Before a number of Britons took to the streets protesting against asylum hotels, raising the flag, painting the red cross at roundabouts, online agitators in the UK looked to the US for a lead, longing for a similar Trumpian regime change.

There were calls for our American cousins to colonise us, free us, or at least support us in the battle royal between the Labour government and the people it was elected to represent.

The historic ‘special relationship’ took on a new form, one that is less an official solidarity between the nations and more a natural allegiance between the natives. Currently, a large contingent of Britons are continuing to take to the streets to bring about not so much a ‘revolution’ but what David Starkey recently referred to as a ‘restoration’. To paraphrase Alexander Pope: Hope springs internal. Of course if Britons have to fight this war alone they will, but assistance from America is welcome. Particularly if it comes sooner rather tha…

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In recent weeks, two types of women in revolt have been sighted on the streets of Britain, defined by opposing outlooks and experiences. One group rails against Israel, the other objects to illegal immigration.

What they have in common is their sex. They are mothers, wives, grandmothers, but there the similarities end. What divides them is class.

Provincial middle-class protesters have become a spectacle in a market town in Somerset, a county colonised by the Lib Dem vote perhaps more than any other. In the market square of Wells, the smallest city in England, they gather on Saturday mornings banging pots and pans, accompanied by a sandwich board calling for sanctions on Israel, much to the annoyance of the stall holders attempting to earn a living. That’s not an issue for this handful of women, as they’ve passed pensionable age. Two of them, former teachers, returned to Wells as conquering heroes following their arrest at a rally in support of Palestine Action in Cardiff, with their adventurous day out becoming a major story in a minor local newspaper.

These are the same ancient activists who block roads for Just Stop Oil, or cling to ‘Refugees Welcome’ signs between bread-making classes. A type as I say. They shop at Waitrose (while boycotting the Israeli goods), they buy shapeless tops from Seasalt and sport hairstyles that belong on Colette or Mary Beard. The women of Wells on pan duty for Palestine wear a shade of burgundy reminiscent of that required by devotees of the bygone religious cult of free love, Rajneeshpuram.

‘Who radicalised Nan?’, began Tom Slater, when examining this breed of silver-haired female activists in the Telegraph recently. It’s a type, a trend, a cult. Rumour has it that there have been sightings of similar women, of a similar age, armed with similar pots and pans, in similar settings. But larger crowds of females from another class with their own pressing concerns are evident in other towns and cities, swelling in numbers with each passing week.

In London’s East End, working-class women taking to the streets don’t have the luxury of returning to rural middle-class homes after a day of demonstrating. What needles them, what has propelled them to protest, doubtless for the first time, is an immediate threat that’s on their doorstep: illegal immigrants housed in hotels and buildings on the streets in which they have spent their lives.

These women are all ages. The younger are accompanied by their children, with the elders supported by walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs and mobility scooters. They are captured on camera doing the conga, breaking into a rendition of ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’, holding a sit-in outside the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. These happenings followed in the wake of protesters congregating outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, a postcode familiar to those who were part of the diaspora when East Enders made the voyage out to Essex, to become home owners.

Events in Epping have pressurised the district council to apply for an injunction to close down the asylum hotel, but this is yet to be acted upon. In Westminster, government ministers have been silent on the impact of these protests, and those in Waterlooville, Diss, Bournemouth and elsewhere. This is also true of the mainstream media, leaving a clearing for citizen journalists, activists and GB News reporters to cover the story.

Beyond the Labour government’s silence exists a sinister attempt to censor these protesters and prevent similar events – largely using the Online Safety Act, which introduced age restrictions on content in July, having been passed into law by the Conservative government in 2023. The police at these protests threaten those gathered with arrest for public-order offences that could result in lengthy sentences. This further confirms the two-tier policing operation that takes a far softer approach to counter-protesting interlopers – from other postcodes, other classes – masked by balaclavas and keffiyehs.

The face coverings conceal the identity of ‘Antifa’ activists who are as interchangeable as the marches and counter-demonstrations they join to bring about disruption and confrontation. They lack the impetus that has roused the women assembling with local men outside asylum hotels throughout the country. They are motivated by the detrimental impact an influx of strangers will have on their neighbourhoods and on local services. As one of the organisers of the Canary Wharf demonstration is quoted as saying, they are well aware that not all these migrants are paedophiles or rapists, but they are unwilling to ‘play roulette’ with their children’s lives.

