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

Why so many BLM ultras are white - Spiked, July 3, 2020

Why so many BLM ultras are white

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.

Boris’s misguided war on obesity - Spectator Coffee House, July 3, 2020

Boris’s misguided war on obesity

Patrick West


Boris 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 West

Television 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:

“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.

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.’