Category: Britain

No-one should be in the slightest doubt about the titanic struggle becoming more desperate by the day to defend British democracy and restore the UK as an independent self-governing nation. An all-out attempt is being being made to frustrate the wish of the British people, expressed by 52 to 48 per cent in the 2016 referendum, to leave the EU. Last night, after a day of drama and arm-twisting, Theresa May’s government narrowly escaped defeat over the EU Withdrawal Bill. A number of amendments to the bill, which had been…

Prostitution: men shouldn’t get all the blame At the University of Cincinnati, the sex war has reached an absurd impasse. A male and female student who woke up together after a drunken encounter have each complained of sexual assault by the other. Some have speculated that the case might signal a weakening of the presumption that women are invariably victims of male sexual aggression. This premise lies behind the Commons women and equalities committee inquiry into sexual harassment to which I was invited to give evidence last week. The word…

What do Sir Martin Moore-Bick and Sir John Mitting have in common? Both are distinguished former judges. Both head public inquiries. Moore-Bick chairs the one dealing with the Grenfell tower fire; Mitting chairs the one looking at claims that undercover policemen who infiltrated various groups deceived women members into sexual relationships. The two have something else in common. Both are under heavy attack from victims and complainants who are demanding they be removed from their posts. Everyone “knows” there should be arrests after Grenfell. Everyone “knows” those undercover officers should…

While my Times column this morning has attracted much support (for which, many thanks to all) other brains appears to have been exploding over my argument that there is no moral equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia. The New Statesman has devoted an entire article, no less, to what it calls my “terrible column on the ‘fiction’ of Islamophobia, annotated”. Writer Nicky Woolf laboriously holds up paragraph after paragraph for scrutiny. Presumably she intends to demonstrate that not one of my arguments can withstand the force of such forensic analysis. Alas,…

Islamophobia is a fiction to shut down debate Remarks I made on BBC TV’s Sunday Politics seem to have caused some controversy. Even before the credits started to roll, Twitter was going into meltdown. I had said there was no equivalence between antisemitism and Islamophobia. The former was a deranged demonisation of a people; the latter was used to shut down debate. Cue foaming outrage. No matter that I acknowledged the existence of prejudice against Muslims, just as against Sikhs, Hindus and others. In denying Islamophobia, I was an Islamophobic…