Across Europe, the act of knowing the citizen has become a test of power.
These three essays trace how identity moved from the census to the classroom, from the passport to the algorithm. Germany counts precisely; Britain hesitates to count at all. Yet both reveal the same unease — that the more the state tries to know its people, the more it risks losing their trust. Counting Strangers, The British Fear of Being Known, and From Card to Code follow that uneasy journey from bureaucratic record to digital surveillance, asking what remains of freedom when knowledge itself becomes a form of control.
An exploration of the moral and ecological misjudgements that have shaped modern Britain — from misplaced compassion and guilt to the exhaustion of land and wildlife — and a call to recover stewardship and restraint before it is too late.
Modern schooling does little to help children discover what moves them or what they might live for. The timetable is full, the spirit empty. Passion, curiosity, and imagination — those inner resources that make learning joyful — are treated as optional extras. Since the 1990s, legislation and professional fear have drained warmth from classrooms; teachers now perform roles rather than form relationships. The result is an education system that functions but no longer inspires — a wall between intellect and soul.
A study of France and Britain as mirrors of Western decline — from post-war faith in welfare to today’s procedural governance, fiat money, and managed control. The end of the post-war promise is not collapse but sedation.
A reflection on how Britain’s independent schools and social hierarchies mirror one another—each a compartment where people learn the codes of belonging that keep them exactly where they are.
Once the British working class carried an unspoken code of loyalty, duty, and honour — a moral architecture that gave meaning to lives built on hard labour. Today, that structure has collapsed. What remains is not liberation but loss: a generation cut adrift from purpose, belonging, and hope.
For three centuries France and Britain have rebelled against religious authority, from Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme to Nietzsche’s death of God and the modern satire of Private Eye and Le Canard enchaîné. Yet rebellion, once a weapon of liberation, has hardened into reflex. The challenge today is not to keep mocking but to recover conviction—before the state learns to silence even our laughter.
It is a paradox that in Britain, after thirteen years of compulsory schooling, many young people emerge without a secure grasp of either English grammar or basic arithmetic, while at the same time official figures tell us that one in five schoolchildren suffers from a “probable mental disorder.” Adults fare little better: rates of anxiety, depression, and mixed emotional disorders are climbing steadily, particularly in the working class.