Toby Young

According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced concern about the psychological fragility of students. In their view, millennials aren’t ‘snowflakes’, but imagine themselves to be on account of having been surrounded by over-protective parents and teachers.

Earlier this week, the Labour MP Dawn Butler ‘called out’ Jamie Oliver for ‘appropriation’. His sin, according to the shadow minister for women and equalities, was to launch a product called Punchy Jerk Rice. ‘I’m just wondering do you know what #Jamaican #jerk actually is?’ she asked him on Twitter. ‘It’s not just a word you put before stuff to sell products… Your jerk rice is not OK. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.’ The notion that it is problematic for white people to ‘appropriate’ the culture of other ethnic groups has become widespread on the left.

When I was 16 I failed all my O-levels, bar a grade C in English Literature, and concluded I wasn’t academically bright. Instead of retaking my O--levels, doing some A-levels and trying to get a place at university, I decided to pursue a career as a tradesman and enrolled on a residential work experience course. It was a bit like a boarding school, except it offered students a technical and vocational education rather than an academic one. It was a miserable period of my life. The stench of failure hung over the institution like a toxic cloud and my fellow students and I were treated as if we were semi-delinquents who might at any moment go off the rails.

The Young family’s annual summer holiday could not have got off to a poorer start, thanks to Ryanair. As veteran customers of the budget airline will know, you have to jump through an endless number of hoops beforehand to avoid having to pay punitive fees at the airport. In fact, the cost of failing to navigate the advance check-in website correctly is so high, ‘fees’ is the wrong word. Fines, more like. Fees are what you have to pony up in order to avoid paying the fines, since checking in is far from free. Anyway, Caroline got one thing wrong in spite of peering at Ryanair’s website for at least two hours the night before, debit card in hand. So we got hit with a hefty fine at Stansted airport for not having already checked in our second piece of baggage.

This summer has seen yet another group of thought criminals being mobbed on social media. Some of them are the people you’d expect, such as the American journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a cover story for the July/August issue of the Atlantic about parents of transgendered teens agonising over whether to accept their children’s new identity or to try to talk them out of it. That dilemma is particularly acute when the teens in question are only 13 and pushing their parents to allow them to have surgery. Singal’s crime, in the eyes of trans activists, is that he interviewed several older teens who have changed their minds about transitioning and are now grateful to their parents for not letting them take that irreversible step.

Are we witnessing the rebirth of Radical Chic? That was the term coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay about the party given by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein for the Black Panthers at their 13-room penthouse apartment on Park Avenue. It described a weird trend, beginning in the late 1960s and peaking in the early 1970s, whereby the crème de la crème of New York’s moneyed elite embraced radical left-wing causes, such as the anti-war movement and black power. They did so without irony, seemingly oblivious to the absurdity of trying to ‘stick it to the man’ while living on trust funds established by their robber baron forefathers.

It was only a matter of time. The headteacher of a primary school in Ilfracombe in Devon has banned ‘Flossing’, the dance craze linked to the video game Fortnite, on the grounds that it’s being used to ‘intimidate’ other children. ‘Fortnite is about mass killing of other human beings and being rewarded by a dance of celebration if you are successful,’ she told the Telegraph. This is the latest example of the moral panic surrounding Fortnite, a video game in which up to 100 players compete against each other, either individually or in ‘squads’, to see who can be the last man standing.

According to a poll of 538 experts on women’s issues, the United States is one of the ten most dangerous countries in the world for women. Admittedly, America is ranked tenth, but it’s still considered more dangerous than 183 other countries, including Iran, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Bangladesh and Myanmar. That’s quite a claim when you bear in mind that Iranian women caught not wearing a full hijab are routinely sentenced to 74 lashes, that an estimated 94 per cent of women in Sierra Leone have had their genitals mutilated, and that thousands of Rohingya women and girls have been raped by Myanmar’s soldiers and militiamen in the past year. What can these so-called experts be thinking?

A controversy has erupted in Folkestone over a forthcoming screening of Zulu, the classic British war film. A charity has arranged to show the film at the Silver Screen Cinema on Saturday to raise money for members of the armed forces and their families, but the event may have to be cancelled following a letter to the town’s mayor signed by 28 locals objecting to Zulu’s ‘racist overtones’. ‘The film glorifies the myth that was created in 1879 after the humiliation of the British military defeat at the battle of Isandlwana,’ they write. ‘The Battle of Rorke’s Drift was, in reality, little more than a footnote after a far more important and far more gory battle earlier in the day, 11 miles away at Isandlwana.

An academic paper by a group of child psychologists caused a stir earlier this week. ‘Helicopter parenting is bad for children,’ was how the Times reported it, and other news outlets summarised it in the same way. Here was proof, apparently, that wrapping your children in cotton wool and limiting their exposure to risk is bad for their emotional development and can lead to problems at school, as well as difficulties in later life. A few years ago, when I was in the first flush of fatherhood, I would have leapt on this study as confirmation that my laissez-faire attitude to parenting was more effective than the more hands-on approach of my peers.

According to a new study published by some feminist academics at the Australian National University, women risk damaging their health if they work more than 34 hours a week. That’s not because women are the weaker sex, obviously, but because they do more housework and childcare than men, effectively working just as hard but dividing their labour between the office and home. On the back of this, the report’s authors have called for women to be paid the same for working a 34-hour week as men are for a 47-hour week. Until this happens, according to the researchers, women are being forced to choose between their health and gender equality. On the face of it, this proposal is bonkers.

My heart goes out to Owen Jones. The left-wing journalist is one of the headliners at a Labour party fund-raiser scheduled for next Saturday and, at the time of writing, 85 per cent of tickets remain unsold. It is particularly embarrassing for Jones, given that Rod Liddle managed to sell out the London Palladium last month. As someone who has struggled to attract audiences to these sorts of things in the past, I have a few tips for Owen. First of all, don’t give tickets away, because those who have already bought them will ask for their money back. Unfortunately, that horse has already bolted in Owen’s case.

I am currently in Brittany with the family, having made the 11-hour drive from London on Monday. It sounds like quite a lot of effort for a few days’ holiday, but my friend Wendy Steavenson invited us to stay and that so rarely happens when you’ve got four children that we felt we couldn’t turn her down. No doubt Wendy will regret this after 24 hours, as nearly all our previous hosts have. The journey wasn’t as much of an ordeal as it sounds since Caroline did the driving and I sat in the back and read Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West.

As a conservative, I wasn’t sure what to make of the news that the BBC was adapting A Very English Scandal, John Preston’s entertaining account of the Jeremy Thorpe affair. On the one hand, it’s easy to depict Thorpe, the son of a Tory MP and an old Etonian, as a ruling class villain. Would the BBC turn his story into yet another ‘bash the rich’ tragi-comedy in the same vein as The Riot Club, a piece of left-wing agitprop in which members of the Bullingdon Club conspire to commit murder? When I heard Hugh Grant had been cast as Thorpe that confirmed my suspicions.