Holland Park must not fall - Spectator Coffee House, June 25, 2020

Holland Park must not fall

Patrick West


he latest victim in this summer's mania could be the name of one of London's best-known and wealthiest areas: Holland Park, in the west of the capital.

A monument in the park itself, of the 19th-century politician Henry Vassall-Fox, the third Baron Holland, was splattered with red paint on Wednesday. After, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea suggested that the park, underground station and entire district could end up being renamed.

The park and neighbourhood was named after Henry Fox, the first Baron Holland. His descendent, the third Baron, technically owned slaves and dozens of plantations in Jamaica through his wife's estate. Hence this weeks' desecration, with a cardboard sign left perched in the bronze statue's arms reading 'I owned 401 slaves.'

The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea now says that the statue could be placed under review as part of a 'conversation about the figures we see in our public realm'. A spokesman said: 'In London we must oppose racism in all its forms and we fully support everyone's right to protest peacefully. The Mayor of London has launched his London-wide public realm review and we expect this to consider station names, statues and street names.'

But not for the first time among the iconoclasts and policy makers, there is a large degree of historical ignorance afoot. While Henry Vassall-Fox was indeed a plantation owner through marriage, he consistently and actively opposed slavery. As a statesman in the Lords from 1796 until his death in 1840 he helped to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself in most of the colonies as part of the 1807 and 1833 governments (Vassall-Fox was Lord Privy Seal from 1806 to 1807, and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster between 1830 and 1834).

The Foxes were one the most prominent Whigs of their time, and Henry was a nephew of the great Whig orator Charles Henry Fox. From an early age he imbibed his uncle's progressive politics. In 1791, Henry travelled to continental Europe, meeting Talleyrand and Lafayette in Paris, and he became a great sympathiser for French reformers and a lifelong supporter of better Anglo-French relations.

He was not merely a progressive politician – he was sometimes considered a radical. During a debate on the union with Ireland in 1800, he moved for the reconsideration of the two acts barring Roman Catholics from sitting in parliament, which, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was 'the first time Catholic emancipation had been raised.'

He became known for his many protests he entered in the House of Lords. One protest made in 1801, on a bill for suppressing rebellion in Ireland, was considered so subversive that the Lords ordered it to be struck from the record. He continued to speak for Catholic emancipation until this was realised in 1829 and he also supported bills to remove the civil disabilities of Jews. And while he did receive financial reward under the 1837 Slave Compensation Act, he had campaigned for abolition in the full knowledge that he would lose income from his plantations.

A primary school in Notting Hill Gate was named after his sister, Caroline. I attended Fox Primary School in the 1980s and grew up and lived in the Holland Park area, one road parallel to Holland Park Avenue. Back then, as is the case today, the neighbourhood was known for its affluence. But it's worth remembering that 'Holland Park' was also associated with the inner-city, left-wing politics of that era, owing to the enormous, progressive comprehensive school that bore its name.

Holland Park School, now a top-rated posh academy, was a very different prospect in the 1980s. Its intake was predominantly working-class teenagers from what were then the rough-and-ready areas of Ladbroke Grove and Shepherd's Bush. To associate 'Holland Park' entirely with slavery is to ignore the area's post-war experiment in comprehensive education and the progressive politics of the Fox dynasty.

Yes, Henry Vassall-Fox did technically own slaves, but he was far from a villain. He was a radical progressive of his time, and even today his politics would be considered liberal. In conclusion? 'Holland Park' must stay.

Borders - The TLS, May 15, 2020

THE ATLAS OF UNUSUAL BORDERS

Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities 

ZORAN NOKOLIĆ 

255pp. 

HarperCollins. £14.99. 

Given that Russia, the US and the UK have extended or threatened to harden their borders in recent years, while the EU has simultaneously sought to render its internal borders increasingly irrelevant, the matter of national boundaries remains as pertinent as ever. Although they often shift conspicuously, there have always been esoteric anomalies, and Zoran Nikolić’s engrossing guide takes readers into some truly strange territories. 

