Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)
It’s a crying shame that we will no longer hear the insightful and original opinions of Gary Lineker. No more comprehensive and judicious appraisals. No more balanced verdicts delivered in an authoritative yet amiable manner. No longer will we witness Lineker draw from his deep well of experience and knowledge to deliver his considered conclusions.
Christmas television adverts are meant to be comforting, homely, and traditional. While some find these offerings, especially John Lewis’s, overly twee and sentimental, most would agree that festive adverts should be kept clear of politics – overt or otherwise. This unspoken consensus, however, appears to have been lost on those behind the new Boots Christmas
The interest in reading books and the appreciation of English literature is at a nadir. This week it was revealed that only 35 per cent of eight to 18-year-olds enjoy reading in their spare time. The finding, by the National Literacy Trust, represents more than an 8 per cent per cent drop on last year,
One of Kemi Badenoch’s much-touted strengths is that she cares about British culture, society and our country’s values. She is renowned for her war on woke ideology, speaking out against multiculturalist dogma and identity politics. And in her appraisal of community cohesion and society at large, she shares an outlook with a predecessor as Conservative
Aside from debates as to what actually constitutes a ‘working person’, the Labour government does ostensibly seem clear as to whom it wants to shield in the forthcoming Budget: the less well-off and those who continue to struggle financially. It is therefore perverse that it should remove a benefit that has been a blessing to
We in Britain have become used to the hallmarks of anti-Israeli protests. There are the slogans decrying ‘genocide’. There are chants in sympathy of terrorist organisations. There’s the explicit or insinuated anti-semitism. But one sinister feature making its transition across the Atlantic is the appearance of the face mask. Wearing a mask at a demo
One of the most popular sitcoms of the 1980s, Cheers, is set to return to our television screens. The show is set for a revamp, except now it will be uprooted from Boston and transposed to a pub in Britain. This is obviously a terrible idea, for a few logistical reasons – and for one
Universities today are well-known as places where progressive, hyper-liberal politics predominate. It’s only logical, therefore, that the cry for equality and diversity should now extend to the television programme University Challenge. Despite the current series witnessing the second-largest proportion of female competitors in the programme’s history – with 34 female contestants representing a 31 per
The Labour government’s u-turn on freebies, its disclosure last night that it will no longer accept donations for clothes, is an admission that it has got it wrong. But ‘wrong’ in which sense of the word? Wrong in that they admit that they committed an error, or wrong in that they have behaved immorally? Their
Is it possible to change your class? Not just superficially – in moving up and down the hierarchy of social standing – but change it inwardly so that you transform your very sense of self? Conservative leadership contender Kemi Badenoch seems to think so. Speaking on Chopper’s Political Podcast this week, the shadow housing secretary
To some people, the culture wars don’t matter. They are an irrelevance, an indulgence. A distraction from the material, bread-and-butter concerns of ordinary people, like paying the bills or finding an affordable place to live. This sentiment was echoed by Robert Jenrick, the Conservative leadership contender. As reported in the Times yesterday, Jenrick told a meeting of
On Times Radio this morning Lucy Powell, Leader of the House of Commons, said that she wanted the government to ‘tackle the scourge of vaping’. Of course she does. This is the next natural step for a government intent on stopping people enjoying themselves, or exercising individual freedom. Never mind that vaping, according to Public
It’s only been a month since the new Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, declared that the ‘era of culture wars is over’. Yet this morning the Daily Telegraph reports that teachers in training courses will be taught to challenge ‘whiteness’ in lessons, to ensure future educators are ‘anti-racist’. The guidance in question has emerged from universities,
It has been widely observed that we live in a society marked by cancellation, censorship and cowardice in the face of mob rule. To this we might add a fourth ‘c’: capitulation. The decision announced yesterday by Rachel Reeves to offer junior doctors an average pay rise of a 22.3 per cent in an effort
With England playing Slovakia in the Euros later today, there’s absolutely no excuse this time for Anglophones to confuse this country with that other European nation of a similar name. That’s because England’s previous opponents in the tournament were indeed Slovenia. This confusion has bedevilled the two countries The confusion between the two nations is
The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of
D Day, 6 June, 1944, saw put into action one of the most unlikely alliances in the history of warfare: that between the largest military invasion of all time, and French poetry. The episode in question concerned the role played by a poem by Paul Verlaine in that momentous event: an episode immortalised in the
One of the country’s most cherished footballers, and one of its most irritating right-on social media commentators, Gary Lineker, has been at it again. In a post on X on Friday night the former Barcelona striker declared his support for their arch-rivals Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Why? Because, citing an account that
Has the word ‘woke’ become a lazy, all-too-common cliché? The novelist and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver thinks so. During an appearance at the Hay Festival, she has lamented how the word has become ‘horribly overused’. The author says: ‘I’m as tired of it as you are. There have been other people trying to coin something else, which
You may laugh. You may have gasped in disbelief. But yes, it’s true, we now have a new socio-economic classification, known collectively as the ‘working class, benefit class, criminal class, and/or underclass’. This, is at least, is the latest addition to the list of ‘traditionally disadvantaged groups’ especially welcomed by The Camden People’s Theatre, North
