Paint Balls

On 4 September at Preston Crown Court, the next five Palestine Action convicts will be sentenced as terrorists, a possibility of which neither they nor the jury had been informed, for criminal damage by throwing paint at a building, even though they had acted 11 months before Palestine Action was proscribed. So this could happen to any dissidents, including traditional conservatives and the populist Right.

Yvette Cooper imposed the mass homicidal Work Capability Assessment. She has announced new mental health hubs "to get people back to work", as if the mentally ill never worked, or as if a job were a cure for mental illness. And having been Home Secretary when Palestine Action was proscribed, she is threatening to resign if that proscription were lifted. Wes Streeting's funny money is the chance to exorcise Blairism, while this is the chance to exorcise Brownism.

For Public Protection

They are going to find a way to keep the killers of PC Andrew Harper in prison. I do not know how they are going to do it. But they are.

So they can also find a way to rectify the injustices arising out of the abolished sentence of Imprisonment for Public Protection.

More Than They Can Chew?

It is not surprising that two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper will be released early when, in a doomed attempt to placate the people who had taken to biting the Police, it was proposed to evict foreign nationals from social housing. That would not expand or improve the stock, which is the problem with what is most certainly not "a safety net for the poor", any more than is the National Health Service, or state education, or public transport, or municipal leisure facilities, or the state pension, all of which would be redefined as such if this were.

"It is entirely undesirable," wrote Aneurin Bevan, "that on modern housing estates only one type of citizen should live. If we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sectors of the community. We should try to introduce what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street."

In 1979, two fifths of people lived in council housing, an impossible figure for a mere safety net. As recently as 1980, what is now a breathtaking 20 per cent of the richest tenth of the population lived in social housing. Now, after four decades of selling off the stock and of not building any more, the stringent criteria for new tenants effectively guarantee a large number of single mothers of dependent children who are thus unable to work full-time, if at all, and of people newly released from prison or newly discharged from psychiatric institutions.

Margaret Thatcher's assault on council housing is the one thing that her supporters still feel able to defend unconditionally. But it created the Housing Benefit racket, and it used the gigantic gifting of capital assets by the State to enable the beneficiaries to enter the property market ahead people who had saved for their deposits. What, exactly, was or is conservative or Tory about that? Or about moving in the characters from Shameless either alongside, or even in place of, the respectable working class? Shameless began under Tony Blair's model for the last Labour Government. But supposedly not for this one, so the fight goes on, and it is a fight on many fronts.

Today, we learned that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools were to identify potential future NEETs so that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools could funnel them into a curriculum determined by "local employers" such as vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, Turkish barbers, and American candy shops. Or pack them off to be sexually assaulted from the age of 16 in the tender care of the sacrosanct Ministry of Defence. In the financial year 2024-25, the Government wrote off £6.6 billion of public money, with £1.6 billion of that being mismanagement and cancelled projects at the MoD for which every other Department of State has been ordered to make yet further cuts. And now, did critics of the early release scheme say something about grooming gangs?

A Meter On The Common Wealth

Paul Knaggs writes:

There is a sentence buried in the schedule of an obscure 1971 statute that deserves to be read aloud in every school in England. It repealed the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the document that had told the Crown, in plain and binding terms, that the forests, the rivers and the common land of this island belonged to the people who lived on it. The charter had survived on the statute book for seven hundred and fifty four years, longer than any other law in English history. It survived the Tudors. It survived the Civil War. It survived two world wars. It did not survive Edward Heath’s government, which struck it down in the summer of 1971, eighteen years before Margaret Thatcher put England’s water up for sale.

That is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the hinge on which this whole story turns. The Charter of the Forest was sealed alongside Magna Carta in the reign of a child king, and where Magna Carta protected the barons, the Forest Charter protected everyone else: the freeman’s right to graze his animals on common land, to gather fuel from the woods, to draw his subsistence from ground that answered to no lord. It even reached, in its modest way, toward women’s rights: its provisions coincided with a widow’s recognised right to a means of subsistence and to refuse a forced remarriage, a small but real advance in an age when a woman’s person was routinely treated as property to be disposed of.

