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The orthodox Jews tripping on toad toxins The ‘medicine’ brings them closer to God

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Can Burnham banish Maggie’s ghost?

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‘At least I knew who the enemy was.’ (Ben Stansell/AFP/Getty)

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[H5] Jonny Ball

[H6] 23 May 2026 - 12:10am 7 mins

In 2013, I attended a Margaret Thatcher death party in Brixton. At the age of 23, perhaps I should have known better. Politically, I was in an extended-adolescence phase of edgelordism — jumping chaotically between anarchism and a post-ironic Stalinism, with teenage rebellion stuck on permanent default mode, fuelled by high London rents, low London pay, and a nagging sense of self-righteous, insufferably graduate-class grievance. The post-2008 economy could no longer provide a ticket to middle-class security for the near-50% of school-leavers then going to university. Thatcher, who had died, aged 87, of a stroke at the Ritz, served as a convenient scapegoat. It was she who could be blamed for every ill that had befallen both the British Left and Liverpool, my hometown, in the prior 35 years.
Today I find the idea of drinking cans of Polish lager to mark the passing of a former prime minister rather pitiable. From a solely political perspective, of course, it is counterproductive, for it tells the general public that the contemporary Left resembles little more than a misanthropic, detached subculture found mainly among the younger, over-educated denizens of gentrifying urban enclaves. But beyond any strategic consideration, it also signifies the strength of Thatcherism, against which my fellow Brixton revellers and I were pathetically impotent.
In contemporary discourse, Maggie’s enduring legacy is taken to be something called “neoliberalism”, a system of political economy apparently dominant for the last 40 years, and now undergoing a critical appraisal, not least because of certain Labour leadership hopefuls blaming it for British decline. In his slick Makerfield campaign video, Andy Burnham says he “saw what Thatcher’s government did to places like this”, citing “deindustrialisation” and “the draining away of economic, social and political power” from provincial Britain. As Reform positions itself as the party of the Northern working class, in alliance with small traders and the Home Counties’ petit bourgeoisie, the Left delivers dire warnings of a Thatcherite revival — the better to hold onto those working-class Northerners. Farage and the Reform leadership clique are, after all, longtime disciples of the monetarist creed.
None of this is to say that my opinions on the Iron Lady have altered much. Even from a purely conservative standpoint, she caused a lot of harm to the country, much of it perhaps irreparable. Though her project invoked a parochial conservatism, it nevertheless radically altered our mode of production according to an imported set of continental (namely Austrian) ideologies. It projected a vision of British patriotism that sold off national assets by the pound, exposing a relatively coherent and regionally balanced national economy to all the volatilities of globalised, financialised capital and international trade flows, as well as leaving us dependent on the kindness of strangers and cap-in-hand foreign patronage. And while its libertarian streak was applied ruthlessly to “free market” actors, an authoritarian traditionalism and throwback Victorian morality dominated in the socio-cultural sphere and in law and order — as exemplified by the battle of Orgreave.
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[H5] Cosmic Scallies are radicalising Liverpool
By Jonny Ball
Thatcher, then, is as significant a figure in discourse as she was when she died. In that sense, it is an auspicious time to be putting on a play about her. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novella, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, is nearing the end of its first run. It’s a fitting venue: 13 years ago, as I drank cans of Tyskie in Brixton, groups of fellow Scousers spontaneously emptied out of the dockers’ pub The Casa just yards from the Everyman to mark Thatcher’s death. It’s a fitting time, too, as a famous son of Liverpool promises to reverse the legacy of the city’s — and the play’s — bête noire (Burnham the Scouser has spent around a decade posing as a Mancunian — a rare boon for someone born in the nether regions between the North West’s two great metropoles, with a shifting dual identity that mirrors his political oscillations).
