Monday 12 October 2020
Wednesday 7 October 2020
Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country - Spiked, October 2, 2020
Why it’s fashionable to hate your own country
This is more about parading virtue than reckoning with history.
Patrick West
If one had to explain today’s culture wars in the barest, most simple terms, the best method would be to refer to David Goodhart’s division of peoples into the Somewheres and the Anywheres. In Britain, America and elsewhere we see a conflict between those attached to their homeland, its history and its traditions, and a more affluent, mobile elite, who profess to be more internationalist in outlook – because they can afford to be – and who are less likely to revere the tradition and culture of the lands, cities and towns of their birth.
This is to put it mildly. Going back to the 1930s, as George Orwell famously observed, the Anywhere class is not so much casually indifferent to the culture of their place of birth as positively hostile to it. The ostensible internationalists of Orwell’s time venerated anything that emerged from Moscow or Paris, in contradistinction to that which stemmed from petty, boring, philistine, church-going, beer-drinking England.
The culture wars of the 21st century illustrate that this division very much remains, albeit in mutated form. This was illustrated recently by the decision of a debating society at Trinity College, Dublin to rescind an invitation to Richard Dawkins to speak at a function, on account of his critical viewpoints on Islam. Dawkins, perhaps the most famous atheist of our times, has described the faith as ‘the greatest force for evil in the world today’, and referred to the ‘pernicious influence’ of Islamic faith schools.
Atheism is the default position of most students, and anyone in their twenties who likes to style themselves as a radical freethinker will call themselves an atheist, so you might think Dawkins would find favour in their numbers. And indeed he does – but only when he is attacking Christianity. When it comes to denouncing Islam he is implicitly making the grievous transgression of racism, of attacking the Other, of something sacred and international to the Anywhere class.
To attack Christianity, something that pertains to the Self, to the Somewhere people, is conversely positively fashionable and will find you friends and allies among like-minded, ostensible and ostentatiously international types.
It is a pattern repeated elsewhere. In America we have white, liberal, coastal types mocking Donald Trump and his blue-collar supporters for being small-minded, borderline or actual racists, and for never leaving their opioid-infested, ghastly Middle American towns. In Britain we have been all too accustomed to the Remainer depiction of anti-EU Brexiteers as low-information morons from the provinces who didn’t even know what they voted for.
The white-on-white narrative between the enlightened, educated Brahmin class and the brainless Morlocks is repeated on both sides of the Atlantic, whether it be Momentum or BBC executives versus brainwashed chavs stuck in the past yearning for Empire, or white Black Lives Matter and Antifa virtue-enforcers seeking conflict with redneck MAGA types. On both sides of the Atlantic we see Anywhere liberals denounce the history of their own country as one of genocide and racism.
The abiding and inherent tendency of the people of the Anywhere class is thus to denigrate their own country. The motivation for this should be obvious, if we view this conspicuous self-hatred in terms of virtue-signalling. It is to draw attention to oneself, to display what an enlightened and decent person you are, prepared to right the wrongs of the past and confront the wrong-minded folk of the present. It’s a modern form of self-flagellation, an egocentric, narcissistic, often insincere form of romantic primitivism that goes back to Rousseau, in which the childlike, innocent Other is always sanctified as superior.
The showy politics of the Anywhere liberal-left is often politics to make you feel good. It’s posturing to make others know that you are good.
The new dogmas
Back in the late 20th century it was often observed that Western society had lost faith in its old certitudes, in its faith in reason, progress, grand narratives and objectivity itself. According to a certain coterie of mostly French intellectuals, professors among the humanities departments in universities and journalists in elevated echelons of the press, there was a consensus that we lived in a postmodern society, hopelessly mired in relativism, doubt and multiple irreconcilable interpretations. No one could really say what was true or not as there was no ultimate arbiter of truth.
How things are different today. Our society now seems in precisely an opposite impasse. We now live in a culture suffused with ferocious certitudes, in which everyone believes they possess the truth. This is why verbal conflicts on social media have become so vituperative and unpleasant. This is why political violence and conflict between factions has returned to our streets for the first time since the 1930s. This is why people hold such tenacious views on transgenderism, race, the European Union or the future of America. This is the reason for our conformist and censorious cancel culture of No Platforming. Everyone knows what’s right and seeks to silence those who are wrong. Heretics are punished, fired or brought to bear. Doubt has disappeared.
As Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times suggested at the weekend, we are living in a Counter-Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Immanuel Kant to David Hume, were guided by doubt and the desire to question dogmas held by others or themselves, in order to further human knowledge and progress mankind, dogma today rules.
This is why Friedrich Nietzsche, widely misunderstood as the godfather of postmodernism, was hostile to final, absolute truth. He believed it could ultimately lead to blind ideology. As he wrote in one of his notebooks (a passage that posthumously appeared in The Will To Power): ‘The claim that the truth has been found, and that there is an end to ignorance and error, is one of the greatest temptations there is. If it is believed, it paralyses the determination to examine, to investigate, to be curious and to experiment.’
Postmodern advertising
This is not to say the spirit of postmodernity has vanished. Its embers still waft around us. Consider two television adverts for coffee now showing. One is a series of adverts for Starbucks, in which people explain how and why they transitioned. One portrays a young girl changing her identity from Jemma to James. These tell us nothing about the beverages for sale. It’s all about selling a brand as a woke value. It’s thoroughly postmodern, in that the real and represented have become utterly divorced.
Another advert, that for McDonald’s coffee, is thoroughly rooted in modernity. Its message? Its coffee is tasty and cheap. I know which brand I would prefer to buy.
Trekking - The TLS, September 25, 2020
WALKING THE GREAT NORTH LINE
From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to discover the mysteries of our ancient past
ROBERT TWIGGER
320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
The route Robert Twigger takes in this rambling adventure may seem unconventional, but it is guided by a neat idea. One day, having noticed that a straight line from Hengistbury Head in Dorset to Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast passes through no fewer than forty-two sites stretching back to prehistory – including Old Sarum, Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor – he sets out on a pilgrimage along this novel pathway. A question forever hovers in the background: does this alignment exist by accident, or by design?
Luxuriating in the quotidian aspects of walking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, Twigger sees his trek as a homage to the ancients, to “my freedom to do as I pleased, sleep and walk where I pleased. And freedom also includes not paying for things that are ours by rights, by the rights of ancient England”. “I was fondly hoping to develop ideas about England’s ‘primitive’ past”, he writes, “and to point out that ancient man was just as intelligent as us.”
Part poet, part pub philosopher, he is sometimes friendly and open, discussing Jack Kerouac with fellow trekkers, for example; at other times, he is a misanthrope who enjoys being alone and unhappy, mired in bad weather, suffering from blisters and getting lost. In perhaps an accidental allusion to the eternal monomyth, he seems to be on his own Hero’s Journey: he grows dispirited as he zigzags through the Peak District, facing false starts, disenchantments and deliverances – he is frustrated by barbed wire and blocked passages, but elsewhere discovers an “island with a single small oak ... made for a great seat, a regal seat, a poet warrior’s seat” – while repeatedly vowing never to forget the pain of walking.
An inveterate grumbler, Twigger is seldom a bore, however, and this melancholy, elegiac and meandering book is strangely satisfactory. It doesn’t matter that the original conceit, the supposed line from north to south, retreats into irrelevance (Twigger reluctantly concedes that he “had a correlation. Nothing more”), it is just good to be in his company as he walks and reflects on such esoteric subjects as shamanism, Continental philosophy, church porches, land ownership, autobiography, family history and the stressful and sometimes soul-destroying nature of modernity.
Patrick West
An independent Kent isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds - Spectator Coffee House, September 24, 2020
An independent Kent isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds
Patrick West
The news that a Brexit border will be introduced for lorry drivers entering Kent has aroused hilarity and derision among some Remainers. These critics see in Kent the personification of all that is parochial and plebeian. Horrible old Kent, with its proles who epitomise Little England at its most execrable and risible. The truth is that we people of Kent won't be too flustered by this new development. Many of us will actually welcome the Sussex/Kent divide.
For too long our county, the oldest in England, has been the playboy playground of rich Londoners and Sussex/Surrey county types who have descended on our wonderful chaff fields and cliffs, wading their cash around, buying up houses that they rarely occupy, or maybe live in for two or three weekends every summer.
Sure, I may be one the many ex-Londoners who has settled here, but at least I have done so properly and permanently for years now. Nowhere are second-home owners more conspicuous than in east Kent.
And there is the other case of people breaching Kent's borders, via the English Channel. Those who come from France and settle here place a burden on schools and hospitals. No-one here in Folkestone or Margate has a grievance with foreigners. It's just not being able to understand your neighbours that really grates. There is literally something alienating about not understanding what people around you are saying.
I'm being facetious, of course. Kent folk are the most generous and English people around, like Yorkshire types; more English than English. But those smug, remote people who think it's amusing to guffaw at the prospect of Kent independence inadvertently expose their own metropolitan ignorance. People outside London do care about their country and have an inherent patriotism, and they do care about where they live. This is because we are the somewhere people from somewhere, not the anybody people from anywhere.
Yes, we in Kent may want to erect walls. But don't all householders want to erect walls and lock doors? Proper caring neighbourhoods always want to put up walls. It's because they care about all that they hold dear. Show me someone who doesn't lock their door at night or someone who bewails the walls of their house and I'll show you a hypocrite.
We have always welcomed incomers who want to immigrate here, from Lithuanians to Poles, and we have seen the sons and daughters of these immigrants learn English and teach their children English and integrate with those who live here. That's because many of us came from London areas where we lived among eastern Europeans, and where eastern Europeans learned to live with others from ethnic minorities. If you want to see an exemplar of an English-Polish multicultural society, come to Dover.