Nikolić mentions a few curiosities that the general reader might already be familiar with: the artificial Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania; the Armenian enclave of Nagorn-Karabakh, situated in Azerbaijan; and the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast. But these examples are positively conventional compared to other geographic peculiarities on parade here. These include counterenclaves such as the UAE village of Nahwa, located inside the Oman enclave of Madha, which is itself inside the UAE. Perhaps the bestknown such instance is the collection of Belgian enclaves inside the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, which themselves contain ten Dutch counter-enclaves. Here it is possible to cross a national border by moving from one end of a restaurant to the other. 

While boundary anomalies and enclaves are problematic in Cyprus, which contains pieces of land that remain part of the UK, they are less a problem in the Schengen area of Europe, where what belongs to which country increasingly doesn’t matter. The twin towns of Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany and Słubice in Poland, and Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden, are increasingly merging. The latter two reside in different time zones; as a result, it is possible for a ball to leave the ground on the border golf course in one hour and land an hour earlier. 

The reasons for such curiosities are manifold. The situation in Baarle-Nassau was the result of an accumulation of divisions, contracts and exchanges. The two islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede, separated by less than four kilometres, are a day apart because they sit on either side of the International Date Line. Pheasant Island in the Moselle River between France and Spain has changed hands more than 700 times, because a late-seventeenth century peace treaty between the countries decrees that France should own it for one half of the year and Spain for the other half. 

The book isn’t entirely satisfactory, however. The origins of the oddities often remain unclear – the reader is left in the dark as to why, for example, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast should be sovereign French territory. Nonetheless, it is on the whole a fascinating achievement from (fittingly) a former Yugoslav national.

Patrick West

Nature is a bastard - Spiked, May 1, 2020

Nature is a bastard

This pandemic reminds us that nature is not benign, pure and innocent.

Patrick West

In Western culture, ‘nature’ and that which is ‘natural’ is usually evoked as something benign, pure, innocent and uncontaminated. ‘Nature’ relates to the way things should be – the natural order of things. This association is manifest most clearly in television adverts, where ‘natural’ is used to convey the message that a product is harmless and harmonious. It has sprung forth unmolested from Mother Earth. It’s an implicit opposite to ‘manmade’, that which is potentially perilous because its inherent purity has been violated by homo sapiens.

At a deep level, this myth of natural goodness has its origins in Christianity and the notion that mankind is a fallen creature, who once inhabited the untainted Garden of Eden before his innate immorality got the better of him. It’s a myth that has been repeated and reinforced over the centuries, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, who lauded man in the childlike ‘state of nature’. It gained traction soon after in the Romantic reaction to the Industrial Revolution, as epitomised by William Blake’s lament about those ‘dark satanic mills’. In more recent decades, the supposedly benevolent qualities of the ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ have been espoused by the environmentalist movement, in response to the perceived deleterious effect man has had on the planet, whether it be pollution, industrialised farming, nuclear disaster or climate change.

All the same, it has always been a myth. And a staggeringly ludicrous, even risible myth at that. The reality of nature is this: disease, pain, parasitism, predation, cancer, infant mortality, brain tumours, faeces, wisdom teeth, eczema, infection, plagues, tempests, earthquakes, madness, ageing, decrepitude, death – and deadly viruses. All these things are natural.

Nature in a benign light is something beautiful to behold, if we consider the lilies in the field, or raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. But nature’s malign aspect is a thing of awe and terror: cold, cunning, savage and utterly indifferent. Foul and visceral, ferocious and scheming – ‘all swoll’n and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye’, as Shakespeare put it.

At the moment, many people are beginning to talk of the coronavirus from an imagined future point of view – namely, what we will have remembered from this dreadful affair in, say, six months time. It is hoped that we will have remembered the sense of community, how our neighbours came to our aid, how we kept in touch with relatives via Zoom, how for weeks we diligently kept ourselves indoors and metres apart for the greater good.

I do hope we do remember all this. I do indeed hope all survivors will be grateful for being alive and live every day like a cancer survivor does: in joy and gratitude. But I also hope we take away a more sober, rational lesson. I hope that we will remember the death, fear, paranoia and utter boredom inflicted upon the entire world in the spring of 2020 at the hands not of nasty mankind – who usually gets the blame for these things – but by nature, by a natural virus.

