While attending the anti-lockdown protest at Trafalgar Square last Saturday, I crossed the road to the Caffe Nero. In a queue I chatted to a pleasant couple in their 60s behind me. When it was my turn, I ordered a double espresso and produced a fiver. The young European guy serving told me that I must pay by card. Now, if … [Read on]
While the BBC excises classic comedies and variety shows from its archives for offensive racial stereotypes, the musical genre of rap has seemed immune to cancel culture. Glorifying drugs, misogyny and violence, its lyrics are a profusion of the ‘n’ word and ‘motherf******s’. If you were to quote these verbal volleys on Twitter you would risk a ban, or perhaps … [Read on]
Robert Oulds and Niall McCrae are joint authors of this blog and Moralitis: a Cultural Virus (Bruges Group, 2020). On a sunny Saturday morning, the queue outside Waitrose on the main thoroughfare in Chiswick basked in a glow of self-satisfaction. Dozens of casually-dressed, trendy urbanites displayed their social justice credentials by ‘taking the knee’, a ritual show of support for … [Read on]
Silence speaks louder than words. Nonchalantly, Peter Hitchens strolled through the cobbled streets of Oxford University, pursued by a baying mob. Dozens of students, a multicultural mix, were led by a young black woman hollering with menace through a megaphone. A cinematic production would have looked down from high, showing the honey-stone quads and dreaming spires, and the man who … [Read on]
The veneration of George Floyd shows how rapidly a supposedly rational and civilised society can degenerate into mass hysteria. As a mental health expert at a London university, I have studied social phenomena and mental health throughout my career, but I never expected to see my country in such danger from a collective psychosis. When reason and feeling for fellow … [Read on]
After an orgy of desecration of imperial heritage by the Black Lives Matter campaign, Guardian writers had much to celebrate. In drunkenly righteous exuberance, they gloated on Twitter as statues were vandalised and police officers got what they deserved for a history of racism towards black people. Perhaps foolishly on the part of Metropolitan Police Chief Cressida Dick and senior … [Read on]
On Saturday, a small number of harmless (if somewhat eccentric) protesters gathered at Speakers’ Corner. Under the Coronavirus Act and Guidelines demonstrations are not essential activities and are thus banned, so even at this symbolic site of British liberties, you cannot protest against lockdown, because of lockdown. One of us went to Hyde Park and observed the overzealous policing. Various … [Read on]
Modern feminism has so successfully captured the mainstream media that notions such as ‘toxic masculinity’, ‘white male privilege’ and ‘the patriarchy’ are constantly parroted on page or screen. Grievance tracts by the likes of Carole Criado Perez are heavily promoted. But most of this literature is for middle-class consumption. While women in highly-paid city jobs are encouraged to be pushy, … [Read on]
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