Tom Slater

So we’re now three weeks into our coronavirus lockdown and we’ve had a glimpse of what a very British police state might look like. The picture that has emerged is one as comical as it is terrifying. From the off, it seemed many police officers had not bothered to read or even tried to get the gist of the new laws and regulations they were supposed to be enforcing, under both the Coronavirus Act and the Health Protection Regulations – later brought in to empower police to enforce the lockdown. Instead, police across the country have confused government guidance with actual law. People buying so-called ‘non-essential items’ seems to be a particular obsession.

Do you know who hasn’t had a good corona war so far? Celebrities. Throughout this crisis, many of them seem to have gone out of their way to prove our worst prejudices about them right: namely that they are narcissistic, entitled people, completely cut off from the concerns of ordinary people and yet possessed by a desire to lecture to and coo over us. First there was Hollywood actress Gal Gadot, who thought that what we all needed amidst this pandemic was for her and her celebrity mates to sing a profoundly cringey cover of ‘Imagine’. She teed it up by saying ‘it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, we’re all in this together’.

Not for the first time since the coronavirus crisis began, controversy has hit Derbyshire. While the other week it was the county’s finest sending up drones to spy on and shame people walking in the Peak District, this week it's a Labour councillor who has had the whip withdrawn and lost her job at a law firm for saying something nasty about Boris Johnson on the internet. Sheila Oakes, who is also the mayor of the Derbyshire town of Heanor, made a fool of herself the other day on Facebook. In response to another post, encouraging people to pray for the PM, she said that Johnson, who has just come out of intensive care with coronavirus, ‘completely deserves’ to be laid up because he is ‘one of the worst PMs we’ve ever had’.

I’m old enough to remember when the people who students wanted to shut down on campus were real pieces of work: Nick Griffin, Anjem Choudary, fascists or Islamists who, given half the chance, would turn Britain into a bigoted, authoritarian backwater. How quaint that feels now. So low has the bar for censorship on campus sunk, that not only are trans-sceptic feminists as likely to be shut down as the fash these days, but centrist Tories can also find themselves in the crosshairs. This is the news that Amber Rudd has been no-platformed by a student group at Oxford University. Rudd was due to speak at a UNWomen Oxford UK Society event last night, discussing her time working as women and equalities minister and her experiences as a woman in politics.

Plenty of people are pretending this morning that they actually knew who Dave was the day before yesterday. The Streatham rapper made headlines at the Brits last night for calling Boris Johnson ‘a real racist’ during a performance of his song ‘Black'. Suddenly, he’s the toast of Twitter, liberal-lefties and assorted other Boris-loathers, who eagerly shared clips of the performance. Following the huge success of his debut album, Psychodrama, which won album of the year last night, Dave, it seems, has achieved a kind of crossover success - he's cracked the Guardianista market.

The 2020 Oscars will go down in history for two things: Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant film Parasite becoming the first foreign-language film ever to win Best Picture. And Joaquin Phoenix talking about artificially inseminating cows. Yes, in a crowded field of un-self-aware, right-on speeches and stunts during this year’s awards season – Natalie Portman’s Dior cape bearing the names of snubbed female directors certainly deserves an honourable mention – Phoenix came out on top. In his emotional acceptance speech for Best Actor, won for his skeletal, bravura performance in Joker, Phoenix was almost quaking as he talked about the need for a political unity of purpose among the Hollywood set. ‘[W]e feel or are made to feel that we champion different causes.

‘You can’t change sex – biologically, that is impossible.’ That, by most people’s standards, is a simple observable truth. But by the standards of campus activists, it is tantamount to hate speech, deserving of merciless retribution. The quote above is from Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. And for daring to express what most other people in this country would take to be common sense, she has been marginalised and threatened. Today the Telegraph reveals that she has been assigned two bodyguards to accompany her to all of her lectures for the rest of the year, after threats were made against her and circulated online.

Are you a student at the university of Sheffield looking for work? Do you have an incredibly thin skin and a passion for policing other people’s conversations? Are you willing to work for £9.34 per hour? Then have I got the job for you. The university is hiring 20 students to challenge offensive language on campus. In particular, they’re going to tackle racial ‘microaggressions’, described by Sheffield as ‘subtle but offensive comments’. The brief says new recruits will help students understand racism and its impacts by leading ‘healthy conversations’, working between two and nine hours a week around campus. Vice-chancellor Koen Lamberts says the plan aims to ‘change the way people think about racism’.

Many Brits still bristle at the importation of Halloween. It’s easy to see why. It is an American holiday that involves grown adults dressing up and children begging for food from strangers. But there is one upside to it that we can all enjoy: woke campus officials losing their minds over ‘offensive’ costumes. It’s hilarious, and it is now an annual feature of Halloween – as traditional as carving the pumpkin or egging the neighbourhood sex offender’s house. Today we learn in the Times that officials at Sheffield University banned students from wearing sombreros this Halloween, because doing so is ‘culturally insensitive’.

Student politics these days is frequently self-parodying. The Gandhi Must Fall campaign at Manchester university is a perfect case study. Manchester city council has approved plans for a nine-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral. The idea is to promote peace in the wake of the horrific Manchester Arena attack. Who could possibly object to this? Sara Khan, Manchester students’ union’s ‘liberation and access officer’, that’s who. She is leading the campaign against the statue on the grounds that the Indian independence leader made racist comments about Africans. This follows the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, which unsuccessfully tried to have a statue of the long-dead colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed from Oriel College.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has announced it will finish its ‘Autumn Uprising’ earlier than planned in order to make way for the People’s Vote march on Saturday. The two groups have been in informal discussions for some time aimed at avoiding getting in one another’s way, according to a report in the Times. Even if the Metropolitan Police’s draconian city-wide ban on XR may have made such a deal unnecessary, it reminds us how much the groups have in common. It’s not exactly a stretch to say these two predominantly bourgeois movements may have some crossover in support.

Is it a crime to mock a criminal’s unfortunate hairstyle? Police in South Wales seem to think so. Last week, Gwent Police posted on Facebook calling for any information on the whereabouts of 21-year-old Jermaine Taylor, a convicted drug dealer from Newport who had breached his license conditions. They put up the obligatory mugshot, in which Taylor sports his one-of-a-kind do – completely bald on top, two vertical, wispy columns of hair in the back. Facebook users proceeded to rinse him for all he was worth, with thousands of jokes, memes and puns. ‘Who done his hair? Moses?’, said one user, nodding to Taylor’s Red Sea-style parting. ‘Barber: “What you after bro?” Jermaine: “You know Joleon Lescott?