Month: September 2025

Danny Kruger and the Kiss of Death

This article is re-posted from the website of the Libertarian Alliance, which gives a blanket permission to do so, subject to certain provisions. The original article can be found at https://libertarianism.uk/2025/09/16/danny-kruger-and-the-kiss-of-death/

Dr Sean Gabb

It is no surprise that Danny Kruger, the Member of Parliament for East Wiltshire, has crossed the floor to Reform UK. The Conservative Party is finished, and every backbencher with a nervous constituency association is now scrambling for a new flag of convenience. Mr Kruger’s most fitting alternative to a party endorsement at the next election is probably to be pushing trolleys round a Tesco car park. Club subscriptions must be kept in good order, and I do not condemn him for preferring a Commons seat to a fluorescent tabard. Rationality has its place in politics.

I do, however, condemn Reform UK for admitting him. Here is a man who has sat on the Conservative benches since 2019. During that time, he did not resign the whip when Britain’s departure from the European Union was sabotaged. He did not resign during the two lockdowns, when the State chained the population indoors and closed the economy. He did not resign when state employees were compelled to inject themselves with vaccines already suspected to be harmful, and which increasing numbers now regard as a disastrous experiment. He did not resign over the Online Safety Act, or over the highest levels of borrowing and state spending since 1945, or over the highest inflation since the 1970s. He did not resign when the Conservative Party promoted leftists throughout every institution of state, nor when immigration reached record levels despite solemn promises it would be cut. He did not resign when the Government stumbled into a shadow war with Russia, in which perhaps several million men have been killed to keep the City banks solvent.

Any man of honour would have resigned in April 2020, when it became plain that the Johnson Government had turned Britain into a police state. Mr Kruger did not. He has sat tight, drawing his salary and pension entitlements, waiting for the day when the brand “Conservative” ceased to guarantee employment. That day has now arrived, and he has decided that “the Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.” Time to move on.

It is not only dishonourable, it is dangerous. He resembles not a defector but a carrier of plague, leaving one infected city for another, contagion festering in his baggage. Reform UK should have turned him away with loud scorn. His acceptance by Nigel Farage is proof that Reform is no vehicle of national salvation but a fraud—another holding pen for discontent, another safety-valve to channel fury back into safe channels.

Labour at least is honest in what it stands for. No one supposes Keir Starmer or his Blairite clerks are our friends. The regime they serve does not pretend to share our values. Farage, on the other hand, shouts that he is on our side, that he will restore border controls, rebuild industry, cut the State down to size. Yet his latest act is to welcome into his ranks a man who voted for betrayal after betrayal between 2019 and 2024. If this is his recruiting standard, a Farage government would make John Major look like Lord Salisbury.

The British right does not need another safe house for failed Conservatives. It does not need another talking shop of cast-offs, eager to mutter against immigration while voting for censorship and war. What it needs is a party that understands this country is ruled by a financial oligarchy entrenched in the City of London. It needs a party willing to break the power of that oligarchy, end the surveillance laws, close the borders, and restore a society fit for free men to live in.

Reform UK will not do this. It will stagger forward with its new Tory baggage, bleating about tax cuts, whining about “woke,” but touching nothing essential. It is not an opposition, but an impersonation of opposition. The acceptance of Danny Kruger is not a bold stroke—it is the kiss of death.

Until a real party of the right arises, we are better off under Labour. At least the enemy declares himself. Better a clenched fist than the hand that proffers friendship while fumbling for your throat.

A small victory in a losing war: The UK government retreats on encryption

This article is re-posted from the website of the Libertarian Alliance, which gives a blanket permission to do so, subject to certain provisions. The original article can be found at https://libertarianism.uk/2025/09/03/a-small-victory-in-a-losing-war-the-uk-government-retreats-on-encryption/

by Sebastian Wang

The British Government has quietly abandoned its demand that Apple build a backdoor into its encrypted communications platforms. This is not a sign of principle or enlightenment. It is a tactical retreat, forced by the sheer impracticality of enforcing a law that no technology company with global ambitions would obey. But the retreat is real, and it is welcome. As Intelligent CISO reports:

“The UK Government has confirmed that it will not immediately enforce its demand for Apple to scan user devices for harmful content, effectively backing down from one of the most controversial aspects of its Online Safety Act.”