Parliament’s own historians note that the deep green of the Commons benches, the colour the Chamber has kept since at least the seventeenth century, echoes the colour of pasture and village green: the colour, in other words, of the common man, set against the red of the Lords and the Crown. The building itself still carries the memory of what was won in 1217, even after the law that won it was quietly buried.

Because buried it was. When Heath’s government abolished what remained of the charter, it did so as a piece of statute law tidying, a Law Commission recommendation to strip out defunct royal prerogatives over wild creatures and forest law. Nobody stood at the despatch box and announced the end of the commoner’s right to the land. But intent is not the same as consequence, and the consequence is there in the historical record for anyone to read: the last legal echo of the idea that England’s natural wealth belonged collectively to its people was struck from the statute book in the same decade that a different idea, that everything held in common was really just an asset waiting to be sold, began its long march through British politics.

The economist Guy Standing, in the lecture that gives this argument its clearest modern shape, counts five kinds of common wealth: the natural commons of land, air and water, the social commons of housing and health, the civil commons of courts and rights, the cultural commons of art and memory, and the knowledge commons of science and ideas. Since 1980, he argues, all five have been enclosed, sold off, or simply starved by neglect. The rain that once fell on land held in trust for everyone now falls on assets held in trust for shareholders. His book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, is more than worth the read.

This is not new. It is the oldest fight in English history, and it follows a shape the economic historian Karl Polanyi described eighty years ago in his book The Great Transformation. Polanyi watched market logic tear land, labour and money out of the social relationships that had once bound them and turn each into a commodity to be bought, sold and speculated upon: a process he called disembedding. He also noticed something else, that disembedding never goes unanswered forever. Sooner or later, society pushes back and tries to reclaim what was taken. Every generation refights the same battle because every generation’s elites try the same trick again, dressed in the fashion of their age. In the thirteenth century, it was royal forests. In the twentieth it was the assets of the welfare state. Today, it is the water in your taps and the rain falling on a Highland mountainside, and the question is whether this generation intends to push back or simply watch.

Here is what the taking looks like when you put a number on it. Since Thatcher’s government privatised the water industry in 1989, the population of England and Wales has grown by more than ten million people, and not one major reservoir has been completed in England since Carsington opened in Derbyshire in 1992. The companies that inherited a debt-free public asset have since loaded it with roughly £60 billion of borrowing while paying out some £78 billion in dividends, much of it to owners who have never set foot in the towns whose water they now own.

A Thirst for Profit: How Monopoly Water Companies Drain Consumers’ Wallets

They did not simply fail to build. They sold what previous generations had already built for them. A GMB union investigation published in 2022 found that water companies in England and Wales had sold off at least 35 former reservoirs since 2017, pocketing at least £26 million between them, while opening exactly two new facilities in the same period: a storm tank in Preston and a contact tank in Oswestry. Andy Prendergast, the union’s national officer, made the point that matters most to anyone who has watched a river turn brown after heavy rain: these reservoirs were built with public money, and losing their spare capacity means less room to store sewage before it is dumped.

Now watch the same trick being played again, dressed up this time as the solution. Thames Water, which has not completed a reservoir since the 1970s, is nominally the company behind the largest reservoir scheme proposed in Britain in half a century: a site near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, rebranded this year from the clinical acronym SESRO to the more marketable White Horse Reservoir. But Thames Water is not actually building it. Under the regulator’s own framework, a separate Infrastructure Provider will be brought in to finance and construct the scheme, while Thames Water keeps only the day-to-day running of it once it opens.

The estimated cost has already trebled during design, from an initial £2.2 billion to a range of £5.5 to £7.5 billion, and in January this year the company issued a £5.7 billion tender for a main works contractor, close to the top of that revised range. Running costs on top of the build, Thames Water’s own figures show, will add a further £1.9 billion over the reservoir’s first sixty five years, all of it recovered from customers of Thames Water, Affinity Water and Southern Water through their bills, with completion not expected before 2040. A failed company hands the job to a fresh financier, and the public pays the debt for a reservoir it will never own, for the better part of a lifetime, before a single fresh idea has been proven to work any better than the one it replaced.

