Category: Britain

The Times (£) reports today that a white Christian child was taken from her family and forced to live with a niqab-wearing foster carer in a home where she was allegedly encouraged to learn Arabic. The story says that child was placed in not one but two Muslim foster homes, against the wishes of her family, by the London borough of Tower Hamlets. “In confidential local authority reports seen by The Times, a social services supervisor describes the child sobbing and begging not to be returned to the foster carer’s home…

Police officers are about to start piping classical music into the notoriously troubled Broadwater Farm estate in north London in an attempt to calm the atmosphere and disperse troublemakers. Relations between estate residents and the police have been poor for decades. In 1985 rioting there resulted in the murder of PC Keith Blakelock; further rioting broke out in 2011 and spread around the country over the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan, an estate resident, in the course of an arrest. The suggestion that piping Mozart into Broadwater Farm…

A male politician has said that men are better suited than women to fill top posts in society. This is because they possess the competitive drive that builds success and are less likely than women to feel the low self-worth that destroys achievement. OK, calm down, no male politician said that; I made it up. Obviously if a prominent man had said such a thing his heels wouldn’t have been seen for dust. Yet women have been making equivalent prejudicial remarks about men that are supposed to be not only…

My piece on the Charlie Gard case, which went super-viral on social media, has now been republished by the London Sunday Times. That article itself is behind a paywall. But of course you can still read the original piece here.

Last night a tribute to Princess Diana was transmitted on ITV. The film showed that, 20 years after her death, Princes William and Harry are still grieving. It’s not just that, even now, they miss the mother so brutally snatched from them at such a young age. They are still forlornly trying to manage lives ripped apart by the breakdown of their parents’ marriage. This was all most deeply touching. We felt their pain. Yet wasn’t that exactly where the whole Diana thing spun out of control? To read my…

The reason why conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have lost their way so badly in recent years is that they never understood, and paid scant attention to, the culture wars. In Britain, this has now led some of them to come out as warriors on the wrong side. Conservatism is not an ideology but an attitude of mind. It involves identifying and holding onto what is most valuable and defending it against erosion or attack. In the 18th century this was embodied in the thinking of Edmund Burke,…