ROWAN DEAN ‘Is it heartening for you to see someone like anti-immigration Pauline doing well in Australia?’ asked the Channel Nine journalist. He was chatting, as you do, to a character called Thomas Robb, who happens to be the leader, or Grand Wizard or whatever ridiculous title it is, of the vile racist organisation the Ku Klux Klan. This is what passes for insightful political commentary by the mainstream Australian media these days – attempting to smear politicians not through association but through third-party endorsement. ‘This is disgusting and a new low…’ exploded One Nation leader Senator Hanson. ‘The Ku Klux Klan is a white supremacist organisation with a long history of racial hatred, terror and violence. Yet Channel Nine sent an Australian journalist to the United States to seek them out, interview them and broadcast their views to Australians. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/not…

Yes - I am outspoken on this. But this is why I support COMPULSORY voting. "It is massively beneficial - not just to conservatives - put to the survival of politics. The truth is, that if you have the majority of people voting being politically motivated - they will be young, radicalised people. The people you see at the anti-Pauline Hanson rally. If you don't force people to vote - the tired working families and older wise Australians won't bother to vote. Sure, you might have a few people at the polling booth who haven't thought about it. But those people - if they see someone with purpose hair, a nose ring, and 'I love socialism' on the poster vs an ordinary person - people will vote for the ordinary person. We don't want to create a situation where politicians are rewarded for an arms-race of radicalism.' Follow @SpectatorOz and subscribe to support us! 🥰spectator.com.au/join/monthl…

UK Labour is considering bringing in compulsory voting because they're concerned about radicalisation at the polls. Meanwhile, Australian Labor want two things: * To lower the age. * Make voting voluntary. Why? Because Labor want young, radicalised kids to vote. The sorts of people who you see marching on the street against One Nation, for ClimateChange, for Palestine, and against Freedom. Follow @SpectatorOz and subscribe to support us! 🥰spectator.com.au/join/monthl…

I know the choices for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square are deliberately baited for a horrified reaction, so I shall refrain from saying how hideous, gigantesque and ill-sorted with its surroundings is the latest artwork, Tschabalala Self’s ‘Lady in Blue’. But, as a concerned citizen, I feel it my duty to call out the fact that the statue is racist. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/the…

Every year in Athens, the richest 300 citizens could be instructed to carry out a leitourgia, lit. ‘work in the interests of the people’, i.e. an obligation to subsidise a state activity (origin of our ‘liturgy’). The wealth in property that qualified a man for such a duty was 3-4 talents (18,000-24,000 drachmas). This duty could involve anything from equipping a trireme for a year to underwriting cultural festivals. These did not come cheap. A working man’s wage was 1 dr. a day. One of the cheapest liturgies was staging a choral show at 300 dr.; putting on a stage production could cost 3,000 dr.; and running a trireme for a year 5,000 dr. or more. The rich, however, are a hard-headed lot, and Athenians were no exception. What if Alpha down the road got the leitourgia but thought Beta was richer? He could challenge Beta to an exchange of property or ask a court to decide. But there was a competing, even more powerful, emotion involved: desire for public acclaim, with all the kudos and political benefit that b(r)ought. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/tax…

Behind the scenes of The Spectator’s wealth tax debate this month there were lots of nervous whispers. ‘Wealthy people we work with are absolutely terrified about an exit tax,’ one Westminster figure remarked. The economist Arthur Laffer, one of the debate’s speakers, couldn’t believe a wealth tax was even being considered. Britain is already near the top of his famous curve – the point beyond which taxation reduces the Treasury’s take – and seems determined to push things to destruction. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/the…

Twenty years ago, as America fought in the Middle East, a junior Democratic senator from the Midwest, a forty-something man with a Muslim name, decided he was going to run for president. Against the odds, Barack Hussein Obama of Illinois, who’d dabbled in Marxist academia and whose father was born in Kenya, went on to become the first non-white commander-in-chief. Two decades on, as America fights another war in the Middle East, an even more unconventional Midwestern Democrat is rapidly advancing. Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, whose father was born in Egypt, is currently the favourite to win his senate race in Michigan in November – even as Republican campaigners spend millions of dollars branding him a terrorist sympathiser. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/is-…

A year on from Charlie Kirk’s death, I find myself mourning what he represented: a rare beacon of liberalism in a world that fears disagreement. We must ask ourselves why Kirk’s debates attracted so much attention. Perhaps, in his taste for disagreement, he represented the desire that many college students have for it yet feel unable to express. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/in-…

Why do public servants obey the 'red man' when Brisbane's streets are empty? "I was one of those unthinking, obeisant and sanctimonious slaves to the letter of the law, as my brother frequently reminds me. I was morally superior to my brother because I did not cross at the red light." Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/the…

They keep inventing them, don’t they? New expressions we didn’t have before, and I’m not entirely persuaded we need now! ‘Keystone species’ appears to have been coined in 1969 in the ecology community and first appeared in a journal called American Naturalist. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/lan…

