Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
Ukip’s conference last week featured some characteristically colourful characters, including a lady with a Nigel Farage tattoo on her arm (and, strangely, one of Robert Smith of The Cure on the other). Significantly, though, attendance was down on last year. Sebastian Payne asked what the point of the party is, now that the Brexit referendum is
When did political campaigns become so vain? The latest instance involves a bunch of clowns from Spain (they’re literally clowns, I mean) protesting against the Israeli security barrier by standing in front of the wall, naked. A statement on their Facebook page said: ‘When you stand before this shameful fence, all of humanity is naked. The
Now that the Middle East is basically moving to Europe after Germany did the national equivalent of advertising a house party on Facebook, it’s worth looking back four years ago to when the ‘Arab Spring’ was beginning, and what might have been done. At the time, you’ll recall, Egypt’s kleptocrat dictator had just fallen and
My six-year-old, when told that there was a princess of England with the same name as her, was astonished to learn that such things existed. ‘In real life, not in princess-land?’ She assumed princesses only lived in some made-up world along with dragons and trolls and daddy’s savings account. One of the arguments made against
Today it’s widely accepted that Germany is not only the most popular country on earth, but the world’s moral leader, admired far more than the United States or Britain, let alone the likes of Russia or China. This has been illustrated once again by the country’s extremely generous treatment towards Syrian refugees, which stands in
I never knew my paternal grandfather, who was apparently a bitter, angry right-wing journalist who thought the world was going to hell; although as this was the 1930s, he was pretty much right. Almost the only thing I remember being told is that in 1938 he and my grandmother took in an Austrian boy as
Corbynmania has unleashed a great feeling of hope and change in the British public, especially among people hoping to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Whether or not Jezza can be blamed for his links to activists with fascinating, esoteric views of the second world war, the accusations have focused attention on one
Britain’s Poles go on strike tomorrow to protest the widespread anti-Polish xenophobia across the country, which is literally everywhere. There are about one million Polish people in Great Britain, and many sectors of the economy depend on them, so in theory they could hold the country to ransom by striking. But they wont, and this
If the Labour leadership has taught us anything it is that, as Kent Brockman once observed, democracy simply doesn’t work. The people’s party has asked the people, and the people are going to drive them off a cliff. One or two journalists have speculated about whether the Tory Right could ever do something similar. To
I used to consider myself to be in tune with the general public on politics, by which I meant – on the loony wing of the Tory party. After all, I told myself, we have widespread public support on crime, immigration, Europe and most issues involving morality. Things had only gone wrong because a modernising
I have a new Kindle Single out, an essay on the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, who can rightly claim to be called the ‘father of social science’. Ibn Khaldun is underrated in the west, compared to the other great philosophers and historians of the ages, but he enjoys a cult following because his
Poor Walter Palmer – I bet he wished he’d stayed home in Minneapolis and left Cecil the Lion alone, because now he’s officially the Worst Person on Earth and there are grown humans outside his workplace dressed as animals. As the Guardian reports: Protesters placed animal toys outside Palmer’s River Duff dental practice in Bloomington,
I’ve often wondered if Freudian theories could be applied to the Left in the same way they have been applied to the Right in the past. Is there an equivalent, for example, of The Authoritarian Personality but perhaps labelled The Moralising Personality, which would explain the mind-set of so many people? (I agree with this writer that a lot of people
If a political subject is inconvenient to both Left and Right then the chances are that it won’t get addressed, however serious the problem. And so it has been with house-building; we have a desperate need for more homes in this country, but the Tories don’t want to discuss it because the obvious solution is
Tonight it looks like the Oxi’s have it, and Greece’s fraught relationship with the Franks has reached a new phase, with possible Grexit coming; that’s assuming the exit polls are correct and that this whole torturous episode doesn’t continue. Whether Grexit takes place or not, though, the whole episode has fundamentally damaged the European Union
Back in the early 1990s when the kind old 17th Duke of Norfolk was special guest at prize-giving night at our school he remarked that in Islam one was allowed up to four wives. ‘What a nightmare,’ he quipped, ‘imagine having four mothers-in-law’ (or something to that effect). I think back at the joke as
During the period of the crusades Greeks would refer to western Europeans by the generic term ‘Frank’, derived from the name of the leading barbarian tribe of the west. The word still lives on as a name for white people in Urdu and Hindi – Firangi – as well as Thai and Vietnamese, for whom
I’ve just been reading Jonathan Sacks’ excellent new book, Not in God’s Name, which sets out to explain why people kill for religion. Although he explores the theology of the Old Testament, Rabbi Sacks also looks at evolution and evolutionary psychology to explain the unending human tendency to have in-groups and out-groups. This will be
Will the country be torn apart by the EU referendum? That’s the argument made by Chris Deerin on the capitalist running dog website CapX. Deerin, a Scottish Unionist, says it’s now Great Britain’s turn to go through the same painful and divisive process that Scotland endured last year. Personally I doubt that will happen, although
There have been a number of articles recently by American liberals warning about the intolerance of academia, in particular pointing to the dangers of a generation who’ve never had their views challenged. The latest is by an academic using the pseudonym Edward Schlosser, who writes in Vox last week: Things have changed since I started teaching.
