Brendan O’Neill

Normally the best response to political correctness at the Oscars is to laugh at it. Whether it’s Lady Gaga singing a song about campus rape culture or Leonardo DiCaprio taking a break from his lovely, fossil-fuelled, jet-setting life to lecture the billion-strong TV audience about the scourge of climate change, a chuckle is usually enough to puncture the Academy’s woke windbaggery. But not this time. As of today, PC at the Academy Awards has become a genuine problem and a genuine threat to artistic freedom. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, to give it its full name, has announced that movies hoping to compete in the Best Picture category will, from 2024, have to conform to certain ‘criteria’.

Is Banksy a Tory propagandist now? His latest juvenile stunt suggests he might be. On the day the government announced that it will soon be mandatory to wear face masks in shops, Banksy released a video showing himself daubing a Tube train carriage with pro-mask slogans and images. Way to stick it to the man, Banksy! Banksy's latest act of politicised vandalism really sums him up. He dressed up as a cleaner, went Underground, ordered Tube passengers to move out of the way, and then got to work on his latest sneer at the masses. He stencilled rats inside the Tube carriage. One rat is sneezing. Another is struggling to put on a surgical mask. Another is clinging to a bottle of anti-bacterial gel. That's us, that is: rats.

Cancel culture is out of control. Over the past 24 hours Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and Chris Lilley's brilliant comedy shows have been shoved down the memory hole by Netflix and the BBC. Why? Because the kangaroo court of correct-thinking has found these comedy classics guilty of offensiveness. Punish them, purge them, cast them out into the wilderness of 'problematic' culture. The speed with which the justifiable, righteous anger over the police execution of George Floyd in Minneapolis has turned into yet another culture war against offensive art is staggering. And terrifying, to be frank.

As they tore down the statue of the 17th-century merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol yesterday, protesters were behaving like a woke Taliban. Just as Taliban extremists smashed huge carvings of Buddha that offended them, and just as Isis nutters took hammers to 'idolatrous' monuments in the cities of Palmyra and Nimrud, so British protesters are now waging war on historical statues that they claim are 'hurtful' to ordinary people. It was the glee with which they tore down Colston's statue that was most unnerving. They yanked him down and started cheering and screaming as they stomped on his head. He was then taken to the nearby harbour and thrown in the Avon river. Another rousing cheer. It was as if evil had been defeated.

So now we know. All the things said about Dominic Cummings – that he shattered the lockdown, that he thinks it's one rule for him and another for everyone else – are far truer of those protesting at the big Black Lives Matter demo in Trafalgar Square on Sunday, than they are of Cummings. The demo’s message was clear. It shouted to the nation that the virtuous and right-thinking are more important than the rest of us. Their views and their rights count for more than ours. So while people will be shamed for sitting on a beach or taking part in VE Day celebrations, those who have the right opinions can press the flesh in a huge public gathering with seeming impunity. Politically, the gathering on Sunday was a confused affair.

The National Education Union, the largest teaching union in the UK, has branded Boris Johnson 'reckless'. What's he done now? He said Britain's schools should start to reopen in June.  This is how weird politics has become in Covid-hit Britain. The 'Evil Tories' want working people, especially teachers, to get back to work, while the unions are saying: 'No, thanks. It's too dangerous.' Our apparently uncaring government wants kids to mix together once again and to get back to the incredibly serious business of learning. And the supposedly loving left is pushing back and pretty much insisting that schools should remain closed and kids should stay stuck at home. Political life has been turned upside down.

 ‘People want to know why Michael Gove owns "racist" and "anti-Semitic" books’, reports the Independent’s website. By 'people' it actually means the time-rich Twitterati, who have discovered a new hobby: bookshelf policing. And the latest bookshelf to fail their purity test, to commit the sin of containing books these people disapprove of, is Gove's. Yes, not content with policing speech, tweets, jokes and even hairstyles (witness the screams of 'cultural appropriation' that greet any celeb who wears her hair in a way her race isn't meant to), now the offence-taking mob is policing bookshelves. The Shelf Stasi, we might call them, peruse the tomes in people's private book collections and bark 'Verboten!' if they spy something unacceptable.

Remember when it was fashionable to hate old white men? Of course you do. It was only a few weeks ago. In the era of BC – Before Coronavirus – there was no hipper prejudice than to loathe old white men. If you were pale, male and stale, you were bad. You were to blame for everything. Trump, Brexit, sexism, every misfortune that befalls the millennial generation: it was all the fault of old blokes with white skin. As Simon Jenkins said, PSMs (pale, stale males) became the last social group it was 'OK to vilify'. How things have changed. Now, deservedly, the hero of the moment is Colonel Tom Moore, the former British army officer who raised more than £30m for the NHS's Covid-fighting fund by walking around his garden. It's his 100th birthday today.

There was an interesting moment at the government's daily Covid-19 press briefing a couple of weeks ago. Angela McLean, the Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser, was reiterating the government's core message. 'What really matters', she said, 'is that people stay home, protect lives and save the NHS'. Then, a look of confusion, possibly even concern, took over her face. She raised a finger to her mouth and said: 'Or is it the other way around...?' In short, she couldn't remember, for a moment, which message was most important: protecting lives or saving the NHS. She did have the message wrong. The government's latest public-health adverts make clear what the moral priorities are in Covid-hit Britain: 'Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives.

There’s a dark irony to the scorn being poured on 5G conspiracy theorists right now. Which is that a lot of the ridicule is coming from those sections of society that have done more than their fair share to stoke up conspiratorial thinking in recent years. Whether it is the unhinged idea that Russian bots made us vote for Brexit, or the obsession with Zionist power and its malign influence on British politics, conspiracy theories have become positively fashionable in the UK over the past five years. And such warped thinking has been promoted by the very people — Twitter leftists, supposedly sensible Remainers — who are now getting their rocks off by mocking the handful of 5G nutters. The 5G conspiracy theory is mental. It’s a classic conspiracy theory.