Friday , March 29 2024

Sam Hooper

Sam Hooper is a former management consultant turned political commentator, currently living in London with his Texan wife. Sam can usually be found somewhere online, droning on about politics, free markets, civil liberties, classical liberalism and classical music. Sam is a proud conservatarian, blogs at http://semipartisansam.com and tweets @SamHooper.

Budget 2017 Reaction

This was a holding budget designed to buy the government some political breathing room, and so Philip Hammond kicked the can down the road on nearly all of the major fiscal and structural issues facing Britain I intended this piece to be just a few disjointed thoughts reflecting on Philip …

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The Two Brexits

Not everything of value can be measured or counted, and Remainers opposing Brexit purely on economic or materialistic terms are doomed to forever misunderstand half the country when they refuse to view Brexit through any other prism If we are to have any hope of knitting Britain back together after …

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Does Oxbridge Discriminate?

Oxbridge has every incentive to admit more students from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. If diversity has failed to improve then it is our fault as individuals, families, communities and voters for failing to provide elite universities with a bigger, better talent pool Another day, another tedious story about Oxbridge being …

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Resurrecting The Citizen Politician

After Brexit, attracting more exceptional citizen politicians and fewer mediocre career politicians is the next crucial step towards democratic renewal in Britain A worthwhile article by new Labour MP Laura Smith for LabourList underlines the urgent need for more politicians who look and sound like contemporary human beings rather than …

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Chasing Liberty

David Green, author of the upcoming “Inclusive Capitalism: He we can make independence work for everyone“, has a good piece in the Spectator about the extent to which the modern Conservative Party has abandoned the goal of maximising liberty. Bonus points to Green for quoting Michael Oakeshott, with whose work …

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Can Dual Citizens Be Good Citizens?

What does it mean to be a dual citizen in the Age of Brexit? Following my recent blog post lamenting our society’s devalued and transactional concept of citizenship in the Age of Brexit, I was asked by a reader to write a companion piece on the topic of dual citizenship, a …

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Brexit Opposition And The Quiet Death Of Citizenship

It is difficult to have a serious conversation about citizenship in the Age of Brexit when so many people hold a such transactional, materialistic and reductionist definition of the concept as meaning little more than benefits received in exchange for taxes paid One interesting and overlooked aspect of the Brexit …

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Like, Why Can’t British Politicians Talk Fancy No More?

Great political speeches are only possible when there are great ideas to be expressed, and great leaders to express them After watching the semi-famous video of former Labour minister Peter Shore arguing passionately against Britain’s membership of the EEC during a 1970s Oxford Union debate, Mark Wallace of Conservative Home …

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Women-Only Train Carriages: Identity Politics Leads To Calls For Segregation, Once Again

Is there any contemporary problem that the identity politics Left will not propose solving through the introduction of segregation? I see that the recurring debate about whether or not to introduce female-only train carriages has bubbled up again from the swamp of leftist thinking. Charlotte England tries to make the …

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Centrism Is The New Extremism

For many years, the most angry and bitter invective in our political discourse hailed from the far Left and Right. But now it is the supposedly rational and pragmatic centrists who are becoming unhinged and increasingly uncivilised. Like the stopped clock which still tells the correct time twice a day, …

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Remainers: You Can Stop Pretending To Be Patriotic Now

A rare moment of honesty from an arch-Remainer New Statesman staff writer Jonn Elledge – whom I recently described as “worse than a garden variety xenophobe” for his heinous statements about elderly Brexit voters, much to his indignant outrage – recently engaged in a minor Twitter spat with Tim Montgomerie …

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Calls For A 100% Inheritance Tax Reveal The Far Left’s Evil Heart

Renewed calls by leftists for a 100% inheritance tax force us to have the argument all over again – does the state exist to serve us, or do we exist to serve the state? I’m sure that many others have already published their own incredulous reactions, but I cannot let …

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#GE 2017: Conservatives Cannot Give Up On The Youth Vote Part 2

Through their arrogance and sheer incompetence, the Tories have turned an entire generation away from conservative politics. But the solution is not to go marching off to the socialist Left It doesn’t have to be like this. It doesn’t have to be the case that people under 30 years of …

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Embracing ‘Compassionate Conservatism’ Will Not Make The Rootless Tories More Popular

Despite its complete and utter failure to deliver a solid electoral victory for the conservatives, or to meaningfully detoxify the Conservative Party’s “nasty party” image, the woolly, nebulous and thoroughly unhelpful concept of “compassionate conservatism” refuses to die. Following Theresa May’s abject failure in the 2017 general election – losing …

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Labour Centrists Bend The Knee To Jeremy Corbyn, Once Again

No courage, no backbone, no vision of their own Telegraph sketchwriter Michael Deacon reports on the rapturous reception given to Jeremy Corbyn by the Parliamentary Labour Party when he entered the Commons yesterday: Labour MPs cheered Jeremy Corbyn. Genuinely. They really did. And when I say Labour MPs, I don’t …

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Labour’s Cynical, Disingenuous National Debt Hysteria

Pot, meet kettle You’ve probably already seen them countless times over the course of this general election campaign – the smug, sanctimonious internet memes bandied about by Labour supporters and other left-wing activists excoriating the Conservatives for having presided over a massive increase in the national debt since taking office in …

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