Ed West

In this week’s magazine Rod Liddle has a piece on the worst ‘clichés, lies, evasions, obfuscations, PC euphemisms and disingenuous balls words and phrases which, in recent years, have annoyed me the most’. He was inspired by Brook Newmark’s recent shenanigans with a phantom lady and a computer, which were explained as the MP ‘battling his demons’. Rod also includes vulnerable, community, ‘bravely fighting cancer’, vibrant, diversity and, of course, ‘wrong side of history’. For a while I’ve been collecting my own worst words and phrases in the ever-evolving English language, a sort of dictionary of political cant that I work on to keep me sane.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3" title="Damian Thompson joins Fraser Nelson to discuss the Pope v the Vatican." startat=928] Listen [/audioplayer] Is it sinful to be not so keen on the whole immigration thing? I suppose Justin Welby thinks so, according to his recent comments.

You have to wonder about the future of the Conservative party when you hear stories like this, from the Birmingham Post: 'Councillor Deirdre Alden (Con, Edgbaston) said she was concerned that such a large amount of effort and investment was being spent on a mode of transport predominantly used by young men. "The vast majority of cyclists on our roads are young, white men," she said. She added that, while there were exceptions, "most elderly people are not going to cycle, and it would be dangerous for them to start on our streets now". The councillor said disabled people did not benefit from cycling and that "women of any ethnic group who wish to wear modest clothing, and I count myself in that category, are not going to cycle. It is a discriminatory form of transport".

Up to 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by large numbers of men between 1997 and 2013 in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, a review into child protection has revealed. How could this have happened? A clue is given by the report's authors, who state that ‘several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist’. ‘I didn’t want to appear racist’ is truly the ‘I was only obeying orders’ of our time. Racism has become so hysterical a subject that it has crowded out all other moral concerns, including in this case the concern to look after children.

The great Theodore Dalrymple once came up with the theory that there is a fixed level of righteous indignation in any society. As soon as we become more relaxed about one area — say, drug taking — we get much more prudish and finger-wagging about something else — smoking, for example. Sometimes one taboo easily takes the place of a previous one. Race, for example, has become the new sex, with the F-word and C-word de-stigmatised and replaced by the N-word and P-word as no-nos (the new taboo also comes with its own hypocrisies, obviously, and few of today’s moral leaders send their kids to vibrant inner-city schools). But in other cases, whole moral frameworks are inverted.

As silly seasons go, this August has been pretty rubbish, I have to say. Iraq heads the list of gloomy subjects, obviously, as 100,000 Christians and many more Yazidis flee from the genocidal maniacs of the Islamic State. And before anyone asks, yes I do support intervention there: this is not like other conflicts in the region, between two heavily-armed militias both hostile to the West, as in Syria; it is an unprovoked attacked by our enemies against defenceless civilians simply because of their religion, the very thing the post-1945 order was supposed to prevent. Gaza is also deeply depressing; obviously it's existential to the people of Israel and Palestine, but the events the conflict has triggered off in Britain and across Europe make my heart sink.

Yesterday was a chance for people to remember relatives who died in the 1914-1918 conflict, often the only record of their existence being grainy old portraits from a grandmother’s mantelpiece and a gravestone in France. I have no idea what my grandfather did, although he was old enough to be fighting by the end of the war; he was a journalist too so he probably just sat behind a typewriter encouraging others to fight and making stuff up. I do remember as a child hearing about how my great-uncle, Charles Leaf, had suffered terrible shellshock in the trenches. But I only recently read my grandmother’s memoirs, which were published in 1958, and which end in July 1914.

If you’re walking through any built-up area in England between 8 and 10pm this Sunday and you hear a cheer you can be pretty sure it means one thing – Germany have scored yet again. One of the great myths we were fed as children in the 1980s and ‘90s was that the English don’t like the Germans, and in particular the living representatives of all things Teutonic on earth, the German national football team. We love ‘em, and I imagine most English people will be supporting Germany on Sunday. I remember being stuck in the countryside in 2006 and watching the Argentina-Germany quarter-final in a pub; the place went wild when Germany equalised and then won.

You have to laugh. Two men who’ve admitted to trying to go abroad to fight jihad had to buy copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies before their glorious mission. Shouldn’t the publishers cash in by publishing a Jihad for Dummies? It would sell like hotcakes. The young chaps, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, are off to jail for a while, but to paraphrase Bill Hicks, I don’t think we’ve lost any cancer curers here. But they are far from being Britain’s stupidest jihadis. This country, which is at the cutting edge of social trends in pioneering the Reverse Flynn Effect, seems to produce an enormous number of very thick Islamists.