Racism

Earlier this year the Guardian vetoed HP sauce for its readers on the grounds that it is the sauce of the establishment. In May, the newspaper then went on to criticise tea drinkers, who exhibit ‘the worst possible English trait, up there with colonialism and the class system’. Now, it’s time to step away from the fire lighters, put the skewers down and ignore the impulse to put HP sauce on your charcoal grilled meats, as barbecues are now facing the heat. According to the Guardian, the barbecue ‘has its roots in the cooperation between black and indigenous peoples struggling to get or keep their freedom from colonialists’. As Michael W Twitty, a culinary historian, explains: ‘Barbecue is

The question is, says the Guardian in a report from San Francisco, whether God is actually gay, what with the gay marriage movement being on such a roll. The US Supreme Court majority ruling that marriage between same-sex couples is a constitutional right usefully coincided with a similar ruling on gay marriage in Mexico, which makes a nice change, I expect, from worrying about the narcotics-related homicide rate. In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull says it’s bound to happen there. Quite a coup, this, for the social media companies like Facebook, Apple and Google who’ve been campaigning for just this outcome. Over here, David Cameron too must be quietly congratulating himself on the outcome, given that he declared

Jerry Seinfeld’s takedown of the political correctness of today’s youth should give us all pause for thought. In an interview on US radio, the sitcom and stand-up star said that college campuses have become a no-go area for comedians. ‘I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, “Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC”’ he said, before launching into a story about the time his 14-year-old daughter accused his wife of being ‘sexist’ for suggesting that she may soon want to start seeing boys. ‘They just want to use these words. That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice. They don’t know what the fuck they’re talking

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults brush past without leaving a mark, others pierce the skin and sink in. This one sunk like a splinter, and like a splinter I’ve been worrying away at it ever since, turning what was a small injury into a painful, bloody mess. I can dismiss the accusation easily enough — the Spectator office is multi-racial,

Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers of sentiment about history and hymns, Shakespeare and lawn clippings, does it have a hateful heart? I ask because, as I’ve written before, I feel patriotic, and until recently I’ve considered this to be a good thing. I felt particularly patriotic at a service in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria, last week. I slid in late and guilty, amid snippy Sunday stares. After the sermon we trooped outside and in the suddenly sunlit graveyard the vicar whipped a trumpet from his cassock and began to play. A pair of starlings began their electric

To the extent that Britain has philosophers, we do not expect them to address issues of any relevance to the rest of us. They may pursue some hermeneutic byway perhaps, but not the urgent or profound issues of our time. Roger Scruton has always been an exception in this regard, as in many others. He has spent his adult life thinking and writing about the nature of love, the nation state, belonging, alienation, beauty, home and England. But even his closest readers may gulp at the relevance of his latest subject matter. His new novel, The Disappeared, is set in the north of England and centres on the recent rape-gang

My mum once told me about a man she knew who’d come from a poor background and had no luck finding a job. He’d applied for over 400 positions but never got a response, but then he made one change to his CV and the next job he landed straight away. What did he do? He used a friend’s address, a friend who lived in a neighbouring postcode. The point of her story was that perseverance and lateral thinking will win out in the end, but what I took from it was that employers tend to choose people on arbitrary grounds. Postcodes are just one way in which employers use

Weekends are quality time in the Alderman household. On Saturday evenings, following the termination of the Sabbath, my wife and I are accustomed to sit together, review the week that has just ended, and map out the week ahead. But last Saturday the conversation took a very different turn. My wife and I considered the drama that had unfolded in Copenhagen, and asked ourselves, for the very first time in over forty-one years of marriage, whether we should not make plans to leave (flee?) England – this green and hitherto pleasant land in which we had both been born and educated– and seek shelter in some foreign field. We considered

Props to Goldsmiths Students’ Union, for taking the ‘safe space’ concept to absurd new levels. Last week, one faction of the union hosted a screening of the film Dear White People and advertised it as being ‘for BME students’. BME stands for ‘black and minority ethnic’ – and the poster specifies that this screening is for students of ‘African, Caribbean, Arab, Asian and South American ethnic origin’. The union’s welfare and diversity officer and education officer both reiterated this message on Facebook and Twitter, then stated that before the screening, there was a BME ONLY social happening at Cafe Natura. There it is: racial segregation at a British university. Imagine if the tables were