The women returning to protest at Canary Wharf have earned the title ‘pink ladies’, because they turn up wearing assorted pink garments, which bring a softer, amenable look compared with the cult of the ancient sisterhood in a certain market town. Yet they are referred to as ‘far right’ by left-wingers who have never lived in the streets native to these women, and never will. In response to the predictable name-calling, they march behind a banner bearing the words: ‘We are not far right but we’re not far wrong. Stop the boats.’ Yet still the slurs occur. At the prospect of a protest in Bristol, Carla Denyer, MP for Bristol Central and co-leader of the Green Party, declared:

‘Today a far-right protest is expected to take place outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Bristol. Let me be clear: the far right are not welcome in Bristol. They don’t represent us, or what we stand for.’

Arguably, the politics and pedigree of a middle-class woman like Denyer, daughter of a scientist mother, with a father who worked for the Ministry of Defence, do not represent the majority of Britons – particularly the working-class women taking to the streets of the East End.

The attacks on these women, and the men they march alongside, are reminiscent of the verbal assaults on Leave voters who triumphed in the EU referendum from middle-class Remainers, hinting that the background and social status of the victors should have prevented them from having a say. It’s an attitude that goes back even further, to the age when Matthew Arnold popularised the term ‘populace’ in the 19th century, and later when the poorer classes from the London docks took to West End streets, flags raised, to celebrate the relief of Mafeking in South Africa, following a seven-month siege during the Boer War. One observer compared them to ‘rats emerging from a sewer’.

Centuries pass, times change and still the bleat goes on. Figures from the left post their reactions on X to the recent protests, referring to these characters as the worst of Britain, as jobless scroungers and benefit cheats. Leading trade unionists not only support those antagonising these working-class men and women, but also reputedly fund them. At an Epping protest, Ed Harlow, vice-president of the National Education Union, addressed the ‘Stand Up To Racism’ demonstrators with a comical, tone-deaf speech that knowingly overlooked the class and concerns of the locals protesting nearby: ‘The enemies of working people in this country are not staying in hotels in Epping. The enemies of people in this country are floating around the Med on super yachts.’

Among those relevant to the new trade unionism of the late 19th century were the unskilled ‘matchgirls’ from the Bryant & May factory, who famously went on strike for better working conditions in 1888. Then as now, East End local working-class women are taking on a contemporary challenge. One that they are generally fighting alone, with an absence of support from women from other parts, other classes. Many, but not all, feminist writers and pundits from the middle class and upwards, rightfully forthright on misogyny and male violence, are silent on the hotels issue.

To their detractors, the women protesting are as much a type as the provincial middle-class women wearing Crocs and banging pots in the West Country. If so, it’s a type many of us salute. Their voices, accents and histories are familiar to us, as are the streets they walk and the city that formed them. The elders among these women are from the last generation of men and women who witnessed or were privy to harsh times, deep struggles and a conflict that saw the East End ablaze during the London Blitz. They have buried parents, husbands and maybe children long before their time. This might be their last battle, but it’s one they won’t retreat from.

For the younger ones it could be the first fight of many, in a city in which they have been discarded, and their history erased, by officials who hold them in contempt, and a London mayor who continues to cart around the washed-up corpse of multiculturalism, while ignoring key issues that are destroying the nation’s capital.

These women, these men, are part of a silent majority seeking a voice, just as their distant relatives and ancestors were, for other reasons. They have been stirred into action. Something has been awakened in them and their number elsewhere. It may be the beginning of a new dawn. As Edward Carpenter wrote in his famous ‘Socialist Marching Song’ from 1886: ‘England, arise! the long, long night is over.’ Or it may be the last gasp of a diminishing people in a dying nation. But if they’re going down, they’re taking this ship with them.

Originally published in Spiked.

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It’s more than two years since the death of Queen Elizabeth II at her beloved Balmoral Castle, and, in May, it will be two years on from the coronation of her first son, Charles.

