Patrick West

One of the most grating and nauseating verbal constructions of our times – ‘Our NHS’ – has with grim inevitability began to evolve and expand. It was only a matter of time before someone or some organisation deemed it necessary to affix that possessive determiner to another state-run organisation, and you hardly need to guess which one. ‘A GB News presenter has said the BBC should hand “several million pounds” of licence-fee payers money to Donald Trump. We must defend our BBC from those who want to destroy it.’ So ran a post on Friday on from the official X account of the Liberal Democrats.

A famous pop star once sang that sorry seemed to be the hardest word. Almost fifty years after Elton John uttered those sentiments, nothing has changed. Saying sorry for your own errors or moral transgressions remains for many individuals and organisations an almost impossible task. Saying sorry for your own errors or moral transgressions remains for many individuals and organisations an almost impossible task The BBC’s reputed apology to Donald Trump, for having spliced a speech of his from January 2021, is an instructive example of how and why people will dodge this substantial and consequential word. ‘While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim,’ it says.

One of the greatest dangers posed by the government’s curriculum review is that it will result in children abandoning more demanding subjects such as history, geography and languages at GCSE. This is the fear voiced by a number of educationists, including Baroness Spielman, the former chief of inspector at Ofsted, who said that scrapping the English Baccalaureate would be a ‘death blow to secondary languages teaching.’ Learning to read, write and speak a foreign language is not only a ‘skill’. It’s about learning how to think differently and think better This, alas, merely reflects a longer-term malaise: teaching the adults of tomorrow how to speak – and think – in a second language.

Those who believe in free speech, and those who are particularly concerned by plans to have ‘Islamophobia’ codified, ought to be delighted. A judge has ruled that criticising Islam, or viewing the faith as problematic, is a protected belief under equalities law. As reported in The Sunday Telegraph this morning, an employment tribunal judge has found that Patrick Lee, 61, who was found guilty of misconduct last April by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries over posts on X - including one calling the Prophet Mohammed a ‘monster’ – was merely ‘critical of certain Islamic doctrines and practices, and not to individual followers of Islam or to the Islamic faith/religion at large.’  Mr Lee has now won legal protection for his beliefs.

The first, and the lasting, impression one gets from Canterbury Cathedral’s new graffiti-style art instillation is just how reasonable and normal are the questions it quite literally poses. That’s some feat for an exhibition that purports to be ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘dynamic’ while simultaneously attracting such derision – even provoking the ire of the US vice president, J.D. Vance. Echoing the feelings of many people in this country, he asked why the cathedral's curators had to make a ‘beautiful historical building really ugly’.

The vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Professor Irene Tracey, has been giving some gloriously counterintuitive advice recently on how to safeguard free speech in academia. On Tuesday, she claimed that teaching the ethos of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) ‘goes hand in hand with our commitment to academic freedom and free speech.’ Yet diversity training always has the opposite effect.

The desire to seek restitution from those who have harmed or wronged us is normal. Our instinct for justice is inbuilt. Yet, in recent decades, there has emerged in the West a perverse distortion of this impulse: the demand for financial compensation from people who have done no wrong, made by people who have not been wronged. Long-established campaigns calling on Britain to pay reparations for slavery are founded on this strange premise, and the latest figure to join their ranks is Sir Lenny Henry. The comedian and actor makes his case in a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with Marcus Ryder, a television executive and charity boss. He argues for the UK to hand over £18 trillion in compensatory payments.

Believe it or not, some judges in this country are starting to show signs of having a connection with reality and in possession of an outlook based on common sense. It’s hard to credit it, given the roll call this year of judges delivering over-lenient verdicts in regard to asylum seekers wanting to remain in Britain – often on highly dubious and sometimes ludicrous grounds. But it’s really happening. Change is afoot. Believe it or not, some judges in this country are starting to show signs of having a connection with reality This has become apparent not in the High Court or immigrant tribunals, the places where those notorious judgements are handed down, but in the less illustrious sector of employment tribunals.

Keir Starmer’s behaviour, demeanour and language has taken a rapid and strange turn of recent. Unable to do anything meaningful about this country’s economic woes or the chronic immigration crisis, the Prime Minister now resorts to words in preference to actions. He relies increasingly on alarmist rhetoric and hollow gestures in order to make us believe that he is a competent and purposeful leader. It’s the customary response of low-intelligence fringe-leftists The decision to officially recognise Palestine, a country with no borders, no capital city and no meaningful government, was merely one indication of this lurch.

