Racism

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

We are not a hateful nation

Britain is in the grip of an epidemic, apparently. An epidemic of hate. Barely a day passes without some policeman or journalist telling us about the wave of criminal bigotry that is sweeping through the country. It’s been bad for years, they say, but has become worse since the EU referendum. Police forces tell us that hate crime has ‘soared’ in recent weeks; there’s been an ‘explosion of blatant hate’, according to some newspapers. Twenty-first-century Britain, it seems, is a pretty rancid, rage-fuelled place. Brendan O’Neill and Kevin O’Sullivan discuss the real hate crime scandal: If you feel this doesn’t tally with your experience of life in Blighty in 2016,

Thursday

David Horspool

A five-ring fiasco

The ambitions of the founding father of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin — that they should be ‘the free trade of the future’ and provide ‘the cause of peace’ with a ‘new and mighty stay’ — were at once wildly optimistic and strangely prescient. Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst. To anyone who believes that the excesses of the Games over the past 50 years or so have betrayed a purer original legacy, these two books by

Sunday

Charles Moore

Is racism really on the rise in Britain?

It keeps being said that racist ‘hate crime’ has increased as a result of the referendum. One must bear in mind how the public authorities define these things, as confirmed this week by Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence set the current rule. It defined a racist incident as ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. The police are instructed to log all such incidents as racist incidents. So you only have to have more people reporting what they see as racist incidents for an exactly corresponding rise in the number of recorded racist incidents.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 14 July 2016

On Tuesday night in London, I spoke to Women2Win, a Conservative organisation dedicated to recruiting more women candidates. My title, suggested long ago, was ‘The Woman Who Won’. It referred to Margaret Thatcher. The day before my speech was delivered, another woman (and former chairman of Women2Win) won, so now there are two. Everyone seized the moment to compare and contrast them. There is a clear difference between Theresa May’s situation today and Mrs Thatcher’s in 1975. Mrs May, like Ted Heath in 1975, represents the side that just lost, Mrs Thatcher the side with a new idea about how to win. Mrs May is the establishment candidate: Mrs Thatcher

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

A sad new British status symbol: the second passport in the bedside drawer

I suppose I could probably get a Polish passport. Both of my maternal grandparents were Poles, displaced by war and Holocaust. Neither ever went back, because neither had anything to go back for. So a passport is the least they could do. The buggers owe me a house. There’s Lithuania on the other side, but that would probably be a bit of a stretch because it’s been over a century. A German passport might be doable, though, through my considerably, if not entirely, German wife. I daresay they’d let me tag along. Ja. Danke. Or a Scottish one, should the time come. When the time comes. Choices,-choices, choices. This is

Matthew Parris

For the first time, I feel ashamed to be British

Before even writing this I know what response it will meet. Some who fought for Leave on 23 June will be contemptuous. ‘Bad loser’, ‘diddums’, ‘suck it up’, ‘go and live somewhere else’. From the online Leave brigade who stalk the readers’ comments section beneath media columns I’m already familiar with the attitudes of the angry brigade; but aware that there were also plenty of perfectly sane and nice people who took a considered decision to vote for our exit from the EU. To what I shall say, such people can reasonably reply that their side have beliefs too, and Remain can claim no monopoly on reason or conscience. What

Thursday

The Spectator

A vote of confidence

During the referendum campaign, it seemed at times as if a competition was on to issue the most hyperbolic claim of what might happen should the British public vote to leave the European Union. Now politicians and commentators are competing to come up with the most hysterical assessment of the British decision to leave. Leading the field is Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, who declared that ‘England has collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’ In other words: without us, you’re nothing. Politics in collapse? We do not want to intrude on the private grief of the Labour party but the Tories are heading into a leader-ship contest with as

Saturday

Ross Clark

Google isn’t racist – but it is filthy

Is Google racist?  That is the charge made in a short video in which someone types ‘three white teenagers’ and ‘three black teenagers’ into the Google images and finds that while the former brings up images of happy, smiling students, the latter brings up what appear to be police mugshots. Given that Google searches do to a certain extent reflect a user’s own past search history, I am not entirely sure what the video, which has gone viral, is supposed to prove. When I repeated the experiment it pulled up some mugshots of black teenagers – though no obviously police images – but it also brought up a large number

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 9 June 2016

Boxing brains Muhammad Ali died aged 74, after more than 30 years with Parkinson’s Disease. How many boxers suffer brain damage? — A 1969 study by A.H. Roberts examined 250 retired boxers and found 17% had lesions of the nervous system. Many had started out in the 1930s, when a professional boxing career could involve over 300 bouts; it’s fewer than 20 now. — However, brain examinations are now much more sensitive. A 2012 study by the University of Gothenburg of 30 Swedish boxers found that 80% had protein changes indicating brain damage. Hideously white? A BBC memo revealed it was seeking an ‘ethnically diverse’ presenter with a ‘northern accent’.

