Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
This is a message to any politician out there thinking of using the phrase ‘hardworking families’ or ‘hardworking people’ – I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. A day does not go by without a Tory politician using this highly irritating slogan, especially in the regular spam emails
It looks like Boris has offended lots of people by suggesting that some folk are where they are because they’re not very bright, something Nick Clegg calls ‘unpleasant’ and ‘careless’. It’s also, as Clegg must know perfectly well, true, but as Rod Liddle writes this week there are certain things you just can’t talk about,
There was an excellent Radio 4 documentary on yesterday in which Sarfraz Manzoor interviewed a group of people you don’t hear much about – ex-Muslims. Like all good radio documentaries, it left me wanting to know more about the individuals involved, feeling more confused about the world, and with mixed feelings too. On the one
Liberals are almost as likely to flee diversity as conservatives, according to new research by Prof Eric Kaufmann for Demos. Some 61 per cent of white people who were ‘very comfortable’ with mixed marriages (the best indicator of views on race) moved to whiter areas during the period, compared to 64 per cent of those
I fear that Stonewall are turning into those old colonels who used to write to the Telegraph complaining that the word ‘gay’ had been taken up by homosexualists. Viz had a letter to that effect a few years back lamenting that the kids have taken a perfectly good word, ‘gay’ as in homosexual, and now
‘Hull has been named the 2017 city of culture. Better luck next year, Luton.’ So wrote the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley on Twitter. Nadine Dorries said: ‘Hull? City of culture? As one originating from Liverpool, a former recipient, I’m er, surprised but of course, delighted for Hull!’ That summarises the general reaction to the choice of
The Church of England is doomed, Lord Carey has said, warning that Anglicanism is just ‘one generation away from extinction’. To be fair people have been saying this for a long time; in the mid-19th century the Church decided to make a survey of churchgoing, and were stunned to find out that only a quarter
The persecution of Christians, the greatest story never told in the Western media, is finally building momentum as a story, after a year which has seen villagers massacred in Syria, dozens of churches burned down in Egypt’s worst religious violence for centuries, and the Peshawar atrocity in which the suicide-bombing of a church killed more
My dad used to tell me that when he was a foreign correspondent in the 1960s he was once assigned to the Gambia where, upon arriving at the airport, some man started trying to sell him a watch. Brushing aside the persistent chap, dad finally said ‘sorry, I’m going to be late for my meeting
These days I find myself so drifting away from the bounds of acceptable opinion that I don’t even shout at Radio 4 for being biased, because I don’t even understand the basis of what the arguments are about. Take this morning’s schools feature (occasioned by Sir John Major’s comments about the ‘truly shocking’ dominance of
I hate drivers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all of them, just a considerably larger proportion than I hate of the population as a whole. And, like most cyclists, I drive myself, having been bullied into it by my then girlfriend who bought me lessons for my 27th birthday. But generally speaking I
I know we’re inundated with ‘raising awareness’ days these days when we’re supposed to wear a bracelet or grow facial hair, but I’ve got a great idea for a new one – Hate Speech Day. It occurred to me while reading this Atlantic piece about gay rights by Jonathan Rauch in which the author came
It’s important that newspapers make themselves sounding boards for unpopular opinions, especially in an age when identity is sacred and people are judged by having the right views rather than the right behaviour. But we still reserve the right to mock if they are badly argued, such as this Guardian piece arguing that since most Saudi
Before a mob turns up at my house and someone starts dragging up that unfortunate picture of my grandfather with Hitler, the headline is a joke, but I do wonder if the media has given a rather misleading idea of Malala Yousafzai. For example, the Pakistani International Marxist Tendency claim that the schoolgirl sent a
The media seem to be in a pickle over the removal of a blonde girl from a Roma family in Dublin, which followed the arrest of a couple in Athens who had a suspiciously Nordic-looking child with them. It’s a fascinating story because for the first time I can remember the two great hysterias of
If the Leveson Inquiry does nothing else, then it has at least provided a useful guide to the British Left for those of us on the saliva-speckled wastelands of British conservatism. Political tribes are complex but occasionally one issue will neatly divide a movement into easily identifiable clans, of which press regulation is one. And
As Edmund Burke wrote: ‘Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend.’ Testify, brother – and if our lawmakers have no manners, then we are really up a creek. As Spectator columnist James Forsyth noticed yesterday: ‘Quite remarkable that no MP has offered Jo Swinson, who is
I’m starting to get the impression that the Guardian isn’t very keen on Michael Gove, and may not give him the benefit of the doubt in their reporting. The latest offering was this, ‘Genetics outweighs teaching, Gove adviser tells his boss’, which was presumably designed to infuriate teachers, about an essay written by Dominic Cummings.
Now that the middle class squeeze has become my sujet du bore at the fancy north London dinner parties I attend, I was interested in Saturday’s New York Times piece about what foreign billionaires are doing to our insane property prices. One statistic really stuck out: ‘An astonishing £83 billion worth of properties were purchased
The outrage over Jack Wilshere’s comment that ‘If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English’ shows how the Overton window can shift in such a short space of time. Fifteen years ago no one would have cared, but many drew sinister implications from the statement, and England cricketer Kevin Pietersen