This is a victory, however small, for privacy, for freedom, and for the idea that citizens are not the property of the state. We should celebrate it with both caution and contempt. Caution, because the Government will be back. Contempt, because the very demand was a disgrace.

In February, I wrote an article titled The British Government’s War on Encryption: Protecting Pedophiles, Spies, and Itself. In it, I argued that the true motive behind the encryption crackdown had little to do with child safety and everything to do with silencing dissent and criminalising opposition.

The same regime that ignored grooming gangs for decades, that covered up rape in Rotherham, and that now funds drag queens to lecture children on kink play, cannot pretend to care about child safety. Its priorities lie elsewhere.

The Online Safety Act gave Ofcom the power to demand that encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage insert secret backdoors so that messages could be scanned for prohibited content.

It would have made Britain a global outlier — a country in which secure messaging was no longer secure. It would have driven companies to exit the UK market or to fight back in court. Apple chose the second option. And for now, it has won.

What is extraordinary is not the victory, but how close we came to defeat. For years, the British Government — Labour and Conservative alike — has moved in lockstep towards digital authoritarianism.

It is not the totalitarianism of 1984, where Big Brother watches your every move from a telescreen. It is more like the soft digital totalitarianism of 2025, where everything is tracked and nudged and shadowbanned, where your digital wallet can be suspended if you say the wrong thing, and where every online interaction is monitored “for your own safety”.

The justification is always the same. Terrorism. Child abuse. Misinformation. Extremism. Words that mean whatever the Home Office wants them to mean. As the recent counter-extremism review shows, even claiming that there is a two-tier policing system may now be labelled “extreme”. As if noticing that BLM rioters are treated better than lockdown protesters is the same thing as inciting terrorism.

The encryption battle was supposed to be the final blow against privacy. Once messages were open to inspection, no dissident could speak freely. No whistleblower could expose corruption. No friend could speak to another without wondering if a machine was scanning their thoughts. Britain would be safe — not from crime or terror, but from its own people.

That it did not happen this year is not due to any love of liberty in Whitehall. It is because Apple, Signal, and others said “No”. They refused to compromise the security of their global users to satisfy the neurotic demands of a parochial surveillance state. Signal even threatened to leave the UK market entirely. Apple said it would disable FaceTime and iMessage rather than comply. This resistance, not Parliamentary courage, is what saved us.

But the danger has not passed. The Online Safety Act still exists. Ofcom still has the authority. The Government has merely said it will not “immediately enforce” the most extreme provisions. That is not a repeal. That is a pause.

We must also understand the larger context. Britain is not a free country. It is a managed democracy run by a technocratic class that despises the native population. It censors speech, polices thought, and persecutes dissent. The abandonment of the Apple backdoor demand is a rare crack in the wall, not the fall of the prison.

Encryption matters because it is the last line of defence. You can be deplatformed from PayPal, banned from Twitter, censored on YouTube, and still retain your dignity if you can speak freely to those you trust. Lose that, and all that remains is silence.

To those who say, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, I say this: The people who most want to watch you are not the people you should trust. The paedophile with a badge, the corrupt MP with something to hide, the civil servant who dreams of thought control — these are the people who hate encryption. These are the people who have lost.

Let them lose more often. Let them be afraid. And let us never forget that they will be back. Our job is not to rest. It is to build, to strengthen, and to make our communications so private that not even the spies in GCHQ can break them.

In the meantime, thank you, Apple. And thank you, Signal. You have done more for freedom in this country than Parliament has in a decade.

But this is one battle. The war goes on.

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