Mantel’s original story attracted controversy at the time of its publication in 2014. For all the brouhaha, one would have expected it to be historical fiction in the philosophical tradition of Frantz Fanon — the French psychoanalyst whose writing on the efficacy and superior morality of Left-wing political violence is still a bookshelf stalwart of many a LARPing student revolutionary. Conservative MPs led the chorus of condemnation, but, in all likelihood, they had never read the text, despite its short length. For Mantel was no frothing-at-the-mouth extremist advocating the progressive or, like Fanon, mentally rehabilitative, qualities of revolutionary murder. Her epic on the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety, reveals no sympathies for the cold, utilitarian, socially cleansing properties of the guillotine. Instead it focuses on some of the human costs of political upheaval.
In that vein, the Scouse IRA sniper featured in The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is fundamentally more melancholic than heroic. He seeks a personal catharsis in his act, as well as political change, but it’s highly questionable whether he will attain either. The play adaptation carries this mood forward — the assassin portrayed more as a sad, disturbed reject than a hardened, cocksure ideologue. The terrorist tricks his way into the home of a single widow, whose bedroom window happens to overlook a hospital entrance on the day of a prime ministerial visit. The widow tries gently to persuade him of the errors of his ways — and it is she who carries the audience’s favour in this two-person performance.
Nor is Mantel’s choice of terrorist surprising. Such is the hold of the Thatcherite decade over the collective Liverpudlian imagination that local politicians still frequently invoke the Toxteth riots along with Maggie’s supposed plans for Merseyside’s “managed decline”. It was, in fact, her chancellor Geoffrey Howe who suggested the policy of allowing a city-wide gradual atrophy, rather than attempting to guide water up a hill in what was known as “the Bermuda Triangle of British capitalism”. Eventually, Howe’s plan was rejected in favour of a Heseltine-branded plan of city-centre-focused urban regeneration. But since then, the “managed decline” epithet has stuck — a Scouser never forgets, of course.
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[H5] What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong
By Jonny Ball
The cultural influence of the era is still broad. The industrial wastelands and mass unemployment portrayed in the Liverpool-based TV series the Boys from the Blackstuff was apparently what inspired Burnham to go into politics by joining the Labour Party aged 14. It is as if our local political elites (all Labour, still, for now) are afflicted by a collective, 40-year hangover induced by the transition from a bustling, Tory-voting, mercantile port (the “Second City of Empire”) into a belligerent poster child of urban decay (“Smack City”). Though admittedly the anti-Thatcher finger-pointing might also help redirect attention from the likes of “Chippy tits”, a recent mayor who awaits trial over charges of bribery and conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. Many in the audience of The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher will no doubt hope that Makerfield’s Labour populist can prove the final antidote — the paracetamol and bacon sandwich — to cure the lasting Thatcherite headache.
The rich nuance of the play is undermined by the limited-edition tote bags proclaiming “REJOICE! REJOICE!” on sale behind the theatre bar. They will have sold well. But how much can we still claim to live in Thatcher’s world when the tax burden is at a 70-year high? Where is the Thatcherite free market when a bureaucratic welfare state takes ever-increasing tax revenues from productive labour and investment, redirecting it toward the ever-expanding army of the indigent and indolent? Certainly, few business owners will see in today’s stagnant Britain a portrait of laissez-faire nightwatchman governance.
Two political tribes offer opposed diagnoses for the UK’s dismal situation, with each identifying different starting points for the Fall. For the Burnhamite Left, the decline began in 1979, when Thatcher came to power. For the Right, decline began in 1997, on Blair’s arrival. The Right posits that the source of our ills is the lingering effects of too-much-state, of an overbearing, Cool Britannia lanyard socialism. This is a story of radical constitutional renewal and the empowerment of quangos, arms-length bodies, international organisations and the judiciary at the expense of executive ministerial authority and the Crown-in-Parliament. The result is an omnipotent regulatory deep state that hampers individual initiative and state capacity alike.