Nature is not our friend. Nature is a bastard: red in tooth and claw. Nature is mankind’s eternal enemy. Our lot is a perpetual war against it. We may be of nature, but unique to all species on this planet, we are not slaves to its lethal diktats. We transcend our origins. This is why we have always had medicines and doctors, and in more recent centuries, hospitals to treat the poorly, and scientists to invent cures and vaccines to nature’s deadly defects. Without all of this, life would be very nasty, brutish and short indeed.


Who are we really clapping for?

There is something awfully familiar about Clapping for the NHS, that evening event in which we go outside and give thanks to the NHS workers who have risked their lives to save the lives of others. It’s strangely reminiscent of the reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997.

Sure, the tone is different. It was mournful, maudlin and hysterical back then. The tone today is one of relief and even joy. But in both cases there is a sense of people wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, to be part of the crowd. In both cases you sense people are emoting because of a feeling of loneliness in their own lives: in 2020, this is literally the case for so many. And both then and now there is an uneasy suspicion that people are enjoying it a bit too much – taking herd-like pleasure in something that should be a sombre and serious affair.

How much of the clapping is for the benefit of NHS staff, and how much of it is for the benefit of those doing the clapping? I’m in awe of NHS staff who have risked their lives to save coronavirus victims, but I don’t think this kind of communal applause is really needed. A rainbow poster in your front window would do, or even an appropriate tweet. But where’s the fun in that? Silent, solitary gestures are boring.

Underneath, little has changed in British society since 1997. Many of us still live soulless, lonely lives. We are probably more atomised now. Communities are still fragmented. Nothing has yet to replace the rites and beliefs afforded to us by traditional religion. It’s in this chronic vacuum that ersatz, transient religions emerge. Back then it was competitive mourning. Today it’s NHS worship.


Selfies still make you miserable

The harder you try to improve your selfies, the worse you will feel about yourself. This is the conclusion of the study, ‘Uploading Your Best Self: Selfie Editing and Body Dissatisfaction’, published in the journal, Body Image. It monitored 130 women aged 18 to 30 who took a selfie and were given 10 minutes to edit it. The more the selfie-taker edited, the more she felt miserable. The study concluded that vulnerable women and girls should refrain from putting on social media edited ‘perfect’ selfies and instead post ‘more naturalistic images’.

The temptation to take a selfie in order to garner self-affirming likes on social media is a strong one. Indeed, the desire to be ‘liked’ on social media is a universal one. It’s just that it is stronger in some of us than others. Most of us forever fail to learn that the desire to be ‘liked’ never leads to long-term contentment, irrespective of how many ‘likes’ we get.

The only solution is to stop putting up pictures of yourself altogether. Better still, stop seeking to be ‘liked’ at all.

Apollo 13: a heroic failure - Spiked, April 17, 2020

Apollo 13: a heroic failure

Fifty years ago today human beings proved we can overcome impossible odds. We can do so again.

Patrick West



Many cultures have their own narratives of ‘heroic failure’ – an event in their past that was a disaster or embarrassment of some sort that has since been transformed into a story of triumph. The British have Dunkirk, the Irish have Easter 1916, the Australians have Gallipoli. For America, the unifying narrative of ‘heroic failure’ has undoubtedly become that of Apollo 13.

As we commemorate and celebrate the spacecraft that never landed on the Moon, and which almost never came back at all, but which landed safely in the Pacific Ocean 50 years ago today, it’s worth keeping in mind that it hasn’t always been thus. As Andrew Smith wrote in his 2005 book, Moondust, ‘the now-received perception of the Apollo 13 save as “NASA’s finest hour” dates no further back than Ron Howard’s eponymous 1995 film of the mission’. When the movie’s co-scriptwriter, Al Reinert, went looking for Jim Lovell in the late 1980s, he found him running a tugboat company, ‘the forgotten commander of a “failed” mission… it was Reinert who wrote the “finest hour” line’.

