Andrews to write her controversial essay is the ousting of Larry Summers as Harvard’s president.

Andrews, who has a degree in Religious Studies from Yale University, is a conservative commentator and a long-standing critic of feminism. She is the author of the 2021 book, Boomers: The Men and Women who promised Freedom and delivered Disaster.

What Andres argues is that the increasing feminization of America’s key institutions — universities, journalism, the medical and legal professions, and, most crucially, the courts of law — has been bad for the country and its citizens.

Specifically, she contends that the rising dominance of women in institutional leadership positions prioritizes empathy and risk-aversion over meritocracy and traditional competition. It is a thesis for which, unsurprisingly, she has had to take a lot of flak from the liberal mainstream.

The reason Andrews views the feminization of key institutions as a problem is that competition drives our search for the truth. Once you substitute empathy for competition, truth will likely suffer as a result. In one survey, which Andrews cites, 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

Most controversially perhaps, Andrews detects a clear correlation between the feminization of American institutions and the rise of wokeness: “Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” She puts it even more starkly a little further down in her essay: “Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

The staff of The New York Times is now 55 percent female. America’s law schools became majority female in 2016, with its medical schools following suit in 2019. Women now make up 33 percent of America’s judges. Courts, universities, and hospitals matter. Unlike English departments effectively banning certain books or imposing kosher interpretations on students ('It’s sad that English departments are all feminized now, but most people’s daily lives are unaffected by it') — medics, lawyers, and the heads of financial organizations shape how societies govern themselves.

Andrew’s point is thus decidedly not about individuals, but about group dynamics. She writes: “In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men.”

Andrews is quite blunt in how she characterises those group dynamics: “Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutley must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in groups dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies.”

For Andrews, the feminization of institutions includes phenomena such as doctors wearing “pins and lanyards expressing views on controversial issues from gay rights to Gaza.” I recently went to the University of Zurich’s dental clinic, but I’m pleased to say that nobody I saw wore a pin or a lanyard promoting a particular political cause. But I guess there are others where that sort of politicisation is rather common.

But what frightens Andrews the most is the feminization of the law profession, and particularly of the legal system and the courts. “To be blunt,” she claims, “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” That is because, she argues, “the rule of law is not just about writing rules down,” but it “means following them even when they yield an outcome that tugs at your heartstrings or runs contrary to your gut sense of which party is more sympathetic.”

Anyway, here is a podcast from Interesting Times where Andrews debates her controversial arguments with the conservative feminist Leah Libresco Sargeant. The moderator is the NYT’s columnist Ross Douthat.

Three extremely smart and eloquent conservatives debating a controversial issues in a highly intelligent way — where, outside America, does this still happen?

Last week I renewed my subscription to The Atlantic, an American left-of-centre magazine of considerable intellectual stature and influence. What prompted me to press the resubscribe button was an article by Tyler Austin Harper. In it, he explains why he left his tenure-track position at an elite liberal arts college in the state of Maine. He is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he is turning into a star columnist.

Harper has published a brilliant and beautifully written piece on his experience as a professor at an American elite education. Within a fortnight, his essay has provoked a debate on DEI and its detrimental effect on education and wider society. It’s the best piece by far I have read on this topic.

Harper is directing our attention to some of the hypocrisies and spinelessness of the progressive educational establishment. For nearly a decade, he contends, this establishment has promoted an agenda causing damage to the reputation of higher education among the wider public.

Harper views himself as a democratic socialist. He laments that race and ethnicity now carry much greater weight than class among progressive academics. He is not opposed to affirmative action per se, but he wants to see it reformed. Unlike progressives obsessing over DEI issues, he is not turning a blind eye to academic support staff having to exist on low pay and being exposed to bad working conditions.

And he provides a concrete example on how he thinks hirings and admissions need to be handled in future: if two candidates — one privileged and polished, the other from a lower-class or minority background and unpolished — compete for a job or a place of study, with both displaying roughly similar qualities, then the latter candidate should get the call. But he doesn’t want DEI to trump all other considerations. He wants competence and qualification being placed back at the centre of staff hirings and student admissions.

Most of all, he believes in the original mission of of the liberal arts and the education they have traditionally provided to the benefit of the nation — but which, in recent times, have descended into credentialist bureaucracies.

