Britain recently woke up to the startling revelation that Keir Starmer now knows what a woman is. How does he know? Because a court told him. According to Sir Keir “A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear. I actually welcome the judgment because I think it gives real clarity.” This change of heart could be read as an act of political opportunism in the face of fast-changing public attitudes, but the way the Prime Minister framed the shift was telling. It seemed to speak of a man who had outsourced his rationality and morality to the legal system, patiently waiting for “clarity” to descend from on high, rather than making his own mind up.
English civility, scepticism and legalism have been taken to unhealthy extremes
Certain elements of the British character — eccentricity, ambition, courage, stoicism — have withered away, whilst English civility, scepticism and legalism have been taken to unhealthy extremes. We are terrified of confrontation, relativists about truth, and obsessed with impersonal authority. The result of this new national character is a culture that venerates procedure over principle and prudence.
The English legal system, historically, was rooted in both of these things. The rational application of laws assumed an overarching moral order, derived from Christian theology, and an underlying foundation of common sense and natural reason. The “reasonable man” is the fundamental unit of British civil order, rendering law and politics rational and humane by tethering it in the world of everyday life.
That world is gone, and we find ourselves instead subject to the rule of inhuman, irrational strictures. Rather than fitting law and regulation to human reality, we twist our lives to fit the dread dictums of bureaucracy. Instead of the human person we have homo economicus, and instead of the reasonable man, we have the procedural man.
The results of this transformation are, despite the worldly pretensions of the proceduralists, a country that cannot function on a practical level. As I write, rubbish is piling up on the streets of Birmingham, whose local council faces bankruptcy. The source of this civil catastrophe is not flood, fire or famine, but the British courts. Under equality legislation, judges have suddenly decided that wildly different areas of work, such as dinner ladies as compared to bin men, or warehouse workers versus shop assistants, must be paid the same, because the more male-dominated form of work is better paid. No woman is being paid less for the same work, but in its infinite wisdom, the machine has decided that we must have equal pay for unequal work. The cost of these judgements could cost British local government over £10 billion, see the wages of working class men cut, jobs outsourced, and public services severely reduced in quality. The same impacts will occur in many areas of the private sector as well, with costs increased for consumers.
Ask a serious philosopher, or the man on the street, about the idea of assessing “work of equivalent value” and they will tell you the same thing: it’s comparing apples and oranges. Such a judgement is just too subjective, two things that are so different in nature cannot be finely weighed, and can never be “equal” in any absolute sense. But ask a lawyer, and they will produce charts and numbers that they will cheerfully assure you show just that. Consider the charts below:
Soviet Gosplan had more rigour. pic.twitter.com/985yMr0j90
— max tempers (@maxtempers) April 22, 2025
What on earth do any of these numbers mean? What methodology is used to generate them? It’s all on the basis of subjective human judgements, which are then rendered down into junk data and recycled into something that can be read out in court as if it was the hardest of hard science.
This inability to think outside of numbers, preferring even the most synthetic sort of data over the best rational arguments, is now a defining feature of British institutional life. Every large organisation, from hospitals, to universities to government departments, is afflicted by this kind of thinking and language.
And it is precisely a linguistic failure. Despite our abysmal failure to foster STEM learning at school and university, we are even more deficient in the domain of the liberal arts. At school and increasingly at university too, those studying English, History, and Philosophy are trained to pass exams, fill out worksheets and apply pre-chewed, sub-sociological “critique” to the material they encounter. The bones of grammar, memorisation and facts are missing, and anyway lack the flesh of a wide reading of classic sources and texts. Absent these fundamentals, it is little wonder that the arts of classical logic and rhetoric have fallen into total abeyance.
In the growing gulf between the sciences and the humanities, we instead have seen the rise of a new genre of fake, sophistic “social sciences” from cultural studies to sociology to economics. The ethos of these novel pseudosciences have in turn been imposed on traditional subjects and professions, especially in areas like business, law and administration.
Britain has a new motto and a new philosophy: “computer says no”
Whilst judges like William Blackstone wrote on poetry and architecture, as well as writing sophisticated treatments of legal theory, today’s august justices have worksheets to fill out and boxes to check before determining that rapists can’t be deported or shop assistants have as hard a job as warehouse workers.
Today’s liberal elites have an iron grip on the levers of institutional power, but are religiously opposed to exercising that authority for the sake of the common good. Instead, they cling on privilege and position whilst hiding behind an increasingly Kafkaesque system that they have left to run on autopilot. Britain has a new motto and a new philosophy: “computer says no”.