Many of us Kent folk tolerate the derision from the metropole for the same reason that we don't like them: there is a manifest feeling that for years they have looked down upon us. This is why we vote Ukip. This is why we voted Brexit. This is why so many Labour heartlands voted Tory. We were fed up of being condescended. And this is why a lot of naturally Labour heartlands in Kent will continue to vote against the metropolitan elite: we hate being laughed at, for being mocked as silly Kent people. We are at the beginning and end of England.
And we care about Brexit; we care about the effect a no-deal Brexit will have. We care about it because we have felt the brunt of immigration for decades now, in a way that those in London and beyond have not. From Herne Bay to Folkestone, from Margate to Dover, we have seen our societies changing. We are at the front line.
This is why Kent independence isn't such a ridiculous idea as it sounds. It's only as absurd as what's been going on in the past decades with the British working-class, lower-middle class and even the middle class. We've had enough of you. And if our answers seem silly, it's because your questions have been silly. So Viva Kent Independencia if you must. It's not merely a joke. On anyone's behalf.
Wokeness is a cult of purity - Spiked, September 4, 2020
Wokeness is a cult of purity
They believe cultures cannot mix and that good people must be punished for the most minor transgressions.
Patrick West
It’s a sign that normality has returned in earnest: the trivial transgression of cultural appropriation is back in the news headlines. No doubt you will have seen the story. The singer Adele has been accused of this outrageous violation after appearing in a virtual Notting Hill Carnival photograph sporting a bikini top emblazoned with the Jamaican flag and with her hair in Bantu knots, a hairstyle mostly associated with African women or women of African descent.
We are back on familiar ground, back to the notion that any form of intercultural interaction, especially undertaken by white people, is inherently racist and offensive. Some did defend Adele on the grounds that being a native of Britain’s multiracial capital city, she knew exactly what she was doing, and was less engaging in appropriation and more appreciation. Yet the affair reveals how tenacious remains the notion of ‘cultural appropriation’.
This popular conceit is profoundly ignorant and illiterate. All cultures are cross-breeds to some degree. I write these very words in a language that is a mash-up of Anglo-Saxon and Old French. English combines the language of the oppressed and oppressor. I punch up and down merely by typing these words.
Yet the resilient belief that cultures are sacred and incorruptible is significant. It is a symptom of a new morality of purity, a culture of cleansing and of new boundaries.
As Frank Furedi argues in his recent book, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries, our culture’s borders have shifted focus in recent decades. Traditional boundaries between nation states are deemed archaic or undesirable by some. The boundary between male and female is collapsing, as is that between gay and straight, adult and child, public and private. Transgression is the name of the game.
Or so it seems. Boundaries themselves aren’t vanishing — rather, our culture has erected new ones. One example is this boundary between cultures, which are now viewed as akin to animal species that cannot interbreed. Cultures are deemed in need of inoculation from each other. Hence the felony of ‘cultural appropriation’. Furedi also points to ‘safe spaces’, which erect a different type of boundary, as does ‘cancel culture’, which divides mankind into two categories: the elect and the outcasts.
In the United States, there is talk of introducing racial segregation on university campuses. This reification of race – between people of the same species – is but another extension of the new quasi-religious imperative to purify, simplify, to erase nuance, subtlety and shades of difference. Such is the forensic fanaticism and fundamentalism of the new puritanism that even the most tiny transgression, or ‘microaggression’, must be identified and exorcised.
This purity cult seeks to expunge society of those who fail to obey woke diktats, to cancel, ‘call out’, shame, intimidate, harass or punish the undesirables. Liberal humanism is derided as insufficient. It is not enough to tolerate people we disagree with. They must conform or be expelled. Hence the violence in America at the moment, from the puritan stormtroopers of antifa and BLM, who demand strangers show obedience and compliance, who are literally destroying America. In pulling down statues, they betray how they want to erase history itself. It’s all classic Year Zero behaviour, worthy of a cult, of which the new puritanism is but an extension.
It is often remarked that people are far more intolerant these days, and seek recourse to censorship so freely. It derives from this new morality, which can’t abide impurity and cannot tolerate difference or dissent.
The new morality worships purity. The new boundaries are the means by which this doctrine is enforced.
John Williams: the great classical composer of our time
What a joy it was to listen to Classic FM’s ‘Movie Music Hall of Fame’ throughout bank holiday Monday. It was an escapist fantasy. John Williams’ score for Schindler’s List was eventually voted the nation’s favourite piece of film music, knocking from the top slot Howard Shore’s score for The Lord of the Rings.
It was a triumphal day for Williams all round, with five entries in the top 20 alone, the others including Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and ET the Extra-Terrestrial. Surely John Williams should be recognised as our greatest living composer.
Purists might object that his music is highly derivative, with his scores being conspicuously reliant on Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Elgar. This is true. Yet Williams, not to mention Shore, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Ennio Morricone and so on, have produced some of the best-loved and most enduring classical music of the second half of the 20th century and first two decades of this one. Their music has proved more lasting than anything produced by mainstream modern classical composers. Film scores today are the only form of new classical music that enjoy popularity among the masses.
Most of the new material performed at the Proms this year will be forgotten in 10 years’ time. By then the Classic FM Movie Music Hall of Fame won’t have changed much at all.
We all have bad thoughts
The singer George Ezra has revealed that he is suffering from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) known as ‘Pure O’, short for ‘purely obsessional’, the symptoms of which include distressing or disruptive thoughts associated with OCD, but none of the physical actions to relieve them, such as internal counting, blinking or other repetitive physical rituals.
Upon reading the confession, I began to suspect that I, too, had ‘Pure O’. I have three classic psychological OCD symptoms: hoarding, repeated checking of door locks or oven knobs, and indeed disruptive thoughts.
I’ve always had all sorts of strange and unpleasant thoughts. But no one is in charge of their subconscious, and who governs what might spring from it unannounced, so I’ve learnt not to hate myself for such thoughts, just as most of us eventually don’t blame ourselves for the weird and horrible things we do in our dreams.
My most common disruptive thought is the temptation to throw myself in front of an oncoming train or from a tall building. But again, many of you will have had this temptation. It’s a common cause for fear of heights, and not remotely connected with actual suicidal thoughts.
Most of us have strange thoughts from time to time. Most of us have some form of OCD, in which case we should accept that behaviour associated with it is otherwise known as ‘being human’.
The singer George Ezra has revealed that he is suffering from a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) known as ‘Pure O’, short for ‘purely obsessional’, the symptoms of which include distressing or disruptive thoughts associated with OCD, but none of the physical actions to relieve them, such as internal counting, blinking or other repetitive physical rituals.
Upon reading the confession, I began to suspect that I, too, had ‘Pure O’. I have three classic psychological OCD symptoms: hoarding, repeated checking of door locks or oven knobs, and indeed disruptive thoughts.
I’ve always had all sorts of strange and unpleasant thoughts. But no one is in charge of their subconscious, and who governs what might spring from it unannounced, so I’ve learnt not to hate myself for such thoughts, just as most of us eventually don’t blame ourselves for the weird and horrible things we do in our dreams.
My most common disruptive thought is the temptation to throw myself in front of an oncoming train or from a tall building. But again, many of you will have had this temptation. It’s a common cause for fear of heights, and not remotely connected with actual suicidal thoughts.
Most of us have strange thoughts from time to time. Most of us have some form of OCD, in which case we should accept that behaviour associated with it is otherwise known as ‘being human’.
The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail - Spectator Coffee House, September 3, 2020
The BBC’s bid to axe left-wing comedy will fail
Patrick West
People of a conservative or Eurosceptic disposition should be thankful that the BBC's new director general, Tim Davie, is to address the widely-held perception that its comedy output is disproportionately left-wing. For years, listeners and viewers of the likes of The News Quiz, The Now Show, Mock The Week and Have I Got News For You have been subjected to – and bored by – an endless stream of quips and invectives at the expense of the Conservative party, Donald Trump and Brexiteers. According to a Daily Telegraph report, the BBC is to tackle this imbalance. Some of these shows might even be axed altogether.
Yet this could be a difficult task. Although the liberal-left or woke nature of much BBC satire and political comedy can be grating, it is, alas, intrinsic to its nature. These shows are mostly aimed at herd-minded twenty-somethings, for whom parroting one's anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, Tory-bashing opinions is not only a matter of pride, but serves as generational, tribal glue.
Most stand-up comedians duly cater for these viewpoints, and in doing so, also satisfy their own needs. As the Dave channel series Comedy Against Living Miserably has illustrated, many comedians today conform to the stereotype of the sad clown, the figure who on stage makes us laugh but in private suffers from profound unhappiness. An episode on Sunday that featured Seann Walsh, Suzi Ruffell and Nish Kumar – the latter an obsessive anti-Brexiteer – revealed how deeply insecure they were and how a bad gig would plunge them into a week-long bout of depression.
To judge from Comedy Against Living Miserably, most popular TV stand-up comedians are insecure souls who seek plaudits from strangers to boost their fragile ego and feel better about themselves. And you don't win plaudits from young people by articulating sensible or unfashionable or conservative opinions. Hence the bias we see today. It's the result of a symbiotic relationship between crowd and performers, each seeking confirmation from the other.
This is why conservative stand-up comedians are so rare on TV and radio. Simon Evans and Geoff Norcott are exceptions, with the latter's awkward appearance on Mock The Week only highlighting that show's ingrained liberal-left tendency.