Having worked in a similar environment to Harper’s, I pretty much agree with his assessment. Where I worked from 2005 to 2021, student admissions were certainly guided by the principle he recommends (see above). But there were also selections made on the basis of preferentiality, which reflected the luxury beliefs of progressive academics. None of those decisions, at least in my experience, worked out in favour of the students concerned.

In the podcast posted below, Harper discusses the arguments of his piece in The Atlantic with Glenn Loury (an economist at Bown University) and John McWorther (a linguist at Columbia University). None of those three scholars has any time for those white critics of DEI who worry that the progressive onslaught on higher education might end the nepotism of legacy and other types of admissions reflecting the advantages of wealth.

This is the best exchange on the topic of DEI and its impact on higher education I have come across so far.

Long live the rejuvenated & fearless liberal arts.

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I find particularly interesting what Stock says on the “disconnect” between his (sometimes co-authored) books and his journal articles. The journal articles are grounded in hard core CRT (Critical Race Theory), which, contrary to its followers’ claim, is not a scientific theory, or a set of hypotheses, but a political ideology aimed at changing educational institutions, including the liberal ethos that used to underpin research and teaching conducted at western universities.

In contrast to his journal articles, Arday’s books are written in a chatty style centred on his own biographical experience. But the argument he seeks to advance is the same as in the journal articles, even though it is presented in a different guise. A more flowery language and a more conciliatory tone are used to spread to same message.

I have read one of Arday’s journal articles. It boils down to a highly repetitive, jargon-ridden summary of CRT theory, followed by a confirmation of the theory (which is treated as absolute truth, not as a set of hypotheses to further knowledge) with an autobiographical method — two or three examples of Arday’s experience as a Black academic.

What’s missing in the conversation between Stock and Sayers is a spotlight on the Oxbridge cosmos and its culture, and how it has changed since with the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement. This would be important, as it forms part of the enabling conditions.

More detailed comment, based on some of my experience with the other place that is not Cambridge, to follow…

Jonathan Haidt is one of America’s great intellectuals. But that is not all. If you want to get an idea about his standing in the scholarly community, you can go to Google Scholars to find out what he has published. He’s one of the most-cited social scientists of his generation, so he doesn’t belong to the podcasts-only club of public intellectuals. He’s got some scholarly and analytical hinterland to draw on. He probably first became known to a larger public with his book The Righteous Mind: Why good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012).

And now his 2024 book “The Anxious Generation: How the great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”, has become a global bestseller. In this work, he expressed his strong support for laws preventing children under age 16 from accessing social media content (including TikTok and Instagram, but particularly providers of pornographic material). If I had to describe Haidt’s normative perspective, I would say that he is a libertarian on free speech and a social conservative on children’s use of social media.

In the interview below with Unherd, Haidt defends his position as Freddie Sayers bombards him with a series of challenging questions. Here are a couple of points Haidt makes in the course of his conversation with Sayers:

• On the question of why the conservative right in the UK has responded much more critically to attempts to restrict children’s access to social media: Unlike the UK (during the pandemic, and particularly under Keir Starmer), the US has seen no state-led attempts to police what people can say on social media. Freedom of speech is protected through the American Constitution (First Amendment). Haidt believes that the content of social media posts should not be censored, except where they break the law (e.g. inciting to violence, terrorist acts). But that the big tech companies should not be allowed to generate a generation of young social media addicts.

• What he advoces are “design-based restrictions” that prevent children from accessing social media. This is an area where Australia has become the pioneer. Two years ago, its parliament passed the so-called Online Safety Amendment Act, requiring platforms to block under-16 users. But companies are not allowed to use goverment id for verification purposes. At the moment they use face scans, which, while not perfect, are constantly improving. This has created what Haidt calls “friction” for under-16-year olds accessing certain platforms, by which he means that they get sidetracked when trying to access problematic material. As a result, social media use among Australian children has gone down by 40 per cent.

• As a consequence, and in anticipation of similar legislative moves being in the offing, companies outside Australia (including Apple and others in the US) have started to develop better identification tools to verify children’s age. The tools are getting better and less intrusive.

• There is a great deal of support among US parents, across the political spectrum for an Australian-style solution. At the moment, this is not the case: “Right now”, Haid notes, “every kid can check any porn site they want while they are waiting for the elevator.” Childhood had “become swipin through videos,” with research showing that attention spans and IQs are going down. Most parents don’t want their children to be on TikTok and Instagram talking to complete strangers.

