Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
There was much glee about yesterday’s publication of a report into the economic impact of immigration, which concluded eastern Europeans had provided a net benefit of £4.4 billion to the UK economy. There was far less mention of the fact that immigrants from outside Europe in the same period cost the taxpayers £118 billion. But
In this week’s magazine Rod Liddle has a piece on the worst ‘clichés, lies, evasions, obfuscations, PC euphemisms and disingenuous balls words and phrases which, in recent years, have annoyed me the most’. He was inspired by Brook Newmark’s recent shenanigans with a phantom lady and a computer, which were explained as the MP ‘battling
[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Damian Thompson joins Fraser Nelson to discuss the Pope v the Vatican.” startat=928] Listen [/audioplayer] Is it sinful to be not so keen on the whole immigration thing? I suppose Justin Welby thinks so, according to his recent comments. ‘We have to be careful and you can’t over-burden the community, you have to
When I first learned about Athenian democracy as a teenager I was baffled that they could have decided government positions by lottery; what was to stop someone totally unsuitable and useless from ending up in control? But then I look at the current Labour front bench and think, how bad could it be? I’m thinking in particular
So we’re back to bombing Iraq again, by the looks of things, for the third successive decade – this time to destroy the Islamic State, or Isis or whatever they’re called. David Cameron, asked by an MP whether Isis was a ‘threat to the British people’, answered ‘yes’ and said: ‘This is about psychopathic terrorists
I’ve been in Turkey the past week, which as anyone will tell you is the friendliest and most beautiful of countries, and a kinder and more welcoming people you will not meet. But I’d be lying if I didn’t add that a major bonus of being there was that I missed the finale of the
You have to wonder about the future of the Conservative party when you hear stories like this, from the Birmingham Post: ‘Councillor Deirdre Alden (Con, Edgbaston) said she was concerned that such a large amount of effort and investment was being spent on a mode of transport predominantly used by young men. “The vast majority
Can being more Right-wing make you happier? According to the right-wing Daily Mail it can: ‘People with conservative views are more content than their more liberal-minded neighbours, research suggests. ‘Those with politics that lean to the Right were found to have higher levels of well-being – even when their favoured political party was in opposition.
Hugo Rifkind had an interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the Scottish referendum arguing that the No campaign, by focussing on economics and pragmatism (where they obviously have the edge), had totally conceded the realm of emotion and attachment. Yet Rifkind, coming south in his twenties to settle in London, had found that England
Up to 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a review into child protection has revealed. How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report’s authors, who state that ‘several
There are now thought to be more British-born members of Isis than there are Muslims in the British Army, leading lots of people to ask how they could hate us so much. After all, we did everything right: we imported low-skilled migrants from among the most clannish and socially conservative societies on earth to do badly-paid
The great Theodore Dalrymple once came up with the theory that there is a fixed level of righteous indignation in any society. As soon as we become more relaxed about one area — say, drug taking — we get much more prudish and finger-wagging about something else — smoking, for example. Sometimes one taboo easily
The collapse of some of the Sykes-Picot states in 2014 will spur people to ask which way the world is heading and what it all tells us, just as with the fall of Communism in 1989. After Communism we had at first Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History,which foresaw the triumph of western-style liberal democracy,
As silly seasons go, this August has been pretty rubbish, I have to say. Iraq heads the list of gloomy subjects, obviously, as 100,000 Christians and many more Yazidis flee from the genocidal maniacs of the Islamic State. And before anyone asks, yes I do support intervention there: this is not like other conflicts in
So Boris Johnson is standing for parliament next year, triggering speculation about what would happen if David Cameron lost the election. Could we have Ed Miliband as prime minister, followed by Boris Johnson? Jon Stewart would have a field decade. Boris is easily the most popular Conservative politician around, both inside and outside the party,
Yesterday was a chance for people to remember relatives who died in the 1914-1918 conflict, often the only record of their existence being grainy old portraits from a grandmother’s mantelpiece and a gravestone in France. I have no idea what my grandfather did, although he was old enough to be fighting by the end of
I’ve just been in France, where the shadow of the First World War always seems to be darker and longer than that cast over Britain; it is partly that, aesthetically, their war memorials are far more haunting than ours, but also that in sheer numbers our allies lost more men than we did, up to
I don’t know if David Cameron was trying to tell us something about Michael Gove’s prospects as chief whip by comparing him to the Hand of the King in Game of Thrones. Things don’t really turn out very well for the hands, generally; Jon Arryn was poisoned, Ned Stark was beheaded, Tyrion ended up in
Now that Elizabeth Butler-Sloss has stood down as head of the inquiry into historic sex abuse, I’d like to nominate myself as Britain’s new paedofinder-general. If I got the job, I would use the latest scientific techniques to track down every single sexual wrongdoer in Britain, alive or dead. Firstly I would type into Google
If you’re walking through any built-up area in England between 8 and 10pm this Sunday and you hear a cheer you can be pretty sure it means one thing – Germany have scored yet again. One of the great myths we were fed as children in the 1980s and ‘90s was that the English don’t
