Patrick West

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.

There will always be a certain class of people who sigh that Nigel Farage only reaps what he sows. Ever since milkshakes starting being tossed at a man they regard as an incendiary rabble-rouser, they have argued that it’s his fault for having raised the volume and coarsened the tone of political discourse in this country in the first place. In other circumstances this would be called ‘victim-blaming’: he shouldn’t have behaved so provocatively. He was asking for it.

The timing of the death this weekend of Ken Bates, the former owner of Chelsea and Leeds United, will have struck many older football fans as significant, incongruous or – as football commentators are apt to say – ironic. On the same morning in which millions of Englanders of all backgrounds were preparing to cheer on a conspicuously multi-ethnic England team, the announcement of his passing, aged 94, will have undoubtedly evoked memories of time when the sport in this country was in a very different state, and when some of its fans were of a very different disposition. Hooliganism was rampant and racism on the terraces endemic.

You frequently hear the charge today that the social contract in Britain has broken down. And there is much evidence to support this accusation. The epidemic of shoplifting, the tacit acceptance of fare evasion, rampant mobile phone-snatching in the capital, and most seriously of all, the fragmentation of our once much-vaunted multicultural society into a hotch-potch of mutually-suspicious and resentful ethnic and religious groupings: empirical research and personal testimony points to a society undergoing a process of disintegration. The demeanour of London bus drivers today perhaps reflects how fed up they are of having to deal with members of the public For many people, nowhere is this development more evident than in the normalisation of incivility on public transport.

The annual Pride parades celebrated across the globe are not the events they used to be. First held in New York City on 28 June 1970 and going by the name of the Christopher Street Day Marches, they were initially designed to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, when the gay community in that city rose up in protest against police brutality. Yet what began as a show of defiance and demand for equality by gays and lesbians has incrementally metamorphosed into an event which largely celebrates trans people. And many gays are not happy about this transformation. Not happy at all.

June is a month most people anticipate for various reasons, it heralding the Isle of Wight Festival, the Summer Solstice and Wimbledon. It’s also a time many of us have come to dread, it being the occasion in which Pride Month is foisted upon a compliant and increasingly resentful population. This is why many gays regard the rainbow flag in its modern incarnation as a hostile symbol What began in San Francisco in 1981 as simply the International Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade has evolved into an entire month of worldwide celebrations chiefly dedicated to the trans movement, and at the expense of actual gay people. This metamorphosis can be seen by the original, simple Rainbow Flag having been supplanted by the chevroned, omnicause standard of the Progress Pride Flag.

The issue of what images to put on new banknotes, and specifically of whom, has become one of the great battlegrounds of the culture wars in this country in recent years. Whenever the subject is broached there always arises the cry that the new note ought to feature a woman or an ethnic minority figure – someone who has been ‘written out of history’ – and that dead, white males have for too long hogged the limelight. This inevitably provokes the response that such special pleading merely amounts to ahistorical tokenism, a kind of retrospective, posthumous form of DEI hiring.

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.