• Haidt strongly supports families, rather than the state, being responsible for their kids. The problem, he argues, is that most adults find it hard to keep their kids from these sites. He offers the impressive example of affluent residents of Sillicon Valley, individuals who are highly accomplished tech users. Feeling powerless, many now send their children to tech-free schools.

• In other words, the social media epidemic now affects children from poorer families much more than children from better-off families, as the latter are more likely to have the means to protect them. Like with junk food or declining linguistic standards in innercity schools, there is a class dimension to this. It’s why Haidt thinks that parents need help “in the presence of predatory companies”, who have “hired the best psychologists whose goal is to get your child addicted to their stuff.”

• In the US even the Republicans, (JD Vance) and even Elon Musk of all people, are now broadly supportive of legislation restricting children’s social media use — as long as it’s about limiting access rather than proscribing content. Very interesting is Haidt’s point on the impact of American federalism has on legislation in this area: While Congress has effectively been bought by the big tech companies, more than 40 state govrnments have introduced protective legislation.

• On Freddie Sayers point that the tech companies are the drivers of the American economy, and that this makes it hard to restrict them through legislation, Haidt’s reply is that many Americans now see these companies as highly problematic (JD Vance chief among them). So, he argues, a hit to their stocks would hardly amount to a hit to the American economy as a whole.

• “It can’t be good for the American economy to make our children stupider and stupider and sicker and sicker every year. That can’t be a growth strategy. While China is able to say ‘our tictoc is healthy’. China is able to regulate.” Tech companies have become more powerful than governments. He also finds fault with threatening countries with tariffs that wish to pass what he calls “child-friendly regulations” for social media use.

• Haidt concludes with a plea to conservatives (whom he considers the “canaries in the cole mine” when it comes to protecting the integrity of the family) and even libertarians: get behind the protection side of the argument, and continue to criticise attempt at censoring content.

What you see in me is a European who does not believe in Jean Monnet and certainly not in Walter Hallstein, in other words a European who has always said that political issues must be decided politically. The belief that the EU is like a bicycle that either rolls or falls over is hair-raising nonsense.

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Looking hard for another podcast on the state of the US after Independence, I didn’d find anything recent that can match the talks by Victor Davis Hansen and Jill Lepore, respectively, in terms of substance and inspiration. But then I stumbled upon the following discussion on Triggonometry. The interview, which appeared in 2025, features the journalist, author and news entrepreneur Richard Miniter. I think it is fantastic, in the sense of: bold, provocative, learned, and inspirational.

Miniter offers an interesting take on both the US and the world in general. Two of his suggestions strike me as particularly pertinent.

• On HISTORY AND MIGRATION: How networks of migration from the British Isles, which started way before American Independence (1776), shaped culture and society in the US. Here Miniter offers an insight normally confined to the books of specialist historians of migration: migrants don’t move from country A to country B, but they move as part of cultural networks. As he puts it: All migration is the move of social networks, and the ideas that move with those networks.

  He argues that this explains, among other things, why different regions developed different characteristics depending on where in Britain the migrants hailed from. Of particular significance were the religious denominations that emerged from the English Civil War, roughly a century after the Reformation. Drawing on a famous book by the historian David Hacket Fischer (the deails of which are indicated below), here Miniter distinguishes between four “religious utopias”. They were transplanted from Britain to the US over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Each of these migratory communities came with different moral codes and expectations. They settled in different parts of the US, shaping the society and politics of their new regional environment.

  Miniter goes so far as to explain the election of Trump by reference to those networks and their moral values, which I think is stretching it a bit.

  As with most models, there is a danger of over-determinism here, as the history of a country cannot be reduced to the origins of its inhabitants in particular networks of migration. Migrants are also shaped by their new environment, including many contingent factors, plus they are also individuals rather than just members of a cultural network. But the model is useful nevertheless, particularly as we are talking about the first wave of migration to the US. Plus Miniter is a great narrator.

• On THE NEW CLASS WAR IN THE WEST. Despite its obvious reductionism, this is truly interesting. In the new class war it is not workers and the capitalists that are pitted against each other, as classical Marxism would have predicted. Nor is it the haves and the have-nots, the natives and the newly arrived, or the educated and uneducated, the rich and the poor that face each other in the public arena. Instead, in this new class war, the “accountable class” faces the “unaccountable” class. While the former class is judged by people other than themselves or their peers on what they can provide, deliver or otherwise achieve in terms of an outcome that benefits others (e.g. customers or tax-paying citizens), the unaccountable class is judged only by themselves and their peers. When it comes to assessing their professional performance, they tend to be their own judge and jury.

