Tag: London

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Ed Brandon
A History of London County Lunatic Asylums & Mental Hospitals
Pen and Sword History, 2022

Some of the news aggregators I watch online show clips from TikTok, and the fascination of watching this menagerie of psychological dysfunction reminded me of something I read or heard long ago. It seems that the Victorians in England would pay a penny to enter lunatic asylums, where they would watch the unfortunate inmates grimace and cavort for their entertainment in those pre-cinematic times. I never bothered to confirm this over the years, but always had a hankering to get hold of a decent history of English asylums. (more…)

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Sign from the protests in Epping.

A Very Civil War

With Britain inching closer to mass civil unrest, it is worth dusting off the only sensible thing 1990s Conservative Prime Minister John Major ever said. Major was placed in Downing Street to placate a Tory Party – and a seething public – after Margaret Thatcher was seen to have gone beyond her brief and started actually acting like a Conservative. (more…)

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This is London; and there are no fields. Only fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.
-Martin Amis, London Fields
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The Albert Memorial in London. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

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A Tale of Two Cities

It’s always instructive to compare the respective fortunes of England and France, those old enemies. And what better way than to follow the lead of Charles Dickens, take the cultural temperature of both London and Paris, and so tell a tale of two cities? We’ll start with my hometown. (more…)

Tschabalala Self’s Lady in Blue, coming soon to Trafalgar Square. (Image from Ewan C. Forbes on Twitter/X)

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New Model Irish Citizen Army

Éire may not seem the concern of the Union Jackal, but we would all like to see a united Ireland, one country without borders and troubles. Unfortunately, Ireland already has no effective border with her sister to the north, and its troubles are due neither to the British nor the Irish Republican Army, but self-willed via its importation of the Third World. Many of the immigrants who come ashore on England’s Kent coast use the country merely as a travelator to get them to Northern Ireland. (more…)

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English football fans in Europe during the 1980s and ‘90s were not ambassadors either for the British game or Britain itself. Increasingly cheap flights across Europe meant that vast numbers of fat, pasty, sweaty, bald or balding men were able to enjoy spoiling the afternoons of those wishing to use cafés and bars in Portugal, or France, or Malta.

Whenever England or a top English side played in Europe, a town square somewhere would soon fill with beer bellies on shirtless, gross, and grubby torsos. (more…)

One of the Ramadan messages that appeared on the signboards at London’s King’s Cross railway station last week. Photo courtesy of @surplustakes on Twitter/X.

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That elusive last puzzle-piece

The jigsaw puzzle that is the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland has a piece missing. Of the puzzle’s four parts, as of this month the only non-white premier in Great Britain is Michelle O’Neill, a worryingly white-skinned blonde who obstinately stands in the way of an ethnic minority clean sweep of the UK’s top posts in government.

With the resignation of Welsh premier Mark Drakeford, a black man, Vaughan Gething, was duly elected in his place, and he wasted no time celebrating the fact that he is the first black premier in the European Union. There, you might be tempted to say, goes the neighborhood. (more…)

Fagin as depicted by Joseph Clayton Clark, aka Kyd (1889)

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[S]tanding over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. — Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

All my dearest companions have always been villains and thieves. — Fagin, “I’m Reviewing the Situation,” from Oliver! (more…)

Harmonie London

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Delivery for Airstrip One!

America and Great Britain were trading together long before Sir Winston Churchill minted the phrase “special relationship” to describe the transatlantic accord. (It wasn’t Reagan or Thatcher who came up with that one, as is commonly supposed; they just pulled the term out of mothballs). Some American imports were and still are loved in Britain: pre-woke Hollywood, jazz, the great American novel, actually preparing food rather than just killing it and eating it with mushy vegetables. The list is extensive. (more…)

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Jim Goad has produced a short film to accompany his latest essay, “The Anti-Black Plague,” on a purported new study which shows that black women were disproportionately affected by the Black Plague in thirteenth-century London — due to RACISM! (more…)

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Even the fleas in medieval London hated black women.

That’s the only conclusion I could draw from a series of headlines this week implying that no one suffered more from the bubonic plague that ravaged London in the mid-1300s than black women.

This came as quite the wake-up call to me, seeing as how in my repulsively bigoted ignorance I was unaware there were any black women in Western Europe back then. (more…)

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Jordan Peterson was asked by journalist Camilla Tominey about his views on multiculturalism during a recent exclusive interview with GB News, Britain’s nominally Right-leaning news station. In a refreshingly scathing tirade, the Canadian public intellectual branded the idea of mixing incongruous population groups together as “a miracle of stupidity,” correctly making the link between diversity of cultures and the potential within multicultural societies for civil conflict. (more…)

Tommy Robinson with supporters at the Cenotaph on Saturday.

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Tommy Robinson’s Armistice Day rally has come and gone. Fortunately, it was not as bad as I and a lot of people feared — but it was bad enough.

To recap, after a successful 100,000-person pro-Palestine protest in London in October, the organizers scheduled another, even larger protest for November 11. (more…)