Right-wing comedy is anyway less suited to the vocal, audience-based format in our woke culture, in which causing offence has become one of the most grievous transgressions. Right-wing and conservative humour is less chummy, luvvie and ingratiating, and can often be cruel, outrageous and brutally honest. Think Ricky Gervais or Frankie Boyle. While both offensive stand-ups wouldn't classify themselves as classically right-wing, both inveigh against political correctness and both are inherently obsessed with man's fallen nature.
Conservative – and thus necessarily pessimistic – satire is better digested in print, alone in the private sphere, where we can laugh inwardly at things we know we can't find funny in public. It's where we can recognise that which we know to be true, when saying what is true might land us in trouble with the law or with our bosses. The best satire is read, not heard, whether it be the misanthrope Jonathan Swift having Gulliver urinating on a queen's home to put out a fire, or Viz having my generation wetting ourselves at the angry feminist Millie Tant and the absurdly right-on Modern Parents.
The foremost written-word conservative satirist today is Andrew Doyle, creator of the preposterous woke caricature, Titania McGrath. And Doyle's monster enjoys a noble pedigree; she could easily have been dreamt up by the late Michael Wharton, who for the second half of the twentieth century and early part of this one, wrote the Daily Telegraph's semi-fantastical 'Peter Simple' column.
Wharton populated his fictional world, 'Stretchford', with liberal-left grotesques: Hampstead intellectuals, barmy social workers, supinely liberal Tories, trendy vicars. The pinnacle of his creation was the psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk, who invariably concluded his monologues with the bellicose refrain: 'We are all guilty!' This might as well be the actual motto of today's liberal-left.
That the BBC is funded by you and me, whereas print satire is not, is an important matter. So the political imbalance of its comedy panel shows should at least be investigated. But I'm not sure it's going to be a success story, certainly not without alienating the audience that currently does like to be reassured of its anti-Brexit and anti-Trump righteousness.
From Punch in the 19th century to P.J. O'Rourke to Auberon Waugh to Craig Brown to Titania McGrath, if it's grown-up, nuanced political humour and satire you want, refer to books, newspapers, magazines or the internet. Let the lefties have the airwaves. They and their pliant audiences are quite good at it, to be fair. Yet they'll never match the refined and elevated humour of conservatives, who always find comedy in the more cerebral and less conformist medium of the written word.
Yet this could be a difficult task. Although the liberal-left or woke nature of much BBC satire and political comedy can be grating, it is, alas, intrinsic to its nature. These shows are mostly aimed at herd-minded twenty-somethings, for whom parroting one's anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, Tory-bashing opinions is not only a matter of pride, but serves as generational, tribal glue.
Most stand-up comedians duly cater for these viewpoints, and in doing so, also satisfy their own needs. As the Dave channel series Comedy Against Living Miserably has illustrated, many comedians today conform to the stereotype of the sad clown, the figure who on stage makes us laugh but in private suffers from profound unhappiness. An episode on Sunday that featured Seann Walsh, Suzi Ruffell and Nish Kumar – the latter an obsessive anti-Brexiteer – revealed how deeply insecure they were and how a bad gig would plunge them into a week-long bout of depression.
To judge from Comedy Against Living Miserably, most popular TV stand-up comedians are insecure souls who seek plaudits from strangers to boost their fragile ego and feel better about themselves. And you don't win plaudits from young people by articulating sensible or unfashionable or conservative opinions. Hence the bias we see today. It's the result of a symbiotic relationship between crowd and performers, each seeking confirmation from the other.
This is why conservative stand-up comedians are so rare on TV and radio. Simon Evans and Geoff Norcott are exceptions, with the latter's awkward appearance on Mock The Week only highlighting that show's ingrained liberal-left tendency.
Right-wing comedy is anyway less suited to the vocal, audience-based format in our woke culture, in which causing offence has become one of the most grievous transgressions. Right-wing and conservative humour is less chummy, luvvie and ingratiating, and can often be cruel, outrageous and brutally honest. Think Ricky Gervais or Frankie Boyle. While both offensive stand-ups wouldn't classify themselves as classically right-wing, both inveigh against political correctness and both are inherently obsessed with man's fallen nature.
Conservative – and thus necessarily pessimistic – satire is better digested in print, alone in the private sphere, where we can laugh inwardly at things we know we can't find funny in public. It's where we can recognise that which we know to be true, when saying what is true might land us in trouble with the law or with our bosses. The best satire is read, not heard, whether it be the misanthrope Jonathan Swift having Gulliver urinating on a queen's home to put out a fire, or Viz having my generation wetting ourselves at the angry feminist Millie Tant and the absurdly right-on Modern Parents.
The foremost written-word conservative satirist today is Andrew Doyle, creator of the preposterous woke caricature, Titania McGrath. And Doyle's monster enjoys a noble pedigree; she could easily have been dreamt up by the late Michael Wharton, who for the second half of the twentieth century and early part of this one, wrote the Daily Telegraph's semi-fantastical 'Peter Simple' column.
Wharton populated his fictional world, 'Stretchford', with liberal-left grotesques: Hampstead intellectuals, barmy social workers, supinely liberal Tories, trendy vicars. The pinnacle of his creation was the psychoanalyst Dr Heinz Kiosk, who invariably concluded his monologues with the bellicose refrain: 'We are all guilty!' This might as well be the actual motto of today's liberal-left.
That the BBC is funded by you and me, whereas print satire is not, is an important matter. So the political imbalance of its comedy panel shows should at least be investigated. But I'm not sure it's going to be a success story, certainly not without alienating the audience that currently does like to be reassured of its anti-Brexit and anti-Trump righteousness.
From Punch in the 19th century to P.J. O'Rourke to Auberon Waugh to Craig Brown to Titania McGrath, if it's grown-up, nuanced political humour and satire you want, refer to books, newspapers, magazines or the internet. Let the lefties have the airwaves. They and their pliant audiences are quite good at it, to be fair. Yet they'll never match the refined and elevated humour of conservatives, who always find comedy in the more cerebral and less conformist medium of the written word.
Vegans, your soya milk is killing the planet - Spectator Coffee House, August 22, 2020
Vegans, your soya milk is killing the planet
Patrick West
In the popular imagination, veganism and environmentalism go hand-in-hand. Both are championed – often in one voice – by ultra-progressive types who protest that we should live more ethically and responsibly in order to save the planet. Both types argue that eating less methane-emitting cattle and consuming more agriculturally-efficient crops is the first step we can all make as individuals into halting climate change.
A report published by the UK Sustainable Food Trust not only implicitly challenges the assumption that veganism and environmentalism work in symbiosis, it tacitly suggests that the two movements may be in actual conflict with each other.
It calls upon vegans to stop drinking soy milk in order to save the planet, and that milk from cows – especially cows grazed on grass rather than imported soya beans – is much better for a sustainable planet. 'Vegans and others who buy milk substitutes made from soya for their latte and cappuccino, or breakfast cereal, are also harming the planet. They would do better to switch to milk from cows... if they want to help make a more sustainable planet,' the report states.
Global production of soya beans and palm oils has doubled over the past 20 years and continues to rise. The two account for 90 per cent of global vegetable oil production and are used in processed foods, animal feed and non-food products. Many of us are attuned to the devastation caused to rainforests by palm oil cultivation, but less well known is comparable ruination caused by soya bean production: and the cultivation of both is having terrible consequences.
Soya milk is only the most glaring battle-ground between vegans and environmentalism. Veganism, as practised today, is mostly the preserve of the cosmopolitan middle-classes, whose diet often include quinoa imported from South America, almonds from California, pomegranates from India, beans from Brazil, goji berries China and soya from south-east Asia – this soya will, in turn, be transformed into processed vegan burgers and vegan sausages. Most popular plant-based proteins, including chickpeas, lentils and chia seeds, are also usually flown thousands of miles to reach their consumers in the UK.
Another dairy product substitute, almond milk, begins life on the monocultural landscape of the almond plains of California, where the almonds are doused in pesticides and fungicides, before being flown thousands of miles to the UK. (It requires a colossal 130 pints of water to produce just one glass of almond milk). The use of fertiliser, fungicides, pesticides and herbicides has long been a feature of industrial crops producing maize and grains.
The appetite for voguish vegan food can have a devastating effect on local economies. In 2013, prices of quinoa rocketed to such an extent that those growing the grain in the Andes, where it plays a central part in the local diet, could no longer afford it.
Not all conventional fruit and vegetables are environmentally-friendly, either. The UK imports strawberries and blueberries from continental Europe and the US when they are out of season here, generating their own carbon footprint. And perhaps the biggest sinner is the asparagus. Research by Angelina Frankowska at Manchester University recently found that asparagus eaten in the UK has the highest carbon footprint of any vegetable here, mostly because it is imported from Peru and because of the vegetable's thirsty nature and demand for land.
Another environmental villain that we take for granted is the avocado, a staple of the hipster vegan diet, and a similarly thirsty fruit. A single mature avocado tree in California, Chile or Mexico – areas that face chronic water shortages – needs up to 209 litres every day in the summer, before taking its journey by plane to the consumer.
The processed nature of much 'vegan food' is yet another problem. This February, Graham McAuliffe of the Rothamsted Institute, said that tofu has a worse carbon footprint than chicken, pork or lamb. The protein foodstuff has a larger carbon footprint than the meat it ostensibly replaces owing to the fact that it is processed and because it is made from soy milk. The story is similar with cow-free vegan cheeses made from coconut oil. These require a warm tropical climate to grow and they are often imported from Pacific regions or Sri Lanka.
It's not veganism per se that is necessarily bad for the environment. A 2018 Oxford University study found that a vegan diet is the single most effective way to reduce our environmental footprint, which is true, but only in the case of a sensible and rational vegan diet. If you were to eat a diet derived from locally-sourced, in-season, non-processed vegetables, fruit, pulses, legumes, berries, rice and oats, you would indeed be considerably reducing your carbon footprint.
