Oliver Kamm
CapX
United Kingdom
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Past articles by Oliver:
Thank goodness Labour is rid of Corbyn's deeply misguided 'anti-war' politics
Jeremy Corbyn was a disastrous Labour leader and one reason was his inability to hide his true beliefs. Asked on Times Radio yesterday by John Pienaar whether he admired the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, Corbyn refrained from giving the obvious answer. Instead, he proffered the non sequitur that he had ‘never met him’. To the […] → Read More
In siding with Putin, far-left 'peace' activists have shown their true colours
Vladimir Putin’s regime invaded Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, and has illegally annexed Crimea. It has in addition launched cyberattacks against both these states and against Estonia, shot a civilian airliner out of the sky, and conducted a brutal war through proxy forces in the territory of Donbas. It has now amassed 100,000 […] → Read More
Young Labour has no attachment to democratic politics – it's time the party shut it down
Back in 1984, Labour had barely started to recover from a devastating general election defeat the previous year. The party presented to the electorate an ugly face of extremism and intolerance. And it had one more potential public relations disaster that year when the national student Labour conference, held at Hull University, was abandoned after […] → Read More
Anyone who believes in democracy should cheer Labour's purge of the hard left
As Labour’s national executive committee met yesterday, a motley crew of discontents paraded outside. They included Piers Corbyn, the prominent conspiracy theorist and Covid denialist, and a handful of people who either have already been expelled from the party or sympathise with far-left organisations that the NEC has now proscribed. Pleasingly, the protesters vigorously fell […] → Read More
The BBC should be ashamed of its whimsical portrayal of British communism
The BBC went through immense soul-searching 12 years ago when it invited Nick Griffin, then leader of the British National Party and an MEP, to appear on Question Time. I think its decision was defensible and the programme turned out to be a disaster for Griffin, who was attacked afterwards even by his own party […] → Read More
I take no satisfaction in the imprisonment of my online abuser
I wrote this piece in March 2020, to draw attention to the issue of online harassment. The subject of the article, David Lindsay, had just been convicted at Durham Crown Court of malicious communication and perverting the course of justice. As described in the article, he had sent an anonymous death threat to 57 Labour […] → Read More
Why supporters of market capitalism should welcome the Foxtons pay revolt
Boardroom pay stokes passions. Having lost the 2017 election by less than pundits (including me) had predicted, Jeremy Corbyn felt emboldened to attack a “broken economic system” and call for an end to “greed-is-good” capitalism. Though the market economy is in fact resilient rather than broken, its defenders are forever being accused of advocating avarice. […] → Read More
'Buy British' might be good politics, but it's lousy economics
There is a strong intuitive appeal to calls to “Buy British”. What patriot could possibly demur? And as the Government urges that all government buildings fly the Union Jack and retains strong support in newly won northern constituencies, you can understand why the Labour Party would wish to burnish its own credentials as the party […] → Read More
John Lewis is a great company, but it's model isn't an alternative to capitalism
John Lewis is a fine company. The range and quality of the goods it sells have improved many homes and lives, and it is known for customer service and keen pricing. But it’s in difficulty. This week it announced its first ever annual loss and indicated that it does not expect all of its stores […] → Read More
David Miller's anti-Semitic invective is an affront to academic inquiry – and his university should say so
In his classic essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1963), Richard Hofstadter noted: “Notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the part of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews, or Communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern history.” He was right, of course, but there is an under-remarked common aspect of these … → Read More
Mishandling of FOI requests is a threat to democracy
Dr Robert Rines was a self-styled American zoological expert who became briefly famous in the 1970s as a hunter for the Loch Ness monster. Underwater equipment deployed by his organisation, the Academy of Applied Sciences (despite its name, a purely private and non-academic body), took three photographs of what appeared to be a large unknown … → Read More
Once he becomes a private citizen, Twitter should let Trump speak again
The impeachment of Donald Trump is clearly merited. Short of treachery in the service of a foreign power, there can be no greater abuse of office than encouraging insurrection against constitutional government. It may seem odd, therefore, that the comparatively inconsequential issue of banning Mr Trump from social media should excite comment. Yet it ought … → Read More
The party of Thatcher must resist the siren call of protectionism
“We rely on imports too much,” tweeted Jeremy Corbyn yesterday. “Let’s grow and make more at home.” I’m making it up, of course. These were the words not of Mr Corbyn but of Sir John Redwood, twice a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Yet they do bear a resemblance to the views … → Read More
The Great Reset is the latest conspiracy fantasy
If you were running a shady cabal dedicated to controlling the world, it’s unlikely you’d advertise it on a website. But perhaps that’s just me: according to a loose assemblage of anti-vaccine campaigners and conspiracy theorists, and given a platform by Russian state propaganda, that’s exactly what’s happening. Their strain of thinking alleges that the … → Read More
After today's report, Starmer should expel Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour Party
The Labour Party has committed unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination. It breached equality legislation through the acts of its agents. These acts included the use of antisemitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of anti-Semitism were smears. This is not merely my opinion. These are conclusions of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the … → Read More
Trump's Nato-bashing exposes the hollow myth of US 'imperialism'
Like the great majority of European public opinion, I hope Vice-President Biden wins next month, and wins big. Though the decision is American voters’ alone, the presidency of Donald Trump has had catastrophic effects for us Europeans too. The oddity is that the diplomatic damage that the Trump administration has inflicted on America’s allies demonstrates … → Read More
Keir Starmer should make a virtue of opposing the awful Len McCluskey
In August 1990, the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait, a member-state of the United Nations. The efforts of a US-led coalition to militarily reverse this flagrant aggression a few months later had the backing of the United Nations and the authorisation of a Security Council resolution. But one organisation in … → Read More
The hard left have been crushed, now for the purge of the Corbynites
Among the merits of Keir Starmer’s Labour conference speech on Tuesday is that it wasn’t Delphic. It could scarcely have been a clearer repudiation of the record of his predecessor. Whereas after Labour’s catastrophic defeat in December Jeremy Corbyn claimed to have won the argument, Starmer said: “When you lose an election in a democracy, … → Read More
Shunning Russia Today is not enough, it's time to shame those who indulge its lies
It’s almost exactly 20 years since the worst ruler in Europe since 1945, Slobodan Milosevic, bowed to popular pressure and resigned the presidency of Serbia. The issue that had prompted huge demonstrations against him was not his genocidal campaigns that had laid waste to much of the former Yugoslavia, but his penchant for ballot-rigging. He … → Read More
The West must act now to back the Belarusian people's call for liberty
An autocracy faces an existential crisis the moment that its subjects perceive they are not alone in their discontent. For Nicolae Ceaușescu, the kleptocratic thug who tyrannised Romania for more than two decades, it came one day in December 1989. Herded unwillingly into Revolution Square in Bucharest to listen to the dictator’s hollow slogans, crowds … → Read More