Black lives matter

The conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd makes last summer’s Black Lives Matter mania in British institutions look even stranger. The British Museum, Oxbridge colleges, Sir Keir Starmer, football teams, government departments, Kew Gardens, the National Trust and numerous corporations indulged in various forms of self-abasement. Some ‘took the knee’. At the Ministry of Defence, the permanent secretary, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, broke professional political impartiality by emailing his staff about the ‘deep roots’ of ‘systemic racial inequality’ in Britain, and signing off with a BLM hashtag. He was subsequently promoted to be the UK National Security Adviser. It was never clear why, among the many dreadful

The radicalisation of the Ben & Jerry’s PR department has been one of the stranger spectacles of recent years. After all, for all its hippyish origins and homespun shtick, Ben & Jerry’s is a corporate giant flogging expensive ice creams with wacky names like Cherry Garcia and Truffle Kerfuffle. And yet it has become remarkably preoccupied with virtue-signalling and moral hectoring. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate strategy for attention, or if someone’s pious nephew has simply seized control of the social-media accounts at head office. Following the killing of George Floyd last year, Ben & Jerry’s made a solemn pledge to help ‘dismantle white supremacy’.

Does Black Lives Matter speak for black Brits? The organisation’s objectives are certainly radical: it has professed public support for direct action in the name of ‘black liberation’, along with aspirations to dismantle the capitalist economy. It has also said it wants to get rid of the police and abolish prisons. It’s safe to say those views are not shared by many of those BLM claims to represent. A new report by the Henry Jackson Society reveals that, while nearly six in ten black people in Britain think the UK is a fundamentally racist society (a view shared by three in ten people in the general population), the core objectives of

Your quiz for the week is to make the connection between the following people: fun-loving Greek hack Homer, veteran US centrist Democratic party politician Dianne Feinstein, dodgy-night-at-the-theatre president Abraham Lincoln and Middlesbrough-born peripatetic James Cook. The answer is that they are the latest individuals to have been ‘cancelled’ by the woke Taleban. Don’t worry, they’ll get around to you soon enough. Homer is being kicked off college curricula in the USA because his character, Odysseus, had a habit of mansplaining to thick Greek women. It has always been my view that mansplaining means ‘telling someone, often a woman, something they don’t want to hear, but need to hear nonetheless’, as

My great-great-grandmother, born on a Barbadian plantation and transported to what was British Guiana in the 19th century, gave rise to a tribe that has spread across the globe. Weirdly, Covid has brought us together (via Zoom) in a way that used to be reserved for weddings and funerals. My New Yorker nephew found a time of day that could accommodate the Californians, the Canadians and the English rump in London, Cambridge and Nottingham. Harlem’s lights glimmered from another nephew’s screen, while the Florida gang kept their windows shut just in case the neighbours not so far away in Mar-a-Lago decided to drop by. Sadly, someone forgot to let the

The Black Lives Matter website (different from the new Black Liberation Movement) mostly presents an image of an organisation of the clenched fist and permanent protest. Its work with the police is an important exception, but otherwise that rhetoric seems unlikely to create sympathy and understanding among white communities, especially when black successes — e.g. anti-racist protocols across all institutions — remain unacknowledged. The Roman statesman Cicero understood where such disharmony could lead. In 63 bc, Cicero was made consul to deal with his rival Catiline, who (Cicero claimed) was planning an armed insurrection and the economic reordering of the state. Under the banner of a ‘concord of the classes’

I wonder if British universities will follow Cornell’s innovative approach to ensuring students are protected from wretched viruses? The American institution has received plaudits for its rigorous regime. Students who refuse to have the flu vaccine will be barred from the Cornell libraries and other campus buildings — or, at least, they will if they are white. ‘Students of colour’ can decline to receive the vaccine. Why? Cornell explains: ‘Students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or as a Person of Color (BIPOC) may have personal concerns about fulfilling the Compact requirements based on historical injustices and current events.’ The university authorities give a little more detail about what those concerns

It is an enormous shame that the Millwall fans who booed their players for ‘taking a knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter last week were not better acquainted with one of the British BLM leaders, Sasha Johnson — they might have taken a knee themselves out of admiration. In August Ms Johnson tweeted: ‘The white man will not be our equal but our slave.’ If there is one thing Millwall supporters respect it’s aspiration, and Ms Johnson has that in abundance. I am sure the FA, the English Football League, and indeed the Millwall club board, who condemned the booing, all wish Sasha the best of luck in her

Scandalously, we never studied Ted Hughes at school. As the Poet Laureate is arguably the finest British poet of the 20th century this would be a scandal wherever I attended (‘studied’ would be pushing it) but I attended Calder High in Ted’s home town of Mytholmroyd. Though the grand total of my published poems stands at seven, we share connections, Ted and I. When my first novel was published — set in a fictionalised version of the Calder Valley — I was a guest of the Ted Hughes Festival. As a teenager in the 1980s, I tended Sylvia Plath’s grave. By then Ted was already a bogeyman for some of the area’s