  Miniter makes two points that are eminently worth discussing. Firstly, he argues that while the US witnesses a class war between the accountable and the unaccoutable class (manifest, for example, in the election of Donals Trump, and the political initiatives of Elon Musk against state bureaucracy), in Europe the unaccountable class (in the shape of the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy and the politicians, lobbyists and the academic campus class who represent their interests) has achieved predominance. This explains, among other things, why Europe’s establishment cannot see anything wrong with media laws restricting the freedom of expression. That’s because the unaccountable class is not used to being judged by people from outside their own milieu, or in any case wants to restrict the possibility that they are. Remember Vance’s Munich speech and the dismay it provoked among the assembled members of and lobbyists for the unaccountable class?

  Secondly, Miniter argues that the political left everywhere has made it their business to represent the unaccountable class whose reproduction relies on being assessed by its own members rather than by outsiders (e.g. tax-paying citizens or other paying customers), which in turn explains the massive expansion of the state and of bureaucratic regulation almost everywhere in the western world. The political left knows that their success at the ballot box relies on the expansion of the unaccountable class, which is why it fears anyone who dares to declare war on it. “The unaccountable live in fear of accountability, and it’s terrifying.”

Finally, towards the end of the discussion, Miniter offers two suggestions for further reading. The first is David Hacket Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1992), which informed Miniter in his take on how migratory cultures shape US politics to this day. The second is Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (1998) by the political scientists turned political anthropologist James C. Scott. I don’t know the first of those two books, so I have just ordered it. But I do know what is Scott’s most famous book, which has exerted a considerable influence on my own thinking.

I hope you will enjoy the interview with Richard Miniter, which is provided by the star-studded guys from Triggernometry.

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In the spirit of intellectual pluralism and to gain a sense of perspective, I want to complement this with an equally influential voice who, without being a progressive radical, sits on the left of the political spectrum. Jill Lepore is a Professor of American History at Harvard and a Pulitzer Prize winning author who is also a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Lepore is not what academic historians would call a historians’ historian - by which they mean someone who feels most comfortable engaging in relatively narrow scholarly debates and topics, and whose publicaitons are attractive to a confined milieu of experts - but something else altogether. With her books reaching millions of educated readers, she’s a public historian in the true sense of the word.

Also, and remarkably for someone who writes so intriguingly about modern American history, Lepore’s formal degrees were in Law and English rather than in history. Indeed, the first books she published were works of fiction. Outside of her academic pursuits, she likes to raise sheep and read poetry, so there is at least some affinity with David Victor Hanson, who, when he doesn’t write or read, takes care of his farm.

Lepore’s latest major works are These Truths and We the People. Whereas the first offers an account of modern American history, the latter examines the American Constitution. In both these works Lepore delivers narrative history at its entertaining and analytical best.

In the Bloomberg Podcast I’m posting below, she offers a few insights into her thinking, including the following:

• Unlike David Victor Hanson, who is an “originalist” when it comes to constitution, Lepore advocates a more dynamic interpretation, seeing it as a living document. It’s one of the reasons she objects to the term “founding fathers”. It’s not that she denies that the men who congregated in Philadelphia achieved something extraordinary. But she insists that they lived in a era radically different from our own.

• What she laments is that the hurdles for amending the American Constitution have become so high as to be impossible to overcome: a 2/3 supermajority is needed in both houses before anything can be changed. As a result, the Constitution has been amended only seventeen times since its ratification was completed in 1788.

• Lepore reminds us that the Constitution that was worked out in Philadelphia in 1787 was the result of a “very trenuously fought compromise”. The reasction of the then 13 American states proves her point, as over 200 amendments were proposed when the content of the Constitution became known.

• When confronted with this degree of opposition, the leading Federalists begged the sceptics “to ratify now, amend later”. But once the ink was dry on the ratification document, they found it hard to remember their plea. It’s what anti-Federalists such as “Federal Farmer” had been suspecting would happen.