To their credit, the defenders of this arrangement do not rely on nonsense. They will tell you, correctly, that environmental and planning law has tightened enormously since the great reservoir building era of the 1960s and 70s, and that any builder, public or private, now faces years of habitats scrutiny that simply did not exist then. They will point to schemes like Coire Glas in Scotland, which come with a cap and floor mechanism limiting the return investors can earn, so that excess profit flows back to consumers rather than into private pockets indefinitely.

Both points are true, and neither survives contact with what is actually happening on the ground. Planning law binds a public builder exactly as it binds a private one; it is an argument about how long permission takes, not about who should own the asset once permission is granted. And the claim that private capital spares the public purse collapses the moment you look at how these projects are financed. White Horse Reservoir is being paid for through customer bills, whichever company’s name sits on the paperwork. The cap and floor mechanism underwriting Coire Glas guarantees its private developer a minimum revenue at public expense before a single turbine turns. The public is already carrying the financing risk in full. The only thing we are not doing is owning what that risk buys.

Britain does not need to imagine the alternative, because it built one once, within living memory, in the harshest conditions the state has ever faced. In 1943, in the middle of a world war, Tom Johnston, the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill’s wartime coalition, forced through the creation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board over the objections of landowners, sporting estates and coal interests who had blocked every private hydro scheme proposed in the Highlands for a decade. Johnston wrote into the founding Act that ordinary consumers came first, and that profits from power sold south would fund the economic and social improvement of the Highlands themselves. When the Board began, fewer than one in a hundred Highland homes outside the main settlements had mains electricity. By 1963, nine in ten did. It is remembered as power from the glens, and it was public, and for the length of a working life, it worked.

Then, in 1990, it was sold. Its assets floated on the stock exchange the following year, merged with an English utility in 1998, and exist today as SSE plc. And here the story closes its loop in a way that ought to make every reader’s stomach turn. SSE is the developer behind Coire Glas, a scheme to pump water five hundred metres up a Highland mountainside and store enough energy to power close to five million homes for a day and a half. A second scheme nearby, Earba, will store even more, and it is being built by Gilkes Energy on the land of the Ardverikie Estate, a private Highland sporting estate. The rain that falls freely on common mountains will be captured behind privately financed dams on private land and sold back to the rest of us at a price the government itself has agreed to guarantee.

The frustrating truth is that the tool to do this differently already exists. Great British Energy was established by Act of Parliament with the explicit legal power to develop, invest in, own, build and operate clean energy projects, in exactly those words. Nothing in law stops it becoming the Hydro Board of this century. One year into its life, its proudest achievements are solar panels fitted to schools and hospitals: worthwhile, and nowhere near the scale its founding legislation allows. Of its £8.3 billion budget, £2.5 billion has already been diverted to a separate nuclear programme with Rolls-Royce, money that will not now be spent building or owning a single reservoir or storage scheme of its own. Set that figure beside the £5.5 to £7.5 billion now earmarked for White Horse Reservoir alone, a single privately financed scheme, and the scale of what has been signed away comes into focus.

There is a straightforward test for whether any politician promising public control of water or energy actually means it, and this publication applied it to Andy Burnham’s devolution proposals not long ago. Does the plan involve the state owning the finished asset, the way Johnston’s Board owned its dams, or does it involve the state guaranteeing someone else’s return while that someone else keeps the deed. The water and energy sector is where the answer is easiest to check, because the guarantees are written into public documents for anyone to read.

There is a case for public investment that goes beyond fairness, and it is worth making plainly, because it happens to be true. A country that builds its own water security and generates its own power, rather than begging a foreign market for both, is a country that can plan with confidence instead of nursing a permanent overdraft. Britain spent the middle of the twentieth century proving that a state which builds for its own people, rather than merely for the shareholders passing through, ends up with both the infrastructure and the self belief that draws in everything else. We chose to stop proving it in 1989. Nothing about geography or economics forces us to keep making that choice now.