That sounds a very boring and time-consuming life, which explains the allure of today's exotic vegan diet, a voguish affair which is rather bad for our planet.
A pandemic of corporate virtue-signalling - Spiked, August 21, 2020
Let’s boycott all the money-grubbing companies that pretend to care about us.
Patrick West
You have probably spent the past five months watching a lot of television or online broadcasts or messing around on the internet, which means you will have seen a lot of adverts – most of them woke.
There’s no point singling out any one corporation for trying to make capital out of the coronavirus pandemic, because everyone has been at it since March, preaching first about the imperative to stay at home and then to stay safe – all featuring face masks and Zoom correspondence. Companies have all been very keen to prove how much they care in this crisis.
A notable exception has been the cancer charities, who appear on every television ad break complaining openly that state cash has been diverted from their work towards the Covid-19 crisis – and I salute them for doing so.
If 2020 has been the year of the pandemic, it has also been the year in which insincere corporate virtue-signalling has reached pandemic proportions. We have had McDonald’s obsessing over Black Lives Matter; HSBC reminding us that ‘we are not an island’ (while not exactly being brilliant internationalists); the Dave channel reminding us to stay in (and watch Mock The Week or QI for the billionth time); and most egregiously, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream telling us on Twitter that Britain’s attitude to illegal immigrants is totally awful.
I don’t know what these corporations are playing at. I know that most corporations seek to sell values rather than products these days, but this is getting ridiculous. Most people, from left to right, hate the vacuous posturing of greedy corporations. It’s especially galling that we have to watch them at a time when we are all gradually becoming poorer. The last thing we need during lockdown is insincere sermonising.
Thank God it’s ending at last. Now, let’s boycott all companies that deal in these meaningless and sanctimonious platitudes.
Ghost cities
On Tuesday evening, BBC Two broadcast the first of its four-part series, Manctopia: Billion-Pound Property Boom, charting Manchester’s massive building development of recent years. ‘Since 2014 the population in the city centre has doubled to 60,000 and the rents have gone up by almost 40 per cent’, we are told.
The splurge in skyscrapers in the northern city this decade has been underreported, certainly in comparison to the same (albeit more awesome and awful) boom in super-tall buildings in London. This probably owes to the fact that most of those who write the opinion articles about skyscrapers are based in London, and all the journalists who have been complaining about London’s unaffordability, gaudy ghastliness or awful skyscrapers over the years also work in the capital.
The documentary suggests that Manchester is going the same way as London – it’s becoming a city of empty luxury, where the locals are also moving out, no longer able to afford to live in their native city. Like London, over-gentrification is proving to be a double-edged sword.
As someone who grew up in London in the 1980s and lived in Manchester in the mid-1990s, I can see both sides of the argument in both cases. Parts of London, especially the now fashionable East End of London, were grim no-go areas, while its underground was a ghastly, ghostly affair back then. And while the Manchester of my time was on the way up – as epitomised by yuppie comedy Cold Feet – much of it was forlorn. The horrid tower blocks of Hulme were then only just being torn down and much of its gangster ‘Gunchester’ culture around Moss Side and Rusholme remained.
While London has improved in so many ways, in others it has lost its soul. Soho and Portobello Road have lost their Bohemian charm. Kensington and Chelsea are ghost towns at the weekend, what with all the houses being increasingly owned by the transient or not inhabited at all. I hope Manchester doesn’t go the same way, though it probably will.
While I’m not one to romanticise or trivialise being poor, the fate of London and the likely fate of Manchester remind us that money doesn’t bring us happiness. That’s why so many people voted Brexit. They did so knowing that they could be financially poorer. They did so hoping that their neighbourhoods might once more resemble those they grew up in.
That’s why I don’t celebrate the opulence of London today. I still lament the old homeliness and shabbiness of the west London I grew up in.
Ashamed to be British, proud to be Me
One of the most common expressions you hear from ostentatious liberals is ‘I’m ashamed to be British’. It is being deployed in abundance this summer in relation to the migration crisis in the English Channel. It’s a reaction to the perception that the UK government has been callous and that the plebeian populace has displayed its customary and lamentable xenophobia and racism.
Being ashamed of one’s own country is usually the hallmark of the progressive, as George Orwell famously noted in ‘England Your England’. This loathing of one’s own country has always struck me as not only vapid – as meaningless as being ‘proud to be British’ – but also devious.
Declaring hatred of one’s own country is one of the countless means humans employ to draw attention to themselves. In this case, it implies an internationalist outlook, which in turn serves to parade that you are an open-minded person with intellectual cosmopolitan concerns – with a caring attitude for one’s fellow man irrespective of his or her nationality. And more importantly, it says you are not shackled by narrow-minded patriotism – unlike the uncouth, gormless man in the street.
In other words, it signifies that one is above the mindless herd, that you are a fearsome, independent thinker. ‘I’m ashamed to be British’ can be translated as ‘I’m proud to be Me’ – a more accurate motto for the liberal left of today. Its altruistic outlook is a disguise for its cunning, narcissistic politics of conspicuous compassion and caring one-upmanship.
People like to quote Orwell when it comes to this matter, but, as ever, I defer to Nietzsche, who described Rousseau as combining ‘self-contempt and… inflamed vanity’. That’s a pretty just description of today’s overgrown teenagers who protest how much they hate themselves and hate their country.
On Tuesday evening, BBC Two broadcast the first of its four-part series, Manctopia: Billion-Pound Property Boom, charting Manchester’s massive building development of recent years. ‘Since 2014 the population in the city centre has doubled to 60,000 and the rents have gone up by almost 40 per cent’, we are told.
The splurge in skyscrapers in the northern city this decade has been underreported, certainly in comparison to the same (albeit more awesome and awful) boom in super-tall buildings in London. This probably owes to the fact that most of those who write the opinion articles about skyscrapers are based in London, and all the journalists who have been complaining about London’s unaffordability, gaudy ghastliness or awful skyscrapers over the years also work in the capital.
The documentary suggests that Manchester is going the same way as London – it’s becoming a city of empty luxury, where the locals are also moving out, no longer able to afford to live in their native city. Like London, over-gentrification is proving to be a double-edged sword.
As someone who grew up in London in the 1980s and lived in Manchester in the mid-1990s, I can see both sides of the argument in both cases. Parts of London, especially the now fashionable East End of London, were grim no-go areas, while its underground was a ghastly, ghostly affair back then. And while the Manchester of my time was on the way up – as epitomised by yuppie comedy Cold Feet – much of it was forlorn. The horrid tower blocks of Hulme were then only just being torn down and much of its gangster ‘Gunchester’ culture around Moss Side and Rusholme remained.
While London has improved in so many ways, in others it has lost its soul. Soho and Portobello Road have lost their Bohemian charm. Kensington and Chelsea are ghost towns at the weekend, what with all the houses being increasingly owned by the transient or not inhabited at all. I hope Manchester doesn’t go the same way, though it probably will.
While I’m not one to romanticise or trivialise being poor, the fate of London and the likely fate of Manchester remind us that money doesn’t bring us happiness. That’s why so many people voted Brexit. They did so knowing that they could be financially poorer. They did so hoping that their neighbourhoods might once more resemble those they grew up in.
That’s why I don’t celebrate the opulence of London today. I still lament the old homeliness and shabbiness of the west London I grew up in.
Ashamed to be British, proud to be Me
One of the most common expressions you hear from ostentatious liberals is ‘I’m ashamed to be British’. It is being deployed in abundance this summer in relation to the migration crisis in the English Channel. It’s a reaction to the perception that the UK government has been callous and that the plebeian populace has displayed its customary and lamentable xenophobia and racism.
Being ashamed of one’s own country is usually the hallmark of the progressive, as George Orwell famously noted in ‘England Your England’. This loathing of one’s own country has always struck me as not only vapid – as meaningless as being ‘proud to be British’ – but also devious.
Declaring hatred of one’s own country is one of the countless means humans employ to draw attention to themselves. In this case, it implies an internationalist outlook, which in turn serves to parade that you are an open-minded person with intellectual cosmopolitan concerns – with a caring attitude for one’s fellow man irrespective of his or her nationality. And more importantly, it says you are not shackled by narrow-minded patriotism – unlike the uncouth, gormless man in the street.
In other words, it signifies that one is above the mindless herd, that you are a fearsome, independent thinker. ‘I’m ashamed to be British’ can be translated as ‘I’m proud to be Me’ – a more accurate motto for the liberal left of today. Its altruistic outlook is a disguise for its cunning, narcissistic politics of conspicuous compassion and caring one-upmanship.
People like to quote Orwell when it comes to this matter, but, as ever, I defer to Nietzsche, who described Rousseau as combining ‘self-contempt and… inflamed vanity’. That’s a pretty just description of today’s overgrown teenagers who protest how much they hate themselves and hate their country.
Who is the best James Bond? - Spectator Life, August 20, 2020
Who is the best James Bond?
Patrick West
A Radio Times survey last week, involving 14,000 participants, voted Sean Connery the best James Bond. This is hardly shocking news. The Scot has for years been regarded as not only the first but the best on-screen 007. Less predictable was the news of who emerged in the poll as everyone’s second-favourite Bond: Timothy Dalton.
A discombobulated Daily Telegraph article called Dalton’s placing – above Pierce Brosnan – a ‘big surprise’. Indeed, one would have expected the much-loved Roger Moore, who is almost as synonymous with the role as Connery, to have at least garned the runners-up spot.
I suspect there were many diehard Bond aficionados among the voters. Because for some years now, among the party faithful, Timothy Dalton’s interpretation has been held in reverence for being the Bond most faithful to Ian Fleming’s literary creation.
