Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

The morally illiterate obituaries to Martin McGuinness are just what he would have wanted

From our UK edition

Well the obituaries for Martin McGuinness are in. And many are as morally illiterate as the man himself could have wished for. For instance, various obituarists have noted that the young McGuinness’s failure as a young man to get an apprenticeship as a mechanic started him off on the road to terror. Few of these eulogists have noted the many people across continents and generations who also failed to get apprenticeships (often for even more sectarian reasons) and yet strangely refused as a consequence to pick up some pliers and an Armalite and torture and kill their way to political power. Other obsequies have been even stranger. Alex Salmond, for instance – perhaps recognising a fellow nationalist – praised Martin McGuinness as ‘a friend of Scotland’.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

At least Martin McGuinness made old age. Many others didn’t

From our UK edition

So Martin McGuinness has died. Already this is giving vent to the sort of ‘How McGuinness became a man of peace’ stories. Personally I have always thought the salient point about the man is not that he became a man of peace but that he was ever a man of violence. Over recent years a narrative has developed around the Troubles, that the people who ‘became men of peace’ are much to be admired.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

How the Turkey question could swing the Dutch vote

From our UK edition

Douglas Murray and Melle Garschagen, UK and Ireland correspondent for NRC, discuss the Dutch election: The Dutch public go to the polls tomorrow, and the question of Turkey is on the menu. This past weekend the Dutch government forbade a plane containing the Turkish Foreign minister from landing in the country.  The Turkish minister had been due to address a crowd in Rotterdam.  Another Turkish minister – the hijabi Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, due to attend a similar rally – was prevented from entering the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam.  All of which led the Turkish government to dismiss the Dutch people (and then the Germans as well) as ‘Nazis’. Last night, Turkey then banned the Dutch ambassador from returning to Ankara.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Paul Nuttall and the tricks memory plays on all of us

From our UK edition

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories?

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Where is the evidence that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite?

From our UK edition

Several months ago, after his election victory, I asked for any proof that Donald Trump is – as some of his most mainstream critics were claiming – a vile homophobe. I thought it a perfectly reasonable question to ask, and the only evidence I was given in reply was one gay man in America who cried after the election.  This did not satisfy my standards of evidence.  But a related question now also needs asking.  Where is the proof that Donald Trump is an anti-Semite? I ask because in the last week there has been considerable, nay ecstatic, reporting of an accusation that the President of the USA is not only fuelling anti-Semitism but has installed anti-Semites at the heart of the American government and is himself a vile anti-Semite.

Douglas Murray

Memory games | 2 March 2017

From our UK edition

Poor Paul Nuttall. He seemed to have everything a cheeky by-election victor needed: the outsider vim, the accent, the cap. Then it emerged he had made stuff up about Hillsborough. That was that. He moved from admirable Scouser to tragedy-crasher. In interviews over the years, Nuttall has referred to being at the stadium in Sheffield on the terrible day, and he still insists he was. We shall probably never know why that developed on his website into his having lost ‘close personal friends’ there — something which is not, it seems, true. Yet while it is good fun blowing raspberries and deriding politicians, we should allow them a little understanding too. After all, who is not susceptible to a soupçon of Falstaffian exaggeration in their stories?

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The Stop Trump protesters have got their priorities all wrong

From our UK edition

There’s almost as much talk about ‘virtue-signalling’ these days as there is about ‘fake news’. But one thing that doesn’t get said often enough is why virtue-signalling isn’t just irritating, but destructive. Like Brendan, Will and others here, I also take a slightly dim view of the anti-Trump protests that took place in Britain last night. I walked around the one in Westminster to come to a view, and found myself feeling unsympathetic to people carrying placards that said, for instance, ‘Fuck Fascism’. It’s a sentiment with which most of us can wholeheartedly agree, but I cannot see its applicability to the question of whether or not the US President should enjoy a state visit to the UK.

Friday

Douglas Murray

James O’Brien spreading ‘fake news’ via the BBC is a must-watch

From our UK edition

The row about ‘fake news’ and the ‘crooked media’ appears to be ongoing.  And every time the BBC and other mainstream media mention it they present themselves solely as the victims of such phenomena.  So let us turn to just one edition of the BBC’s Newsnight. On Wednesday of this week the programme was presented by James O’Brien.  Now in the first place Mr O’Brien is a strange choice to present this programme.  Not just because his awkward, cut-out, Lego man gait makes it obvious why he has made his career in radio, but because he is the sort of hyper-partisan figure who, if they came from the opposite political side, would never be hired by the BBC. But back to Wednesday’s Newsnight.

Monday

Douglas Murray

The shameful hypocrisy of Sweden’s ‘first feminist government’

From our UK edition

A couple of weeks ago I named the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as my pious political hypocrite of the week, mainly for being silent on her bigoted aunty while strikingly vocal about a total stranger. I’m afraid that I was so overwhelmed by applicants for last week’s award that I have only just emerged from the pile of entries. However, I am now in a position to reveal the latest recipients of this increasingly coveted prize. Pipping even Speaker John Bercow to the award are the brave sisters of the Swedish government. Here is a photo from earlier this month of Isabella Lovin (Sweden’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate and spokesperson of Sweden’s Green Party).