If the story of Apollo 13 had fallen into obscurity in 1995, in April 1970 the episode had captured the world’s imagination. It was followed on television networks by the largest worldwide audience ever assembled, with Pope Paul VI praying for the crew’s return – and 100,000 pilgrims at a Hindu festival in India doing likewise. No wonder: it seemed like a real-life human disaster was unfolding right in front of their eyes. No one really expected them to make it.

NASA buffs and fans of the film will be familiar with the events. After a successful launch and acceleration out of Earth’s orbit, and with only 45,000 miles to the Moon to go, the crew of Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert heard an explosion. Moments later, Swigert noticed oxygen pressure dropping. Shortly after, Lovell saw gas leaking into space. It transpired that an oxygen tank had ruptured their spacecraft’s service module, blowing out the electricity and safe oxygen supply, forcing them to shelter for the next four days in the landing module – freezing, starving, thirsty and sleepless – while they waited for their craft to make the slingshot around the Moon and journey back to Earth.

Even NASA thought their chances of survival were hopeless, telling the astronauts’ wives that their chances of coming back alive were 10 per cent at best. No NASA preflight simulation had prepared the three man crew for this dire predicament. Flight director Gene Kranz remembers watching ‘the Command Module’s life-sustaining resources disappearing, like blood draining from a body… the controllers felt they were toppling into an abyss'

It was a close call indeed. The landing module wasn’t supplied with enough oxygen for all three to make the entire journey, so they had to make the perilous undertaking of burning its descent engines to hasten their return journey. They came close to carbon-dioxide poisoning, too, a fate only avoided by fabricating an improvised air-filtration system out of cardboard, duct tape, plastic covers from checklist books, storage bags and anything else to hand. Using the land module for re-entry, they could have easily burnt up. Against all odds, they made it home alive.

But you know this already, thanks to Ron Howard’s film. Yet, even if that was a fictionalised version of real events, it was a deserved homage to a heroic failure, and one worth celebrating today. It reminds us that no matter how grim and hopeless circumstances appear, there can be a way out. Human beings are innate, genius problem-solvers.


In defence of Classic FM

It’s always tempting to mock Classic FM for its repetitious and conservative playlist. Indeed, some spiked readers may remember me having done so many years ago. That was back in 2002, when the station’s listeners voted Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending their favourite piece of classical music. Fast forward to 2020, and Classic FM is getting flak again. Why? Because for the second year in a row its listeners have voted The Lark Ascending their favourite piece of classical music.

Writing in The Times on Tuesday, the paper’s chief music critic, Richard Morrison, noted the irony that the number of larks in Britain has plummeted over recent decades. ‘Sadly I don’t think Classic FM’s listeners were registering an environmental protest when they voted for the work. What they were doing was reflecting the narrowness of the repertoire served up by Classic FM.’

I’ve changed my tune over Classic FM. There’s nothing wrong with it playing The Lark Ascending every day, for years never ending, if that’s what the audience is partial to. The same goes for Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2, Beethoven, Mozart, Sibelius or movie soundtracks by John Williams.

Why give in to the tyranny of the new for its own sake? Complaining that people still like Vaughan Williams is like bellyaching that they still regard The White Album by the Beatles as one of the greatest albums ever; it’s like claiming that admiring the works of Shakespeare is, like, so predictable. Classics are timeless, which is why they tend to come top in these polls year after year.

The familiarity and cosiness of Classic FM is especially welcoming now, a reminder of better times gone past and a hint of better times to return. The theme to The Magnificent Seven literally brought tears of joy to these eyes on Tuesday. Likewise ‘Sunrise’ from Also Sprach Zarathustra on Wednesday. There are memories. There is hope.


Learn a language during lockdown

People are spending their hours of domestic isolation doing all sundry of things: cooking, DIY, gardening, drinking loads of alcohol. I’m carrying on where I started 10 years ago: learning foreign languages.