In his two outings as the secret agent, The Living Daylights (1987) and Licence To Kill (1989), Dalton’s Bond is a serious professional, an often violent, dark and ruthless character, who brought back an authentic air of menace and brutality to 007. He was a far cry from Moore’s suave, wise-cracking and flippant Bond, and indeed this incarnation was a deliberate move by Dalton.
Timothy Dalton had originally been approached to play James Bond in 1971, but turned down the part, believing himself to be too young. Eon Productions, who were behind the films, repeated the approach in 1979, but Dalton didn’t want to play a jokey and cartoonish Bond as now Moore had made it. When Dalton, a classical Shakespearean actor, was finally cast in 1986, he did so on the insistence that his Bond would be brought back to his literary origins. He said that year: ‘I intend to approach this project with a sense of responsibility to the work of Ian Fleming.’
Dalton reflected in a 1989 interview:
‘I think Roger was fine as Bond, but the films had become too much techno-pop and had lost track of their sense of story. I mean, every film seemed to have a villain who had to rule or destroy the world. If you want to believe in the fantasy on screen, then you have to believe in the characters and use them as a stepping-stone to lead you into this fantasy world. That’s a demand I made, and Albert Broccoli agreed with me.’
To bring back authenticity to the role, Dalton returned to the source material: Fleming’s novels. ‘On those pages I discovered a Bond I’d never seen on the screen, a quite extraordinary man, a man I really wanted to play, a man of contradictions and opposites.’ The result was not only a more gritty Bond, but one set apart from the fantasy worlds of megalomaniac baddies inhabiting volcanoes or space stations, and set instead firmly in real life scenarios – in war-torn Afghanistan (The Living Daylights) and among drug barons in South America (Licence To Kill), just as Fleming’s early Bond outings had been mired in the Cold War.
Timothy Dalton and Carey Lowell in Licence to Kill (Photo: Shutterstock)
Dalton’s determination to return Bond to his origins may not have charmed younger fans who had grown up with Roger Moore, but the critics were impressed with his mission. ‘Latest 007 thriller is truer to original, violent nature of Ian Fleming’s hero.’ That was the Ottowa Citizen’s verdict on Licence to Kill. The Chicago Tribune agreed: ‘Timothy Dalton gives us a 007 that Ian Fleming would have loved’. The James Bond author Raymond Benson concluded that Dalton was ‘the most accurate and literal interpretation of the role … ever seen on screen’
Dalton’s films were dirty affairs, as the hard-edged Licence To Kill – released in an age of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films – was the first Bond movie to rated 15 in the UK. In this second and last outing, Dalton’s Bond is border-line psychotic, resigning from the Secret Intelligence Service in order to pursue his own agenda of revenge.
Dalton, who was 40 when he eventually assumed the role, was precisely the right age to be Bond. He even resembled the protagonist. While Fleming had described as six foot tall, with a slim build, grey-blue eyes, a ‘cruel’ mouth and with short black hair that leads to a point, Timothy Dalton was himself 6′ 2” with black hair, grey-blue eyes and slim build.
‘Half the world loved Sean Connery and half the world loved Roger Moore,’ Dalton once remarked, demurely. And while there are those who will always prefer Sean Connery’s sex appeal or Roger Moore’s naff humour to Timothy Dalton’s total lack of either, in the role, it’s heartening to see that Dalton’s Bond is still given the recognition it deserves.
England’s soft underbelly - The Critic, August 5, 2020
England’s soft underbelly
Patrick West reviews The Channel, by Charlie Connelly
The English Channel occupies a strangely ambivalent position in the national mythology of England. On the one hand, it stands for the indefatigability of the nation, the ultimate moat that has protected this sceptred isle from being successfully invaded by a foreign army in nearly a thousand years. On the other hand, it has been viewed as England’s soft underbelly, the potential means through which this country could be overrun by foreigners: concerned coverage of illegal immigrants crossing it in recent years betrays this latter concern.
As a resident of Deal at the eastern mouth of the Channel, Charlie Connelly will be familiar with constant local television news coverage of immigrants and asylum-seekers trying to make their way from Calais to Dover (I, too, live in Deal). Hence East Kent residents can tend to be more overtly patriotic, or certainly vigilant as to the numbers of incomers from the continent.
It was on Walmer Beach in Deal, after all, where Julius Caesar’s first invasion of Britain took place in 55BC (his original plan to land at Dover was foiled by fierce resistance of the natives; few things change). Yet later Celts and then Anglo-Saxons were far more likely to view the Channel as a positive conduit of communication: “The notion of the Channel as a moat cutting us from the foreigners across the water is a recent development, dating back roughly as far as the eighteenth century.” The medieval scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth enthused how the “straits of the south” would “allow one to sail to Gaul”.
While Connelly adroitly places this stretch of water in its historical and cultural context, The Channel is for the most part a jaunty travel guide around the towns of France and Britain towards the eastern part of the water, and a multi-biographical guide to the characters who brought fame and repute to it.
The author is blessed with a bounty of characters from whom and source material from which to choose. An opening chapter, which charts the history of cross-Channel ferry crossings, cites the 1909 poem “A Channel Passage” by Rupert Brooke, in which he compared the nausea of a stormy voyage to France to his troubled love life. “The damned ship lurched and slithered,” he wrote. “Quiet and quick my cold gorge rose; the long sea rolled; I knew I must think hard of something or be sick; And could think hard of only one thing — you!”
Later on the author visits Brighton, a once small town originally popularised in the eighteenth century by Martha Gunn, the figure who was responsible for creating the notion that sea water and sea air were good for one’s health. Her Brighton contemporary, the physician Richard Russell, was an even more fanatical seaside devotee, instructing his patients to drink a pint of sea water at least once a day. Dr Johnson was less enthusiastic about the Sussex town, writing in 1776: “It is a country so truly desolate that if one had the mind to hang oneself in desperation at being obliged to live there it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.”
Connelly is judicious in the time and space he allots to both French and British towns. His chapter on Calais reminds us how this used to be a resort people visited, rather than just travelled through. The section on Dieppe brings more light relief, in reminding us in the nineteenth century it became a magnet for artists such as Turner, Delacroix, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Braquet and Sickert. The disgraced Oscar Wilde had a miserable time in Dieppe, with the former inmate of Reading Gaol being widely ostracised. More curiously, Ho Chi Minh worked on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry after the First World War, before returning to Vietnam in 1923.
Connelly tries to restore repute to Jean-Pierre Blanchard, the balloonist who made the first aerial crossing between England and France in January 1783, and in doing so became the first man to see Dover Castle and the walls of Calais as if they were features on a map. Connelly contrasts the brilliant Blanchard with Louis Bleriot, who became the first man to fly over the Channel 1909 by sheer luck. Bleriot was a terrible pilot, who by 1905 had already walked away from 40 crashes. Even his famous flight of 1909 did not “touch down” by Dover Castle but literally crashed down by it.
It remains just about in the national memory that Matthew Webb was the first person to swim the Channel, in 1875; he fortified himself for his feat with eggs, bacon, half a pint of beer and a jug of claret. Webb was a lousy showman who fell into penury and would die eight years later trying to swim the rapids of Niagara Falls.
A swimmer who came after him was the epitome of heroic failure, the Glaswegian Jabez Wolfe, who tried and failed to swim the Channel 22 times. Undoubtedly the saddest fate among the cast assembled here was that which befell the first woman to fly the Channel, Harriet Quimby, on 16 April, 1912. Her feat would surely have made global newspaper headlines had the Titanic not sunk the night before. She died in a plane crash in Boston less than three months later.
The Channel, The Remarkable Men and Women Who Made It the Most Fascinating Waterway in the World, by Charlie Connelly
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99
Why so many BLM ultras are white - Spiked, July 3, 2020
The race wars they are stoking won't blight their affluent neighbourhoods.
Patrick West
Many people have made the observation that most Black Lives Matter activists aren’t actually black. To judge by television coverage, photographs and YouTube videos, most BLM protesters indeed seem to be white, middle-class students. In a further paradox, it is becoming more evident by the day that many black people and ethnic minorities vehemently oppose BLM.
On Tuesday, the black comedian and actor Terry Crews, known to UK viewers from E4’s cop comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine, warned that Black Lives Matter shouldn’t morph into ‘Black Lives Better’. The devout Christian tweeted: ‘If you are a child of God, you are my brother and sister. I have family of every race, creed and ideology.’ Crews was consequently subject to online denunciation, which is not surprising, as he was essentially saying that all lives mattered – a sentiment that infuriates BLM advocates.
Closer to home, this week also saw the mixed-race former footballer Karl Henry publicly call into question BLM UK. ‘I think the majority of the UK have now had enough of that organisation’, he tweeted. ‘Black people’s lives matter! The divisive #BlackLivesMatter organisation, however, DOES NOT!’
Another British mixed-race former sportsman, Matthew Syed of The Sunday Times, asked of BLM whether ‘toppling another statue’ will ‘help the black person cowering from gangs in a drug-infested neighbourhood, the graduate denied promotion because of unconscious bias, the child growing up without hope in a tower block?’.
While in Britain we have the brave Trevor Phillips, in Australia one of the best-known detractors of woke politics and BLM is the journalist and television presenter Rita Panahi, who this summer has described BLM as ‘anti-police, anti-white, anti-capitalist but also proudly neo-Marxist’.
America’s veteran conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has said that ‘the left has deployed a paramilitary’ in militant anti-racist protesting. ‘It’s not just Antifa. It’s all the other groups: Refuse Fascism, Black Lives Matter, and on it goes… This is something that Mussolini had, the black shirts… A roving band of thugs that are protected by powerful people in Hollywood [and] the media.’
