Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
You have to laugh. Two men who’ve admitted to trying to go abroad to fight jihad had to buy copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies before their glorious mission. Shouldn’t the publishers cash in by publishing a Jihad for Dummies? It would sell like hotcakes. The young chaps, Yusuf Sarwar and
After 9/11 the Western world’s response fell between two poles; on the one hand lots of people agreed with General Norman Schwarzkopf that it was not our job to forgive the terrorists, it was God’s job; ours was simply to arrange the meeting. On the other hand some on the American Left asked the question:
I’m not a great believer in the ‘special relationship’, a concept that exists almost entirely in the mind of British journalists, especially during those occasional moments when the English-speaking nations have to bomb some awful former colony. Americans and Brits have a generally positive view of each other—speaking the same language will do that—but American
‘I deserted my children for my own personal happiness: it is as simple as that, regardless if I sometimes reassure myself with caveats, with a rationale which I have constructed for myself out of cardboard or tinplate over the years.’ So writes Rod Liddle in his brutally honest memoir-cum-polemic Selfish Whining Monkeys, which got a
I agree with something Owen Jones has written, a confluence of beliefs that will next occur on September 15, 2319. Addressing the subject of Christian persecution, he argues in the Guardian: ‘It is, unsurprisingly, the Middle East where the situation for Christians has dramatically deteriorated in recent years. One of the legacies of the invasion
The Syro-Iraq war, as the firestorm should probably now be called, rages on, with the sword of Damocles hanging over us in Britain. Some 400 British Muslims are fighting with ISIS – only 150 fewer than the number of Muslims in the whole British Army – and we can be pretty sure of blowback when
Was Karl Marx right all along about capitalism? One of the subjects I like to bore everyone about whenever I get a chance is the hollowing out of middle-class jobs as a result of technology, squeezing wages just as the old German predicted. It’s the subject of a Spectator debate tonight, which will be well
So farewell, then, Tywin Lannister, you truly were the people’s Hand of the King. But this being Game of Thrones, it was never going to last, and now you’ve been shot with a crossbow by your dwarf son while sitting on the toilet. Not how you envisioned it all ending, I imagine. The final episode
I’d like to say that when I’m low and feel I can’t go on anymore that it’s the thought of a child’s smile or a better future for humanity that gets me through, or maybe one of those inspiring Maya Angelou quotes people were sharing last week: but to be honest, it’s actually that picture
The war on terror has gone not necessarily to our advantage. For the second time in a dozen years the land of Abraham has been invaded by a partly-British army, although this time it is composed not of regular soldiers but of bearded lunatics from Crawley. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, an
I’ve been off the past week poncing around Rome in a frilly shirt, and so am naturally gloomy about coming home. Just to make it worse, I return to hear of the death of my childhood hero and news that schools are now going to be teaching ‘British values’, following the Birmingham Trojan Horse scandal.
Following last week’s Purple Revolution in which the pro-democracy Faragist rebels liberated Britain from the hated pro-EUSSR LibLabCon stooges (at least this is the version I’m telling my kids to repeat to their teachers), a number of people have written about what appears to be the opening of a ‘culture war’ in Britain. Andrew Sullivan
Last Saturday a young man in southern California murdered six people. I’m not going to name him or link to his picture because you would have probably seen it anyway, and he does not deserve to be remembered except by his family. He achieved nothing. One of the depressing inevitabilities of such atrocities is the
Today’s European election is not just a matter of deciding who gets to represent my made-up region in Brussels’ toy town parliament. It is a celebration of our common heritage as a people, and our proud record of centuries of killing each other in futile wars and thinking up political schemes that never work. Some
Despite levels of media scrutiny and hostility unseen in recent political history, this Thursday up to 30 per cent of British voters will opt for Ukip. The odd thing is that the more outrageous the slurs made against them, and the wackier the members unveiled in the press, the more their popularity surges, perhaps out
Nigel Farage is in the papers again today – unbelievably! – this time with a full-page advert in the Telegraph responding to his remarks about Romanians on LBC radio. Such was the universal media condemnation over his interview with James O’Brien that on Saturday even the Sun had an editorial on anti-Romanian racism. You couldn’t
We’re four months away from Scotland’s day of destiny, with the London-Scottish media fraternity becoming increasingly alarmed, and ironically (considering their total unionism) far more noticeably Scottish. At the Telegraph Graeme Archer made a characteristically elegant appeal to Sir Malcolm Rikfind to step forward, and there would indeed be something touching and rather beautiful about
Rory Sutherland writes in this week’s magazine that the Mozilla/Brendan Eich affair has finally put him off his dream of moving to the United States, quoting Andrew Sullivan that ‘The whole episode disgusts me – as it should disgust anyone interested in a tolerant and diverse society.’ The issue of gay marriage has changed politics
One of the interesting things I learned from a recent Lord Ashcroft poll was the startling fact that three times as many people identify themselves as Labour voters, tribally, as Tories (around 30 per cent versus 10), despite the two parties having roughly similar base support in general elections. This says something about the different
One of the more striking statistics in yesterday’s Policy Exchange report on multi-ethnic Britain is the revelation that only 25 per cent of white Britons identify as British. This low figure may reflect people not wishing to fill out two boxes (that’s what Alex Massie says, anyway), but it certainly follows a noticeable trend of