• The preamble to the American Constitution opens with the words “We the People”. What Lepore argues in her book is that the American establishment, irrespective of their party affiliation, had not kept that promise. For her, the US constitution is not the possession of the Supreme Court, the Senate or the President.

• Yet the “distortion of the separation of powers” which Lepore identifies, along with a tendency towards “presidentialism”, didn’t start with Trump but reaches back to the presidencies of Clinton, George W. Bush and even Obama. But, in her view, the sitution grew considerably worse under Trump, who she argues threatens the rule of law.

Final thoughts of a broader kind:

The great thing about historians and public intellectuals worth their salt is that you don’t need to agree with them to draw great benefit from the products of their labour.

As long as Americans can contest the meaning and state of their Constitution, their nation is in rude health. It is only when they become indifferent to it that the nation will get into trouble.

Those who read Lepore’s books on modern American history, then complement it with a few other works just for good measure, will realise that many of the journalists who either praise or condemn the US without reservation have never consulted the American Constitution, let alone the Federalist Papers.

How did the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the American Constitution (1787) define and establish America as a unique national republic?

Taking this question as the starting point, Hanson in this interview traces the United States’ development in relation to some of the key ideas, concepts and institutions enshrined in her founding documents.

A very learned and clever conservative who’s not afraid to speak his mind, Hanson sketches the historical context in which America became an independent republic, and comments on some of the intentions of those who led the fight for indepenence.

His argument, in a nutshell, is that the founders’ wisdom, and particularly the Federalists’ constitutional wisdom, enabled America to survive and prosper as a nation.

Along the way, he explains the difference between the ancient notion of “freedom” and the modern idea of “liberty”; why Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson were obsessed with the Roman Republic; why he agrees with Antonin Scalia on the status of the Bill of Rights relative to the division of powers; why he thinks the constitution is worth emulating in the spirit of the ancient authors; and why Patrik Deneen and his post-liberal allies have gone too far in their calls to uproot the established constitutional arrangement.

To me, this interview also shows another reason why powerful founding charters often play such a crucial role in the life of a modern nation: because they are, inevitably, controversial internally (as both the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the American Constitution of 1787 were since their inception), and hence in need to constant re-evaluation, they fuel the national debate. They integrate not despite, but cause of, their contested nature.

An uncontested nation, one which prompts but indifference, is already on its way out. To put the same argument with reference to a thought famously expressed by the French scholar Ernest Renan in 1882. Even though nations depend for their continued existence on a rich arsenal of historical memories, they rely, in the final analysis, on a daily plebiscite.

I should like to introduce a new weekly format.

It is called TALK OF THE WEEK.

As of today this format will replace my THREE PICKS OF THE WEEK.

TALK OF THE WEEK will consist of either a substantial interview, lecture or discussion involving several participants. They will focus on a particular topic or set of closely related topics. Its approximate length will be around 60 minutes.

As a broad rule, TALK OF THE WEEK will feature public intellectuals or scholars who seek to illuminate the present using a historical lens: not because they think the past can tell us how we have to think or act, but because they believe it can inspire debate on some of the most pressing issues of the day.

What will guide my selection is solely the educational substance of the content and the originality of the arguments advanced by the participants. Overall, liberal-conservative and conservative voices may get more airtime in TALK OF THE WEEK, but not exclusively. There are some very important left-wing voices out there who deserve to be heard.

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What prompted me to make the change from THREE PICKS OF THE WEEK to TALK OF THE WEEK is my conviction that less is often more. Epecially in today’s social-media world of massive information overflow.

The best teachers I had at university were not the ones who provided me with the most comprehensive reading lists, but the ones who knew how to select wisely. This may sound rather patronising and old school, but I can assure you it is not meant that way. And if it were, it would be with the very best of intentions…

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I start the new format with an interview in which Victor Davis Hanson - a historian of the ancient world who is also a farmer, a best-seeling author, and a clever conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke — disucsses the state of the US in light of its founding documents.

I hope you will enjoy TALK OF THE WEEK.

Thank you for your continued support.

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What options does a child have who, having finally flown the nest at the mature age of 32, fails to get a grip on life?

Life being notoriously demanding, the child may have but two genuine options at its disposal. He can either engage in some critical soul-searching before redoubling its efforts to make a living on his o…

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‘I get it, I feel it’.

