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Category: Britain

Britain Culture wars USA 

Mrs America and the start of the culture wars

Melanie, ,

Know much about Phyllis Schlafly? Indeed, have you even heard of her? Well, people are about to find out a lot more, and perhaps learn for the first time about the direct line from her to our current political and cultural tumult. Tomorrow BBC2 starts screening a brilliantly produced and addictive series, Mrs America. This deals with the tremendous fight put up in the 1970s by Schlafly, an anti-feminist, anti-abortion, anti-communist campaigner, against the US Equal Rights Amendment. That sought to end the legal distinctions between men and women over…

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Britain Culture wars USA 

The war against the west, and its defender

Melanie, , ,

Across America, law and order has now broken down. There are repeated attacks on the police and a huge spike in the number of murders. On FrontPageMag, John Perrazzo reports: “On Sunday, May 31, eighteen homicides were committed in Chicago, breaking the city’s previous one-day record of thirteen, set 29 years ago. In fact, over the course of that same weekend as a whole, Chicago police responded to at least 73 incidents in which 92 people were shot, including 27 who died as a result. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it at…

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Britain 

The red wall and the hole in Labour’s heart

Melanie, , ,

The Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, chose Armed Forces Day last week to launch a “Labour friends of the armed forces” programme, promising “an exciting new dialogue with forces communities”. Since his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, appeared to view the existence of Britain’s military capacity as a kind of stain on his conscience, Starmer’s gesture was intended as further evidence of a break with the far left. On this issue, however, he is also reaching out to part of the population whose support is essential if Labour is ever to regain…

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Britain 

It takes more than ideas to make an extremist

Melanie, , ,

There’s still much we don’t know about Saturday’s stabbings in Reading which left three dead and others injured. The suspect, Khairi Saadallah, was arrested on suspicion of murder and then re-arrested under the Terrorism Act. Over the past three years, the security service has uncovered and broken up 25 terrorist plots. But after the Reading atrocity, officials were quick to point out that the scale of Britain’s terrorism threat means that such apparent “lone wolf” attacks are very hard to prevent. But there’s another reason why the authorities are finding…

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Britain Culture wars Jewish people USA 

Why even black and brown-skinned Jews are “white imperialists”

Melanie, , ,

The experience of being an immigrant group and living as a minority in an often hostile culture is, of course, one that diaspora Jews know only too well. There are obviously huge differences, though, between the Jewish and black experience. Yet one of the most important is overlooked. In Britain and America, as we have seen over the past few weeks, a movement is under way to rewrite American and British history with the aim of changing the culture. The charge is that white society is endemically racist. This is…

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Sky Audio Britain 

On Boulton show: Boris’s lost mojo, Covid confusion

Melanie, , ,

I took part in a podcast hosted by Adam Boulton on his Sky TV show, All Out Politics, with the editor of politics.co.uk Ian Dunt and Sky’s political correspondent, Kate McCann. We discussed why the government seemed to be veering all over the place, changing its mind over one policy after another, producing confused messages over Covid-19 and with ministers making absurd gaffes. We also discussed the controversial merger of the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office, a move criticised by three former Prime Ministers, and whether Boris…

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Audio Britain 

Systemic racism in the moral maze

Melanie, ,

On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, the first show in the new series, we discussed systemic racism in the light of the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. We asked whether Britain really was a society characterised by systemic racism, as campaigners allege, and whether “white privilege” exists, or whether these claims have been exaggerated out of all proportion and used to defame a country which has bent over backwards to lessen discrimination. On the panel with me were Matthew Taylor, Nazir Afzal and Nesrine Malik. Our witnesses were Jude…

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Britain Coronavirus Global conflict 

We didn’t learn the lessons from Salisbury

Melanie, , ,

The subject of the current BBC three-part series, The Salisbury Poisonings, was always going to unsettle an audience. Against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, its effect is even more frightening. The drama reconstructs the events in 2018 after a Russian double agent for MI6, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok at his house in Salisbury. It’s remarkable that this series was largely made before the Covid pandemic erupted. For the parallels are astonishing. It focuses on Wiltshire’s director of public health,…

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Britain Culture wars Israel USA 

The unmistakeable echoes in the culture war against the west

Melanie

In Britain, statues of historical figures associated with colonialism or slavery are being pulled down or slated for removal. This is to appease the Black Lives Matters activists and their supporters, both black and white, who have seized upon the appalling death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody to claim that western society is fundamentally racist. The destruction of these statues and other similar artifacts, which are part of the cultural memory of a civilization, inescapably calls to mind another act of cultural extermination — the Nazi regime’s burning…

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Blake Britain Culture wars USA 

“Taking a knee” to the destroyers of worlds

Melanie, , ,

Over the years, I have repeatedly warned in these columns that the refusal of the political establishment to defend the integrity of the western nation and its culture has opened the way for noxious forces to occupy the vacuum. We’ve seen this in both the spread through the west of jihadi Islam and the rise across Europe of political parties and groups with racist or fascist backgrounds and antecedents. In the current convulsions triggered by the violent death of George Floyd in American police custody, this baleful development has reached…

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