It’s not only conservative ethnic-minority voices who reject BLM. Last week Africa’s elder stateswoman, the politician and humanitarian Graça Machel, formerly of Mozambique’s freedom movement and widow of Nelson Mandela, criticised BLM’s tactic of pulling down statues of slave-owners. They should remain, to ‘tell generations to come, this is how it started, and this is how it never should continue to be’.
In Britain, Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor, has campaigned for years for explanatory plaques to accompany statues of slave traders. He believes toppling monuments will only erase the memory of their crimes against humanity: ‘You remove the evidence, you remove the deed.’ Indeed. Many black Americans have this summer come out in defence of the Emancipation Statue in Washington DC, paid for by freed slaves.
This paradox veers into genuine irony. Witness the spectacle of a white man attacking a black man for trying to remove BLM posters from a fence. Observe the white man scream at his uppity, negro inferior.
What’s behind such dissonance between whites who think they know best for blacks, and many blacks who disagree? Why are there black people proposing constructive ways of dealing with the past, but nihilist woke white protesters hellbent on destruction of statues, and capitalism itself, who offer no vision and no future?
It’s because for black people racism is a real-life everyday potential experience. It may not be as bad as times past, and race relations are worse in the US than the UK, but racism remains in black folk memory and its shadow is always there. Hence the real desire to educate and to offer positive solutions that encourage mutual understanding and erase superficial differences. Many black people are also more concerned about the present than the past: in 2018, 2,925 black people were murdered in the United States, 2,600 of that number by other blacks.
For Black Lives Matter – the very name epitomises its philosophy of division – it’s all a bit of a posture and a pastime. Racism rarely affects white liberal twentysomethings. But street protests do afford a feeling of righteousness, an opportunity to virtue-signal, to satiate that young man’s power-lust and feeling of importance – and to alleviate the boredom of lockdown. The white BLM protesters don’t think about the dangerous consequences of their actions or politics because they won’t be affected by them. The race wars that they are stoking won’t blight their affluent all-white neighbourhoods.
Black Lives Matter are dangerous narcissists whose driving force is self-aggrandisement. Let’s hope the tide really is turning against them.
There’s nothing racist about White Jesus
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has called for a review to decide which representations of Jesus should remain in Anglican cathedrals and churches, given that most of them portray Christ as white and north-European looking, whereas he was Middle Eastern.
This literal-mindedness is dubious – and for the church, dangerous. Christ is white in most churches because, before Windrush, so was England. Religious icons are always traditionally portrayed in accordance to the ethnicity and culture of worshippers, with Jesus being black in Sub-Saharan Africa, Filipino in the Philippines and resembling previous depictions of Zeus in Greece.
Most cathedrals were built in the Middle Ages, when most people didn’t even leave their hometown in their lifetimes let alone travel to the Middle East. There was very little comprehension of there being people who weren’t white.
The archbishop’s literal-mindedness sets a perilous precedent. If Jesus should be rendered ‘realistic’, should the Bible be rewritten to make it historically accurate?
I really wouldn’t recommend going down that path. The ‘virgin’ Mary was originally the ‘maid’ Mary, and Lazarus was returned from social ostracism, not brought back from the dead. Such are the legion translation mistakes from the Hebrew to the Greek.
The real reason there aren’t more women on Mock the Week
The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week.
I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.
It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.
Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species.
The female comic Katherine Ryan has attacked the gender tokenism on BBC panel show Mock the Week.
I can explain why the programme has always been dominated by men, despite efforts in recent years to introduce more gender balance. It’s because the format of the programme is competitive, and men are more competitive than women.
It’s also because on average men are funnier than women. As Camille Paglia famously argued, men are given to extremes: there are more men of genius for the same reason most serial killers and lunatics are male.
Comedy is fundamentally about cruelty or the distortion of reality: it appeals to the dark side of humanity found mostly in the male of the species.
Boris’s misguided war on obesity - Spectator Coffee House, July 3, 2020
Boris’s misguided war on obesity
Patrick WestBoris Johnson has declared the government's latest war on obesity. It's a continuation of the war on 'junk food'. It's a timely move, as in lockdown we've all been snacking and munching straight from the fridge, during the most ghastly yet boring year in known living memory.
Most of us have got fatter as a consequence. Predictably, we are once more now reprimanded for eating 'junk food'. Yet it's also an occasion to remind ourselves that there is no such thing as 'junk food'. There's only 'junk diet'.
The idea of 'junk food' has been around for a couple of decades now as the proliferation of fast food outlets has expanded exponentially, with those ghastly names such as 'McDonald's' and 'Burger King', offering cheap food for the terrible proletariat.
The waistlines of Europeans and Americans have expanded at an alarming rate as a consequence, so goes the narrative. During lockdown, matters have got even worse. Opening the fridge to see what snack is available has become the most domestically interesting pursuit of the day. Ordering takeaway food has been the norm.
Yet lockdown has made us a nation of new joggers aware of what we eat. We've been eating burgers and pizzas, that is true, but most of us – out of curiosity and sheer boredom – have also been eating lettuce, spring onions, pickled beetroot, and a whole array of unusual vegetables, just because going to the supermarket has become the sole source of recreation this summer.
A common complaint is that we have put on weight. At the same time, we have become more indulgent. And still, we are reprimanded that fast food is bad for us and makes us fat. To which the reply must be: only in lockdown, when for weeks we have been prisoners in our homes, gorging ourselves with pizzas, watching television and drinking ourselves into oblivion, as the only form of escape.
Sure, obesity is a problem for many people, and type 2 diabetes, which results from being overweight, can cause health problems. People with type 2 diabetes, like some in my family, are particularly vulnerable to Corvid-19 and I am especially keen not to develop it.
But the war on 'junk food' is profoundly misguided. It displays wrong, literal-mindedness thinking. Saturday night's burger or kebab after a few pints of lager isn't going to make you fat. Nor will a McDonald's or Burger King meal kill you.
What will kill you prematurely is having fried burgers and copious amounts of alcohol every day. Fast food and beer are not the bad boys here. A post-pub takeaway once a week is harmless and won't make you obese, just as one pint of beer at the end of the day doesn't make you an alcoholic. Concentrating on your diet on a weekly or monthly basis is more important than what you actually eat today or tomorrow. Moderation is the key word here. Eat meat in moderation. Consume alcohol in moderation. Have a moderate amount of vegetables every day.
Alas, we don't live in moderate times. Every fashionable diet has to be deemed to be some kind hardcore regime – hence the rise of puritan veganism, adherents of which look down with pure, self-righteous contempt at mere vegetarians who haven't, like me, eaten animals for a quarter of a century. I'm damned by vegans for eating anything that emanates from animals.
Obesity has been a problem in Britain for years. It's right that Boris Johnson should draw attention to it. But it's also important that a government that has made such a confusion in its response to the epidemic in Leicester also shouldn't send out ambiguous messages when it comes to obesity.
We need to get out of the everyday laziness that some have suffered since March. We need to walk every day. Staying at home watching television is bad for us, physically and mentally. These rules apply every day, all day, irrespective of any viral infection.
There has been much talk in the newspapers about how many of us have vowed to change our ways when this virus has passed. Personally, I don't believe it. As a native Londoner who grew up with IRA and then Islamist terror attacks, I've heard it all before: that terrible experiences change people's thinking about their lives. We'll all go back to as we were – mostly.
The rise of Britain’s new class system - Spectator Coffee House, July 1, 2020
The rise of Britain’s new class system
Patrick WestTelevision chef Prue Leith believes that snobbery is still rife in Britain, and that it's keeping working-class people in their place. Speaking to the Radio Times this week, Leith described Britain as 'the most unbelievably class-ridden country'.
She is right, but not for old-fashioned reasons we associate with that Frost Report sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Snobbery no longer emanates from the landed gentry or the social-climbing bourgeoise. The most overt snobbery today can be found coming from some on the liberal-left and that minority of Remainers who like to deride 'gammons'. These are the people who for over three years – in the Guardian, on Radio 4's Any Questions, BBC comedies and on Twitter – have castigated and mocked the stupid and ignorant working-class in northern England and the midlands for voting Brexit.
It's acceptable to be openly prejudiced against the working-class in the way it isn't along racial or gender lines because our society is no longer class-aware. While from an early age we are relentlessly told that our country is rife with racism and sexism, we are seldom taught about snobbery and class-prejudice.
Class-ignorance and outspoken class-prejudice among the affluent has hastened the demise of working-class support for the Labour party in recent years. As Labour and the left in general has become obsessed with race and gender and other woke issues, the economically left-leaning but morally conservative working-class sees the Conservative party as a better – or less worse – prospect. The perceived anti-patriotism of Jeremy Corbyn was another key factor. During his tenure left-wing commentators ceaselessly belittled and mocked Brexiteers as brainwashed 'low information' voters who didn't understand what they had voted for.
By far the most insulting phrase employed today is 'white privilege'. Many have become so consumed by racial and gender politics, they think that genitals and skin pigmentation are the only determinants of social status. This is not only contrary to the spirit of progressive politics, but astonishingly ignorant. A duchess living in a country estate probably does enjoy 'white privilege'. An unemployed white man in Margate or Doncaster certainly does not. They are separated by vast degrees of class.
That so many on the left, which exhorted class consciousness for over a hundred years, can't even perceive it now is one of the perverse transformations of recent decades. Even when they talk of gender inequality, it's usually framed in terms of how much women in the boardroom earn. It's never about women in factories. This is the ultimate legacy of the culture of identity politics that is socially aware but economically illiterate. And it has some lamentable and even devastating consequences.
