Patrick West

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.

Why can’t academics write properly? Why can’t they express themselves in language that normal people can understand? These are questions that have echoed through the ages, and ones that still resonate today - so much so that even academics are starting to ask them. In an address to the Hay Festival this week, Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham City University lamented how the work of so many of his peers is written in ‘devastatingly bad’, ‘mind-deadening’ and ‘over-convoluted’ prose. Taking one book as an example, he asked why it ‘kept using the word “quotidien”. What does “quotidien” mean? “Everyday”. Why not just say “everyday”?

The American sitcom Cheers depicted a Boston bar where everybody knew your name, and its most loyal customer, Norm Peterson, was the character practically everybody wanted to be. Norm, played by George Wendt in all the show’s episodes from 1982 to 1993, and who died on Tuesday aged 76, was the ultimate bar-fly, the role model for those who used to haunt bars and pubs, and for many who still do. This cuddly, ursine and somewhat shambolic character was held in affection by viewers and all in the fictional drinking-hole – he was greeted upon his arrival with the universal salutation, ‘Norm!’ – mostly because he was just consistently funny. He would deploy killer responses to routine enquiries: ‘What'd you like, Normie?’ ‘A reason to live. Give me another beer.

Can the BBC ever be objective and unbiased? It’s a question many of us ask ourselves, sometimes in hope, often in exasperation. It’s also a question that the Corporation forever asks itself, but instead in the spirit of aspiration and ambition. So it’s ostensibly good news that it has announced plans to expand its Verify fact-checking unit. On the face of it, this initiative should result in more accountably and scrutiny in its news output. Verify was born out of insincerity and dishonesty BBC director-general Tim Davie has unveiled a scheme, on behalf of ‘the world’s most trusted news provider’, to ‘build Verify across more services globally’. Davie also wants to give it a greater role in local reporting as part of a mission to ‘nurture trust’.

Keir Starmer has finally realised that he needs to tackle rising immigration. The Prime Minister said yesterday that Britain risks becoming an ‘island of strangers’ if nothing is done. Predictably, his speech has gone down badly with the usual suspects. There may be a simple reason why some of Starmer’s critics will never see eye to eye with him on migration There may be a simple reason why some of Starmer’s critics will never see eye to eye with him on migration: their main preoccupation appears not to be with different cultures or individuals. Rather, they seem to regard human beings as parts of a bigger, more important whole. These materialists see us as cogs in the machine. This mentality afflicts materially-orientated people on both the left and right.

When hyper-liberal identity politics went into overdrive in that year of madness, 2020, one of the greatest casualties in this country was to be our police forces. This wasn’t obvious at the time, although officers ‘taking the knee’ at the foot of Black Lives Matters protestors hinted at things to come, as did their growing inclination to attend Pride events and adorn their vehicles in LGBT+ colours. Only in recent months, however, has there emerged the extent to which our police have become contaminated and compromised by this ideology. As today’s Sunday Telegraph reveals, in November 2023 officers from Kent Police arrested and detained an old man for a social media post he made warning about the threat of anti-Semitism in Britain.

We now live in a country where, once more, it appears to be a crime to commit blasphemy. This is the inevitable and justifiable conclusion many have made following the news yesterday that a man who burnt a copy of the Koran was charged with ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ against ‘the religious institution of Islam’. The National Secular Society has been volubly alarmed at the case The charge made against Hamit Coskun, who allegedly performed the act outside the Turkish Consulate in London in February, is thought to be the first time anybody has been prosecuted for harassing an ‘institution’, in the form of Islam, under the Public Order Act.