But what we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism: bad aspects of “neoliberalism” coexisting with bad aspects of bureaucratic statism. The result combines top-down statist nitpicking with Thatcherite ownership models; corporate, Whitehall and town hall management structures amalgamating into a public-private-partnership blob, administered and lobbied by armies of LinkedIn-posting hangers-on. Blairism is, after all, a development of Thatcherism, as Thatcher herself recognised when she described New Labour as her greatest achievement.
“What we’re really seeing is a grotesque blend of the worst of Thatcherism with the worst of Blairism”
The consequences of this Frankenstein blend are clear to see. Utilities, critical industries and infrastructure are in the hands of privateers, many of them foreign. Collective bargaining outside the public sector is virtually non-existent, contributing in no small part to a 20-year stagnation in real wages. We suffer from an over-reliance on financial, corporate, and legal services, low levels of public and private investment, and an extremely open, low-wage, low-productivity economy addicted to imported cheap labour and foreign direct investment. But we’ve matched that with a vetocracy that stymies development; with rule-by-NIMBY; with a New Labour-style dispersal of executive power across bureaucracies and professional bodies; and with often excessive meddling in the private sector. Our emasculated politicians are engaging in after-the-fact distributionism, doling out the proceeds of an old, broken growth model without knowing how to kickstart a new one. This is the legacy of Blair: a legalistic, top-down progressivism rather than anything resembling the very British socialism which Thatcher set out to destroy.
It was the One Nation Tory Ian Gilmour who held that Thatcherism had more in common with the free-trading Gladstonian Whigs than with the patrician tendency of his own party. No doubt Britain’s postwar social democracy was in a sorry state by the Seventies, requiring fundamental reform, not least a compromise with the realities of profit and loss. But the grocer’s daughter, steeped in a low-church Methodist ethos, took a polity rooted in the communitarian institutions of mass democracy, million-member political parties, the trade unions, churches, industrial mass production and security in work, housing and therefore family life, and replaced it with a rugged, dog-eat-dog, atomised individualism.
In trying to alter what she called “the object” of man’s soul through “the method” of rigid economism, she initially attempted to model Britain on her native Grantham — a staid Lincolnshire market town full of people who embodied the sturdy, middle-English values of thrift, self-reliance, respectability and quiet, Christian philanthropy. Instead we got the economy of the spiv, the City slicker, the consultant, the agency, with every job outsourced, every project put out to tender, a vast network of email-senders and middle managers vying for a procurement contract, a teat on the underbelly of our swollen PLC state.
Thatcherism’s pivot towards the great circuit of Mammon invited the criticism of even the conservative philosophers, such as Roger Scruton, for whom “the emancipation of the market from the constraints of small communities, territorial loyalty and the jurisdiction of the nation state” had more than an air of deracinated cosmopolitan liberalism.
After watching The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, I thought back to 2013, getting too drunk on Tyskie. The futility is obvious now: we’ve had Corbynism, Brexit and much else besides, but none has brought us true deliverance, and the debate on Thatcherism has never been settled, instead congealing into two different tribal mythologies. The Left hope that a charismatic mayor with a warm smile will exorcise Thatcher’s ghost, and with it that of her New Labour successors, while the Reformist Right prays that it will one day complete her unfinished revolution.
Any genuine saviour, Burnham or otherwise, will have to topple the mongrel system we currently inhabit, which displays neither the features of efficient entrepreneurialism nor those of state competence and capacity. We have neither the comforts of collectivism nor the dynamism of the market, neither the cradle-to-grave carer nor the sovereign individual. Mantel understood this better than most; her assassin seeks a personal and political redemption through violence, but the lead man can’t find salvation by killing what has already metastasised. There are no easy escape routes. At least in 2013, drunk on cheap lager and high off my own supply, I knew who the enemy was.

