A Blog for all seasons

16 August
2016

The EU Referendum: A Call for Genuine Subsidiarity?

The people of the UK as a whole decided on 23 June to leave the European Union. Brexit won the referendum with 51%+ of the vote, the result was backed by more than 17 million citizens. Turnout was the highest seen since 1992, and the outcome determined by the will of large swathes of the […]

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21 June
2016

Jo Cox and a Kinder Politics

On Thursday 16 June 2016, Jo Cox – a 41-year-old Labour MP, committed activist and, above all, dedicated wife and mother of two children aged 3 and 5 – was murdered in her Yorkshire constituency. The Thomas More Institute wishes to offer sincere condolences to her family and loved ones. It is difficult here not […]

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9 June
2016

Is There Such a Thing as Speciesism?

The recent killing of a gorilla at a zoo in Cincinnati has provoked a wildly disproportionate social-media reaction. In some widely viewed footage of the occurrence, a four-year-old boy falls into the gorilla’s enclosure and is subsequently grabbed and dragged through water by the animal. Alarmed by understandably loud shouting from the boy’s mother and […]

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25 May
2016

Whither Western Liberalism?

The outcome of the Austrian presidential election has produced a swift surge in outspoken expressions of relief among the West’s liberal media. Alexander van den Bellen, backed by the Greens and a supporter of further European integration, won by the narrowest of margins, just 31,000 votes in a nationwide poll. His opponent, Norbert Hofer, is […]

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17 May
2016

Overstepping the line, or the invasive role of the media

It seems as though last week was ‘gaffe week’ in Britain. First there was David Cameron describing Nigeria and Afghanistan as ‘fantastically corrupt’. At a reception in Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, the Prime Minister was caught on camera speaking informally to the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Speaker of the House of Commons. […]

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8 May
2016

Racism in the Twenty-First Century

Is there such thing as ‘reverse racism’? May statements be deemed racist only if uttered by white people? There has been a growing debate around these questions in universities and academic circles more widely in recent months. The student radicals who now occupy positions of power within their unions throughout the United Kingdom seem to […]

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30 April
2016

Orwell 2.0

There is something Orwellian about the times in which we live. In a recent debate about free speech on the BBC2 Victoria Derbyshire programme, Richard Brooks – the newly-elected Vice-President of the National Union of Students (NUS) – said ‘everyone has an equal right to freedom of speech; however, some people have more equal rights […]

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18 April
2016

Panama Papers and Political Morality

In recent weeks, newspapers and media at large have been speaking about the biggest leak in contemporary history. The Panama Papers amount to 2.6 terabytes of information or 11.5 million documents on offshore tax havens. The records constitute the internal database of Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm, and were published by the International Consortium […]

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