The banishing of venerated figures from universities is a relentless exercise in correcting past faults by the standards of the present. Busts or portraits are removed, lecture halls are renamed, and classic works are deleted from the curriculum. University College London has launched an independent enquiry on whether it should continue to honour polymath Sir Francis Galton. The retrospective offence … [Read on]
Lies, damned lies and statistics’ has nothing on the campaign (overwhelmingly successful) to depict Jamaican businesswoman and Crimean War celebrity Mary Seacole as a medal-winning, daredevil battlefield nurse, who built a hotel, or a clinic, or a combined hotel and clinic, to nurse wounded soldiers (from battles she never saw) and later went on to become the pioneer nurse practitioner … [Read on]
On Monday ‘the guvnor’ touched down in Britain again, this time for a state visit. Welcome back Mr President. There are lots of things to like about President Trump. He’s a patriot and has a real affection for Britain, his mother’s birthplace. He was a wild kid who liked to challenge authority so his father sent him to military school. It worked, he learned … [Read on]
The EU 27 is triumphant, its super-smart negotiators have outfoxed the ‘Rolls-Royce’ brains in the Foreign Office, reducing the UK to a province of its empire, and its government to a rabble. So runs the official EU version. Its tripe. Whitehall-in Brussels is a pillar of the EU empire. Since 1972, when the Heath government brought the UK into the … [Read on]
Jeremy Corbyn, the communist leader of the Labour Party and celebrated anti-semite, is refusing “on principle” – a strange phrase, coming from him – to attend a Buckingham Palace banquet given by the Queen to mark the state visit of President Trump. Corbyn claims the US president had used “racist and misogynist rhetoric.” That’s rather rich, coming from such a … [Read on]
Three Conservative Prime Ministers have now fallen victim to the schism in Conservative Party over Europe: Thatcher, Cameron and now Mrs May. This is because there are two conservative factions in the House of Commons, elitist and populist. Elitists have no time for the ordinary voter, whom they regard as stupid, fat and uneducated, while populists regard central government as … [Read on]
Andrea Leadsom got into terrible trouble in the run-up to the last Tory leadership election for hinting that her experience of being a mother and raising children gave her an advantage over Mrs May – a wider experience, a broader understanding of people, greater empathy perhaps. This was most unwise because according to diversity and inclusivity theory, the new religion … [Read on]
At the request of several Muslim institutions, the government intends to strengthen the definition of “Islamophobia” so that in future it will read: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness.” No it isn’t, and it could never be that. Here we have a fine example of what Wittgenstein described in his … [Read on]