The Charter of 1217 said the common wealth of this land belonged to the people who lived on it. In 1826, a young and then unknown Benjamin Disraeli put words in the mouth of a character in his first novel that he would spend the rest of his career trying to live up to: that all power is a trust, that we are accountable for its exercise, that from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.

It is a promise that government draws its authority from the people and must exercise it for their benefit. Every generation since the moot beneath the oak tree has had to relearn that lesson against people who profit from us forgetting it. This generation’s lesson is written in rainfall over Highland glens and in reservoir basins across the English lowlands, in a feasibility report that proves the ground is ready and a Parliament that has not yet found the will to use it.

A phrase has been circulating since 2016, when the World Economic Forum published an essay by the Danish MP Ida Auken, imagining a city in 2030 where nobody owns a house, a car or an appliance, and calls itself happy about it. Auken has since said it was only a thought experiment, not a prediction and certainly not a plan. But nobody at Davos needed to issue instructions. The work was already underway: the steady transfer of what people once owned together into assets they must rent, finance or buy back from private interests. One reservoir, one hydro dam, one water bill at a time, Britain is being dispossessed without debate and without consent. You will own nothing. They will own what you cannot live without. Try to be happy.

The rain will keep falling whether we act or not. The question is who will own it when it reaches the ground: the people whose country it sustains, or the interests that have learned to put a meter on the common wealth and sell it back to us.

The Approaching Trainwreck

Kenneth P. Vogel, Christina Jewett and Olivia Diaz write:

The White House is lobbying Congress for a reprieve from a ban it approved last year on potent intoxicating hemp products, seeking a delay whose beneficiaries would include the son-in-law of Susie Wiles, President Trump’s chief of staff. Under pressure from the administration, senators tucked the delay into a stopgap spending measure they are working to pass this week in an effort to head off a government shutdown at the end of September.

The proposal has touched off an internal fight in Congress, with some senators balking at the idea of rolling back restrictions meant to address a public health risk, and could derail an agreement to quickly approve the spending bill. But its inclusion in the bill reflects the success of a hemp industry influence campaign to avoid new regulations.

That campaign was led in part by Bret Worley, who married Ms. Wiles’s younger daughter Caroline in June at the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Va. He is the chief executive of companies that distribute and sell intoxicating-hemp-derived gummies and vapes with names like “Trainwreck” and “Blueberry Cookies.”

While Mr. Trump does not drink or smoke, his administration’s advocacy for intoxicating hemp is in line with permissive stances it has adopted toward other intoxicants and wellness trends. The approach has sparked concern among public health experts and is a departure from Republican orthodoxy.

But it caters to adherents of the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement, a political constituency that Mr. Trump’s team has courted. The administration has taken steps that could pave the way for products with documented health risks, including peptides, kratom and flavored vapes.

The billionaire financier Howard Kessler, a leukemia survivor who is friendly with Mr. Trump and has urged support for cannabis as a pain treatment, was also involved in the push to delay the hemp limits. His allies worked with the White House on the language sent to Congress, according to two people familiar with the situation who requested anonymity to describe private conversations.

Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, suggested in a statement that Mr. Worley and the influence campaign had nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s stance. The White House’s support for hemp is consistent with Mr. Trump’s move last year to ease restrictions on cannabis, he said, and is in “the best interest of the American people” and intended to help veterans and patients.

But Kevin Sabet, who worked on drug policy under Republican and Democratic presidents, said in a voice memo to The New York Times that the White House’s support for delaying the restrictions was an example of a “pay-to-play drug policy” in which decisions “are a result of lobbying, not of the evidence.”

Intoxicating hemp, which is less regulated than marijuana and alcohol, has gained popularity in recent years as a pain reliever and an alternative to other intoxicants. While hemp is sometimes referred to as “weed light,” the Food and Drug Administration has warned of potential adverse effects, including difficulty breathing and coma.

The restrictions in question, which are set to take effect on Nov. 12, would target intoxicating hemp products containing threshold amounts of T.H.C., the main psychoactive compound in cannabis. That would effectively outlaw a multibillion-dollar industry of beverages, gummies, cookies and vapes that are sold in gas stations, vape shops and convenience stores that are not regulated like cannabis dispensaries.

