Dr James Allan

Around the world conservative politicians who take the fight to the woke Left are winning at the ballot box. So why are the British and Australian conservative parties sitting out the culture wars and getting thumped?

Finally skewered by his enemies, Boris's real failure was to have squandered an 80-seat Conservative majority on Covid authoritarianism and green socialism, leaving even his supporters disenchanted.

After reading the Lockdown Files, Dr. James Allan says he is still seething mad at what the political class did to us. "And they did it to us without taking a pay cut."

Western universities have become political monocultures where anyone with Right-of-centre views has learned to go through the progressive motions and keep their forbidden thoughts to themselves, says Prof. James Allan.

When you bend the truth for the greater good, in the long term this is a loser strategy, because truth will out, your credibility plummets, and you’re worse off than if you’d admitted your doubts at the start.

The new Bill of Rights is a disappointment. It won't rein in the judges, just empower British ones at the expense of European ones. It does little about the undermining of parliamentary sovereignty by the lawyerly caste.

Even those who support abortion should recognise that Roe v Wade was a poor legal decision and the US Supreme Court would be right to take the matter away from unelected judges and return it to the democratic process.

by James Allan Trafalgar Square: Almost completely deserted As a convinced lockdown sceptic since near on the start of this pandemic (see my Spectator Australia columns this past year), in November of last year I put my money where my mouth is. My wife and I hadn’t seen our two adult kids in a year. Both of them live and work in London. If we could, we were going to leave Australia (which has so few COVID-19 deaths, still under one thousand, that the virus is statistically an insignificant cause of death for the population at large) and head to London, epicentre of what the Boris Government portrays as this scary, dangerous virus of plague-like lethality. Some friends thought we were crazy, others crazy brave. The first thing readers need to know is that Australia’s supposedly right-of-centre Government has become so heavy-handed, dismissive of civil liberties and authoritarian that it doesn’t allow citizens – yes, Australian citizens – to leave the country without special permission. You have to apply to some officious bureaucrat and beg to be allowed to leave. (Unless you’re an important politician of course. ‘We’re all in it together’ is false on every level, including who is and is not actually forced to stay in Australia.) Still, when needs must I can grovel with the best of...