Patrick West

It’s a well-known fact that social media makes you miserable. While Facebook forever abounds with people apparently having a marvellous time, in exotic climes, never without ubiquitous smiles and exclamations of delight, Twitter seems too often awash with malicious imbeciles, who even when they are right, still get on your nerves. At their worst, Facebook

The latest casualty in the culture wars is an innocent-sounding word: ‘curry’. Apparently it’s inappropriate to use it, and incorrect to use it to refer to all spicy Indian food. It’s far too broad as to be misleading, doesn’t even have pan-Indian usage, and it remains tainted by its colonial origins. This is the widely reported opinion

Facebook has been accused of failing to combat extremism and hate-speech among its users. But as I found out this week, sometimes it does far too much to take down controversial opinions. Coffee House recently published an article by me with the headline ‘Michael Parkinson is right: men are funnier than women’. In the piece, I argued

The BBC and Channel 4 are self-censoring their comedy output because they are so terrified of offending people. So says Jimmy Mulville, the producer of Have I Got News For You, who claims ‘cancel culture’ has resulted in a fearful atmosphere in these institutions:  ‘People who cause offence now can be cancelled. And the BBC are

Corporations and charities virtue signalling has become a familiar spectacle in everyday life. Sainsbury’s, Virgin West Coast, HSBC, Ben & Jerry’s, Gillette and Nike have all pronounced their various anti-racist, anti-sexist and pro-gay, pro-trans principles. The latest to join in this festival of conspicuous compassion is Barnardo’s, which yesterday pronounced on the matter of ‘white privilege’.

As befitting his public persona of a plain-speaking Yorkshireman, and making the kind of devil-may-care social transgression that is the privilege of the very old, Sir Michael Parkinson has declared that men have a better sense of humour than women. In a interview with the Australian Daily Telegraph, the veteran broadcaster, 85, was asked whether

Most of us are familiar with the climate of censure and censorship we now live in. People are ‘cancelled’ and ‘no-platformed’ for having inappropriate opinions on matters of race and gender, and reprimanded for using the wrong pronoun when referring to transgender men and women. But there are worrying signs that this tendency to shut

Once upon a time, a long time ago, this country was consumed by the matter of Brexit. Everywhere you turned, in every medium, even among friends and colleagues, you couldn’t get away from the subject: everyone was talking about Brexit. We were obsessed by it. From 2016 to 2019 there was no escape. All of

The news that a Brexit border will be introduced for lorry drivers entering Kent has aroused hilarity and derision among some Remainers. These critics see in Kent the personification of all that is parochial and plebeian. Horrible old Kent, with its proles who epitomise Little England at its most execrable and risible. The truth is that we people

People of a conservative or Eurosceptic disposition should be thankful that the BBC’s new director general, Tim Davie, is to address the widely-held perception that its comedy output is disproportionately left-wing. For years, listeners and viewers of the likes of The News Quiz, The Now Show, Mock The Week and Have I Got News For

In the popular imagination, veganism and environmentalism go hand-in-hand. Both are championed – often in one voice – by ultra-progressive types who protest that we should live more ethically and responsibly in order to save the planet. Both types argue that eating less methane-emitting cattle and consuming more agriculturally-efficient crops is the first step we

Boris Johnson has declared the government’s latest war on obesity. It’s a continuation of the war on ‘junk food’. It’s a timely move, as in lockdown we’ve all been snacking and munching straight from the fridge, during the most ghastly yet boring year in known living memory. Most of us have got fatter as a

Television chef Prue Leith believes that snobbery is still rife in Britain, and that it’s keeping working-class people in their place. Speaking to the Radio Times this week, Leith described Britain as ‘the most unbelievably class-ridden country’. She is right, but not for old-fashioned reasons we associate with that Frost Report sketch with John Cleese

Dame Helen Mirren has called for a ‘huge investment’ in the arts, warning that the UK’s theatres are only weeks from collapse. The theatre, she said on the Today programme, is central to the ‘identity of our nation’ and ’embedded in what it means to be British.’ With live performances banned since lockdown, most people

The latest victim in this summer’s mania could be the name of one of London’s best-known and wealthiest areas: Holland Park, in the west of the capital. A monument in the park itself, of the 19th-century politician Henry Vassall-Fox, the third Baron Holland, was splattered with red paint on Wednesday. After, the Royal Borough of

Teenagers are no longer reading Harry Potter books in their legions, it emerged this week, as J.K. Rowling’s series dropped out of the top ten favourite books for secondary school pupils. Instead, teens are reading books aimed at primary school children. This is disquieting news. Of all the books teenagers can access, they should be