Officialdom is using the coronavirus to find fresh pretexts to expand its authority. Matthew B. Crawford, writing in Unherd, observes how political and aesthetic preferences have become moralized in safety talk. As some teenaged mountain bikers in California discovered, bureaucrats now claim a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness to sweep aside whole domains of human activity.

Yay Brexit!
Brendan O’Neill in Spiked enthuses that Brexit is superior to just about anything else in the world. “There should be street parties” on the 10th anniversary of the popular vote to withdraw from the EU, he writes. “Let the bells peal for that momentous day when in our millions we said No to globalism.” The continuing surfeit of saboteurs and naysayers among Britain’s “idiot elites”, O’Neill snorts, are gripped by Brexit Derangement Syndrome.