It’s the best hobby I ever took up. In my case – first with Italian – it opened up a whole new world of understanding, perceiving and thinking. I even learned how English grammar works as a byproduct. It’s so rewarding, and it’s a lot easier than most British people fear. If you’re intelligent and interested in words, you’ll love it. And no, age doesn’t matter. It’s a myth that you’re too old to learn a second language. Infants can absorb English without being taught it, this is true, but even by the time they become teenagers they need English lessons.

A world of discovery awaits. My preferred method is initially through teach-yourself books and then through free online courses such as Memrise. Now I even know a little German (he’s over there).

There’s no need to shout - The Critic, March 15, 2020

There’s no need to shout

Patrick West reviews You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy


Our era is the shoutiest humanity has ever known. Thanks to the digital revolution, especially the emergence of social media, everyone can have an opinion. Indeed, many feel compelled to voice an opinion, to be a critic on most aspects of life. Many also succumb to the lure of the censorious mob, seeking to drown out dissent or unwoke heresy. Negativity and antagonism are the prevailing moods. Yet is anyone listening to what we are saying? More to the point, are such complaints, comments and grumblings making us more miserable? Perhaps it’s time we spent less time talking and more time listening. For there is the path to enlightenment and happiness.

This is the advice from Kate Murphy in You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why It Matters. Incessant online vociferating not only makes us unhappy — when we realise that no one really cares what we are saying — but it also makes us more stupid. The more we voice our opinions, the more we become convinced of them. It is the route towards complacency and stupor. People who listen, on the other hand, open themselves to the brave new worlds of doubt and mental exploration. “It is only by listening that we engage, understand, connect, empathise, and develop as human beings.” Listening, says Murphy, not only makes us happier, it makes us more clever.

Good listeners — priests, psychotherapists, air-traffic controllers, bartenders, spies, conmen — usually come up with the best solutions. It’s because they come to understand the complexities of life, that choices aren’t binary, that questions are often more fruitful and interesting than answers. The late Steve Jobs, for instance, used to hire people at Apple to disagree with him. The founder of Ikea used to wander his shop floor anonymously asking customers their opinions of his wares.

The best CIA operatives are not the aggressive interrogators and or those who feign empathy with mandatory eye-contact, a rudimentary nod of the head or insincere “Mmm-mmm”, but those who let prisoners tell their own life stories. Bringing forth such subjective perspectives better helps agents understand perpetrators’ world-view and motives. As one CIA chief interrogator told the author, “Even if you can’t get through to the suicide bomber, it helps you maybe get through to the guy later on, who is on the fringe or who is on the fence. You can relate to him after meeting the guy who took that wrong turn.” In a similar vein, the best hostage negotiator is not the man who deploys the best argument or conjures up some subconscious Jedi mind trick, but the man who tries “to understand the guy’s point of view”.

The most common cause of strife between a child and parent, writes Murphy, is when the former believes the latter isn’t listening. A failure to listen is also the cause for much marital breakdown. We assume we understand what those close to us feel, want or need. “As wonderful as intimacy and familiarity are, they make us complacent, leading us to overestimate our ability to read those closest to us.”

Often it’s the better-educated with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners

Listening isn’t the same as passive hearing, and the author stresses the importance of it being an interactive process. Researchers at the University of Utah found that when talking to inattentive listeners, speakers remembered less information and were less articulate in the information they conveyed. On the other hand, attentive listeners elicited more information, relevant detail, and elaboration from speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions.

Good listeners are good questioners, too. This doesn’t mean repeating impersonal, mundane questions such as “how was school?” but asking curious questions such as “what did you learn today?” or “what was the best part of your day?”.

Listening has become more difficult not merely because of technology — mobile phones, podcasts, social media, louder background music in restaurants, headphones that drown out one’s inner dialogue — but because of an allied culture of individualism, self-promotion and identity politics. We are subconsciously goaded to say things like “speaking as a white man” or “speaking as a woman of colour”. Murphy quotes Pascal Bruckner’s The Temptation of Innocence, in which he writes: “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted.”

Such a focus on the self, on one’s opinions, reinforced by incessant speaking and opining, only fortifies our convictions and closes our horizons. In turn, those with the firmest convictions become even worse listeners. And often it’s the better-educated and those with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners, being so adamant that they needn’t learn anything from anyone else.

