The UK censors have struck again:
News: It is with great sadness that I have to announce the closure of TCW on July 18, two weeks today, when our last 'edition' will go out.
TCW's list of 'awake' contacts – readers and writers – has expanded around the globe, as well to all corners of Great Britain. We are a...
— Kathy Gyngell (@KathyConWom) July 4, 2026
Over at The Conservative Woman, Kathy further explains:
...As some of you know I have edited TCW voluntarily seven days a week for 12 years. It might look as though it appears by osmosis, but believe me, it doesn't. It was only with the advent of Margaret and Alan Ashworth in 2017 and their commitment and professional expertise that the site truly 'took off'.
Though I say it myself, 12 years is an incredible record for a site run on a shoestring. We have taken readers through some of the most turbulent years of dissent and unease in Britain's democratic history. Brexit, the plandemic and lockdown, one election after another, and five Prime Ministers; a sixth arriving as we leave. A period when the MSM catastrophically failed in its role as the fourth estate by not holding government to account. Many readers have told me TCW is what the Spectator should be, but isn't. A 'merit' achieved by a tiny, underpaid (but principled) team compared with their lavish staffing.
Yet despite the high quality of our output, my best efforts at pitching for the investment that would have put us on secure financial footing have come to naught. I have failed to attract either the type of funding behind The Critic or UnHerd or sufficient regular reader subscriptions to make us viable. Why?
Well, we have been hoist by our own petard. TCW has never slotted into that carefully curated, acceptable face of dissent that establishment figures dare endorse. When you are blacklisted, investors run scared. That blacklisting also took the form of a barrage of censorship that stopped us advertising – a significant source of revenue. We were banned by every single online ad agency, and by the whole of Facebook (Meta) during lockdown which, we were advised via a government tip-off was because of an issue with Whitehall, most likely over our covid reporting. Such was the Conservative government's covid censorship crackdown. From then on we were totally reliant on donations and never recovered the readership to fund the revenue stream we needed to grow. There was another reason for that.
In early May 2022 we were banned from all mobile phone access right through to the autumn of that year by the British Board of Film Censors, the government's pre-Ofcom quango tasked with monitoring mobile phone companies. That July I was also banned from Twitter along with a host of vaccine injured individuals, reinstated only well into 2023, a considerable time after Elon Musk bought the social media company. A five-month battle with the BBFC ended with our agreeing compromises over age verification privacy settings and stringent Disqus comment moderation. Only then did they finally agree to allow mobile access to the site.
In my view, there was no clearer sign of the threat to the establishment that we were perceived to pose. This, remember, was under a Conservative government and we were a small 'c' conservative website. There is no doubt this lost us readers. People thought we had shut down or they never knew we existed. Since then the social media market has become ever more saturated with podcasts, substacks and X posts, all costing less to run than a site designed along more traditional lines.
'There is a tide in the affairs of men' for reassessment and change. This is one. We cannot carry on as we are. We must adapt to the times.
However, all is not lost for loyal TCW writers and readers. The fight goes on.
The fact is that Substack offers a much lower cost and less demanding way to publish news, analysis and commentary. We will be continuing TCW's 'mission' there.
The new substack is @RightTimes with Kathy Gyngell. Please follow it. It will build into a similar politics and culture war platform to TCW. It will host critical commentary, news and analysis by some of the TCW writers you have come to know, as well as my own posts. It will have a similar dissenting, no-holds-barred mission, principled and informed.
As longtime readers know, Mark has oft praised the yeoman's work of Kathy Gyngell and her colleagues at The Conservative Woman - so he sees this announcement as a very sad state of affairs indeed. Kathy has appeared several times on The Mark Steyn Show and stood by Mark in the courtroom as well.
Here, we take a look back at one of Kathy's first appearances on The Mark Steyn Show in December of 2021:
Mark: ...Is there something bigger going on, both in our relationship with the state and our subordination to the state in matters of life and death? Jersey has just become the first jurisdiction in the British Isles to legalize assisted suicide. And in a remarkable judgment from the High Court in England, a twenty year old young lady with spina bifida who believes she should never have been born has won millions in damages for quote wrongful conception.
From her mother's doctor, because he failed to impress upon her sufficiently the need to take folic acid and delay her pregnancy. The lady in question, Evie Toombes, is a prominent and successful show jumper. here she is doing her doing her show jumping. That's every little girl's dream, whether you have spina bifida or not.
Look at that show jumping champion. She's won a British Citizen of the Year Award, so not just British Show Jumping Award, but British Citizen of the Year Award. And she's been received in audience by their woke majesties, the Duke and Duchess of Malibu. Look, there they are. She's about 18 inches from Duchess Meghan's kneecap. How many of us are gonna get that close? Miss Tombs has certainly been dealt some tough cards in life, but there are profound and disturbing implications in this judgment about our autonomy, our relationship to the state, and our attitudes to life and death.
Kathy Gyngell from The Conservative Woman joins us now. Kathy, it's always great to see you. But this is a story in in in which you have some personal investment because your late husband, Bruce Gyngell, who was one of the great entrepreneurs of Australian and UK telly, he launched Channel Nine Down Under and TVA in London - where I spent many happy Sunday mornings on the sofa with David Frost - and had a fabulous life that was rather shorter than it should have been.
And at the end of it he was in such great pain that you overheard him on the baby monitor, as it were, asking his doctor if if he could help him die. So you know this issue very deeply from a personal point of view. It does seem to me if the Netherlands and Belgium are anything to go by that we're moving to a world where of more or less death on demand...
Kathy: Well indeed we are. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on again. And and I would say I think with my husband, I just need to say that because as you said it's very personal. It was a momentary thing. It was a momentary feel of despair.