The spending bill moving through the Senate would delay the effective date of the ban on such products until Dec. 11. It would allow a ban to go into effect as scheduled on fully synthetic T.H.C. products that are not derived from any part of the hemp plant.

The White House included the delay among a raft of spending requests it sent to Capitol Hill in June on behalf of the president, calling it a way to “ensure the fair treatment of hemp products.”

Ms. Wiles visited Capitol Hill last week to push Congress to act on Mr. Trump’s agenda, including passage of a stopgap government spending bill.

Mr. Desai, the White House spokesman, said Ms. Wiles did not specifically mention intoxicating hemp or the ban and “has never lobbied in favor of this or any other position on hemp with Capitol Hill.”

But when senators announced a bipartisan spending agreement on Sunday that would keep the government funded through Dec. 11, the delay in enacting restrictions on intoxicating hemp products was one of the few extraneous items included.

Mr. Worley, 30, whose companies operate from Texas and Colorado, did not respond to a request for comment. But the industry celebrated the provision as a step toward permanent legalization.

In an email on Sunday to prospective buyers, MC Nutraceuticals, one of Mr. Worley’s companies, boasted that the hemp industry now had “a seat at the table” and would push to achieve permanent approval for its products by seeking language in the farm bill or omnibus spending bills.

“Industries that get inside that machinery get renewed,” the email read.

Still, the fate of the hemp provision remains uncertain.

The cannabis industry, which has spent heavily to cultivate Mr. Trump, views intoxicating hemp products as a threat and opposes the delay. So do some alcohol producers and lawmakers in both parties.

Senator Ted Budd, Republican of North Carolina, announced on social media on Monday that he intended to introduce an amendment to strip the provision. He said in a statement that he had “made it clear to the White House and my colleagues in the Senate that any action to delay” the restrictions “will endanger both the wellness and safety of Americans.”

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, has also expressed concern about the provision, as has Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota.

A spokeswoman for Senator Pete Ricketts, Republican of Nebraska, said Tuesday that the hemp products were “hurting our kids and communities,” and that he did not want to delay banning them.

But another influential proponent of an intoxicating hemp ban, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has been hospitalized since June and is absent this week as the fight over the provision unfolds.

The current skirmish is the fallout from a measure included in the 2018 farm bill that was sold as a way to create jobs in rural areas by protecting the use of hemp in agriculture and industry. But it also created a regulatory vacuum that allowed the intoxicating hemp industry to flourish.

Mr. McConnell backed the 2018 measure. By last year he was pushing for the prohibition on intoxicating hemp products, which was included in a government spending bill to end the longest shutdown in history. He said at the time that “some companies looking to make a quick buck have been exploiting a loophole” to make intoxicating “snack and candy-like products.”

Senator Rand Paul, another Kentucky Republican who is a libertarian and a frequent opponent of spending measures, has fought against the ban.

“There are a lot of just regular, ordinary people who have trouble sleeping at night, and like to take a hemp product,” he told reporters at the Capitol this week, adding, “There are people that would rather drink a hemp beverage than drink alcohol.” Several hemp industry groups have hired lobbyists, including some with ties to Mr. Trump, to defeat the ban and pursue other policies that would help the industry.

A nonprofit group called Team Hemp has paid $400,000 since November to the lobbying firm of Marty Obst, who worked on Mr. Trump’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020. He did not respond to a request for comment.

And a group called Hemp Industry and Farmers of America, or HIFA, on whose board Mr. Worley sat, has paid $415,000 to lobbyists this year. Late last year, it boasted on its website of “substantive meetings with White House officials,” but warned of the “complete collapse” of the hemp industry if the pending restrictions were enacted.

HIFA and MC Nutraceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Worley has told associates that his relationship to the Wiles family gave him “significant political power,” according to a filing in a lawsuit last year that suggested Mr. Worley had exaggerated his clout.

According to a person familiar with his efforts, Mr. Worley met in recent months with officials in Mr. Trump’s health department to promote the therapeutic benefits of different types of hemp and to discuss broadening its market.

The health department did not respond to a request for comment.

