Patrick West

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.

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.