Spiked, November 29, 2019

Franglais is here to stay

France's word police need to accept that languages are never 'pure'

Spectator Coffee House, November 28, 2019

What happened to all the 'Vote Tory' signs?

General Election time in Britain invariably means you're going to see one thing on the streets: loads of Labour, Green and Lib Dem posters displayed outside people's houses and in front windows, but hardly any Conservative ones. In my 11 years living and travelling around Kent, I haven't seen a single one. The last time I saw one was in the Holland Park area of West London in the early 1990s. If you live in a city centre, they are a rare species indeed.

This has been the pattern for decades now, especially since the Thatcherite 1980s, when Rik Mayall's character in the comedy The Young Ones popularised the notion that all Tories were 'capitalist scum or 'fascists' (even though the character was an imbecile, and actually a send-up of student radicals). By then it had become the popular consensus that Tories were selfish and money-obsessed and that to vote Labour was an act of supreme virtue and altruism. In the last general election, I happened to find myself in the affluent north London area of Crouch End. Nearly every house was festooned with a Labour poster. These were not houses that had any material interest in seeing a Labour; quite the reverse. But I bet it made them feel as one and feel good.

As Twitter has also paradoxically illustrated since, some left-wing people, armed with an unshakeable sense of their own moral righteousness, can be quite nasty at times. There has always been that second thought that spiteful people with a grievance and who lack a sense of doubt might put a brick through a window bearing Conservative poster.

This consensus hasn't changed much, especially in more recent years. A few years ago, James Bartholomew of this magazine coined the term 'virtue signalling, to indicate people voicing an opinion, usually a left-wing one, and often without sincerity, to ingratiate yourself with your peers.

I like to think I got there first, at least in the context of British society, having written a short book in 2003 which described what I called 'conspicuous compassion'. This phenomenon had shown its roots back in 1985 with Live Aid, where people successfully joined in something bigger than themselves, sung along with Status Quo and Queen and helped prop up a Marxist dictator as a consequence.

The real watershed came in 1997. Like many people I found the public outpouring following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales unreal. There were signals that displays of emotionalism combined with ostentatious, unconvincing and indeed menacing signs of 'compassion' were becoming the order of the day. 'Show us you care!', some demanded of the Queen.

The 1990s was the decade in which Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse, playing the uncuous DJs Smashy 'n' Nicey, would liked to boast: 'we do a lot of work for charidee.. but we don't like to talk about it.'

In real life, ribbons for all manner of causes began to proliferate. Remembrance Day poppies got bigger and bigger and were sported earlier and earlier. Minutes' silence began to be held for tragedies that were diminishing in gravity. Politicians like Tony Blair were beginning to apologise for historical sins, an act that cost him zero in emotional investment.

Anti-war marchers seemed less interested in actually stopping conflicts, but keener to brag about their personal distaste for them. 'Not in my name' was their slogan. This was compassion inflation, mourning sickness. It was not the sign of a more caring society. It was the symptom of a cynical, atomised one that would seize any opportunity to bond with strangers.

Of course, neither 'virtue signalling' or 'conspicuous compassion' described something new. The ideas have their origins in Charles Darwin's 1871 book, The Descent of Man, which describes how saying or doing the wrong thing is all part of the sexual selection game. You are not going to get a girlfriend at university if you declare yourself a Tory. Conversely, once you get to middle age you don't really care what anyone's going to think of your political views.  

By the new millennium I was reading a lot of Friedrich Nietzsche. One quote from Human, All To Human convinced me that he had predicted the future and that I had to write a book about the cranky old German: 'Observe how children weep and cry, so that so that they will be pitied... Thus the thirst for pity is a thirst for self-enjoyment, and at the expense of one's fellow man.' Somehow his infamous loathing of compassion no longer seemed so perverse.