Which saddened you more: the 25th anniversary of the mass murder of 3,000 civilians, including ten Australians, or the death from natural causes of a single octogenarian American singer? If you ticked Box A, check your pants for flames. Despite the fact that all Australian Gen Z-ers were born a decade after Dolly Parton last topped the charts, most can name two or three of her songs. But according to the New York Times, very few Americans under the age of forty can name even one of the 19 men who flew those planes into those buildings. I suppose it makes a difference if you knew any of the deceased personally, and I didn’t know anybody who died on 9/11. But I was once very close to Dolly. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/aus…

Why did anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 illegal migrants remain in #Ceuta? The answer is obvious: NGOs. The likes of the Red Cross arrived in force – with cases of bottled water, tinned tuna, bread, milk and free tents, soon pitched across the territory’s once-comely beaches, which were transformed into open sewers. Yet a short stroll away, Morocco has food, water and shelter. NGOs passing out daily rations to migrants in Ceuta is like feeding foxes in London. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/jus…

DOUGLAS MURRAY It is rare that someone caught in a charge of hypocrisy throws their hands in the air and says, ‘Yes, I’m a hypocrite.’ Which brings me to the matter of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Some British readers might be fortunate enough never to have heard of her but Hannah-Jones made her name some years ago with the ‘1619 Project’. This was an attempt – backed by the New York Times – to reframe the American national story. It started from the premise that the United States began when the first slaves were transported across the North Atlantic. The aim of Hannah-Jones’s project was to claim that absolutely everything in American history was the result of slavery and white supremacy and that everything in the American national story – including emancipation – should be viewed through this remorselessly negative light. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/i-l…

Disorder, standoffs and skirmishes are spreading underneath the ocean – and this is where the next major conflict could erupt. It was at the end of May when the Ji Di, a state-owned Chinese research vessel built for Arctic conditions, appeared inside the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Palau, a small archipelagic nation in the Pacific. It spent 14 hours in the Palauan waters, departing under circumstances as mysterious as those of its arrival. ‘Its fleet of unmanned drones and underwater vehicles can map the sea floor and collect data on everything from undersea minerals, ocean currents and marine ecosystems,’ reported ABC, the Australian national broadcaster. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/is-…

Chris Bowen might want to pay attention to this one... "Our very ability to keep the lights on and maintain critical infrastructure is under threat. That is the stark message from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former ‘Chief’ of MI6. In the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Annual Lecture, Dearlove asked whether Britain has thought seriously enough about the vulnerabilities that are being introduced into our increasingly complex energy infrastructure. His answer was emphatic and sobering." Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/net…

The hard-Left's victory in #Berlin has been woefully underreported. Following the election, the only realistic coalition government emerging from the elections will see Die Linke joining with the weaker Green party and Social Democrats to take power in the city of 3.9 million. Die Linke looks likely to become Berlin’s dominant governing force and its 45-year-old leader Elif Eralp, who has Turkish roots and has been dubbed “Germany’s Mamdani,” will therefore become mayor. If that happens, it will represent an earthquake in German politics. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/mam…

A genuine attempt to counteract digital disinformation campaigns from Russian bots - or an excuse to usher in a new age of political censorship? Hoaxers, trolls and disinformation merchants beware, Andy Burnham is on your case. That was the thrust of Andy Burnham's UN General Assembly speech in which he committed to establishing a National Centre for Information Defence. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/how…

Earlier this week, a so-called “mega dinghy” made its way across the English Channel from the coast of Normandy. The prospect of another 60 illegal migrants landing on England’s shores, many of whom will likely come from countries with much higher rates of violent crime, has triggered major protests. British people are coming down to the shore to confront those who bring illegal migrants into the country - and stop them. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/the…

Students of Cambridge University’s gradual self-destruction will recall our disclosure last month that it has appointed as assistant professor a woman called Farah Ahmed, a former senior activist in the racist, separatist and now banned terrorist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/far…

JACOB REES-MOGG I am not a woolly-minded liberal. I am a conservative, and I believe that, when people come to this country, it is their duty to become English. I’m not really interested in multiculturalism. I’m not interested in people who come here preserving bits of their culture. I think our culture is unashamedly better than others. It is more civilised, grander, and more successful. I want people who come to live here to become English, because I believe in the melting pot theory. I think that when people come here, they should be proud to be English, to glory in the name of Englishman or Englishwoman. This is what we want in our society. It is how we create and build a stable society. I resent this idea that a passport is merely like a key, a door card for a hotel, that you use it to check in and check out of the Hotel UK as and when you please, without having to give something in return to make it your home. If England, or Britain, is your home, you need to be English. You’re not Chinese English or Indian English or Pakistani English. You are either English or, frankly, you’re not. And if you’re not willing to be English, then why are you here? Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/the…

SHOULD PUTIN GO TO MIAMI? US Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited Vladimir Putin to an upcoming G20 summit in Miami, giving the Russian leader ‘an opportunity to engage not just with Donald Trump, but with other world leaders.’ In one sense, the invitation is an olive branch to Moscow from Washington, so far the only Western nation willing to engage in peace talks with Putin. On the other, it’s a poisoned chalice that the Kremlin has already signalled that Putin will probably not accept. Article | spectator.com.au/2026/09/why…