Jonny Ball is a Contributing Editor at UnHerd. He formerly wrote under the name Despotic Inroad.
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I’d be lying if I said I love everything about Rowling’s social media style (Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

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[H5] Sarah Ditum

[H6] 23 May 2026 - 12:05am 7 mins

What happened to JK Rowling? If only there were some kind of primary source that could tell us why she became interested in the clash between trans activism and women’s rights — say, a first-person essay. But alas, the archive is silent. It must be, because why else would two male podcasters have taken it upon themselves to solve this supposed mystery?
This week, the Origin Story podcast, hosted by indistinguishable journalists Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, bravely shouldered the burden of analysing Rowling over the course of two episodes. Do they succeed? Not remotely. But they do offer a fascinating insight into what happens when a certain kind of progressive man becomes radicalised by Bluesky.
And if you think I’m being patronising and pathologising, wait until you get a load of the podcast, which is predicated on the idea that Rowling has undergone a metamorphosis so bizarre, only psychological fracture can explain it. “It’s just such a weird story,” says Dunt. “She gets to say whatever she likes, but year by year, it gets quite a bit less kind until you just see this thing left over.”
Neither host notes that Dunt has referred to Rowling as “this thing”, as though a lack of appropriate “kindness” has turned her into something monstrous. (The “kindness” demanded only flows in one direction — there’s no expectation that trans activists could “kindly” respect women’s boundaries.) Nor do they seem to truly believe that Rowling, or any woman with gender-critical beliefs, should get to “say whatever she likes”. Any deference they pay to free speech is strictly pro-forma.
Despite a cursory show of aiming for balance, Dunt and Lynskey aren’t coming to this subject as neutral parties. They have a point of view, and their point of view is that trans activism is the decent, liberal, commonsense stance: any dissent is at best silly, and at worst (gasp) Right-wing. The assumption which shapes the entire podcast is that there is no legitimate way to be gender critical.
Ten years ago, when Stonewall’s “no debate” position held sway, this was the standard stance in most of the UK media. Today, it has substantially collapsed, but it persists in certain pockets. One of these is Bluesky — the X-replacement social media platform memorably described by Josh Barro as a “containment dome” for extremist Left-wing opinions, and a site where Dunt and Lynskey both enjoy hefty followings.
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[H5] How Lindy West poisoned feminism
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On Bluesky, the gender argument never left 2016. Lynskey treats the idea that you can support trans people’s rights while criticising the politics and precepts of trans activism as inherently bad faith: “It’s very hard to separate those two things considering that, without gender identity, how do trans people make sense?” In other words, if you don’t accept trans people’s understanding of the world, you’re a transphobe.
This is obviously ludicrous. There are innumerable creeds that I don’t share, while also believing that the people who hold them are entitled to freedom from discrimination: Christians, Muslims, vegans, even people who think “two male podcasters giving an etiquette seminar to a woman they don’t know” is an acceptable form of entertainment. If the belief in gender identity requires everyone else to adhere to it, that’s pretty totalitarian.
Dunt and Lynskey find it easy to embrace their own gender identities. In a moment of hearty masculine backslapping, they agree that it would be “mad” to object to the term cisgender. “We’re both cisgender. It’s like, whatever,” shrugs Lynskey obliviously. Oh, do you identify as naturally of the sex class that does less housework and isn’t expected to put other people’s feelings first? How nice for you! (Then, having agreed that “cisgender” is “a really valid and useful word”, neither uses it for the entire rest of the first podcast. Truly, an indispensable piece of language.)
They take the same attitude to the word “terf”. “It’s weird the way it’s treated like a slur and yet it’s not factually inaccurate,” ponders Lynskey, which is exactly the kind of thing racists have historically said about the P-word and the N-word. A word becomes a slur because of the way it’s used — and, as the linguist Deborah Cameron noted in 2016, “terf” is used to make violent threats like “slit their throats” and “every terf out there needs to die”.
But it’s a strange quirk of this podcast: listening to it, you’d have no idea that trans activism contains a long history of misogynistic abuse. At one point, Lynskey refers to Julie Bindel’s 2004 Guardian column, “Gender Benders, Beware” as “viciously transphobic” and “ugly stuff”. What he doesn’t mention is that the column was written in response to a grotesque trans activist attack on the feminist organisation Vancouver Rape Relief, for the crime of trying to run a female-only service. (The headline was the Guardian’s own choice: Bindel doesn’t even use the phrase “gender benders” in the copy.)
When it comes to Rowling, there’s not even the tiniest acknowledgement that there may have been an element of sexism in the way she was hounded. The nearest Dunt and Lynskey come to sympathising with her is in a discussion of the domestic violence she suffered from her first husband — and this comes with an intimation that the experience has made her fragile and unreliable. It’s the classic double bind for the female victim: your experience of male violence disqualifies you to talk about male violence.
