Patrick West

Since the 1990s it has been acknowledged that our culture has become unduly concerned with risk and obsessed with the possibility of danger. More recently, however, there has emerged a realisation that this ‘health and safety’ fixation has been counter-productive and corrosive. Nietzsche's psychological philosophy has percolated down the ages, overtly or in evolved form The diffusion of the precautionary principle in regard to science has stifled progress: look at the EU’s irrational hostility to genetically modified foods. But this mania has also had a general infantilising effect: consider governmental advice last month that drinking coffee which is too hot might scald your tongue.

Whenever a left-wing politician wants to besmirch working-class populists or middle-class types who hold conservative opinions, they inevitably choose one of two tactics. Either they smear them as ‘far-right’ or they accuse them of being hopeless nostalgics who long for a mythical past. On Monday, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Labour MP for Suffolk Coastal, went one better by combining the two ploys in a single sentence. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour conference in Liverpool, she voiced her concern at what kind of vision the parties of the right would peddle in the next general election.

For as long as humanity has existed, there have always been those who would view our species as either essentially benevolent or inherently selfish. And while individuals can undoubtedly be either or a combination of both, we are all broadly inclined to view mankind with either kindly or suspicious eyes. On a sliding scale, all of us are either with Rousseau or Hobbes, holding a position which largely correlates with politics and age. Whether that child was his or not was not the point: how could any human being leave a baby to its own fate that way? The dark side of humanity was on grim display last week when footage emerged of a migrant abandoning an infant in the English Channel as he clambered onto a dinghy, leaving his baby to be picked up by rescuers.

For an ideology which proudly pronounces its ethos of respect, compassion and inclusion, hyperliberalism can be decidedly judgmental and supercilious when it comes to appraising the past – and even that of living memory. This irony can be witnessed in the attitude assumed by hyperliberalism's advocates and adherents towards television comedies which first aired at the turn of the millennium. Only last month, a video showing the astonished and appalled reactions by members of Generation Z to Little Britain sketches went viral. That Noughties series, with its depiction of a man feigning disability, blackface and brownface characters, and overly camp and narcissistic Welshman, conspicuously jars with the safe and tepid comedy of today.

Many people who work in the Civil Service are revolting. Quite literally in the verbal meaning of the word, and, as many have long argued, very decidedly when understood as an adjective. Civil Servants have been in revolt this week at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which currently wants to ensure that only biological women can use female toilets and changing rooms, to comply with last April’s Supreme Court ruling which decreed that ‘man’ or ‘woman’ in the Equality Act should refer to biological sex.

When it emerged a fortnight ago that Transport for London (TfL) had unveiled a ‘Calm Space’ at one of its stations, a trial installation at Ealing Broadway on the western fringe of the capital, as part of its ‘future neuroinclusive design initiatives’, much of the reaction on social media was predictably, and one might say justifiably, dismissive. One user on X encapsulated a common sentiment: ‘What would provide a calmer travel environment would be clean, punctual mass transit filled with people who understood the concept of public and private spaces, and some limited policing of anti-social, fare-dodging, drug-using, and sometimes mentally deranged fellow passengers.

Hollywood has a nasty habit of distorting history and telling falsehoods about the past in order to pander to the cultural prejudices and political leanings of its target audience. Few cinemagoers will forget the egregious exaggerations and untruths presented to them in Braveheart (1997) and The Patriot (2000), both of which wantonly perverted chapters in history for their own cynical ends. Garfield said he hoped the movie would leave billionaires 'scared shitless' With this in mind, one can hardly expect a forthcoming movie depicting the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, The Uprising, to be any better.

With the Jason Arday episode set to become one of the most important and symbolic stories of the year, and his death one of its foremost tragedies, it is appropriate and timely that there should be an investigation into the whole sorry affair. As Cambridge University announced on Friday, it will launch a two-part investigation into whether it could have done more to support the professor, who was found dead at an address in south London on 14 August, a week after he resigned as professor of sociology of education at the university.

The Green Party came to prominence earlier this year by forever promising ‘hope not hate’. Indeed, that dreamy yearning played a key part in securing an unprecedented mandate in the May local elections, when a callow cohort of progressive twenty-somethings, wooed by these nice-sounding words, helped to put the Greens into power in many inner-city councils. This is the same demographic who are also receptive to similar utopian platitudes about abolishing borders, housing immigrants, and free bus travel, free university education and free childcare. Free everything, if possible, courtesy of ‘the billionaires’, who in the Green Party’s ethereal vision will obligingly pay for it all.

For decades, voices on the liberal and progressive left have invariably rolled out the terror-inducing accusation of ‘racism’ in order to get their way and silence opponents. It’s thus unsurprising to see, in the wake of Jason Arday’s death, that they're still resorting to this cynical tactic, and in this case, to absolve themselves of responsibility for having exploited this vulnerable man in the first place. To call it a ‘witch hunt’ is predictable and unfounded hyperbole In response to Arday’s death, Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union, said the ‘level of harassment he suffered and the racism he was subjected to has been sickening’.

One of the unfortunate consequences of the Jason Arday debacle is that it has thrown the entire discipline of sociology into disrepute. In the minds of many, his shoddy scholarship, lazy methods and recourse to obfuscating jargon are not an aberration, but reflect the dubious standing of a social science which has always had unjust pretensions to an actual science. Sociology is not alone in having succumbed to gobbledygook and hard-left propagandising There’s been a chorus this week of those repeating this familiar accusation on social media. ‘I have yet to be convinced that sociology is an academic discipline at all never mind that it is important. It seems to be just a vehicle for advancing left-wing policies with a veneer of academic respectability.

For decades now Trevor Phillips has been one of the most astute and unusually self-aware members of the liberal establishment, becoming in recent years one of its sternest critics. That trajectory began with his call in 2004, when he was chairman for the Commission for Racial Equality, for the term ‘multiculturalism’ to be scrapped for being divisive. His columns in the Times these days can be unsparing in their dissection of the shortcomings and failures of left-liberal ideology. Conservatives, old-school liberals and Red Wall Labour voters have either known of this anti-metropolitan sentiment or felt it themselves Phillips’ perceptiveness owes a great deal to the fact that he speaks as a veteran semi-insider.

The strange thing about our new Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s professed wish to return to the 1970s, to a prelapsarian age before Margaret Thatcher, is that this kind of wistful, hopeless desire to turn the clock back has always been an accusation levelled at Reform UK and its supporters. How many times over the years have we heard voices on the left sneer at Nigel Farage and his acolytes, deride his and their delusional, insular, xenophobic, borderline racist yearning for ‘the Britain of the 1950s’? Yet few liberal-left figures today seem concerned that the new leader of the Labour party and this country unashamedly pines for The Good Old Days.

One of the most popular and common beliefs of our times is that women are better than men at performing many tasks at once. The notion that females have a unique gift for ‘multitasking’ has been constantly invoked by women in recent years, proof of their superior cognitive skills and innate, more holistic wisdom. It shows, literally, that they are not so narrow-minded. Likewise, this conceit has been deployed by many a lazy husband as an excuse not to pull his weight around the house: ‘You can’t expect me to look after the children and do the washing. We men are just not hard-wired that way.