Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
I’ve just been reading Jonathan Sacks’ excellent new book, Not in God’s Name, which sets out to explain why people kill for religion. Although he explores the theology of the Old Testament, Rabbi Sacks also looks at evolution and evolutionary psychology to explain the unending human tendency to have in-groups and out-groups. This will be
Will the country be torn apart by the EU referendum? That’s the argument made by Chris Deerin on the capitalist running dog website CapX. Deerin, a Scottish Unionist, says it’s now Great Britain’s turn to go through the same painful and divisive process that Scotland endured last year. Personally I doubt that will happen, although
There have been a number of articles recently by American liberals warning about the intolerance of academia, in particular pointing to the dangers of a generation who’ve never had their views challenged. The latest is by an academic using the pseudonym Edward Schlosser, who writes in Vox last week: Things have changed since I started teaching.
The campaign against Qatar’s plans to host the World Cup is racist and Islamophobic, according to the former prime minister of the oil-rich absolute monarchy where Indian workers are treated like serfs and leaving Islam is punishable by death. Maybe worker health and safety is just a Eurocentric construct and there are no objective truths about
Numerous commentators have noted how the Irish marriage referendum was influenced by big business, especially Californian-based companies like Google. It’s one of the curious trends of recent years that big business, once considered the enemy of ‘the Left’, is now its greatest proponent; or at least the dominant strain of Leftism, social justice liberalism. Silicon Valley
I suppose if you’d told someone in Northern Ireland 25 years ago that the most contentious issue come May 2015 would be a gay cake they would have taken that future. If you’d gone back another 300 years and told John Locke he might not be so pleased, however, to find that his principle of conscience
I keep on reading that the ‘Outers’ are going to lose the upcoming EU referendum because Euroscepticism has become associated with Ukip, and Nigel Farage is too divisive. It has been talked about for some time but I’ve seen it far more since the party won 13 per cent of the vote last week. The paradox
My father recently passed away, and the stories people inevitably tell of the dead brought back memories of childhood. As a small boy I remember Sunday lunches that culminated with my IRA-supporting godmother storming out after dad had said something especially offensive about Ireland. But she’d be back the following month and all was forgotten.
Whoever comes top on Thursday, Labour has won the only poll that really matters – that of Britain’s beloved celebrities, with recent endorsements by Steve Coogan, Delia Smith, Robert Webb, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Jo Brand, among others. The Tories in contrast can only muster a few self-made businesswomen and Peter Stringfellow. Labour’s most important conquest,
There’s an episode of The New Statesman in which geologists discover that there’s no more oil in the North Sea and the British economy is about to crash; as a result all the parties try their best to lose the election so as not to carry the can for the next five years. Alan B’Stard,
I’m mildly posh – nowhere near David Cameron posh, for example, let alone the Olympian heights of Brian Sewell, but I’m unlikely to ever play a football hooligan or an East End gangster in a Guy Ritchie film. And I’m better spoken than I was as a teenager, when I used to affect a slight Mockney
A few months ago I was in a pub on a quiet night and overheard a young couple having an argument about politics. They were both, I’m guessing, young white London liberals and although I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, the gist was this: he was arguing that Islamic violence was a particular problem
The latest issue of The Spectator carries an interesting piece by James Bartholomew on ‘virtue signalling’, the bane of social media and political debate; that is, people expressing how ruddy good they are by telling the world how much they hate bad things like Ukip and the Daily Mail. He writes: ‘It’s noticeable how often virtue
Of all the contradictory ideas in the Green Party’s manifesto, I love their plan to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, while at the same time lowering the voting age to 16. So in just two years someone could go from not understanding the basic difference between right and wrong, to
If the NUT didn’t exist it would be necessary for a latter-day Michael Wharton to invent it. This week the teaching union is having its congress where, among other things, it’s pushing for the government to install an anti-Section 28; a rule stating that schools are required to teach positive examples of same-sex relationships as part
There was something genuinely frightening about the disturbance aimed at Nigel Farage and his family this weekend; what’s scary is that there seem to be so many people in our country who think a man having lunch with his family is a legitimate target for such a stunt because of his views. If you’re prepared
Sweden’s latest attempts to integrate its migrant population have suffered one or two hiccups after it was learned that staff at its ‘assimilation guide service’ were recruiting people into the Islamic State. A partial success, then. According to a recent BBC report, the Scandinavian country now tops the European jihadi league, although others give Belgium
Is privatising BBC3 as bad as Isis’s destruction of Nineveh? That was the wonderfully trolling headline on a Stewart Lee piece in the Guardian over the weekend. He was making the point that even though BBC3 was not to his tastes it should be preserved because the Beeb is ‘the greatest cultural achievement of any 20th-century democracy’ and
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?
I’ve met people at political events who seem otherwise normal, and then Tony Blair’s name is mentioned and their eyes light up in a way that suggest a chemical reaction has taken place in their brain. Likewise whenever the former Labour prime minister is mentioned online, it’s like a hand grenade has been thrown into the