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The David Beckham email leak should trouble us all

From our UK edition

What would you do if naked pictures emerged of a celebrity you liked? Or one you didn’t? What about a slew of emails that were meant to be private that were hacked and then leaked into the public domain? Would you turn away from them, tutting. Or might you be tempted to read them? Would your inclination to read them increase if you liked the person, or if you really disliked them? We seem confused about all of this at the moment. The leak of David Beckham’s emails has condensed the confusion. Most of us believe that private communications should be private. Most of us believe that people’s private communications should not be hacked. And yet whenever they are hacked and then released we cannot help but crawl over the results. Perhaps we should pause.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Some ‘anti-fascists’ need to look in the mirror

From our UK edition

I have noted before in this place that the people who seem most fascist these days are self-described ‘anti-fascists’. The inaugural weeks of Donald Trump’s Presidency are – whatever else you think of them – doing a fine job in smoking these people out. The principal cause of ‘anti-fascist’ ire today would appear to come from the collective decision that anybody whose opinions do not wholly concur with a narrow set of agreed upon ‘liberal’ views is a ‘fascist’. This is not a wholly new development – Allan Bloom noticed this more than thirty years ago.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Abandoned to their fate

From our UK edition

Another day in northern Nigeria, another Christian village reeling from an attack by the Muslim Fulani herdsmen who used to be their neighbours — and who are now cleansing them from the area. The locals daren’t collect the freshest bodies. Some who tried earlier have already been killed, spotted by the waiting militia and hacked down or shot. The Fulani are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues. Every week, more massacres — another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. A young woman, whose husband and two children have just been killed in front of her, tells me blankly, ‘Our parents told us about these people.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

My pick for the pious political hypocrite of the week award

From our UK edition

I would like to propose Labour MP Tulip Siddiq as the winner of the pious political hypocrite of the week badge for her response to President Trump’s temporary immigration halt. From today’s Guardian we learn that Ms Siddiq is one of a number of Labour MPs who have warned that the UK Prime Minister’s allegedly ‘feeble’ response to President Trump’s recent immigration order risks making UK Muslim communities feel ‘disenfranchised and disillusioned.’ Apparently the consequences of this failure could be ‘played out on our streets’ and ‘turning a blind eye to the reality of this ban we run the risk of losing the trust of an entire generation of young British Muslims.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer

From our UK edition

I wonder whether there might be any long-term effects from shouting ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’ all the time? It is possible that it is hard to think while your fingers are in your ears and you are shouting names at everybody. I just put the thought out there. Certainly the consequences of not thinking much seem to be all around us.  Though the Trump administration has decided to put temporary travel restrictions on people from certain countries, the policy seems to have certain internal inconsistencies. For instance, as Gordon Brown said in 2008, 75 per cent of Britain’s security threats originate from Pakistan.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

Dutch courage

From our UK edition

It looks like the people might do it again. After the British electorate misled themselves so badly and American voters failed to rotate the Clinton and Bush families for another presidential cycle, the latest fear is that democracy might occur in Holland. Polls currently show Geert Wilders’s Freedom party almost at level pegging with the governing VVD party, both milling around the 30-seat mark. Questions about when the Dutch became illiberal miss the point that this is a revolt in defence of liberalism rather than against it. The misinterpretation does Dutch voters a serious disservice and fails to acknowledge that the Dutch status quo of recent years — like that in the UK and US — has gone badly wrong.

Douglas Murray

The empathy trap

From our UK edition

Being against empathy sounds like being against flowers or sparrows. Surely empathy is a good thing? Isn’t one of the main problems with the world that there isn’t enough of the stuff going around? Paul Bloom of Yale University is here to argue otherwise. As he explains, while empathy can be a good thing in certain circumstances, in general it is a poor moral guide. ‘It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty.’ As always this depends on definitions. And as Bloom says from the outset, ‘The act of feeling what you think others are feeling —whatever one chooses to call this — is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good.

Wednesday

Douglas Murray

We are living in a seriously phony age

From our UK edition

At the risk of coming across all Holden Caulfield, this is a seriously phony age. Everywhere you look there are people objecting to things they think other people have said or would like them to have said. This past Saturday provided a fine example when in Washington and various other Western capitals some people decided that a fine response to the Trump administration is to pretend that it is ‘anti-women’ in some way. Various politicians, Guardian journalists and others without lives walked around for a day tilting furiously at this imaginary enemy. Some took their daughters with them, as though it is a good idea to inebriate the next generation with the same cocktail of phantoms and lies.

Friday

Douglas Murray

At least Martin McGuinness made old age. Many others didn’t

From our UK edition

When Martin McGuinness said he was retiring from politics due to serious illness it gave vent, almost immediately, to the sort of ‘How McGuinness became a man of peace’ stories. Personally I have always thought the salient point about the man is not that he became a man of peace but that he was ever a man of violence. Over recent years a narrative has developed around the Troubles, that the people who ‘became men of peace’ are much to be admired.

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

Obama’s decision to free Private Manning disgraces America

From our UK edition

Barack Obama's decision to commute the prison sentence of Private Manning is a final, disgraceful undermining of American interests by the outgoing US President. Manning's decision to dump vast swathes of stolen information with the Wikileaks organisation, which then published them, caused untold and untellable damage to America and her allies. It revealed operational details which should never have fallen into the hands of America's enemies. Manning ensured that they were available not just to such groups and nations but to the entire world. And of course leaks encourage leaks.

Friday

Douglas Murray

Golden showers and pigs heads: welcome to the era of trash news

From our UK edition

While observing reactions this week to allegations against America’s President-elect my mind has been ineluctably returning to 2015 and the story so inventively known as ‘pig-gate’. In case anyone has forgotten, this was a story which was pumped into the British press and then into the world’s media about the then Prime Minister of the UK, David Cameron. A former Conservative party donor – Lord Ashcroft – had fallen out with David Cameron years before because Cameron would not give Ashcroft a position in the British cabinet. Being a man of means and owning a publishing house, among other things, Ashcroft had his revenge in an inventive and thoroughly modern manner.