Does Sir Keir Starmer love his country or not? It’s been hard to tell this year. His infamous ‘island of strangers’ speech in May seemed to suggest that he did, only for him to recant the following month after a backlash from the left in his party, saying that he regretted using those words. But now Sir Keir wants us to believe once more that he really is a flag-waving patriot. Literally. Can you imagine a burgher of an affluent part of North London draping the St George Flag from the window of their house? Later this week the Prime Minister will announce an outline to ‘reclaim the flag’ from ‘far right’ protesters in a speech to tackle the rise of ‘divisive populism’.

Many people have been warning for some time about the perilous consequences of introducing an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’ to this country, specifically in regard to its potential to curtail free speech and reintroduce de facto blasphemy laws. But it’s taken a leading KC – an adviser to the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, no less – to remind us of a further danger: the likelihood that it will deter police from investigating Muslim suspects or offenders for fear of accusations of racism.

Nish Kumar isn’t the first television comedian to throw himself into activist politics in recent times. Another former panellist on the now defunct BBC comedy show Mock the Week, Frankie Boyle, did likewise a decade ago, and with little success. So far, Kumar’s decision to do similarly seems to have proved even less popular. Having appeared alongside Zarah Sultana early this month live at the London Podcast Festival, Kumar was at the forefront of the anti-Trump protests orchestrated by the fringe left this week, appearing as host at the Stop Trump protest in Parliament Square in London, where he tossed from the stage a large balloon with a picture of J. D. Vance into the crowd. ‘It's the job of the news to be balanced - not comedy.

The malign effects of the Covid lockdowns continue to reveal themselves. The latest confirmation of the baleful legacy of that policy is a new survey which suggests that we are turning into a nation of hermits. According to a fresh study, reported by the Daily Telegraph, many people in Britain are still imposing lockdowns on themselves, four years after the last government-decreed lockdown. The survey of 2,000 British adults discloses that two thirds of Gen Z – and more than half of millennials – said that there are times when they do not go outside for days. This isn't something that only afflicts the youth. Across all generations, the study related that a quarter of people make a conscious effort to step outside at least once a day.

The progressive and idealistic left will never admit that they are wrong. That’s because, possessed with a sense of mission and unshakable righteousness, they will always believe that they are right. No matter the murder in America last week of a family man by a reputed, self-styled anti-fascist, and no matter the mostly calm and dignified conduct of those at the Unite the Kingdom march in London on Saturday, they will always smear and demonise those of a conservative persuasion with hysterical, slanderous words. By all accounts, despite the 25 arrests made from a crowd of up to 150,000, it was a mostly civilised and peaceful affair.

To smear your opponents as fascists or Nazis has always been the perennial temptation of those who seek to terminate an argument – or have no argument of their own. It’s the last resort of the callow, the ignorant and the desperate. And it’s an argument that just won’t go away. They’re doing this – and McDonnell is joining in – because it’s the last thing they’ve got left Former shadow chancellor John McDonnell deployed it in all tawdry gruesomeness yesterday. Speaking at a fringe event at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) conference, the MP said: ‘Reform are a protest fascist organisation. We’ve seen it in the Thirties.

Most people deplore bad behaviour in public and gratuitous breaches of etiquette and manners on trains and buses. Few would disagree with comments made yesterday by the shadow transport secretary, Richard Holden, that ‘inconsiderate and obnoxious behaviour blights the lives of the travelling public’. Yet many, contrariwise, would disagree with his proposal to remedy this scourge, namely for ‘swift justice for those who make people’s lives a misery’ through on-the-spot fines.

The appearance of vigilantes on the streets of Bournemouth certainly represents a worrying development. What is less widely-known is that civilian law enforcers have also started to appear on the streets in London. London is now exhibiting much the same problems that have been in incubation elsewhere for years I only became aware of this on Monday when walking up Tottenham Court Road. There in the afternoon I spotted two personnel clad in orange patrol vests emblazoned with the words ‘Street Warden’ (deployed, as it explained at the dorsal base, by the Fitzrovia Partnership, an organisation that works with local businesses) questioning three youths who, to judge by the expression and tone of their interrogators, had been up to no good.