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

Spectator blogs, November 14, 2019

Kent’s HS1 shows how HS2 could benefit the North

One of the main concerns about HS2, apart from its vast cost and disruptive effect on the countryside, is that in shortening distances between London and the North, it might lead to the capital further draining talent and money from other regions.

Not so, says an official HS2 review leaked to the Times this week. The draft report by Doug Oakervee, a former HS2 chairman, says that ‘some of the greatest changes to connectivity are the non-London connections’ north of Birmingham, and concludes that cities in the North and Midlands are more likely to benefit from the project than London. He’s right – and Kent’s HS1 shows why.

The line from St Pancras to Ebbsfleet in Kent faced similar objections in the 1990s, before it was fully completed in 2007. But since then, it has benefited destinations out of London, not the capital itself. The route, servicing high speed trains from London to towns all over Kent, has had a transformative effect on the county, helping to revive its dilapidated and once moribund towns and secured the prosperity of its already successful areas.

Perhaps the best-known example of a town coming back from the dead is Margate, right on the north-east tip of the county. Like so many British seaside resorts, its fortunes began to dip in the 1970s with the boom in cheap foreign travel, reaching a nadir in the 1980s. Many seaside towns, such as Blackpool, still haven’t recovered, which makes Margate’s revival stand out all the more.

The cost of London living and the advent of HS1 have combined to help the entire county. For example, in 2017, 1,830 people moved from London to Thanet, the area encompassing Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, with just 760 people moving to London. ‘Up until 2010 this place was really in the doldrums. Really from 1970 to 2010’, Ian Dickie, director of the Margate Museum, told Geographical magazine this month. ‘Now tourists are coming back… The place is beginning to look alive again’. A recent House of Lords select committee, citing the Dreamland amusement park and the Turner Contemporary art gallery (which claims to have brought in £68 million to the local economy since opening in 2011) described Margate as a ‘clear instance of successful culture-led regeneration.’

The pattern is replicated elsewhere. Folkestone, equally miserable at the turn of the millennium, has witnessed a comparable renaissance, albeit with the financial input of local tycoon Sir Roger De Haan. Folkestone also boasts an arts hub, and with it a triennial art show, a book festival and public art collection. The town’s Old High Street is now filled with cafés, boutiques, and music and clothes shops. Folkestone’s harbour, the port of call for ferries until services stopped in 2001, has also been reinvented as a summer venue for bars and cafes.

The town is less than an hour by rail to London since HS1 was opened, and now solidly falls within the capital’s commuter belt. As does Deal, up the coast. By the 1990s this one-time colliery and garrison town had not so much become run-down, but utterly lifeless: the Royal Marines left in 1981 while Betteshanger coal mine was shut down in 1989. Before the high speed connection opened, it took 2hrs 20mins for the train to get into London, which made it nonviable as a commuting town (I know someone who tried the five-day a week commute then; he found it impossible).

Since the HS1 service arrived in 2011, Deal to St Pancras now takes 81 minutes. Consequently, the town has seen its own revival, even reinvention. In 2013 it was the Daily Telegraph’s high street of the year.

It is not all good news. Those escaping London’s spiralling house prices have in turn pushed up prices in the county, and the preponderance of second homes has left some parts of Kent’s towns during the week and in winter deserted. There also remain areas of poverty in Margate and Dover, while Ramsgate high street is a disaster zone. Nevertheless, HS1 has demonstrated that a new, high speed railway, far from sucking more wealth into London, can do the reverse, and bring more people and money out of the capital.

Patrick is a writer based in Deal

Spiked, November 8, 2019

How trans activists made ‘woman’ a dirty wordCalling women ‘cervix owners’ or ‘menstruators’ is ridiculous and insulting.

Spiked, October 18, 2019

Veganism won’t save the planetThis is a cult of self-righteousness, not a sensible eco-diet.