A vicious circle ensues. Our shouty society hardens convictions, which necessitates turning up the volume further. Ultimately, this is why public dialogue today has become so antagonistic and fractious (see Brexit). For instance, neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people’s political views are challenged the amygdala region of the brain (the site of the primitive fight or flight reaction) lights up as if being chased by a bear. The amygdala is also what causes road rage or makes someone tweet vitriol so out of proportion when their political opinions are questioned. And when we are in fight, flight or freeze mode it is incredibly hard to reason or listen.

Murphy, a journalist and contributor to the New York Times, spent much time listening to experts while putting together You’re Not Listening (the best journalists should also be the most curious listeners), and the result is generous, humane and all too necessary. At a time when the bilious nature of public discourse seems to escalate by the day, it’s time that we all stopped speaking and started listening — and this even includes listening to ourselves, to what our inner dialogue is saying. It will make us smarter, happier and more content people.

You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why it Matters By Kate Murphy Harvill Secker, £16.99

The irony of Trevor Phillips’ suspension - Spiked, March 13, 2020

The irony of Trevor Phillips’ suspension

He helped popularise the word ‘Islamophobia’. Now he has been accused of it.

Patrick West



There is something grimly ironic about the Labour Party’s decision to suspend Trevor Phillips from its membership on the grounds of ‘Islamophobia’. For it was Phillips who helped introduce and popularise this bogus word and fraudulent concept in the first place.

In 1997, the Runnymede Trust think-tank, which Phillips chaired, published a report titled Islamophobia: A Challenge For Us All, assessing the state of race relations and specifically looking at the question of sometimes hostile attitudes towards Muslims.

Despite being noble in intent, the neologism was an unfortunate one. ‘Phobia’ suggests irrational fear, and while some anti-Islamic prejudice may be irrational – there is a whole spectrum of different interpretations of Islam – some fear of Islam isn’t. The fundamentalist interpretation, as acted out on the Twin Towers four years after the Runnymede report was published, proved that a form of Islam is indeed something to be feared.

‘Islamophobia’ not only presented itself as something inherently irrational, but it also sought to protect one religion from any criticism. The term became a means to reintroduce heresy, if not into actual law, then into modern-day discourse. It is to this day employed to censure or silence anyone who criticises the religion, its adherents or those brought up in Muslim communities.

Thus, any prominent figure who has expressed concerns about the Rotherham child-abuse scandal, perpetrated by men of Pakistani-Muslim origin, is tarnished as an ‘Islamophobe’. The same goes for those who draw attention to evidence showing a disturbingly high proportion of British Muslims sympathising with the terrorists who killed the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo. ‘Islamophobia’ inevitably becomes attached to a voice who worries that the UK is ‘sleepwalking towards segregation’, and that a ‘chasm’ has been opening up between Muslims and non-Muslims on key issues such as sexuality, the validity of violence, and freedom of speech.

It is on those statements above that Phillips’ presumed sin of ‘Islamophobia’ rests. In recent years, he has drawn attention to these issues, particularly in his 2016 Civitas paper Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence. To this day, as a columnist for The Times and television documentary maker, he is one of the most honest, tenacious and authentically liberal voices talking openly about these issues. No wonder the Labour Party has suspended him ‘to protect the party’s reputation’.

In short, Trevor Phillips has come a long way since 1997. Perhaps he now regrets helping to introduce the concept of ‘Islamophobia’, perhaps he doesn’t. Maybe he thought it right for the times. In any case, the episode is a reminder of the dangers of censorship, of trying to shut down debate through censure, through fright-words like ‘Islamophobia’. The neologism was a dangerous and stupid concept in 1997, and it still is now.


The BBC’s war on middle-aged white blokes

The veteran BBC radio football commentator, Alan Green, is stepping down from the corporation – because the BBC doesn’t want him. The 67-year-old Belfast man doesn’t fit their agenda any more. And I bet you know why.

