Patrick West

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.

After yesterday’s landmark decision on the Bell Hotel in Epping, the next question must be: where do we go from here? What is essential to understand is that yesterday’s High Court judgement was what might be called an ‘Al Capone reckoning’. One ultimate actor, the state, and by extension the government, has been humbled on a mere technicality. The Essex hotel was deemed in breach of contract for using its rooms to accommodate refugees, rather than paying guests. The state was not brought to heel on its ethically unsound and socially corrosive laws on immigration and re-settlement. That the Home Office sought to block Epping Forest council’s application for an injunction is important.

Flags have become a contentious and defining issue of this year. You only have to witness the furore that has surrounded the increasing proliferation of the Progress Pride and Palestinian flags in this country to recognise this. So it was only a matter of time before that other increasingly common sight, flags denoting pride in Englishness and Britishness, should have been drawn into the fray. As reported in the Daily Telegraph this morning, Birmingham Council has ordered the removal of Union and St George’s flags from lamp posts.

Many people are now terrified to say what they think, voice unfashionable opinions, or even let slip the wrong words, having seen what happens to those who do. As we witness in the headlines with unremitting regularity, uttering something potentially offensive might cost you your job or prompt a visit from the police. This is why so many people are fearful of the proposal to have ‘Islamophobia’ defined by the state, and this fear is greatest among those who have felt the full force of our new censorial ethos: the British working class. According to a new survey carried out by JL Partners, Angela Rayner’s proposal for a new official definition of Islamophobia would hand Reform a 100-seat parliamentary majority at the expense of Labour.

If there is one wholesale conclusion to be drawn from the Afghan resettlement scheme scandal, it’s that a problem we have today is not so much a profusion of ‘misinformation’ but rather the suppression of genuine information. In Britain now, it’s not ‘fake news’ that causes widespread resentment and anger, but moves made by successive British governments to silence real news. The authorities continue to make matters worse out of fear that the truth must not out Ever since the masses decided to vote against their overlords in Britain and America in 2016 in the EU referendum and US presidential election of that year, the elites have propagated the belief that an unintelligent populace has been vulnerable to ‘misinformation’.

Britain has a widespread and collective mental health problem – but it’s not what you might think. Specifically, it’s that many people believe themselves to be mentally unwell when actually they are not. What’s more, society and the state have been prone to taking them at their word on this matter for far too long. We’ve become aware of this unfolding problem recently as it's evolved into a veritable crisis. It’s at once a financial crisis, one that now costs the taxpayer and the Treasury billions in welfare payments, while it's also a still-evolving human crisis.

For some years now, one of the greatest worries among a certain coterie has been that of ‘misinformation’. This is the idea that the masses, left to their own devices – figuratively and literally – are unable to discern what is true and what is false. This is what has prompted the establishment of such gatekeeping bodies as BBC Verify, institutions that presume to protect the general public from the vast tides of online nonsense. Logically had ostensibly noble intentions upon its creation in 2016 The news that Britain's biggest fact-checking company, Logically, has gone into administration, will be a blow to those who think we need such bodies.

We live in a country in which petty grievances and perceived slights abound, and one in which resentments and gripes are taken seriously by the state. We saw evidence of this state of affairs in two unrelated reports this week. The first came from Leeds, where an employment tribunal found that the use of the word ‘lads’ in relation to a worker earning £95,000 a year at a farming and food production company amounted to ‘casual use of gender-specific language’, and could be legally regarded as ‘unwanted... given her account of how it made her feel’. Her level of compensation is to be decided at a later date.

This country still has a problem with a radical ideology. News that the government’s anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent, now classifies concerns about mass migration, or ‘cultural nationalism’, as a potential ‘terrorist ideology’ reveals the magnitude of this problem. And the problem in question is hyper-liberalism, a radical ideology that remains endemic in Prevent and elsewhere in the arms of the state. Far from dying out, this ideology, otherwise known as wokery or radical progressivism, has become normalised and embedded, especially in areas of government. The ideology has literally graduated from the academy and into the state sector.