The Spectator Coffee House, October 4, 2019

The RSC should ignore the climate change mob and stick with BP

Patrick West

 "It is often said that Western culture worships youth. Yet this cult of youth worship has started to mutate into something a bit weirder, as it increasingly seems that ours is a society that now worships children. This year, for instance, has seen the rise to global ascendency of the 16-year-old Swede, Greta Thunberg. She has become the child-saint icon of the environmental movement, whose apocalyptic scorn is fawned over by liberal politicians and woke-conscious big business.

Her teenage acolytes bunk school, with the blessing of their teachers, to raise awareness as to the plight of climate change. Elsewhere, we are told that it is imperative to hold a second Brexit referendum ‘for the sake of the children’ (and even, to make the point clearer, ‘our children’s children’). And in the latest development, it was announced this week that the Royal Shakespeare Company is to sever its links with its sponsor BP, thanks to a mass boycott by teenage climate change protesters.

The long-running anti-BP campaign was given a boost last week when students organised a school strike against climate change, asking their teachers and heads to end trips to RSC events, because BP ‘is actively destroying our futures by wrecking the climate.’ Its open letter added that ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company needs young people far more than it needs BP’, repeating that children are ‘the audience of the future’. Finally, the RSC sighed on Wednesday that it ‘cannot ignore’ these cries, and announced that it was capitulating.

This cult of ‘the children’ and its connected narrative of ‘the future’ is a constant theme of political discourse today, especially when it comes to climate change. On Tuesday, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau told a crowd in Toronto: ‘Today we marched for our planet, our kids and for their future’. But it’s not just consigned to environmental rhetoric. Talk of ‘the children’ has played a central role in demands for a second Brexit referendum, owing not only to the fact that millions have come of voting age since 2016, but that such an important decision on Britain’s future will most of all affect ‘our children’. The same argument is made for lowering the voting age: it’s all about their future, you see.

This cult of ‘the children’ is literally juvenile. We all know how base and emotive the word is. It’s why politicians and charity fund raisers invoke ‘the children’ whenever possible. It’s a word that grabs people’s attention, pulls the heart strings and opens purses. It’s why no newspaper coverage of a political demonstration is complete without a child holding a placard reading something to the effect of ‘Mummy is worried about my future’ – a placard clearly not written by the child herself.

There is something exploitative in offloading one’s personal politics and views onto a child or teenager. Whatever your views on the man, president Putin was right when he said on Wednesday: ‘I’m sure that Greta is a kind and very sincere girl… but using children and teenagers for even such noble aims…is wrong’. And this obsequiousness over the pronouncements of children, let alone taking their views seriously, betrays a sad reality that we no longer take grown-up politics seriously. The brain and mind of a 16-year-old is not equal to that of an adult, and to treat them on a par is to diminish the status of the latter.

Most scientists in the relevant field agree that at the age of 16 the brain has not fully matured. This is why smoking cannabis at this age is especially dangerous: a raw brain is a vulnerable brain. As to the mind’s age of maturity, opinion is more subjective, although many scientists believe that you aren’t fully an adult until about 25. Even if the law in this country considers you an adult at 18, most of us, in retrospect, probably wouldn’t look back on the behaviour and immature concerns of our 18-year-old selves as that of adults, let alone ourselves as 16-year-olds.

There are two ironies about the whole sorry RSC-BP affair. The first is that was BP the first of the ‘supermajors’ to expand into areas beyond fossil fuels, establishing an alternative and low carbon energy business in 2005. One shouldn’t punish a corporation that has been making moves in the right direction in recent years.

Secondly, BP has funded a scheme at the RSC which has provided 16 to 25-year-olds (even BP agree that 25 is the age of maturity) with discounted tickets costing £5 for productions. This scheme is unlikely to survive without its support. So by indulging the views of children, ultimately it is children who will literally pay the price.

All this because adults are made to feel guilty for the presumed doomed future of ‘the children’. Conscience makes cowards of us all.

The Spectator, October 5, 2019

Notes on...Romney and Hythe Railway