Green, who has worked for 45 years for the BBC, has been told by BBC Radio 5 Live that his contract is not being renewed this summer. ‘I was basically told “You don’t fit our profile”’, he told The Times.


Green had clearly seen the writing on the wall. At the end of last year, 5 Live announced that Cornelius Lysaght, BBC horse-racing correspondent since 2001, was leaving – not by mutual consent. In January, 5 Live then announced another white, middle-aged commentator, Mark Pougatch, had ‘decided to move on’. Pougatch disagreed, saying: ‘Just so we’re clear this was not my decision, but on we go.’

There has been a long-running crusade within the BBC to rid itself of audible or visible middle-aged white males. Whenever, for instance, one of their kind stands down from a popular show, he invariably tends to be replaced by a she: Question Time, Newsnight, QI, Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Doctor Who.

In its war on middle-aged white men, the BBC is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times. The irony is that this war is being carried out by other middle-aged white men, from the Brahmin liberal class, who run the BBC.

Why I am proud to be a woman/womxn, by Miranda Kalashnikov

I was really disappointed to see the scenes outside the ‘Defend Me or Expel Me’ rally on Monday in London, where trans activists confronted Labour Party feminists with whistles, megaphones, placards, banners, shrieks of ‘Fuck off TERFs’, and smoke grenades. As a cis-woman who nonetheless wholly supports the cause of our brxthrxn, I would like to leap to the defence of our trans sxstxrs.

Trans womxn firmly believe in tolerance for all, and believe everyone should be able to decide their sex or gender. People should never be exclusionary. Obviously there are exceptions. Cis-women who don’t believe that womxn are women should be cancelled, No Platformed and excluded. Or executed. It’s the only tolerant way of dealing with bigots.

The problem with cis-women is that they are biological essentialists, who think that someone’s masculine or feminine personality is determined by their sex or genitals. This is nonsense. We can choose what personality we have via phalloplasty or vaginoplasty, because only through such sex-change procedures can we be true to ourselves.

Some of us were born in the wrong body. Trans people just encourage us all to accept our true innate selves – although encouraging young people to accept their bodies is transphobic. There are no such things as lesbians, only males trapped in female bodies. So young females who think they are of a different sexual persuasion must be put on puberty blockers or receive surgery in order to become true to themselves.

Trans people do not have a medical condition. They are being true to themselves. Except people who have gender dysphoria, who do have a medical condition, and need hormone therapy and surgery to be true to themselves. People who transition are being true to themselves; people who detransition are mad.

Finally, and we must always remember this, gender is a social construct – except for biologically trans womxn, who are just born in the wrong male body. It really is that simple.

If you don’t understand, are you really surprised people want to kill you?

Transgenderism: the great delusion of our time - Spiked, February 28, 2020

Transgenderism: the great delusion of our time

One day it will be studied alongside witch-hunts and alien abductions.

Patrick West


The recent remark by Dawn Butler, shadow secretary of state for women and equalities, that ‘a child is born without sex’ is certainly one of the most bizarre things said by a politician in my lifetime. It is surprising that it hasn’t attracted more derision than it deserves. Or perhaps it isn’t. The transgender myth – that one’s actual sex, not one’s gender, is entirely of one’s own choosing – is firmly embedded as the definitive popular delusion of the 21st century. It will take future historians of a more rational age to assess it more soberly and explain its origins.

My theory is that it is the consequence of what might be called the Discrimination Dialectic. Our society is constantly at war with itself between two conflicting imperatives: the need to have an Other (every culture needs one) who we can define ourselves against and be mean about, and our more contemporary, and culturally specific, progressive imperative to ceaselessly end discrimination against minorities and erstwhile Others. This dialectic involves identifying, or maybe even inventing, the next Other in order to emancipate them.

When I was very young it was still acceptable to be a misogynist – television comedians still made jokes about wives and mothers-in-law – and it was acceptable in certain circles to be racist. Homophobia was even more mainstream well into the 1980s, when ‘poof’ and ‘homo’ were unremarkable playground insults.

