Ed West

What has happened to social justice warriors recently? Every campaign seems to fail, the latest being a cack-handed attempt to police Twitter in order to win the Gamergate saga (turn to p194 for details). Gamergate is one of those things that a couple of years ago would have been resolved quickly, going into the narrative as part of the great struggle against the ‘isms’. Instead it goes on and on, and SJWs seem to be losing the battle. It’s not the only one. Take, for example, the ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirt campaign, which one would have expected the core group of online SJWs to win.

There was much glee about yesterday’s publication of a report into the economic impact of immigration, which concluded eastern Europeans had provided a net benefit of £4.4 billion to the UK economy. There was far less mention of the fact that immigrants from outside Europe in the same period cost the taxpayers £118 billion. But as Christopher Caldwell observed in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, the immigration debate is not about economics, for ‘the social, spiritual, and political effects of immigration are huge and enduring, while the economic effects are puny and transitory. If, like certain Europeans, you are infuriated by polyglot markets and street signs written in Polish, Urdu, and Arabic, sacrificing 0.

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.