Society

There’s no room for racism in Britain, we’re told. EDI (equality, diversion and inclusion) initiatives and anti-racism strategies are everywhere. We’re all familiar with the ‘horror’ of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias. We are forever on alert for dangerous racial ‘dog whistles’. And yet the last few weeks has exposed a troubling blind spot when it comes to tackling racism: it’s clear that Jews don’t really count. Hamas’s attack – and the response from Israel – has unleashed a tide of hate on the streets of Britain. Posters of kidnapped Israeli children have been torn off walls. ‘From London to Gaza, we’ll have an intifada,’ demonstrators chanted during the Palestinian solidarity

Like 9/11, the massacre in southern Israel changed everything. From the great movements of Middle Eastern geopolitics and international alliances to the sweep of modern Israeli and Arab history, life has been split into the before and the after.  In Britain, nowhere has this been felt more keenly than the Jewish community. There have been a great many bitter lessons, but one overshadows all the others. Before the massacre, we thought we had many more friends here.  In the aftermath of the massacre, it is finally dawning on Jewish progressives that their oldest friend doesn’t care for them at all I’m talking about the political left. In recent decades, the

History, we’re told, is written by the victors. But nowadays, it seems it’s museum curators who really have the final word. Across the UK, our much-loved national institutions have been led astray by a minority of campaigners, with no regard for the wishes of the public at large. It has become almost impossible to visit a museum in Britain today without coming across a sign or installation condemning several centuries of scholarship in favour of an activist’s manifesto. Curators of various galleries and exhibits impose modern cultural and ethical values on every time period, denigrating those that don’t meet their standards. On the long march through our institutions, it becomes clear

With all due respect to the diligent journalists who revealed it, I don’t think it’s a big deal that some bits of Rachel Reeves’ book about women in economics were copied from Wikipedia.  The book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was launched at an Institute for Government event in Westminster on Wednesday evening. An examination by the FT of the book found more than 20 examples of passages from other sources that appeared to be either lifted wholesale, or reworked with minor changes, without acknowledgment. Some biographical text about women economists spotlighted by Reeves, who hopes to become Britain’s first female chancellor if Labour wins the next election, was

Shadow chancellor’s Rachel Reeves’s new book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics, was meant to put the spotlight on unsung female economists. Instead, the focus has fallen back on Reeves herself – and not for the reason she hoped. Reeves has denied plagiarism after it emerged that the book is littered with passages from other sources, including Wikipedia, apparently lifted without proper acknowledgment. The Financial Times found more than 20 examples of bits in the book with glaring similarities to text from elsewhere. Reeves wasn’t even as savvy as the average GCSE student This is clearly very embarrassing for Reeves, whose office has said ‘These were inadvertent mistakes and will be