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1 month ago | 
quillette.com | Ira Wells |Jonathan Kay |Stewart Slater |Cathy Young
HOST: Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, which is usually hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy - BiblioasisThe freedom to read is under attack.
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Jan 16, 2025 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
The Columnists’ Paradox is that the more one writes, the less one need be read. We all have our relatively fixed biases and a reasonably finite store of stories and references, and it does not take too long (longer than my own writing “career” to date though, obviously…) for those to become sufficiently well-known to readers that they can predict with almost perfect accuracy whatever a writer will say.
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Jan 8, 2025 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
“I don’t pay any attention to Elon Musk” opined the politician turned talking head, adopting the de haut en bas tones of Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey. He is, of course, only a politician turned talking head because he lost his seat at the election, which leads to the perhaps surprising implication that the views of a failed politician are more worthy of notice and more likely to be correct than those of possibly the most successful entrepreneur in history.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
Regular readers may remember my struggle a year ago to get an A.I. to produce an image for Christmas. Being every bit as male, cheap and lazy in 2024 as I was in 2023, and having the additional justification that it would be an interesting check on the improvement in our soon-to-be silicon overlords, I decided, a few weeks ago, to have another go. Happily, I can report that this more recent effort did not, like the earlier one, feature a horse-less stagecoach in the middle of the river Thames.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
Whether explicitly or implicitly, every MP believes that out of the roughly 70mn inhabitants of these islands, they are one of the 650 people most suited to ruling it. In this, most, if not all, are wrong.
Before you ascribe this to cynicism or a certain disillusionment with the political process (neither entirely unfair), consider the recent debate on Assisted Dying.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
The part of Boris Johnson’s autobiography which most immediately captured the public imagination was his confession that, in the midst of the pandemic, with fears that the E.U. was hoarding vaccines belonging to Britain, he considered ordering the army to cross the Channel to seize them. Pearls were clutched and sage pundits argued that here was yet another sign that this least serious of politicians was fundamentally unfit for the office with which he had wrongly and briefly been entrusted.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
“I stand here also as a black man” the Foreign Secretary portentously informed the United Nations. While sitting down. “I am a woman” was the overwhelming message of the Chancellor’s glossy video celebrating her position as the nation’s first female Second Lord (Lady?) of the Treasury. Their answer to the late Col. John Boyd’s famous question, “To be or to do?” seems clear, seeking praise for what they are rather than what they might achieve.
Which is probably no bad thing.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
My thoughts as we begin another month:
One of the greatest feats of self-control any of us pull off is when the words “I told you so” cross our synapses but not our lips. This is Labour’s problem with “Clothesgate”. Look at any word cloud about the Prime Minister and after “Boring”, the next most common descriptions are “self-interested”, “slimy”, “hypocrite” and the likes. By taking clothes, spectacles, tickets etc.
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Sep 18, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
Principles are funny things. When they apply to others, we tend to regard them as hard and fast rules, never to be broken; when to ourselves, more as rules of thumb, to be followed up to the point at which they conflict with our other desires. Rare is he who always does what he says he should. This is well-understood – Sir Keir Starmer attracted attention and criticism during the election campaign when he stated that he would not use private health care for a relative if needed.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
thenewconservative.co.uk | Stewart Slater
It has not been an edifying experience. As the country’s carnival of democracy slouches towards its inevitable ending, it is hard to say that it is much better for it. We have learned nothing to make us think well of the political class; they appear, given the amount of obfuscation from both sides, not to think well of the electorate. Britain looks increasingly like a loveless marriage whose partners stay together for the sake of the NHS.
