Racism

One of football’s many beauties is in encouraging us to forsake unfortunate strictures of accepted behaviour; as long as it’s at the game, we can sing, swear, cuddle strangers, and even care about stuff without fear of ridicule. And, perhaps best of all, we’re entitled to rejoice in the dastardly; it’s entirely justifiable to drool over the respective oeuvres of Roy Keane, Thierry Henry and Sergio Busquets, if they so tickle you. The game can also serve as a masking agent for off-pitch indiscretions, and remind people that personal matters are precisely that. Kenny Dalglish somehow wore links to the Clerkenwell crime syndicate, and though plenty of people dislike Wayne Rooney,

I am a banana. In Singapore, where I used to live, this needs no explanation — it means I’m yellow on the outside but white on the inside, someone who looks ethnically Chinese but whose way of thinking is ‘western’. There are bananas all over Asia, and I daresay the world. We are better versed in Shakespeare than Confucius, our Mandarin is appalling, and we often have pretentious Anglo or American accents. Then there are people who are ‘ching-chong’, a reference to anyone who enjoys the kitschy bling of stereotypically Chinese things, sans irony — they like paving their entire garden with cement, for example, or driving a huge Mercedes,

The British government has said it will allow in some of Syria’s most vulnerable refugees. The Home Office hasn’t specified how many will be admitted but says it will probably be in the hundreds. The Syrian civil war has created 2.4 million refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced people, and looking through the archive, you get the sense that some of The Spectator’s former writers might have thought Britain could have offered more this time. The government’s attitude towards Jewish refugees in 1944 was ‘niggardly, bureaucratic, evasive and insincere’, according to the diplomat Harold Nicolson. We’ve historically been ‘proud to succour the oppressed and to defend the weak. We were

The Italian shop assistant accused by Oprah Winfrey of showing racial prejudice towards her in a shop in Zurich has hotly denied the charge, but with a curious twist. ‘I am Italian,’ she said in an interview with a Swiss magazine. ‘Why should I discriminate against anybody because of their origin?’ She seemed to be suggesting that no Italian could ever possibly harbour any racial prejudice against anyone. It is a claim that seems especially implausible at the moment when Italy’s first-ever black cabinet minister, the Congolese-born doctor Cecile Kyenge, has been reeling from a number of crude racist attacks. Kyenge, Italy’s recently appointed Integration Minister, has been pelted with

Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. I’m coming round to the view that these intellectual heavyweights have got it back to front and the really significant social trend of our era is the triumph of equality. So it was refreshing to dip into A Classless Society, the third volume of Alwyn Turner’s history of Britain since

I wonder what possessed the jury in the Trayvon Martin case to return two not guilty verdicts when they knew the trouble it would cause. One never ceases to wonder at the self-importance, the narcissism, of those people who always believe they know better than the rest. An important section of the American population — perpetually outraged black civil rights leaders and their faux-left-wing whitey hangers-on — had been absolutely clear about the case: George Zimmerman, the ghastly white neighbourhood watch person, was guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin — and not just murder, but racially aggravated murder at that. The jury knew this and yet knowingly and wilfully acquitted Zimmerman. Since

You will be scandalised by the suggestion, of course, especially those of you who spend several hours every week drinking it, reading about it or discussing it. But most wine is actually rubbish. I’ll let you off the hook if you drink wine only with food. But wine drunk on its own is often a terrible drink, usually consumed for appearances’ sake, or because the drinker lacks the confidence to complain, or for want of any alternative source of alcohol. Our judgment of wine is also notoriously flaky — influenced as much by the appearance and weight of the bottle as by its contents. One winemaker sent the same wine

Do any of you still like the dread word diversity, one that’s proudly flung around by those who squirm when the name of the great Enoch Powell comes up? If anything, Powell was a prophet, and after the latest London outrage, his so-called Rivers of Blood speech sure comes to mind. He got it right while midgets such as Heath and Howe sold and keep on selling the country out to diversity. Can any of you imagine a time when a British soldier was unsafe wearing a military uniform in his own country? Well, yes, when the IRA was blowing up horses and soldiers near the Hyde Park barracks, but

It was Dean Howells who first said, ‘The problem for a critic is not making enemies but keeping them.’ On this account I have been diligent and fortunate in my life so far. There is Nick Griffin of the BNP, for instance, who attacks me for many things including being ‘a cheer-leader for multi-racialism’ and, like some others, for being gay. In recent days two other critics who I regard as equally insignificant have once again been active. I generally try not to get into this kind of thing because I have a lot of work to do and deadlines to meet. But I thought it might be time to

Important work from Latanya Sweeney of Harvard University into the inherent racism of internet search engines. She carried out a study which demonstrated a clear difference between the sort of ads that appear on the page if you’re searching for either a “black” name or a “white” name. She used a bunch of names which had previously been identified as being associated with one race or another. For “black” names she used DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine; for “white”, stuff like James, Emily and The Rt Hon Nicholas Soames or something. When the white names were tapped in, up came adverts for nice sofas and dating agencies and holidays in agreeable