Behind the scenes, people allied with the cannabis industry have called attention in Congress to Mr. Worley's link to the White House to try to undercut the push to delay the restrictions, according to people familiar with the opposition.

Some members of Congress in both parties, however, suggested they could live with the reprieve. Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, said he would back the delay. And Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said a short delay was acceptable if it was the price of averting a federal shutdown.

“I prefer that we don’t extend it, but I can live with a monthlong extension in exchange for keeping the government open,” Ms. Capito said.

Great and Unfortunate Things?

Jason Arday is still only 41 and likely to make it big in showbusiness soon enough, so he could yet become Prime Minister. There has been many such a Count Binface: Boris Johnson, Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump, and indeed Nigel Farage, who finds that tastes have changed and that he will have to give up television for provincial panto and seaside summer season. Tony Blair’s lies about watching Jackie Milburn or stowing away to the Bahamas did not preclude his progress. Whatever may have denied Hillary Clinton the Presidency, it was barely, if at all, her obviously false claims to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary and to have been under sniper fire in Bosnia.

For now, though, Kemi Badenoch no longer professes to have been “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, presumably Nigeria, having lately told both Piers Morgan and Nick Robinson that she had been born in London. Her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before Margaret Thatcher had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch may have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April. Badenoch also failed to mention that her Muslim grandmother had converted to Christianity. And even as, on the other side, the granddaughter of a Methodist minister, Badenoch claims to have taken part in Islamic Friday prayers, “because that was what happened there when I was in school.” Really? Like a lot of churchgoers in this country these days, I know Nigerian Christians, and again I ask, “Really?”

While still in Nigeria at the age of 16, Badenoch could not possibly have been offered a place on a pre-med course at Stanford but had to decline it because the scholarship did not pay enough, since Stanford did not offer a pre-med course. It is wildly unlikely that she really did have to take in her own chair to her elite private school in Lagos, or that her well-connected, urban family really did have to go without water and electricity. Even Lord Ashcroft had to concede that she had simply made up her claim to have been physically assaulted by a woke white women for being a black Conservative. It is, however, true that that scourge of social media for the coming-of-age criminally hacked the website of the then Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Harriet Harman. Think on.

Prosperum Iter Facias

There is either a genius behind Jason Arday, or he himself is one, just not of the academic kind. For example, at a bus-stop, other teenagers beat him so badly that he becomes epileptic. Many years later, two of them turn out to be among his students, and he is now godfather to one of their children. Dickens could have written that. It obviously never happened, but it is no less obviously not the invention of a stupid man. We are all laughing at Arday now, but his book is going to sell by the truckload, and who will be laughing when he sells the rights to Netflix?

Oxford need not look far to oneup Cambridge this time, since the Scofield Reference Bible must be by far the most lucrative publication of Oxford University Press, largely or entirely carrying the whole operation while exercising incalculable negative influence on geopolitics. And that the Quakers are "the sect that really rules the world" is the thesis of the latest book by Edward Dutton, whom I knew at Durham, where he once tried to seduce me after Mass, so that I know his little secret. In 2018, Evolutionary Psychological Science published this masterpiece by Dutton, who is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Mankind Quarterly, which he used to edit. Another member is Dr Adel Batterjee of Jeddah, the founder of the Benevolence International Foundation, which was placed under UN sanctions because it was a front for funding al-Qaeda.

On the Editorial Board of Evolutionary Psychological Science is the archetypal Epstein Class academic, Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although one does have to wonder for how much longer. In 2021, Pinker wrote that, "Oliver Kamm's urbanity, erudition and compassion are raised to the power of two in Mending the Mind. He put them to work in crafting this gorgeous and urgent book, and on every page they remind us of his moral that enviable gifts are no protection against the affliction of depression." Kamm, Pinker, Dutton, Batterjee. Batterjee, Dutton, Pinker, Kamm. Truly, an Axis of Evil. And Evolutionary Psychological Science has published Nathan Cofnas at least twice, including once in dialogue with Dutton. Like most of these papers, that was well before the 2022 appointment of Cofnas to Cambridge. Think on.