Patrick West

Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017)

What the St George’s flag really stands for

From our UK edition

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

The tale of the quiet Englishman who helped make Immanuel Kant

From our UK edition

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)

The Green Party is mad, bad and dangerous

From our UK edition

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

Christopher Eccleston is right about young white men

From our UK edition

It’s not often that actors talk sense or deviate from liberal-left orthodoxies when speaking on politics, so when they do so, we ought to take notice. And when a thespian makes not one, but two, reasonable points in a single interview, it’s really time to sit up and pay attention. To borrow the hideous jargon

Why even Ferrari drivers are stealing petrol

From our UK edition

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

Why are our universities dumbing down?

From our UK edition

It’s strange and ironic that higher education establishments in Britain, institutions which ostensibly exist to broaden minds and deepen thought, should today speak in such a cliche-ridden, jargon-infested and deadening variety of English. Yet it’s unsurprising and rather appropriate that they should do so in order to communicate to everyone that they’re no longer interested

Why the Met police went soft on crime

From our UK edition

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

Labour cares more about itself than Britain

From our UK edition

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

Smartphones are making us stupid

From our UK edition

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

Stop crying wolf about World War Three

From our UK edition

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

‘Blasphemous’ drawings and the myth of tolerance

From our UK edition

It’s often assumed and frequently stated that the biggest threat to British society these days comes from cultures which are alien and inimical to ours. Yet our way of life has for decades faced an equally formidable threat – from forces which emanate from within. A well-meaning, self-abasing and cowardly coterie of white liberals have sought

Why do Britain’s councils hate patriotism so much?

From our UK edition

The war waged by those in authority on those who make overt displays of patriotism shows no sign of relenting. This campaign against Englishness and Britishness has never been an open, honest one, undertaken with manifest intent. This is a devious war pursued through crafty bureaucratic means and framed in the timorous language of health

Who cares if Britain’s Eurovision entry has German lyrics?

From our UK edition

What with the prospect of further resets with the European Union, and with British culture seemingly in a constant battle with those who would degrade and debase it, it’s easy to understand why some people are oversensitive to perceived threats to this country’s independence and integrity. Alas, sometimes this touchiness descends into out-and-out paranoia. Eurovision

The real reason Greens are gaining ground

From our UK edition

It was only a matter of time before an ultra-progressive, hard-left party with a fondness for voguish identity politics, enthusiasm for multiculturalism and morbid obsession with Israel came to preeminence in this country. This inevitability is the consequence of a demographic time-bomb just waiting to make its effects known. It’s no surprise that the Greens

Were fans wrong to boo the Ramadan fast-breaking footballers?

From our UK edition

So much of what is commonly understood to mean multiculturalism has in truth been class warfare by other means. A great deal of it has entailed affluent, white middle-class types telling the white working-class that their culture and values are of unexceptional or lesser worth. Much state-sanctioned multiculturalism has been an exercise in scolding the

‘Family voting’ allegations cannot be ignored

From our UK edition

If allegations of ‘family voting’ taking place at Thursday’s Gorton and Denton by-election prove substantiated, the incidents will not only mark a grave infraction of the law, they will give further weight to the fear that this country is becoming perilously fragmented, terminally Balkanised and mired in sectarianism. Polling had scarcely closed when, a few

What Esther Rantzen needs to know about ‘religious people’

From our UK edition

In politics, there has always been an assumption held by atheists, humanists and many liberals in general that those of a modern, secular persuasion act with autonomy and reason because they are unencumbered by religious belief. They believe themselves in possession of an intellect that needs no external crutch or sanction. While this enables them

How Britain learnt to turn a blind eye to shariah

From our UK edition

The more excitable and less well-educated elements of the liberal left are forever apt to observe that politics today resemble those of the 1930s, being prone to denounce a development or policy they disdain as being ‘just like Nazi Germany’. To be fair, they have a point. It’s not just the street brawls we’ve seen

What Louis Theroux’s Netflix show won’t tell you about the ‘Manosphere’

From our UK edition

There once was a time when you couldn’t move for some progressive voice complaining in superior tones about the latest ‘moral panic’ bestriding the country, stoked in their imagination by right-wing neurotics fearful that Britain was going to the dogs. Whether it be concerns related to pornography, video nasties, Mary Whitehouse’s latest campaign to clean

Would you be friends with a Reform voter?

From our UK edition

Most of us have had disagreements with friends over politics at some point in our lives. Or worse. One of the constant threats to friendships is that such differences could one day spill over into acrimony or result in a full-blown falling-out. In my youth, the election night parties held by my parents seldom ended without