Monday

Ariane Sherine

Sorry, but so-called ‘racist’ jokes are funny

There is a massive stench of hypocrisy in public life. We do and say things in private that we would castigate others for doing in public, possibly the best example of this being jokes about race. Nearly all of us will have told a so-called racist joke in private that we ‘wouldn’t get away with’ posting on social media. I’m not talking about Bernard Manning-type bigotry, but everyday one-liners like ‘Why are Asian people so rubbish at football? Because every time they get a corner, they build a shop.’ I’m an Asian person and this is not remotely offensive. On the contrary, it celebrates our entrepreneurial spirit, while accurately acknowledging

Thursday

Steerpike

Pat Glass calls voter a ‘horrible racist’ while out on the EU campaign trail

In the General Election, a number of Labour supporters defected to Ukip over growing concerns that the party was no longer able to address the issue of immigration. Given that uncontrolled immigration is a big issue in the EU referendum debate, Labour’s Remain-ers need to win back trust here. Alas, Pat Glass appears to have done the In camp no favours today while out on the campaign trail. The Shadow Europe Minister described a voter she met on the campaign trail in Sawley, Derbyshire, as a ‘horrible racist’ after they described a Polish family in the area as ‘scroungers’. Speaking to BBC Radio Derby, Glass said: ‘The very first person I come to was

Thursday

Peter Jones

Rome, racism and Sadiq Khan

‘Racism’ refers to the belief in racially determined inferiority, most often recognised in body-type, about which, by definition, nothing can be done. It is hard therefore to see why accusing London mayor Sadiq Khan of sharing platforms with terrorists was ‘racist’. It was simply a comment on the company he kept. The ancients are often accused of racism. The Roman architect Vitruvius, for example, said that southerners living in hot climates were intelligent but cowardly, while northerners were mentally slow but brave to the point of foolishness. Obvious racism? Far from it. A Greek doctor, following the same train of thought, gave the game away. He asserted that in Asia

Toby Young

These heartless Europhile snobs

One of the interesting features of the Brexit debate is that it has laid bare a schism in British society which runs much deeper than the conventional Labour-Conservative divide. On the one hand, we have the prosperous, educated elite, mainly based in cities and university towns, who are liberal on social issues, pro-immigration, believers in free trade and internationalist in outlook. On the other, we have the white working class, clustered in areas of economic stagnation, particularly seaside towns, who are socially conservative, anti-immigration, suspicious of free trade and staunchly nationalist. This isn’t a perfect summary. Dan Hannan, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove fall more naturally into the first category,

Thursday

Nick Cohen

How to save Labour

To say that the Labour party is in crisis because it is ‘too left-wing’ is to miss the point spectacularly. With eyes wide open, and all democratic procedures punctiliously observed, its members have chosen in their tens of thousands to endorse not ‘the left’, but an ugly simulacrum of left-wing politics. They have gone along with the type of left-winger who flourished in the long boom between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the great recession. The hypocrite who damns oppression, but only if it is committed by western countries. The pseudo-egalitarian who will condemn sexism and homophobia, but not the prejudices of favoured regimes and minorities. The fake

Saturday

Candice Holdsworth

Rhodes Must Fall activists have become the very thing they hate

A cruel stunt by a group of Rhodes Must Fall activists has exposed just how detached from reality the regressive left’s ‘privilege’ narratives are. Ntokozo Qwabe, one of the most prominent figures of Oxford’s ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, has been publicly gloating on social media about humiliating a white waitress in Cape Town. Showing a stunning lack of self-awareness, Qwabe, in his recollection of the incident, does not recognise that as a student of law at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, he is probably more privileged than a waitress working a minimum-wage job. Even if she is white and he is black. Qwabe recounted on his Facebook page how he

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The politically correct way to do racism

Exactly a year ago this week I was at a dinner party when a famous opinion pollster leaned over to me and said: ‘You know, the best thing about this election is that within two years Chuka Umunna will be the leader of the Labour party and Sajid Javid the leader of the Conservatives.’ He was referring to the last general election — the dinner party had been convened a week before it took place. I think the chap had been invited to tell us all what would happen at the polls — and indeed he delivered a lengthy and earnest peroration on this subject, utilising all the expertise and

Henry Jeffreys

The horse from hell

There were moments while reading this sprawling, ambitious novel when I thought I was reading a masterpiece. But at other times, it felt as if the author was convinced that she was writing one. The Sport of Kings is the story of the Forge family of Kentucky. They’re a brutal lot. In the opening scene, John Henry Forge ties his son Henry to a post and whips him. A black employee, Filip, caught with John Henry’s wife, is lynched. As well as violence, John Henry instils a fierce sense of destiny in his son. Against his father’s wishes, Henry turns the family farm over to raising racehorses. Through some severe

Thursday

Jasper Rees

‘Do black movies really not sell?’

The musical biopic is a staple of the Hollywood economy. Like an Airfix model kit it comes with the necessary parts presupplied: sex, drugs and a soundtrack. All the director need do is glue them together. Actors are keen too, as portraying musicians is like prospecting for Oscars: in recent years the lives of Edith Piaf, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash’s wife June Carter have all won statuettes for their stars. The life of Miles Davis, with its giant musical peaks and deep personal troughs, is tailor-made for the big screen. But for years he couldn’t be captured in a bottle. It hasn’t been for want of trying on the

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Everything in black and white

This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on almost every page — and yet it does, inadvertently, answer the very question posed in its introduction: why are certain sections of the white working class so angry about immigration and Islam? The author is a Taiwanese journalist from the metropolitan liberal left. Her MO is to venture — ‘bravely’, we are informed — into quite the most ghastly areas where working-class people live in their decrepit social housing, with their beer and their tracksuits. Her purpose is to find ‘racists’ and inquire as to why they are ‘racist’. And

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

The ‘anti-racist’ crowd have resorted to the old politics of racism

The self-important slayers of ‘cultural appropriation’ have gone too far this time. Clearly they didn’t get a big-enough moral kick from chastising white people who do yoga (on the basis that yoga has ‘roots in Indian culture’), moaning about Beyonce donning a sari (‘how is this different from white folks wearing cornrows?’, the racial police demanded), and fuming about middle-class indie kids who wear Native American headdresses at music festivals (apparently this‘perpetuates damaging, archaic and racist stereotypes’). So now they’re turning their fire on a black actress who, in their view, is not black enough to play Nina Simone. Yes, even black people can now be accused of being insufficiently black for certain cultural