Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
Fey metropolitan ponce that am I, I love nothing better than curling up on the sofa with my partner to watch a Scandinavian drama. Borgen, The Killing; we haven’t got around to watching The Bridge, but only because I’m so busy walking around with a baby in a Kari-me or actually lactating milk, so European
It’s 25 years since the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued history’s worst Valentine’s Day message to author Salman Rushdie, during that momentous spring when communism began to topple in Poland and Hungary, the world wide web was invented, and the Iranian leader issued in a new age of religious tension. The background is full of paradoxes
Last Thursday’s cover story makes alarming reading, Alex Massie arguing that Alex Salmond may come close to achieving victory in September’s vote. Alex wrote: ‘It is beginning to be appreciated, even in London, that Alex Salmond might just win his independence referendum in September. The break-up of Britain will have begun, David Cameron will have
I apologise for writing a blogpost about a tweet, which can look a bit like over-analysis, but I was intrigued by a couple of things that writer Graham Linehan wrote last week. Writers tend to the left because writers tend to have compassion. The nasty party has none so the BBC will never be just
There has been a lot of comment about a recent Michelle Goldberg piece in the Nation on feminism in social media and how incredibly unpleasant feminists are to each other. That is not entirely surprising, in one sense. All political ideologies are wracked by internal struggle, especially those that reach an impasse in their goals.
Apparently there’s some sort of anniversary coming up to do with a war, you may have noticed. To commemorate this the British publishing industry has launched a ferocious selling offensive, no doubt aided by recent remarks from Michael Gove, Tristram Hunt and Boris Johnson. Like with any historical incident, our views of this conflict are
The Ukip candidate for Wythenshawe and Sale East has come up with a rather interesting idea: he wants to move the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to Manchester, bringing 700 jobs to the city. I imagine that a lot of Ukip supporters would be quite happy to see the department metaphorically sent to Zurich
The thing that most surprised me about Scarlett Johansson being asked to cut ties with an Israeli company she was brand ambassador for was that the company in question was Soda Stream. Soda Stream? Does she also work for Betamax and the Atari ST? I had no idea people still drank this 1980s icon, let alone
At the end of Coming Apart Charles Murray mentions, rather enigmatically, that our assumptions about society will soon be blown out of the water by new discoveries about human nature. I imagine he’s talking about genetic discoveries, in particular about the human brain. One of our current assumptions is meritocracy, and the idea that we
Monday’s episode of The Unbelievable Truth, in case you missed it, featured comedians Marcus Brigstocke and Rufus Hound. I did miss it, partly because I read about how Hound thinks David Cameron wants to kill your children, and I just couldn’t face the jokes about the Daily Mail and ‘hoards of Romanians!’ Even Charlie Brooker’s
Anyone who wonders why conservatism is such a lost cause in this country only needs to turn on children’s television to see what the voters of tomorrow are being taught. I used to think that I was the only person who detected a liberal bias in children’s programmes, but if I am actually losing the
I have this theory that the reason why the British public is so hugely in favour of cutting welfare to the bone, and the British media so hostile, is that many (maybe most) journalists still depend on financial support from their parents well into their 30s. Since most media folk come from the sort of
As Rod pointed out the other day, Arthur Scargill’s purchase of his council flat illustrated the triumph of Thatcherism over its opponents; like any winning ideology it created the conditions for its followers to flourish and increase in number, and so securing the revolution. That’s one of many things that Tony Blair had in common
I try to avoid mentioning Owen Jones because he already gets so much attention from people on the Right, including quite a lot of abuse on t’internet; the poor man’s probably blocked more people than have followed me. But his letter to Ukip voters in today’s Independent interested me as a study in what Jonathan
If I was going to measure possible reasons to desert the Tories at the next election, and I can think of a couple, plans to concrete over the countryside would score pretty highly. As a theoretical idea about something happening miles away from my home it almost makes me want to write letters to the Telegraph;
Back in the 1950s my grandmother wrote her memoirs of childhood in Edwardian London, a story that ends in the summer of 1914, when she was 14. In contrast to the image we’re given of cheering men skipping to war, she recalls her father in tears at the breakfast table, lamenting that the politicians had
Like many of you folks out there, I’m currently engaged in the thinly-disguised admission of alcoholism that is ‘Dry January’. I’m also on a diet, and this week have eaten what looked like two shrivelled gonads for lunch, (they were boiled potatoes, I think) and yesterday a ‘salad’. The goal is to be down to
The BBC made a ‘terrible mistake’ in not reflecting public concern about immigration, Nick Robinson has said. This is the latest case of BBC self-flagellation. (Now I think about it, a sort of Maoist-themed programme in which Beeb executives denounced themselves would make great TV.) BBC bias is a subject I know a bit about,
Are there any disciplines on earth as hyped-up and overrated as economics? Every subject depends to some extent on others; you can’t, for example, understand history without a bit of geography or human biology, and you can’t master either of those without a bit of chemistry, for different reasons. The same goes for all disciplines
It’s rare to read a book about politics and be actually excited to get back to it, like you’re on holiday and lost in a novel; but that’s what I felt with How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters, Daniel Hannan’s account of the development of English law and politics. But then again, I am quite
