Tommy Robinson is a paradox: he is a brave and enormously successful activist-journalist with a mean right hook. At the same time, he’s prone to sentimentality, sensitive to criticism and sees himself as a victim, tethering his own private troubles …
Reverse racism ruined South Africa
Jan van Riebeeck, commander of the Dutch post at the Cape, ranted in a diary entry of 28 January 1654 that the indigenous people’s misdeeds were hardly bearable any longer: “Perhaps it would be a better proposition to pay out …
The anti-Israel cartoonist dividing Britain’s art crowd
Promising “kick-ass superheroes, future worlds, fantastical creatures and zombies”, the Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF), should begin next weekend in Cumbria. Yet a row about a Palestinian artist accused of antisemitism threatens to derail the prestigious graphic art event.…
Tommy Robinson, England’s class clown
There is a paradox at the core of the English far-Right: namely, its quaintly un-English preoccupation with race. It’s the reason why, over the past 30 years or so, Tommy Robinson and his ilk have been so marginal to our …
Tommy Robinson is copying the progressive playbook
A strange and dramatic metamorphosis has happened over the last few days. On the one hand, Tommy Robinson, the Right-wing activist and former leader of the English Defence League, has shapeshifted into a Left-leaning analyst of political protest. On the …
How Britain ignored its ethnic conflict
Following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the aftermath, like those of other recent terrorist atrocities, was marked by what later revealed to be a coordinated British government policy of “controlled spontaneity”. Pre-planned vigils and inter-faith events were rolled out, …
Why progressives want to forget George Floyd
Leonard, the hero of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, cannot form new memories. This poses something of a problem when you’re trying to find the guy who killed your wife. Her brutal murder is the last thing Leonard remembers, and he has …
How to spot the next mania
In the late Eighties and Nineties, the psychiatric profession became infatuated with “recovered memory”, which was conceived in the US but also captivated Europe, including Britain. Practitioners claimed that patients sexually abused as children would naturally repress any recollection of …
Claudine Gay and the mafia of mediocrity
What do Nasra Abukar Ali and Claudine Gay have in common? Or, for that matter, the Somali Ministry of Sports and the Harvard Corporation?
The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed …
Gen Z’s radical race politics
It’s a dreary day in a provincial English town. A tracksuit-wearing teenage boy affecting an exaggerated version of the “Jafaican”, which has replaced Cockney as the capital’s working-class dialect, asks a similarly dressed individual: “What nationality is the best to …
Philip Guston’s fight against evil
Two years late and trailing clouds of derision after the Boston Museum of Fine Arts didn’t feel it could mount the exhibition without a confetti shower of trigger warnings and leaflets advising on “Emotional Preparedness”, the Philip Guston retrospective finally …
Yayoi Kusama doesn’t need a race reckoning
“I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life.” So says the titular character in “Pickman’s Model”, a short story by HP Lovecraft about how artists make monsters — or become them. Pickman’s paintings …
Anti-racists are patronising Africa
Why are some groups of people in a weaker position than others? Because, today’s progressives argue, a stronger group put them there, and is acting to keep them there, consciously or subconsciously. According to this narrative, the responsibility for eliminating …
The moral panic over looting
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the post-Bibby Stockholm seaside, Britain’s coastline has become assailed by a new moral panic: TikTok-inspired, flash-mob looting. Such behaviour is “appalling” and “unacceptable”, tutted Rishi Sunak this week, before …
Why looting has returned to London
Lockdown reportedly returned to Bexleyheath on Saturday. As rumours about an impending wave of “TikTok-fuelled looting” circulated on social media, shopkeepers debated whether it was safe to unlock their doors. Eventually they did, but only after a dispersal order was …