Patrick West

Long gone is the time, towards the end of the last decade, when we all laughed off ‘safe spaces’ as the latest, neurotic fad confined to university campuses. Few are laughing now, because in the ensuing years, as this risk-averse mentality has trickled down into mainstream society, the belief in the primacy of ‘safety’ is having outcomes that are proving ever-more authoritarian, frightening and – ironically – dangerous. Students who grew up with ‘safe spaces’ have become today’s narrow-minded adults The decision last week by the British Museum to postpone a Jewish Culture Month event, citing its responsibility to guest speakers to ‘proceed safely, securely and without intimidation’ is a case in point.

How can you tell when an asylum seeker professing to be child is lying? Often, it’s because he has crow’s feet, a receding hair-line and a beard. In other words, it’s sometimes obvious. That’s what makes so risible those stories we habitually read of men who are patently not children being granted asylum on the pretence that they are. We sigh in exasperation because we know why they have been let in: they have been granted entry by a system manned or manipulated by credulous do-gooders. Human beings are good at intuition, at assessing each other non-rationally through mental processes we don’t fully understand, of spotting fakes and fraudsters by their mien, gait and ostensibly innocuous facial gestures.

A whole raft of new terminology has emerged since the Great Awokening ten years ago. Much of it suggests that politics has become increasingly superficial and inauthentic. ‘Virtue signalling’, ‘lifestyle leftism’, ‘elite cosmopolitanism’ and what Neil Davenport calls ‘the aesthetics of radicalism’ vie and jostle alongside that ubiquitous accusation: ‘performative’. In an age when the personal has become the political, striking a pose is now inextricably entwined with having a viewpoint on worldly affairs. Dying your hair pink, sporting a keffiyeh and curating your online profile to accommodate your preferred pronouns and flags of convenience: these are all contrived and combined declarations of selfhood and political creed.

The foremost question Labour party members should be asking themselves this morning, following yesterday’s predicted disastrous showing in the local, mayoral and devolved government elections, is this: do you care more about the short-term survival of your party or the long-term survival of your country? Because as it stands, and if the predicted coup against Keir Starmer is set in motion later today, that is the choice you will now have to make. Starmer’s passive timidity in the face of this threat has made matters worse The reason why Starmer has been such a dithering and inept Prime Minister is that, wittingly or not, he has always placed party before country.

The signs that civic society in this country is disintegrating grow more apparent by the week. In a year which has witnessed the arrival in earnest of a shoplifting epidemic, the continued normalisation of fare-dodging on London’s train and tube network, and a surge in fuel theft at garage forecourts, it now transpires that drivers are increasingly ignoring traffic lights. According to a report in the Sunday Times, between 2022 and the end of last year, there was a 61 per cent increase in the number of drivers caught going through red lights. Across the 29 police forces that supplied figures to a freedom of information request, this figure rose from over 85,000 to more than 137,000.

When it reaches the stage when everyone in the entire country is diagnosed as having mental health problems, will we have to accept that being mentally ill represents mankind’s new norm, thus rendering the whole concept meaningless? This is not some idle philosophical hypothesis. This is a question we will one day have to ask ourselves if matters continue on their current path. According to new research from Zurich Insurance, 51 per cent of people aged between 15 and 19 now have a mental or behavioural disorder such as anxiety, depression or ADHD, and if present trends continue as they have, by 2030 this figure will hit 64 per cent. We have indeed crossed a momentous boundary.

Every year it’s the same old story, and it’s always inaugurated by the usual collection of technocratic mediocrities and simple-minded leftists. Come 23 April, they’re always at the ready to remind everyone that St George wasn’t English actually, declaiming in a precocious schoolboy manner an earth-shattering fact which everybody knows already. Or else they will pronounce that the flag which bears his name actually stands for peace and inclusivity, and that it should never be the preserve of those who stoke hatred and prejudice.

Immanuel Kant, who was born on 22 April 1722, is perhaps best known for two things: writing The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) – one of the most important and most difficult books in Western philosophy, and for being a man of such clinical regularity that the residents of his native Königsberg in East Prussia (present-day Kaliningrad) would set their watches according to the unvarying trajectory of his daily walks. Yet these two facts have helped to nurture a not entirely warm image of the man, leaving the impression that he was something of a cold fish. As is often the case, the man who appears to us in print and the man who was known to friends and intimates were somewhat at odds.

Much has been written in recent days about the outlandish proposals and deplorable opinions of the Green Party candidates standing for the forthcoming elections in May. We have read about one candidate in Scotland who wants to abolish prisons, of another in London who called David Lammy a ‘coconut’, and a whole host of grass-roots campaigners who have repugnant views regarding the Jews, the most interesting being one from a Green Party candidate in Camden who avers that the 9/11 attack on the US ‘was done by the Zionists with Dick Cheney as their executing authority’.

It’s a long-standing and cherished belief of left-liberals that most theft is caused by poverty and desperation, and that a rise in prices will necessarily lead to a rise in stealing by the poor and needy. It’s a shibboleth wheeled out every time this country faces a recession, cost of living crisis or feels the fallout from wars abroad. What’s less candidly admitted is that people will always use these crises as a pretext to steal for reasons that are age-old and less forgivable: because they are immoral and because they are greedy. People will always use these crises as a pretext to steal for reasons that are age-old and less forgivable There has been a surge in fuel theft at forecourts since the US-Iran war, according to a report in the Times this weekend.

After months, years and even decades of dismay about the state of law and order in this country, a leader of one of Britain’s most renowned retailers has intervened to make the simple plea most have been making for ages: can the police, and the authorities charged with overseeing law enforcement bodies, just focus on their job of preventing, stopping and punishing crime? Those in charge of businesses don’t intrude on politics lightly. Their main job is to sell produce, not change the world or potentially alienate customers with their opinions.

While many people have been dissecting the power struggles and growing fissures within the Labour party, it might instead be timely to concentrate on what their senior figures all have in common. Behind the division and fratricidal scheming, they are united by the same raw desire to preserve their party at all costs. They seem to place its existence above all other considerations. This was made clear in Angela Rayner’s speech to the centre-left Mainstream group on Tuesday, in which she warned that the ‘very survival of the Labour party is at stake’. While her speech has been seen as part of her longer-term plan to usurp Sir Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, those words betrayed an awkward truth.

For some years now Private Eye’s ‘Dumb Britain’ section has been regaling its readers with examples of contestants giving ridiculous and risible answers to questions on television quiz shows. You know the kind of thing, the fabulously stupid things people say when asked, say, who succeeded Henry VIII as the king of England – with David Lammy on his 2008 Mastermind appearance responding ‘Henry VII’. It’s no wonder you see people neurotically clutching these devices all hours of the day Yet we might not be laughing for much longer, and Private Eye might be forced to jettison that column altogether, if we are to believe Jeremy Vine.

You sometimes wonder if people who put together newspapers these days have ever heard the story about the boy who cried wolf. This was one of Aesop’s fables which taught children about the dangers of scaremongering in order to get attention, the moral being that if you persist in doing so, no-one will believe you in the end. If nuclear warfare is upon us, there’s nothing readers can do about it Certainly, sub-editors who write headlines to the effect of ‘We’re on the breach of World War Three’ seem unaware of its lesson, as do their superiors, who all hope that such attention-grabbing sensationalism will increase sales or garner more online hits.