The lanyard state

Britain is not in crisis. It is in management. HR departments have replaced political parties, DEI officers outnumber philosophers and moral theatre now substitutes for statecraft. This week’s issue follows the fault lines: the rise of the lanyard class, the import of American panic and the ritual self-punishment of empire guilt. Change is stirring — but don’t expect a revolution, just a well-laminated policy document with your face on the front.

Comment

Angus Colwell in The Spectator visits Lord Glasman in the Lords and leaves with a diagnosis: it’s not liberalism or wokeness voters detest, but the “lanyard class”—those “officious, rules-obsessed” functionaries who run HR departments and public sector offices like Glastonbury campsites. Glasman’s coinage is poetic in origin, he insists, but political in effect. He calls it “a class war against the lanyard.”

It’s a neat encapsulation. The lanyard isn’t just an ID badge but a moral credential, a managerial muzzle and a backstage pass to elite virtue. “Communism was a lanyard system!” Glasman exclaims, not entirely joking. Once a military strap for quickdraw pistols, the lanyard has become a compliance tether: clip it on, shut up, align.

Reform, Trump, even Starmer’s gritted-teeth crackdown on immigration—Glasman reads them all as signs of revolt against the procedural caste. Not the old elite, but the new one: credentialed, laminated and rainbow-striped.

“Why,” Glasman asks, “do we have to walk around with our own face on a badge of ourselves?” Answer: because the system demands constant proof that you belong. The lanyard is less about security, more about submission.

The revolution will not be PowerPointed. It will be de-lanyarded.

The Polemic

The empire of guilt

“Let us call this national self-flagellation,” writes Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, skewering Britain’s descent into performative repentance. At the heart of the Chagos Islands debacle, he argues, lies not law or strategy, but elite moral theatre: £10 billion and vital strategic territory handed over to Mauritius—not because it was right, but because it soothed elite guilt.

This is no one-off. Syed traces the rot from Blair’s “deep sorrow” for slavery, through statue-toppling, to a surreal footnote in a Hogarth exhibition noting a chair “made from timbers shipped from colonies.” The cultural elite, he argues, have traded scholarship and statecraft for confessional penance, while working-class Britons—whose ancestors actually fought for the country—look on, baffled.

Syed, the son of an Indian immigrant, delivers the most heretical point of all: the British Empire, like all empires, was a mixed bag—neither uniquely evil nor uniformly malign, and at times historically beneficial. Try publishing that today. Just ask Nigel Biggar.

In the Chagos capitulation, Syed sees the same pathology behind net zero dogma and asylum dysfunction: “a kind of moral insanity” that privileges signalling over sovereignty. “Only by overcoming our guilt about the past,” he writes, “can we hope to shape the future.”

Until then, the flagellants are in charge.

Full essay here →

Comment

It started with a knee in Minneapolis and ended with Keir Starmer on the carpet. Iain Hollingshead in The Telegraph and Wilfred Reilly in Spiked offer the post-mortem: five years after the George Floyd protests, the Black Lives Matter moment has left behind broken windows, burned reputations and a bout of “woke authoritarianism” that eventually collapsed under its own contradictions.

Reilly dismantles the narrative: the BLM “reckoning” was built on emotion, not evidence—$2 billion in riot damage, a DEI hiring spree and statues toppled from Bristol to Brooklyn. “Nearly every major claim” of the movement, he argues, “was exposed as nonsense.”

Hollingshead tracks the British sequel — same script, none of the backstory. “Hands up, don’t shoot,” chanted at unarmed bobbies. Police chiefs flailed, caught between TikTok theatrics and rising knife crime. And the civil service’s new favourite pastime — corporate soul-searching via diversity dashboards — began to resemble self-flagellation more than reform.

Now? The statues are back, the hashtags have faded and DEI hires are quietly “not being replaced.” But the cultural residue remains. BLM didn’t just fail. It succeeded — in exporting a moral panic and importing the fallout. Britain took a knee. Then lost its footing.

Flashpoints 

Meet Britain’s Joe Rogan: Writing in The New Statesman, Finn McRedmond claims Gary Lineker, having left the BBC amid controversy, is poised to become a dominant cultural and political force through his booming podcast empire, likened to a British Joe Rogan.

Jeremy Clarkson interview: “In the past 20 years Britain has fallen off a cliff”: In an interview with The Telegraph, Clarkson claims Britain has sharply declined over the past two decades, citing crumbling infrastructure, worsening public safety and a visibly crumbling capital.

The sad death of the English pub: Once vital hubs of community life, English pubs are disappearing under pressure from rising costs, distant landlords and shifting social habits, threatening the communal bonds they once anchored, writes Rory Hanrahan in The Spectator.

The end of neoconservatism: Donald Trump has declared the end of the neoconservative era in American foreign policy writes Peter Van Buren in The American Conservative, replacing decades of intervention and failed nation-building in the Middle East with a realpolitik approach focused on stability and pragmatism.

Quote of the week

Until next time,