But in fact, in many ways, even those last terrible months with his brain cancer were extraordinarily positive. And every minute and every hour was time for us, time for the family relationships. Time for him not to do those final things you need to do to complete your life. He knew it was coming to an end. That could not be stopped. But to truncate life at any point, it's a very narrow view of your life and an astonishingly arrogant one to think that we control our lives as this poor girl thinks that her conception could have been controlled.
She might never have been born at all. Who knows? This is an astonishing judgment. I mean, let's just take the two practical points before we get onto the deeper ethical and implication issues of this. I mean, where is the evidence? I'm sorry, that the mother not taking folic acid from would have given birth to a different baby.... where is the evidence?
She would have ever conceived again had she delayed her pregnancy. Where is the evidence she wouldn't have miscarried, which tragically happens to so many women? Where is the evidence that the next child she could conceive was less than perfect? You know, so I think this is an astonishing judgment, just even on the practicality of it... it's mind boggling. But they're obviously profound...
Mark: ...Yeah, it's very interesting to me that the judge somehow because folic acid was a sort of thing for a while a generation or two back. It was something that came up in discussions of maternity, it was something that came up on on radio and TV and in commercials and advertising.
And so it's the idea that somehow the doctor is responsible and that the mother would have had no knowledge of this otherwise, I find very odd. But I'm also interested in the idea this is a state that presumes, for example, if you have a very seriously ill baby and you want to fly that baby to Switzerland or Morocco or whatever it is for some experimental treatment the British state has been quite comfortable decreeing, no, no, no, no, no, that baby, we've decided that baby's gonna die, and that's it, and you have no right to fly that baby out of the country. And I wonder if when one looks back at the last two years in which millions of Western citizens have been content to be treated as children in order to defer the possibility that they might go out into the world and catch some virus. I wonder if in fact we haven't fundamentally changed our concept of humanity, this valuing perfect life at all cost and wanting the imperfections of life out of the way.
Kathy: Well, we've become a remarkably safetyism culture. We've become a remarkably risk averse culture. And we've seen this. I mean, this has sort of been a long time coming. Go back to the culture of complaint. Go back to the eighties. Robert Hughes wrote that brilliant book, I don't know whether you remember it, about the politicization of everything. It was the beginning of identity politics. And as soon as you have that, you have a blame culture. Everyone else but you is to blame. I mean this this is the stuff of a godless secular society, which where you take no personal responsibility, that you don't understand that life is a gift and that you personally are not in control of everything. So it's a very bad psychology across the whole of society that somebody else is going to be responsible. And of course that's what leads to the compliance culture. So in the end, every doctor now is just going to tick a box. He'll never dare talk to you. He'll hand you out a pro forma form of what he's to tell you.
And you all have to sit and accept that. Anything that's personal, any trust completely disappears in relationships and in people who are there meant to help you in a way, in as the way we've developed our society. It's litigious, it's negative, it's nihilistic.
Mark: I wonder if it's also a a hyper present tense culture in the fact that as you know, increasingly throughout Europe we have collapsed birth rates. Our leaders, strikingly, if you look at the French president and the German Chancellor and others, are increasingly childless and we live in a as I said, a a Faustian moment. Life is so glorious in in the European Union.
All we all all that modern Western citizens want to do is is to be able to in enjoy a a kind of perfect moment and the state's job is to keep them alive forever and and protect them from these viruses. but the idea that you're part of a great stream of historical continuity.
Kathy: Sure.
Mark:...if you're lucky you live your three score and ten. If you're not something happens, that is just in the great flow of humanity. All that we don't have a transcendent meaning to life in the post Christian West, and as a result we cling ever more fiercely to the present tense.
Kathy: And it's very sterile. Yes. I think if you look at the abortion statistics, I mean I just actually checked them before we came on air, it's a story. Just since two thousand and fifteen or sixteen, the abortion statistics have rocketed in this country. So it's life so many people I meet, young people now they don't even want to have children. And yet you're trying to explain to them that if you get to my age and you have no children, one has no life, we have to invest in the future. Half of our meaning of life is removed. But this is also to do with the collapse of Christianity or the collapse of faith, because we don't see it in other in Muslim countries. We don't see this negativity towards conception....
Mark: Well you talk about now this legal concept of quote wrongful conception. In fairness to this young lady, she's actually gone into court to say that she was wrongfully conceived. The next step will be judges ruling that you were wrongfully conceived, Kathy. And that's the danger....
Kathy: The children, they'll be suing their parents. Wrongful...
Mark: Yeah, no, no, that's the next one. Wrongful conception.
Kathy: Well, it's you know, this was a life affirming story of human triumph, this mother and daughter. It's sad that this would now descend into an idea that this girl should never have been born....
Mark: No, no, she she she's you're absolutely right, Kathy. This this young lady, she's had twenty years. She's become a famous show jumper. She's won citizen of the year. She's got to sit kneecap to kneecap with Megan. This and the idea that now the judge is agreeing with her that she should never have been born. It's a terrible thing. Wrongful conception is one of the most wrongful conceptions in English law to come along in centuries.
Thank you very much for that, Kathy. You can check out all Kathy's great stuff over at The Conservative Woman website...
Sadly, that fabulous website is now closing but please do continue to follow Kathy's thoughts over at her new substack.
~ Mark will have more to say on the benefits of "folic acid" in the days ahead. But here's a preview:
Why aren't more doctors speaking out about folic acid?
Doctors have a duty to speak out in name of patient safety.
Where are cardiologist protecting patients with stents?
Where are oncologists protecting cancer patients?
Where are neurologistsprotecting the B12 deficient? pic.twitter.com/Tr6eAPJk30
— Dr Clare Craig (@ClareCraigPath) July 5, 2026
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