The period of mourning that engulfed the House of Windsor has passed. The honeymoon period for the new monarch has come to an end. So, what kind of king is Charles at this juncture? It has been neither an easy run nor an easy reign for him thus far. There were the cancer diagnoses that threatened to take him out along with the Princess of Wales, and the domestic dramas that threatened the stature of the monarchy. Prince Andrew has become akin to a tumour the royals are keen to remove, or relegate to a frugal exile at Frogmore Cottage, in the grounds of Windsor Castle. (His links to sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein continue to haunt him.) Meanwhile, the manoeuvres of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have become less malignant, and may soon be in remission.

For some of us, the mona…

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There is much about the modern Labour Party to make the stately politicians from its past turn in their graves.

Think of Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, embarrassing themselves at the Pride Parade in London in 2022. Gay anthems played as Rayner indulged in a self-conscious shoulder roll, before Keir Starmer followed suit. This was before his current incarnation as ‘Starmer the Statesman’. This was ‘Queer Keir’, a heterosexual sexagenarian with glitter on his cheeks. He even sported his customary Barney Rubble look of confusion as though struggling with two thoughts simultaneously. Perhaps he was trying to remember who the Weather Girls were, and what made them biological women.

But it is London mayor Sadiq Khan who is surely most responsible for sending those regal figures from Labour’s past spinning in their graves. His identitarian posturing is ceaseless, his support for voguish causes tireless. He embodies perhaps all that is wrong with the modern Labour Party.

He was also at Pride on the same day as Starmer and Rayner, rallying the crowds while welcoming his comrades to his fiefdom, his Trumpton. ‘The great thing about London is that if you’re different, you aren’t simply tolerated, you’re respected, celebrated and embraced’, he said. ‘That’s who we are: open-minded, outward looking.’ Yet he was oblivious to just how provincial this outlook is. He seems to assume that those in London, and beyond it, who challenge this fantasy, who don’t share his worldview, are the enemy. And this is the main problem with the current mayor: he is arguably the most divisive leading politician in Britain today.

Not that this would concern a figure of Khan’s imagined stature. He seems to believe his position is more presidential than municipal. He even has a security team which provides, as he himself put it last year, ‘the same level of protection the prime minister and the king receive’. He effectively surrounds himself with metaphorical henchmen, too, ready to fend off justified criticisms of his crass political posturing and unpopular policies. The many opponents of his expanded Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) have been attacked and demonised a ‘far right’. And those drawing attention to his failure to tackle the ever-rising rates of knife crime or the capital’s deepening housing crisis – despite his pledges to do so way back in 2016 – have been wilfully ignored.

On paper, Khan has forged a brilliant career, a product of application, ambition and, above all, impeccable timing. Born in Tooting, south London, in 1970 to a working-class Muslim family, he studied to become a lawyer when human-rights law turned the profession into a truly lucrative industry. And he became the member of parliament for Tooting in 2005, when New Labour was on a winning streak.

Good timing also aided his first mayoral bid in 2016. He may have been mocked for making much of his father being a bus driver, but in that moment it provided a welcome contrast to the upper-class pedigree of previous mayor Boris Johnson and of then Tory opponent, Zac Goldsmith. Khan won the 2016 mayoral election with ease, before winning again in 2021 with slightly less.

He has profited from the rise of social media, too. Indeed, the tweet is Khan’s communication of choice. He was one of the first politicians to capitalise on its usage when he chose it to announce his appointment as transport minister in 2009 when Labour were in government. And he has continued to use X, as it’s now called, ever since – mainly to wage his self-aggrandising culture wars, from endlessly attacking Brexit to grandstanding against Donald Trump.

Khan may have been a moderate Labour MP and minister in the 2000s. But his mayoral tenure has been defined by virtue-signalling self-promotion and militant identitarianism. Take his response to the Covid pandemic in 2020. He used it as an opportunity not to unify Londoners, but to spout critical race theory and talk of ‘structural racism’. Or take his oafish anti-sexism campaigns, ‘Have A Word’ in 2022 and ‘Say Maaate to a Mate’ in 2023. The TV adverts for both implied that ‘toxic masculinity’ is the condition of white men, with their black and brown brothers tasked with enlightening them.

While Khan looks the other way on the scourge of knife crime, he eagerly talks up the terror threat of the far right, and was quick to use the T-word after a Welshman drove a van into a group of Muslim worshippers, causing one death, in Finsbury Park in 2017. ‘London stands united against terrorism’, he said at the time. Yet his language has been far more tentative when it comes to addressing Islamist attacks – attacks that have destroyed too many lives to list.