And even to refer to “male violence” would likely send Dunt and Lynskey into apoplexy: accurate references to sex are a dreadful taboo here. Throughout the episodes, they act scandalised at anyone referring to a trans woman as male or a man. Lynskey makes an audible “oof” when Dunt quotes Maya Forstater calling Pips Bunce, the gender-fluid Credit Suisse executive who was anointed one of the 100 top women executives in the Financial Times, “a white man who likes to dress in women’s clothes”.
But to anyone not marinated in Bluesky, there is nothing shocking at all about calling Bunce a man. This is someone clearly male who, half the time, wears a suit; who has a wife and a career in finance; and who expects everyone to fall in line with his self-perception and treat him as a woman when he decides to wear a wig. Bunce’s behaviour is as male-pattern as his baldness. If Dunt and Lynskey think “man” is the most insulting epithet that could be thrown at him, I’m happy to sit here and call them both men all day.
“If Dunt and Lynskey think “man” is the most insulting epithet that could be thrown at him, I’m happy to sit here and call them both men all day.”
Dunt and Lynskey are the proverbial last Japanese soldiers in the jungle, still fighting a war that’s been settled elsewhere. According to them, rapid onset gender dysphoria is a discredited “clown car” theory: actually, the increase in girls identifying out of their sex in adolescence without a previous history of gender variance was confirmed by the Cass report. Ah, but Cass too can be dismissed: she’s “not a gender specialist”. (She is, of course, one of the most experienced and respected paediatricians in the country, but what does that weigh compared to a podcast?)
In Origin Story land, autogynephilia — the theory that some men transition because they are turned on by the idea of themselves as a woman — is similarly “discredited”. Who’s going to tell the American critic and trans woman Andrea Long Chu that he was wrong when he wrote that he transitioned “for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”?
In the podcast, Imane Khelif is the “female Algerian boxer”, and it’s sheerest cruelty to point out that Khelif is actually a male athlete who, regardless of DSDs, therefore doesn’t belong in women’s sport. There’s even a throwaway reprise of the once-popular “Michael Phelps’s armspan” argument, which claims that being male in a female competition is no different to any other physical advantage an athlete might have. I wanted to ask Dunt and Lynskey to do clownfish as an encore.
When Dunt and Lynskey absolutely have to acknowledge that trans inclusion has costs for women, they can’t concede that this is built into the system they are endorsing. Referring to the case of the rapist Karen White, who reoffended while held in a women’s prison, they agree that this was an “insane” decision by the prison service: “however trans inclusive you are, it’s quite hard to [say] that a rapist who then transitioned should be put in there without any consideration,” says Lynskey.
Well, it should have been a hard argument to make. And yet trans activists made it, and prison policy was shaped by it. The women who were assaulted are not figments of a terrible Right-wing imagination — even though I and other feminists were called “terfs”, “transphobes” and “genital obsessives” for pointing out that self-identity made cases like this inevitable.
If the terfs had been listened to, a young female psychiatric patient who identified as male would never have been placed on a male ward, where she was raped. (The NHS trust that enforced this “inclusive” policy also deliberately obstructed the police investigation into the crime.) It’s the funny thing about being called trans exclusionary: I know perfectly well why trans people should be included in the services that fit their birth sex. The “kindness” Dunt and Lynskey demand in their idiotic podcast led, in this instance, to a vulnerable trans person suffering the worst kind of violation.
Even the fact that Rowling funds a centre for female victims of violence is held against her, because Beira’s Place is women-only and therefore tarnished in the eyes of these reasonable men. Her greatest crime of all, though, is funding For Women Scotland’s Supreme Court case against the Scottish government, which ultimately clarified that the Equality Act protects sex, and not gender identity. The Equality Act also, separately, protects trans people, but apparently it’s intolerable for women to have even one clause of legislation to themselves.
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By Rob Burley
By writing this, I’m laying myself open to the charge of “obsession”. “Once I see a writer become obsessed with this issue, they cannot let it go. It becomes almost all they write about,” says Lynskey. But this reveals more about his fixation than mine. The gender-critical writers named in the podcast — Jesse Singal, Victoria Smith, Bindel, me, Rowling — all cover a vast number of other topics, from the Super Bowl to surrogacy to celebrity sex tapes to extremely long crime novels. It’s Lynskey and Dunt who are only able to see trans.
I’d be lying if I said I love everything about Rowling’s social media style: certainly I wish she’d spent less time beefing with India Willoughby, if only because it seems beneath her dignity to pay attention to a voluntarily castrated ex-weatherman. But there’s no hidden truth, no sinister “origin story”, about what happened to her. She’s always been fighty on social media. (Remember Indyref? Or Brexit? Or all the times she sassed Trump?) She’s always been committed to feminism.
This podcast is nothing but a whine of fury that Rowling has shown she values women’s rights more than pandering to men’s feelings. I’m sure that Dunt and Lynskey consider themselves as far from the manosphere as it’s possible to be, and yet the message of Origin Story is that defying men makes a woman subhuman. Such chauvinism has always been embedded in trans activism. That’s why so many feminists rebelled against the doctrine, and it’s also why some liberal men have such a hard time giving it up.

Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.
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