Going back further, misogyny, racism and homophobia were all pretty mainstream in the 1960s. They are all taboo today. Most people under 30 probably don’t even know that Irish jokes were commonplace until the 1980s. So what discriminated Other should our society campaign for now? What minority can we be progressive about now? Trans people, it transpires.

It is owing to our culture’s cult of progress, and the liberal-left’s compulsion of forever ending discrimination, that the trans movement has captured the Labour Party so virulently. While Butler’s remark raised some eyebrows, a recent statement by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, raised none, when he asserted that ‘Trans women are women. Trans men are men.’ Another transparent falsehood. A trans woman is a trans woman.

Trans is a powerful myth, which explains how it demands some curious mental gymnastics and strange doctrines. First was the notion that by having cosmetic surgery you can change your sex. (You can’t, because you can’t change your chromosomes or biology. I never have and never will menstruate or give birth.) Then came the idea that you can change your sex through performative utterance, by merely declaring you have done so. And now comes the literally – literally – unreal dogma that babies have no sex.

Most people, especially those of a woke persuasion, like to ridicule Christian creationists who believe the Earth is only 6,000 years old. They are certainly irritating, such is their wilful, wanton resistance to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution. True trans believers have become intolerable for exactly the same reason: their flight from reality and denial of not just science, but also what is staring them in the face. You don’t even need a doctor to tell what sex a baby is.

The trans movement began as an extension of the gay-rights movement. But since gays are nearly totally accepted now, it has usurped it. It has since morphed into something more uncanny: a modern-day cult. It’s an ersatz new religion, hence the doctrine among its believers that ‘transphobia’ is a most grievous transgression. Look, too, at the way people demand that strangers use pronouns of their choosing. And regard the degree to which people have internalised ‘transphobia’ as a modern-day blasphemy against this religion, a heresy against the church of trans, with so many people terrified to speak openly and honestly about it.

It is nothing more than a case of hysteria, a modern-day delusion, a phenomenon that one day will – or should – be studied alongside witch-hunts and alien abductions.


Poaching poorer countries’ nurses

While the debate in the UK about migration, NHS staffing and low-paid employment focuses on immigration levels from the EU, it is worth considering the matter of emigration out of EU member states. An article in Labour Heartlands last week tells us that since Poland joined the EU in 2004, around 20,000 trained nurses have left the country. Of the 280,000 that remain today, only 42,000 of them are under the age of 40, with the average age being 51. In 2015, Poland had 5.2 nurses and 2.3 doctors per 1,000 citizens. ‘The country’s health-care system is chronically underfunded.’

The majority of nurses and doctors who come to the UK for employment come from countries poorer than ours. Yet it is these states that have paid for or facilitated their education. We are further impoverishing these countries by taking their labour. If our unwillingness to train our own doctors and nurses has been deplorable, poaching them from poorer countries is profoundly shameful.


Three cheers for Big Pharma

Last March I developed a case of intense itching on my back and backside. Presuming it to be the re-emergence of the eczema that tormented me as a child, I thought it could be remedied with cream. But no cream seemed to solve it. Nor did changing diet or clothing. Consequently, I have spent the past 11 months constantly scratching myself, leaving my skin scarred and myself in considerable pain. My concentration has at times been consequently shot, leaving me periodically unable to read or write.

After a particularly savage scratch attack two Saturdays ago, I had a doctor come round. I had already suspected it wasn’t eczema – I didn’t recognise the unpleasant smell. I suspected it was something worse. It turns out it wasn’t. It was a fungal infection all along. He gave me a prescription for a dose of antibiotics. The fungus is now gone, the pain is subsiding and the scars are healing.

I consequently feel obliged to state that ‘I ♥ the NHS’. But I must also add that ‘I ♥ Big Pharma’. In an age in which we are meant to hate greedy corporations (‘Big’ with a capital ‘b’ has become a pejorative adjective in itself), it is time to give some respect to the pharmaceutical corporations that invent these wonderful drugs.

So thank you to Pfizer, who patented fluconazole in 1981, to the inventors of flucloxacillin, patented in 1961, and to the Schering Corporation that launched prednisone on to the market in 1955.