In March last year, former news presenter Michael Buerk remarked that the BBC had become so preoccupied with gender balance and racial diversity that it had become less representative of the country it serves. The corporation, now dominated by the metropolitan middle-class, had become ignorant to matters that concern the working-class, because there are so few of its numbers left in its ranks. In anticipation of John Humphrys's departure from the Today programme, Buerk remarked:
She is right, but not for old-fashioned reasons we associate with that Frost Report sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Snobbery no longer emanates from the landed gentry or the social-climbing bourgeoise. The most overt snobbery today can be found coming from some on the liberal-left and that minority of Remainers who like to deride 'gammons'. These are the people who for over three years – in the Guardian, on Radio 4's Any Questions, BBC comedies and on Twitter – have castigated and mocked the stupid and ignorant working-class in northern England and the midlands for voting Brexit.
It's acceptable to be openly prejudiced against the working-class in the way it isn't along racial or gender lines because our society is no longer class-aware. While from an early age we are relentlessly told that our country is rife with racism and sexism, we are seldom taught about snobbery and class-prejudice.
Class-ignorance and outspoken class-prejudice among the affluent has hastened the demise of working-class support for the Labour party in recent years. As Labour and the left in general has become obsessed with race and gender and other woke issues, the economically left-leaning but morally conservative working-class sees the Conservative party as a better – or less worse – prospect. The perceived anti-patriotism of Jeremy Corbyn was another key factor. During his tenure left-wing commentators ceaselessly belittled and mocked Brexiteers as brainwashed 'low information' voters who didn't understand what they had voted for.
By far the most insulting phrase employed today is 'white privilege'. Many have become so consumed by racial and gender politics, they think that genitals and skin pigmentation are the only determinants of social status. This is not only contrary to the spirit of progressive politics, but astonishingly ignorant. A duchess living in a country estate probably does enjoy 'white privilege'. An unemployed white man in Margate or Doncaster certainly does not. They are separated by vast degrees of class.
That so many on the left, which exhorted class consciousness for over a hundred years, can't even perceive it now is one of the perverse transformations of recent decades. Even when they talk of gender inequality, it's usually framed in terms of how much women in the boardroom earn. It's never about women in factories. This is the ultimate legacy of the culture of identity politics that is socially aware but economically illiterate. And it has some lamentable and even devastating consequences.
In March last year, former news presenter Michael Buerk remarked that the BBC had become so preoccupied with gender balance and racial diversity that it had become less representative of the country it serves. The corporation, now dominated by the metropolitan middle-class, had become ignorant to matters that concern the working-class, because there are so few of its numbers left in its ranks. In anticipation of John Humphrys's departure from the Today programme, Buerk remarked:
“When John goes, all four of the Today programme’s regular presenters will have been privately educated, like a quite remarkable proportion of other people working for the BBC… These are more uniformly middle-class, well-educated, young, urban and bright, with little experience of – and sometimes little sympathy for – business, industry, the countryside, localness, traditions and politicians."
It's no coincidence that the BBC has been manifestly – or as they say, 'systemically' – anti-Brexit in the past four years. It's also why Mock The Week, the Now Show and other BBC comedies have spent four years contrasting industrious Polish plumbers with lazy, native Brits lounging at home watching daytime television.
Class ignorance is also why working-class boys are behind almost every other group at GCSE lvel, and why white working-class pupils in the 2010s performed worse than their BAME working-class counterparts.
Class is a problem in Britain – but our problem is that we don't speak about it enough, or understand that it's just as important as gender and race.
British theatre needs to re-examine its politics - Spectator Coffee House, June 30, 2020
British theatre needs to re-examine its politics
Patrick West
Dame Helen Mirren has called for a 'huge investment' in the arts, warning that the UK's theatres are only weeks from collapse. The theatre, she said on the Today programme, is central to the 'identity of our nation' and 'embedded in what it means to be British.'
With live performances banned since lockdown, most people will share her concern about the future of Britain's theatres. But the implication that theatre is intrinsic to the national character doesn't ring true today.
The only genres of live acting that have widespread popular appeal in Britain are musicals and pantomime. Otherwise, theatre is a decidedly middle-class affair these days, and a left-wing one to boot (with rare exceptions such as the playwright Tom Stoppard). Often this left-wing dominance of the acting fraternity has an unpleasant side, as shown by Laurence Fox’s ordeals and the recent airing of Maxine Peake’s politics.
Theatre in this country is therefore a minority interest, which is why Mirren's plea is unlikely to garner much sympathy, especially among conservatives. If British theatre really wants saving it should re-examine its politics.
For example, there are many people who would like to see a Shakespeare play set in the relevant era with male parts played by men – or at least in Elizabethan or Jacobean times, with female parts played by young men. But these plays are the exception today, with directors often giving male roles to women instead. It's annoying, distracting and incoherent, not least when the gender pronouns in the play aren't altered in accordance with the sex of the actor. This kind of meddling often leads to theatre’s cardinal sin: it breaks the suspension of disbelief.
Take the RSC's acclaimed 2016 production of Hamlet, which also aired a couple of weeks ago on BBC4. Set in sub-Saharan Africa, the whole play was transferred to a different setting with its assigned gender roles remaining intact. All of the main characters were black, and the story remained coherent (with Paapa Essiedu rightly praised for his superb performance as Hamlet). It remained a story about an angry youth mourning the death of his father and seeking revenge: a story for people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or nationality.
With one exception. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were played by white actors. The suspension of disbelief was shattered temporarily, as you realised the director was trying to make a point about racism, by imagining a world in which the white man is subservient to his black master, a world in which the white man is not taken seriously. All of a sudden you were no longer immersed in the story, and merely watching actors in a play in a theatre.
Earlier this year, Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph wrote that Shakespeare was in danger of being 'cancelled' by a 'woke' generation of artists and theatregoers who are intent on a diverse, gender-flipping casting of a playwright who was the 'product of a patriarchal, Anglo-centric, proto-colonial, age', and 'that a traditionally cast production is now a rarity, ever more unthinkable'. I'm inclined to agree. If I want to enjoy Shakespeare these days, I will read him or watch old films and RSC television productions from the 1970s on YouTube.
Shakespeare plays are only the most obvious casualty of director tampering. Two years ago, in a West End production of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, the Duchess of Berwick was played by the white actress Jennifer Saunders, while her biological brother Lord Lorton was played by Joseph Marcell, who is black. While the play received rave reviews, it still had an inherent incoherence at its heart.
Of course, diverting from the original text of a play can work, such as when Glenda Jackson first played King Lear at the Old Vic in 2016. But this wasn't manifest politicking: Jackson, a rather masculine actress anyway, is held in high repute. The situation is very different now, with divergence from original texts and blatant left-wing politics being the norm in British theatre.
So yes, let's save our theatres. But in return theatres should put on plays for everyone, that aren’t just vehicles for woke agitprop.
With live performances banned since lockdown, most people will share her concern about the future of Britain's theatres. But the implication that theatre is intrinsic to the national character doesn't ring true today.
The only genres of live acting that have widespread popular appeal in Britain are musicals and pantomime. Otherwise, theatre is a decidedly middle-class affair these days, and a left-wing one to boot (with rare exceptions such as the playwright Tom Stoppard). Often this left-wing dominance of the acting fraternity has an unpleasant side, as shown by Laurence Fox’s ordeals and the recent airing of Maxine Peake’s politics.
Theatre in this country is therefore a minority interest, which is why Mirren's plea is unlikely to garner much sympathy, especially among conservatives. If British theatre really wants saving it should re-examine its politics.
For example, there are many people who would like to see a Shakespeare play set in the relevant era with male parts played by men – or at least in Elizabethan or Jacobean times, with female parts played by young men. But these plays are the exception today, with directors often giving male roles to women instead. It's annoying, distracting and incoherent, not least when the gender pronouns in the play aren't altered in accordance with the sex of the actor. This kind of meddling often leads to theatre’s cardinal sin: it breaks the suspension of disbelief.
Take the RSC's acclaimed 2016 production of Hamlet, which also aired a couple of weeks ago on BBC4. Set in sub-Saharan Africa, the whole play was transferred to a different setting with its assigned gender roles remaining intact. All of the main characters were black, and the story remained coherent (with Paapa Essiedu rightly praised for his superb performance as Hamlet). It remained a story about an angry youth mourning the death of his father and seeking revenge: a story for people irrespective of their gender, race, culture or nationality.
With one exception. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were played by white actors. The suspension of disbelief was shattered temporarily, as you realised the director was trying to make a point about racism, by imagining a world in which the white man is subservient to his black master, a world in which the white man is not taken seriously. All of a sudden you were no longer immersed in the story, and merely watching actors in a play in a theatre.
Earlier this year, Dominic Cavendish of the Daily Telegraph wrote that Shakespeare was in danger of being 'cancelled' by a 'woke' generation of artists and theatregoers who are intent on a diverse, gender-flipping casting of a playwright who was the 'product of a patriarchal, Anglo-centric, proto-colonial, age', and 'that a traditionally cast production is now a rarity, ever more unthinkable'. I'm inclined to agree. If I want to enjoy Shakespeare these days, I will read him or watch old films and RSC television productions from the 1970s on YouTube.
Shakespeare plays are only the most obvious casualty of director tampering. Two years ago, in a West End production of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, the Duchess of Berwick was played by the white actress Jennifer Saunders, while her biological brother Lord Lorton was played by Joseph Marcell, who is black. While the play received rave reviews, it still had an inherent incoherence at its heart.
Of course, diverting from the original text of a play can work, such as when Glenda Jackson first played King Lear at the Old Vic in 2016. But this wasn't manifest politicking: Jackson, a rather masculine actress anyway, is held in high repute. The situation is very different now, with divergence from original texts and blatant left-wing politics being the norm in British theatre.
