Politics

Britain once prided itself on being different from France, Belgium and Germany, where Jewish blood was repeatedly spilled on European streets. Now the same contagion has arrived in your green-but-less-pleasant-land. Britain was never free of prejudice, but unlike Europe, its anti-Semitism never captured a major party or defined the state – until our times. The Manchester attack was not merely an assault on Jews. It was an assault on Britain’s soul I write as an American of Jewish heritage, and a lifelong champion of Britain – the nation that turned liberty into law, and faith into citizenship. I write to offer a warning to Britain’s Jewish community: Don’t flee your

The question has changed, as one Oxford don noted wanly on social media, from ‘What are you reading at university?’ to ‘Are you reading at university?’ Such is the state of undergraduates entering English literature courses these days, brains addled by scrolling on their mobile phones, that universities are now offering ‘reading resilience’ courses to help them tackle the unfamiliar task of reading long, old, sometimes difficult books. It’s a whole new cause of gloom to discover that even students who have actively signed up to study English literature at university are struggling to read books We’re accustomed, some of us, to feeling gloomy about the sinking popularity of Eng lit – once comfortably among the most popular choices at A-Level

Kemi Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives are now irrevocably committed to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) surprised no-one. It was nevertheless nicely done, and showed that here at least the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well. The Tories have now stolen a march on Nigel Farage For one thing, this is patently the right decision for the UK. The baneful effects of scrupulous adherence to the ECHR have been apparent for some years. Migration is a straightforward example. The ever-widening Strasbourg interpretation of Articles 3 and 8, protecting freedom from torture and family life, which we then have to apply loyally, often

The Conservative party conference kicks off today in Manchester. Dominating the headlines is the long-awaited announcement that the next Tory government would pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In a break with recent conferences, leader Kemi Badenoch will be making two speeches. The first this afternoon will set out what ECHR-exit would look like. The second on Wednesday will deal with more of what George Bush Sr. called ‘the vision thing’: Badenoch’s big picture for Britain. ‘Stronger economy, stronger borders’ is the party’s slogan for the four-day jamboree. That reflects the two-pronged approach that senior Tory strategists believe is the only way back to power.

Five years ago, following the murder of George Floyd, a ‘racial reckoning’ shook the West. For some it was a time for our part of the world to come to terms with the reality of racism and to address the legacy of white supremacy. For others the protests following Floyd’s death poured petrol on the fire of the culture wars; racial divisions became reified and Britain was intellectually colonised by our American overlords in a spectacle of futile kneeling, black squares, virtue signalling and gesture politics. What I saw during that period, however, was the ghost of Malcolm X, haunting our times like Banquo at the feast. He was born

Last week, a 75-year-old Christian grandmother was bundled into the back of a police van outside a Glasgow hospital. Her alleged crime? Conversation.  Rose Docherty wasn’t spray-painting walls or blocking doorways. She wasn’t shouting or shoving leaflets into anyone’s hands. She simply held a sign offering a listening ear: ‘Coercion is a crime. Here to talk, only if you want.’ In the eyes of the state, this made her a criminal.  Under Scotland’s new ‘buffer zone’ laws, even the possibility of ‘influencing’ a passerby outside an abortion facility is treated as criminal behaviour. Rose wasn’t standing with an influential message. She was giving people the choice: walk on or stop and chat. But choice, it seems, now belongs only to the abortion lobby. Rose, with two hip replacements, was