Tom Slater

Anti-fascism ain’t what it used to be. It used to mean signing up to go to fight Franco’s fascists in Spain, turning out against Oswald Mosley in the East End, or trading punches with National Front thugs. Now it means trying to get right-wing Tory MPs no platformed on elite university campuses – and occasionally punching elderly gender-critical women in the face. It’s by turns despicable and pathetic. The cancellation of Suella Braverman’s event at Cambridge last week – following threats of protest by assorted faux-radical groups, with ‘Cambridge for Palestine’ to the fore – was grimly predictable.

Socialism, wrote George Orwell, has often had a habit of attracting posh cranks. He witheringly described the ‘sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come knocking towards the smell of “progress” like bluebottles to a dead cat’.  Even though Starmer’s Labour has all but dropped the s-word, fully embracing its role as the party of the new elites, its electoral triumph certainly has been a boon to scolds and irritants. All the worst, most meddlesome factions in British public life appear to have been emboldened by this government. Woke censors? Tick. Nanny statists? Alarmingly so. And of course there’s the environmentalists, who clearly see in Labour their best chance for eco-immiseration in our lifetime.

It’s boom time at Ofcom. In the past few years, what was until recently the government-backed regulator for broadcasting, telecoms and postal industries (already an absurdly broad range of responsibilities) has seen its remit expanded beyond all recognition. Following the passage of the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom has been handed the famously straightforward task of regulating social-media companies – compelling them to clamp down on illegal speech and activity on their platforms. The Media Act 2024, which gained royal assent in May, has extended its reach to streaming services, too. Now, a think-tank has essentially suggested we should cut out the middleman and turn the Office of Communications into a full-blown Ministry of Truth.

It’s hard to keep up with what is racist these days. It used to be straightforward. You know, discriminating against, hating or depriving rights to certain groups for no other reason than the colour of their skin. But that quaint definition just won’t do anymore. Nowadays, the countryside is racist, maths is racist, telling a Japanese person you like sushi is racist, wearing a sombrero if you’re not Mexican is racist, compliments are racist, babies are racist. To that yawning list we can now add… buildings. Particularly those in Wales, it seems. The Welsh government has pledged to ‘eradicate’ systemic racism by 2030, and apparently it’s starting with those notorious bigots, the librarians.

Just Stop Oil’s campaign to infuriate ordinary people has moved up a gear. After bringing traffic to a standstill and disrupting play at the snooker, now its activists are targeting those havens of peace, harmony and low blood pressure: Britain's bustling airports during the school summer holidays. A group of JSOers sat themselves down on the floor and locked their hands together at Gatwick’s south terminal yesterday, in an attempt to block the path through security. (Intrepid holidaymakers merely stepped over them and they were swiftly removed.) Now, JSO poster girl Phoebe Plummer – fresh from her conviction for throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers – has popped up at a protest in which paint was sprayed around Heathrow Airport.

Far be it from me to give advice to the Green Party. From their insistence that ordinary people put up with being poorer and colder to ‘save the planet’ to the alarmingly high number of Israelophobic, 7 October-denying cranks on their candidates list, I’m really not a fan. Still, I’d gently suggest that the golden rule for any Green vying for election is to practise what you preach on climate. If you are standing on a manifesto of national immiseration, you’d better be willing to go without the fossil-fuelled comforts you want to rip away from everyone else. The Greens co-leader has been caught out as an eco-hypocrite Not so for Carla Denyer, it seems.

Is it racist to tell a Japanese colleague that you like sushi? No, says an employment-tribunal judge, in another welcome blow for sanity. This is the conclusion to a downright deranged claim of racial discrimination lodged by Nana Sato-Rossberg, a linguistics and culture professor, against her employer, the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) at the University of London. It revolved around Sato-Rossberg’s alleged treatment at the hands of Claire Ozanne, the former deputy director and provost at Soas. After their very first meeting in 2020, the tribunal heard, Sato-Rossberg told a colleague that she suspected Ozanne would be biased against her.

Does the Tory party have a death wish? It’s a question we have been prompted to ask again and again over recent years, as the supposed natural party of government has self-immolated before the electorate’s eyes. But if an interview with education secretary Gillian Keegan on Sky News over the weekend is anything to go by, the answer is an emphatic ‘Yes’.  Many prominent Tories are up to their necks in woke identity politics Last week’s horrific alkali attack in south-west London has exposed a dysfunctional asylum system that no sane person could support.

Now the environmentalists are going after the Mona Lisa. Because of course they are. Just when you thought you couldn’t dislike these apocalyptic irritants anymore, now they’ve gone and pelted soup at another priceless artwork, the most famous artwork in the world no less, because they think their fever dreams about climate change are more important than ordinary people getting to marvel at da Vinci’s masterpiece. Two activists from Riposte Alimentaire – France’s answer to Just Stop Oil, only with a particular interest in food policy – took their chance at the Louvre yesterday. After emptying a bottle of orange gloop on to the Mona Lisa, one of the women was captured on video shouting: ‘What is more important: art or the right to a healthy and sustainable diet?

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re not even 48 hours into the latest Twitterstorm about upstart anti-woke news channel GB News – this time sparked by presenter Laurence Fox’s sexist, on-air comments about journalist Ava Evans – and it’s already become abundantly clear that all the outrage and fury isn’t really about those comments at all.  On the BBC’s Newsnight programme last night, veteran journalist and broadcaster Adam Boulton had this to say: ‘I think there is a delicate and important broadcast ecology in this country. I think GB News is trying to bust that ecology, and frankly what Ofcom should do is shut it down’.  Tory MP Caroline Nokes, who has never seen a bandwagon she hasn’t wanted to jump on, concurred.