It seems that Khan is similar to too many other figures on the ‘modern’ left who once fought against actual racism and sexism. Now change has come about, bringing progress in the main, he is lost for a cause. And so in the name of identity politics, he busily reignites the embers of old grievances and revives old battles.

Khan takes an approach to London’s past that is as selective and divisive as his approach to present-day issues. Last summer, he tweeted that London ‘was built by migrants’ and ‘refugees’. This came as a surprise to Londoners whose ancestry is synonymous with the city – particularly the white working-class Londoners who were seen as a blot on the landscape of multiculturalism when they lived there, and provincial racists when they made the voyage out of the city during the second half of the 20th century. Many of them were born in the poorer postcodes of the capital long before these became gentrified and colonised by self-entitled cyclists. These Londoners, or their relatives, worked in the docks, factories, markets and warehouses. They laboured on building sites, laid the tarmac for roads and the cables that ran beneath them.

Londoners knew them. They were our families, our ancestors. Now, those of us who evacuated the city return as ghosts to familiar streets to visit ancient relatives. They too will soon join those whose bones lie beneath soil and stone on cemetery plots beyond the urban streets where they lived their lives, and in the suburbs where their children lived theirs. They are dust and ashes now. But the memory of them is immersed in the city many remember and which some attempted to capture in poetry, pop and prose. As WB Yeats wrote: ‘This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually.’

Mayor Khan seems to think he can re-write and ‘improve’ this history of London. In 2021, as part of his Diversity Commission’s ‘Untold Stories’ project, he claimed that ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength but for far too long our capital’s statues, street names and buildings have only shown a limited perspective on our city’s complex history’. Just this month, he announced that several London Overground lines are to be renamed along predictably right-on lines, with Windrush, Lioness and Mildmay lines arriving among others in the near future. They are a nod, said Khan, to London’s diverse history.

To this mayor and other figures on what passes for the left today, it seems that London’s and indeed Britain’s familiar history is a source of shame. It is useful only when it is being renamed, refashioned and often simply fabricated to satisfy the ‘diverse’ fantasies of our cultural elites.

And so Khan claims that multiculturalism has always defined London. He suggests that the waves of mass immigration into the city and the country more broadly in recent decades have forever been the norm rather than an anomaly. This argument, like the lexicon around race to which the left plays lip service, is risible.

In spite of the revisionism, the factual history of London as many experienced it is there for those prepared to look, listen and learn. London and the traditional concept of the Londoner was once defined by the working class. This was the demographic most likely to remain in the capital, because of a lack of options. They were likely to be born there, raised there and end their lives there, very likely within the same neighbourhood. Although tribal and localised, they incorporated whatever changes were imposed upon them and the city, whether it was the eradication of the infrastructure of their neighbourhoods or the shift in demographics, attributable to the high level of immigrants moving to beleaguered postcodes.

From the 1980s onwards, the official emphasis ceased to be on the integration of immigrants. Instead, policymakers demanded that the natives accommodate themselves to the new arrivals, even when the newcomers’ tribalism was more rigid than that of the established Londoner. This resulted in communities defined by faith, and sometimes race, dominating parts of London – as it did in other cities, too. This lack of integration has been cheered on by a white middle class, eager to flag up the edginess and vibrancy of the capital from the comfort of their leafy or gentrified postcodes. And it has been observed contentedly by super-rich foreigners, perched high up in their shielded Ballardian towers.

Mayor Khan hails this division, this factionalism, with the mantra, ‘Diversity is our strength’. It’s rhetoric that deafens the ears it falls upon, and dies on the lips of Khan’s supporters. The conflictual reality of ‘diverse’ London does sometimes bubble to the surface. Such as last year, when a crowd descended on an Asian shopkeeper’s business in Peckham, south London, because he retaliated when attacked by a black shoplifter he challenged. But like crime statistics, particularly the knife crime for which young black men are disproportionately the perpetrators, but not always the victim, such events are sidelined by the mayor’s office.

If the multiculturalism Sadiq Khan celebrates had emerged from London itself, a product of a city’s inhabitants absorbing influences from outside and evolving over time to form a new Londoner, that would be one thing. But Khan’s multiculturalism is not organic. It’s an elite imposition, a result of encouraging and incentivising minorities to cultivate and ‘celebrate’ their difference.

