Patrick West

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.

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 and safety. This offensive began as a response to events last summer, when, under the banner of ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, many individuals took it upon themselves to attach St George’s and Union flags to lampposts throughout England. In response, many councils, prompted by complaints from some who felt ‘uncomfortable’, or run by those who feel uneasy at unrefined shows of patriotism, took them down on the grounds of health and safety.

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 has long since descended into a tacky, hyper-camp circus act The flustered reaction to the news that this year's UK Eurovision entry is partly sung in German is a case in point. Following the disclosure that the song, Eins, Zwei, Drei, by Look Mum No Computer, not only has a chorus in a foreign language, but has lyrics which appear to disparage British culture – ‘Counting in English doesn't cut the mustard.

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 offer hope to that portion of a generation As a YouGov survey has revealed this week, the Green Party has now overtaken both Labour and the Conservatives to take second place in the polls, two points behind Reform UK. Their support now stands at 21 per cent, up four points in the week since their historic win in the Gorton and Denton by-election.

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 proletariat for being unenlightened, denouncing them as bigots and racists when their behaviour fails to fall into line with modern, cosmopolitan, metropolitan mores.

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 minutes after 10 p.m., Sam Coates of Sky News posted on X intelligence related to him by a team from Democracy Volunteers, a group of voluntary election observers, in which they claimed to have witnessed a total of 32 cases of family voting in 15 of the 22 polling stations in the constituency.

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 to achieve objective detachment, those who cling to religion can never attain such a refined plateau of enlightenment: their convictions are indelibly shaped and clouded by religious dogma.

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 in Manchester and Lyon over the last week, between hard left and hard right youths, that should arouse such unnerving comparisons. It’s also because we are living in an age of appeasement. And this time it’s the liberal left who are doing the appeasing. This was a textbook case of appeasement: not a tactical retreat to be dismissed as a one-off, but an action consistent with a sustained process of surrender This trend continues to make itself more obvious.