Dear Editor, On April the 21st the Sunday Times published an article in which an anonymous teacher wrote that, when he asked his class who hated Britain, “Thirty hands shot up with immediate, absolute certainty.” It couldn’t possibly have been clearer from the article that those thirty hands were all Muslim, belonging to pupils believing that women […]
Who Exactly Hates Britain? Read More »
When someone accuses you of something widely thought disreputable, something you don’t believe you are guilty of, you deny it, instinctively. Unfortunately, this makes you subject to the Mandy Rice-Davies Manoeuvre: Well, he would, wouldn’t he? (Often abbreviated to MRDA: ‘Mandy Rice-Davis applies’.) And this is a manoeuvre to which neither Steven Ward’s defence counsel
The Colours of Our Skins Read More »
Banks – perhaps big corporations generally – have got too big for their boots – but banks especially. The idea is, or was, supposed to be that the bank just held your money; it held it but it was still yours, to use as you wished. But no longer. Things haven’t yet got to the
Banks: It’s for Your Own Good You Know Read More »
Should we speak ill of the dead? Probably, not–if we can help ourselves. Speaking ill of someone who can’t speak up for himself is too much like kicking a chap when he’s down. But how about speaking ill of the living for praising the dead for qualities they didn’t have? Surely, we may do that,
Benjamin Zephaniah … “a titan of British literature”? Read More »
Every conservative must, I think, agree with Mr Baron’s attack on multiculturalism, on, at least, the forced and inorganic form it has taken in Britain (The New Conservative, 28/11/23). But not every conservative will warm to his list of the “shared values” that, in his view, make our “British identity”: liberal democracy, free speech, the
In Response to Joe Baron: ‘Time to Put Multiculturalism to Bed’ Read More »
The word ‘anti-semitism’ for what took place in Israel on October 7th is a wonderfully convenient word all round. It is a boon, of course, to Islamists and their Western sympathisers because it blends October 7th into the long history of Christian anti-semitism that concluded (let’s hope it concluded) in the Holocaust. It hints that, if Islamists deliberately
(Photograph: Stew Dean from London, United Kingdom, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons) Dear Sir, What could do more to further the progressivist cause than trying to hold back this year’s variant by furthering last year’s? Graham Linehan (in The Mail on Sunday) rightly calls trans-activism madness, insane, but its mere insanity isn’t a sufficient
Graham Linehan: Why Play the Progressives’ Game? Read More »
Sir, Your ‘Lucy Letby‘ piece doesn’t support the death penalty as you think it does. You would have (some) murderers and traitors put to death but only when we eliminate “human error … entirely”. But why, with that condition attached, need any opponent of the death penalty differ with you? The administration of justice is
Supporting the Death Penalty Read More »
The following exchange I had with the BBC illustrates how hard that is. Me to the BBC In the reporting of the change to the abortion law in the USA, you repeatedly and consistently treated the matter as having to do with and only with “care” and the withdrawal of the right to it for
The difficulty of getting the BBC to acknowledge its own biases Read More »
A lesson that the state—the modern, enlightened, left-liberal, Anglo-Saxon state—finds hard to learn is where the limits of its power lie. It fancies it can do all sorts of things that can’t be done. It does seem to have learned that it can’t do what it likes abroad but only because ‘abroad’ has shown itself
The Great Leviathan or the Great Humbug? Read More »
