Brendan O’Neill

There was an extraordinary moment in the government’s Covid-19 news briefing yesterday. Boris Johnson was asked: ‘Prime Minister, people aren’t acting responsibly, so when are you going to bring in the police?’ Boris was aghast. ‘Bring in the police?!’, he said, looking, as one would hope he would, horrified by the prospect of the UK becoming a police state that arrests people for going outside and strolling in parks. Guess which side in this telling Q&A got the most flak? Yep, not the journalist wondering out loud when cops are going to step in, but the PM who has an instinctive loathing of such an authoritarian prospect.

We’re all worried about older people right now. But I’m worried about the young too. I fear they lack the social nous and moral muscle to deal with a crisis as profound as the Covid-19 pandemic. I fear that the cult of fragility is so widespread among the youth that some will struggle to rise to the occasion of facing down this wolf at the door of our society. Our first priority must be the elderly, of course. We know Covid-19 is more dangerous for them than it is for other age groups. (Though I wish the media would stop giving the impression that every old person who catches it dies. That isn’t the case. To spread fear among the old is its own kind of disease, causing moral and mental harm to people who often feel isolated enough as it is.

Many of us suspected the Labour party was on a suicide mission. Now we know for sure. The party’s suspension of Trevor Phillips over allegations of Islamophobia feels like a turning point. It is surely one of the final nails in the coffin of irrelevance that has been enveloping this party for a few years now. The casting out of Phillips confirms two things about Labour under the baleful, Stalinist rule of the Corbynista left. First, that they will brook no dissent. No questioning of their deathly creeds of identitarianism and multiculturalism — a questioning Phillips has pursued with great clarity and purpose in recent years — will be tolerated.

Isn’t it amazing how all the woke rules for how to talk about women and people of colour go flying out the window when it comes to Priti Patel? You can say anything you like about Patel and the PC set won’t bat an eyelid. In fact they will cheer you on. Patel is possibly the only female, Asian-heritage public figure in the UK who enjoys absolutely none of the protections of political correctness. It’s always open season on Priti. So for years we have been told that we shouldn’t call successful women ‘bossy’ or ‘bitchy’. Those are sexist insults against women who have simply shown the kind of resolve and determination that men are celebrated for, feminists say. And they have a point.

Imagine if a politician went on TV and said ‘The Earth is flat’. Or ‘Man didn’t really land on the Moon, you know’. We would worry about that politician’s fitness for public life. Well, Dawn Butler has just done the trans equivalent of that. She appeared on Good Morning Britain yesterday and said babies are born without a sex. That is easily as loopy and anti-scientific as saying the Earth isn’t a sphere. Butler, the Labour MP for Brent, was taking part in another discussion about Labour’s interminable slide down the trans rabbit hole. Labour has completely lost the plot on this issue.

There has been a revolt in Ireland. Not a huge one. It isn’t a Brexit-sized rebellion. It isn’t an all-out populist protest against the establishment of the kind we have seen in the US and various European countries in recent years. But still, the result of Saturday’s general election is a brilliant blow against the Irish establishment and its obsessively pro-EU, anti-Brexit leanings. People are talking up the election result as a humiliation for Taoiseach and Fine Gael leader, Leo Varadkar. It certainly is that. Varadkar’s attempt to make the election about Brexit — and about his apparently brave efforts to frustrate Brexit — fell spectacularly flat.

Friday was Brexit day. The day that the largest act of democracy in the history of this country was finally enacted. The day when the wishes of 17.4m people finally became a reality. And how did the BBC, the national broadcaster, mark this extraordinary democratic day? With a sneer, of course. A smug, aloof, bitter sneer at the entire country. Not only did BBC reporters huff and moan at the mass pro-Brexit gathering in Parliament Square, coming off like anthropologists who had happened upon some bizarre, exotic tribe. It also chose that day to push out anti-Brexit nonsense via its kids’ wing, CBBC. Yes, even children must now be subjected to the media elite’s Brexitphobic claptrap.

Don’t gloat. Don’t be too triumphalist. Don’t wave your flags too boisterously. Don’t say or do anything that might offend sad, pained Remainers, who will be huddled in their homes, looking with bemusement and concern upon the terrible new world that will be born at 11pm tonight. All of these warnings are being issued to Leavers today as we gear up for our Brexit Day celebrations. Be humble, we’re told. Be magnanimous. Be quiet. And the party-pooping isn’t only coming from Europhiles who think the end of our membership of the EU is tantamount to the End of Days. Like London mayor Sadiq Khan, who has expressed concern that after Brexit Day we might see a rise in xenophobic hate crimes.

Eurocrats still don’t get it. They still don’t get Brexit. They still don’t understand that us Brits didn’t vote for some kind of trial separation from the EU. No, we voted for a full and everlasting divorce. There’s no going back. We’re out (or will be soon) and we’re staying out. The latest EU bigwig to advertise his ignorance about Brexit is Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s ‘Brexit negotiator’ (that’s Eurospeak for Brexit wrecker). On the Today programme he said he agreed with Labour MEP Seb Dance, who said the UK is merely on ‘sabbatical’ from the EU. We’ll be back, said Dance. ‘I think that will happen, yes, [but] it’s difficult to say when’, said Verhofstadt.

Boris Johnson likes to call black people 'piccaninnies’. Everyone’s saying it. Even Stormzy said it this week in his endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. It is ‘criminally dangerous’ to give the keys of Downing Street back to a man who refers to ‘black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”’, the grime superstar said. Whether Stormzy also thinks it is criminally dangerous to elect as PM a man who counts as 'friends' an organisation that literally wants to destroy the Jewish homeland is not clear. But hey, Jews don’t matter very much. We’ve all learned that over the past few years. But does Boris really call black people 'piccaninnies'? Has he ever?