This was one of the soundbites that the current British PM used in his attempt to rescue his premiership after his party had lost 1,500 council seats to Reform UK and around 400 to the Green Party. With his position having been challenged by over 80 Labour MPs and three members of his own cabinet, he is now, objectively speaking, on political life support. Only the lack of an acceptable alternative can save him. For now.

Another soundbite Keir Starmer used in his reset speech, which he held before a select group of supporters and journalists, went like this: “The election results last week were tough. Very tough. We lost some brilliant Labour representatives. That hurts. And it should hurt.”

He also found words for the working-class voters who - especially in Wales and in the North of England — deserted Labour in droves to vote for Reform UK. What was new was less their desertion of the party their families had supported, often for generations, but that this now happens at the level of England’s councils, as well. So, here’s what he had to say about his party’s loyal working-class following:

“But for the British people, tired of a status quo that has failed them, change cannot come quickly enough. And truth be told, I’m not sure that they believe that we care. I’m not sure they believe that we see their lives. That’s tough to say. When you come from a working-class background like me, it’s hard to hear that. Because I do know what it’s like to struggle and to strive. But what I take from it is that I’ve spent too much time talking about what I am doing for working people, and not enough time talking about why or who I stand for.”

Even The Guardian was critical of Starmer’s performance, noting that what he had come up with was too little, too late. “It was notable”, the left-liberal paper observed, “that the introductory speech by the 2024-intake MP Jade Botterill packed more genuine-seeming emotion into three minutes than Starmer did in nearly 20.”

There is one thing in particular, though, that should worry the Starmerites. It’s that this north London human rights lawyer doesn’t seem to understand how the constitution of Britain’s parliamentary democracy works. If your MPs turn against their own PM - and there are now over 90, to go by the latest reports - then he has to resign to make the constitution work. It’s simply not up to the party members to decide on the political fate of their PM. As Tom Harris put it a few hours ago: “Sir Keir Starmer’s defiant refusal to step aside as Prime Minister speaks volumes of his own weak grasp on political realities. It also says much about who schooled him in the ins and outs of the British constitution.”

But watch and listen for yourselves. The three clips below are

• Starmer’s speech

• A comment on his speech by Andrew Neil

• A comment on his speech by Maurice Glasman (intellectual leader of Blue Labour).

1. Starmer’s speech to his own MPs

2. Andrew Neil on Times News

3. Maurice Glasman (Blue Labour) on Times Politics

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But for once, Wales may hold the key. When historians and political pundits are assessing the UK’s political landscape in a few years time, they may see the the nation in the midwest of Great Britain as the trailblazer for a general turn away from the political arrangements of old, and towards something new, as yet unknown. With people who are motivated, not by rational expectations but by the conviction that change, of almost any kind, is needed. Or as one of the Welsh people interviewed by the Spectator’s podcast crew put it: “Nigel Farage is probably a bit of a dick. But he’s a useful dick.”

In Wales, Labour hasn’t lost a single national election since 1922. As late as 2024, Labour was looking strong in Wales, thanks, in large part, to the disintegration of the Tory vote. But now, as everyone in Wales seems to either hope or fear, that history is coming to an end. Opinion polls suggest that the Reform Party (who promise to be the ordinary men and women’s new advocates) and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists (who promose to deliver full national independence), are the frontrunners, with Labour (who promise more of the same) trailing far behind.

In a country in which many people are poor and lack prospects, Labour have endeavoured to realise their luxury beliefs, such as imposing 20 mph speed limits, increasing the size of the Welsh parliament from 60 to 96 seats (at a cost of 120 £million), enabling pro-Palestine demonstrations, and ensuring that illegal immigrants are given preference when it comes to social housing.

And now, on top of all this out-of-touch progressivism, there is PM Keir Starmer and his perpetual government crisis in Whitehall putting a dent on Labour’s prospects in Wales. Even left-leaning pundits say it would be a miracle if Labour could emerge from this unscathed.

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So here are are three podcasts on the forthcoming elections in Wales from different new outlets…

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And a forth one, my favourite, featuring the great Richard Burton talking about pride and the Welsh working class of his youth. And generally displaying the beauty of the English language.

“Looking down on the pharmacist’s daughter from below.”

This is how the radical left-wing MP, Diane Abbott, who became an Independent after being kicked out of the Labour Party, put it in the House of Commons. And for once, Abbott posed the decisive question, the one t…

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