Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
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The head of America’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (Doge) has written to all federal workers in the US asking them to explain in a brief email what they did last week. The exercise is intended to take no more than five minutes but has already lead to howls from many employees. How could anyone expect
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In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK. It has picked up this idea despite it being so idiotic that it was even rejected by the last Conservative government. That well-known theologian Angela Rayner has decided to set up a council to look
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A poll out this week found that only 41 per cent of those aged 18 to 27 are proud to be British. Frankly I’m surprised the figure is that high. After all, if you add together the immigration of recent decades and the concerted effort to demoralise the population that has gone on, that is
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The new administration in Washington has somewhat startled its critics by issuing a blizzard of executive orders during its opening weeks in office. So far the reaction from the American left might be summed up by the sentiment: ‘That’s not fair – it’s only us that are allowed to do things when we are in
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How hard is your soft power? According to David Lammy, Britain’s soft power is so strong and underrated that he has decided to set up a ‘soft power council’ to show just how hard we are. Put aside such details as waste and futility for a second. Surely there is something rather embarrassing about boasting
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Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It is easier to capture in a cartoon than in prose but it looks something like this. A chap tries to make a leap across a canyon, falls ever so slightly short and as a result
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What’s in a word? ‘Equality’. ‘Equity’. It’s the sort of thing that Channel 4 newsreaders find impossible to understand. Surely they’re the same thing, aren’t they? And even if they aren’t then what kind of pedant would keep trying to point it out? What difference does it make anyway? Well, quite a lot. Potentially the
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47 min listen
This week: what does justice look like for the victims of the grooming gangs?In the cover piece for the magazine, Douglas Murray writes about the conspiracy of silence on the grooming gangs and offers his view on what justice should look like for the perpetrators. He also encourages the government to take a step back
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It is always interesting to watch a dam burst. In the past week, as Elon Musk and other prominent Americans discovered the British ‘grooming gang’ scandal, British politics has suddenly had to face up to something it has spent a quarter of a century trying to ignore. One would hope that the claim that thousands
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34 min listen
Douglas Murray, Spectator columnist, joins Americano host and Spectator deputy editor Freddy Gray. This week, Home Office Minister Jess Phillips rejected Oldham Council’s request for a government-led inquiry into the horrific scandal of grooming gangs in dozens of UK cities. Her decision has led to real backlash – with X owner Elon Musk calling for
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We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 4: Douglas Murray’s article from August about the UK riots. As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote. And with that suspicion comes the inevitable sense of déjà-vu. Because
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It is that time of year when people in churches across the land have to face the difficult question of how to read scripture out loud. I count myself a bit of an expert in this, not because I have had to do it many times for some 35 years, but because I have seen
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I feel some sympathy for the British royal family because of the ghastly people they are forced to meet. The late Queen had to greet Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe. This week the King and Prince and Princess of Wales had to meet the Emir of Qatar and his wife. True
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It is always interesting to watch the debates that roil a nation. So far as I can see, the current debate in parliament mainly consists of trying to work out whether the NHS is competent enough to kill people or not. This week one of our greatest Home Office ministers – Jess Phillips MP –
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I mentioned some weeks ago that one of the great points of interest – not to say enjoyment – in our era will be seeing how Keir Starmer’s government copes with the incoming Donald Trump administration in Washington. It is fair to say that many Labour MPs, not to mention the mayor of London (who
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28 min listen
As Donald Trump selects his new cabinet, Elon Musk has been chosen to head up the new efficiency department. Douglas Murray, Spectator columnist, joins Americano host Freddy Gray to discuss. How will their relationship shape Trump’s presidency? What will Musk’s ownership of X, formerly Twitter, mean for free speech? And will their newfound friendship last
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On 13 July this year, an assassin’s bullet grazed the ear of Donald Trump as he turned his head on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania. The whole world saw it and his response: ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ For Elon Musk, this was not just a news event but a galvanising and clarifying moment. He immediately posted a
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We hear a lot about white supremacy these days. But for some reason we rarely hear about black supremacy. I wonder why? There’s a lot more of it around. For Butler, describing someone as white or as trying to be white is clearly a great insult While it is vanishingly difficult to find an overt
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There are certain rules in British public life that are worth noting. Such as this one: if someone is killed by a jihadist or someone who could plausibly be connected to immigration in any way, the British public will not be informed of the possible motive – or at least not until it becomes impossible
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Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of 7 October, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to