So yes, let's save our theatres. But in return theatres should put on plays for everyone, that aren’t just vehicles for woke agitprop.
On the box: why communal TV is back - Spectator Life, May 5, 2020
On the box: why communal TV is back
Patrick West
While it has been widely observed that we are watching far more television during lockdown, it’s not just grown-ups who are turning to television sets to find escapism, relief from boredom and the latest coronavirus news. It seems that lockdown has spurred even teenagers to start watching proper television programmes on that strange, large, stationary rectangular object in the corner of the living room.
According to study from Barb, reported in the Sunday Times last week, younger adults aged 16 to 24 are not only watching 22 per cent more conventional programmes than before lockdown, they are doing so on old-fashioned networks on television sets, with the proportion viewing via portable devices falling from 1.7 per cent to 1.4 per cent. Three times as many young people aged 16 to 34 are watching BBC daytime television compared to a year ago. Lockdown has even generated a trend for teenagers and young adults to sit on the sofa to watch entertainment or the evening news with their parents. No wonder: in these worrisome times, it’s natural that families want to spend time together.
This is welcome news. As the original series of The Royle Family reminds us (it was created before the ascent of the smartphones), the television set in the late 20th century was for many the traditional hub around which families would come together as one. Communal television viewing for families – especially working-class families – was the customary occasion when a family did its most chatting and bonding, using programmes such as Grange Hill or Brookside as conduits to discuss relevant everyday issues that maybe pertinent to their lives, such as bullying, drugs or homosexuality. For the participants in Gogglebox, it does much the same today.
Of course, not everybody approved, especially the respectable middle classes. Television was widely deplored for having displaced the dinner table as the place the family assembled in the evening. 'Gogglebox' used to be a term of derision applied to a device blamed for destroying precious evening dinner time, in which mother and father used to ask son and daughter how their day was, how school was going, before they were shooed away to do their homework.
Yet even middle-class families were prone to employ the TV as a means of domestic binding. When I grew up in the 1980s, our family was capable enough of doing so, whether it be sitting down to watch the Rugby Five Nations, The World At War or films such as The Sound of Music or The Longest Day. TV had its positive role to play.
By the 1990s, however, television had become a problem. Or rather, an excess of it had. Households had forgotten how to turn television sets off; they now served as evening sedative apparatuses from hometime till bedtime. Breakfast television had begun in the 1980s; a decade later night-time television arrived. Second sets could now be found in kitchens and, most fatally, in teenagers’ bedrooms. They were indeed stupefying family time, shortening attention spans and taking us away from other stimulating and edifying pursuits, notably books. TV had already made reading too much effort.
With the dawn of the internet and advent of the smartphone in the new millennium, matters got even worse. It wasn’t merely that families were no longer sharing the same television experience, or that teenagers were secluded in their own rooms watching anything from a plethora of cable television channels. Teenagers weren’t even watching television programmes. YouTube clips had become the order of the day. Even an hour-long drama or a thirty-minutes soap had become too much bother.
The revival of the Royle Family this past Christmas and the continued popularity of Gogglebox hints at a spirit of nostalgia and longing. It suggests that we feel we have lost something in the evolving digital revolution, that there is something to be said for the communal TV viewing experience.
If, in days past, everyone would have watched the Morecombe and Wise Christmas Special, or would have asked ‘who shot JR?’, Gogglebox reveals how the Great British Bake Off or Strictly Come Dancing still provide for a communal, national watching experience. If the smartphone epitomises a fractured, atomised society, the television set still represents a society that sits together.
We may regret the reason why, in the past five weeks, families are once more coming together to watch with hope and fear the latest coronavirus headlines, or more happily, The Repair Shop or some other harmless but vital distraction. But it’s a good thing it’s happening nonetheless.
This development reminds us, and it should remind our baby-boomer parents, that the television set wasn’t and isn’t a bad thing after all. It may be an ersatz, soporific hearth, but like fireplaces of old, it’s a fine place around which families come together.
The summer we all went mad - Spiked, June 26, 2020
The summer we all went mad
The Black Lives Matter hysteria is this generation’s Diana moment.
Patrick West
The summer of 2020 will probably be remembered as the season in which everyone went mad. The root cause for this is the lockdown implemented to stem the coronavirus, which has generated feelings of frustration, powerlessness, loneliness and restlessness, feelings that in turn have been transformed into bad-tempered attention-seeking and ostentatious displays of moral purity. The current convulsions of anti-racist boasting have been the most egregious consequence of the virus pandemic.
From corporations issuing historical apologies for their part in the slave trade to the defacement of statues, from violent weekly Black Lives Matter demonstrations to police and footballers ‘taking the knee’ to demonstrate their solidarity with the anti-racist cause, sanctimonious anti-racism has become this summer’s mania.
Inevitably, as with Remembrance Day poppies growing larger and being displayed earlier each year, the eagerness to display one’s caring or ‘woke’ credentials has escalated and become ever-more vociferous and competitive. Some anti-racist campaigners have graduated from taking the knee to giving Black Power salutes. Others have declared their new icon to be the awful Louis Farrakhan. While tea manufacturers are implored to declare #solidaritea, Sky News and the BBC are locked in a contest as to who can can out-anti-racist the other. Meanwhile, the foaming and shrieking on Twitter – the intemperate denunciations – become louder and more sulphurous every day.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has established the Orwellian sounding Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm to review which statutes in the capital should remain. While some police officers decide to take the knee in order to quell volatile crowds, Hertfordshire Police now insist that its officers do so. Every football game not only begins with the taking of the knee, but every player bears on his shirt the legend ‘Black Lives Matter’. We’ve got to the bizarre stage now that a veteran, black anti-racism campaigner – Trevor Phillips – is denounced by white, middle-class wetpants liberals as an ‘Uncle Tom’ for having the temerity to suggest that Britain is the best country in Europe to be black.
A sure barometer of something becoming a hegemony, which ‘woke’ ideology has undoubtedly become, is the manner in which dissenters or non-conforming voices are treated. So witness the fury and outrage on Monday night when some Burnley supporters hired a plane to fly over Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, with a banner pronouncing ‘White Lives Matter’. Naturally, within hours the police said they were getting involved. Of course they were. To counter-protest in this febrile atmosphere of white, liberal-left grandstanding and fawning self-hatred that ‘White Lives Matter’ is an appalling and offensive blasphemy. Of course white lives don’t matter. Everything is the fault of white people and their privilege.
The vehemence of the outrage, and, more to the point, the ostentatious apologies by faux-guilty white people, is telling. Ben Mee, the Burnley captain, said he was ‘ashamed’ and ’embarrassed’ by the incident. Like Greene King, Lloyds of London, Barclays Bank and the Bank of England apologising for the sins of their ancestors, the Burnley captain issued a mea culpa for something he didn’t actually do.
Apologising for something you haven’t done yourself takes no emotional investment, but it does serve the purpose of drawing attention to yourself and making you appear noble and virtuous. And this is the essence of so much loud anti-racism at the moment – certainly among white liberals: it’s good old-fashioned virtue-signalling, coupled with fear and conformism. What footballer would dare refuse to take the knee? What corporate head would appear on television to pronounce that he had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery and was not for nowt going to say sorry for anything?
What we are seeing at the moment is akin to what we experience each November (but more sinister), when people compete over who can have the biggest poppy the earliest, and anyone who appears on television without one is subject to suspicion and inquisition. It resembles, too, the reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, when a menacing air of emotional correctness pervaded the land.
Black Lives Matter 2020 is this generation’s Diana moment. This summer we have been implored to say the correct thing, to display the correct emotion, to be conspicuously compassionate. Anyone dissenting or staying silent is morally wanting, or worse: a racist. Such monstrous stupidity.
Sky Cinema’s war on the past
Much to the chagrin and irritation of many of its users, but keeping with the spirit of this summer, the Sky Cinema channel has this month started to put trigger warnings next to potentially offensive films. Movies such as Gone with the Wind and Dumbo now carry the caution that they contain ‘outdated attitudes, language and cultural depiction which may cause offence’. A Sky spokesman says: ‘Sky is committed to supporting anti-racism and improving diversity and inclusion.’
Like statue iconoclasm, Sky’s move represents today’s current hostile and superior view of the past. They did bad things then because they were racist and unenlightened. There is the implicit belief that we in 2020 have reached a plateau of enlightenment from which we can judge all previous times.
Yet morals always change and always will. History is one era in which we can genuinely talk of moral relativism. The next generation is bound to decry our one because tomorrow’s moralities will be different. Who knows what they will be. To judge by the growing popularity of veganism, my bet is that the people of 2020 will be damned for eating animals. Censorious ‘woke’ cancel culture might also be condemned for the intolerant ideology it is. And just as we deplore the brutalists of the 1960s who destroyed so much Victorian architecture, the vandalisation of statues might also come to be deplored by the more liberal people of tomorrow.
‘As the perfect afterthought Father’s Day gift, scented candles come in an arguably excessive range of aromas. Thanks to Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, there is now one more.
‘His candle is called This Smells Like My Jizz. It is the companion to his two Burp brands launched last year: This Smells Like My Bellend and This Smells Like My Anus. The new model is described as “A fitting follow-up to that candle, this blend is made with human placenta, canine diarrhoea, absinthe, hemlock, essence of petunia, rhubarb, Monster Munch, two pints of cider (ice in the cider) and boiled cabbages for a scent that’s sexy, surprising and wildly addictive”.
‘Martin, 43, unveiled the candle, priced £75, on Tonight With Fucking Jimmy Carr on Tuesday.’
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