In 2022, Khan attended the ceremony for the launch of the Bangladeshi signage on Whitechapel Tube station – a first, as no other station has the official name in anything but English. ‘London’s diversity is its greatest strength’, Khan announced, as though road-testing a tweet. ’The revamped signs at Whitechapel station celebrate the vital contribution Bangladeshi Londoners have made in shaping the community in Tower Hamlets and throughout our city.’ Exactly what contribution has this community made that warrants a privilege never accorded to any other immigrant group? Surely Khan should be promoting a common language, shared values and aims to bring the people of the capital together? But instead he seems intent on emphasising the differences that drive Londoners apart.

Predictably, any effort to highlight the failures of multiculturalism in London and Britain more broadly is met with the standard insults from the usual pundits. Last year, the then UK home secretary, Suella Braverman, claimed that the ‘misguided dogma of multiculturalism’ now threatens social cohesion. The rhetoric of the Tories when highlighting the flaws in multiculturalism may be empty. But no more so than the slogans of Labour apparatchiks celebrating it. In response to Braverman’s criticism, wealthy celebrities flagged up curries and carnivals. Others knowingly conflated the fact of living in a diverse society with state multiculturalism, the very policy that emphasises cultural difference over common values, and that is helping to divide the capital. ‘Diversity is our strength’, they said again.

This phrase, and Sadiq Khan’s use of it ad nauseam, epitomises the crassness that has defined his time as mayor. Like Queer Keir’s glittered cheeks, it’s an embarrassing attempt to tie his wagon to relevance and modernity. He has even reached for it in response to the now habitual ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, brimful with anti-Semitism, that have erupted on to our streets. In October, Khan tweeted that ‘anyone inciting violence or hatred in London will have strong action taken against them’, without mentioning who the victims or the perpetrators might be. Yet the day an estimated 100,000 people marched through the streets of London against anti-Semitism, he neither commented nor responded.

It’s a grim irony. Despite rambling on about diversity and repeatedly informing Londoners ‘they’ will never divide us, Khan remains the most divisive politician we have.

Through his identitarian politicking, he has helped to sow antagonism throughout London. Khan has created a divide between those who believe in the values of freedom and tolerance and those who do not. And now many of the latter are calling for jihad and venting their hatred of the Jewish State on the streets of London.

Unlike the useful idiots attending these ‘pro-Palestine’ marches, the old Labourites now turning in their graves held conviction for the causes they supported. The current mob of graduates and grifters will either leave London and grow into the people they loathe, or remain the people that everyone else loathes, by dragging their psychoses, cosplay and homemade placards into middle age. They will hopefully prove irrelevant in the greater history of a once great city.

Mayor Khan, meanwhile, will be a footnote, because of the office he held, and because he was the first Muslim to hold it. In an interview with The Big Issue last year, he claimed he was ‘proud’ of ‘a number of things’. These ‘things’ seemed to consist of reaching air-pollution-reduction targets, planting trees and installing electric-car charging points. No mention of increasing the housing stock, tackling violent knife crime or improving a dilapidated transport system. When it comes to the fundamental changes required to improve the lot of Londoners who are not well-heeled electric-car drivers, his legacy can be covered in the length and depth of one of his tweets, if that.

Originally published in Spiked.

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Today is Stephen Lawrence Day. It commemorates the 30th anniversary of the lethal stabbing of 18-year-old Lawrence in Eltham, south-east London, at the hands of a gang of young men.

Initially, six suspects were arrested but not charged, before the Lawrence family launched an unsuccessful private prosecution against five of them in 1994. It was not until 2012, after a change in the law allowing individuals to be tried twice for the same offence, that two of the gang were eventually convicted of Lawrence’s murder.

Do I need to add more details? Isn’t this one instance where the name of the victim – Stephen Lawrence – is enough to conjure up a tragedy and summon a sequence of events?Many will be able to immediately recall that photograph of the teenager in a blue and white striped top. It is sometimes cropped to remove Lawrence’s slightly raised fist, as if some fear this gesture would take away from the severity of the crime in some way. But ar…

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Even before Harriet Harman married the trade unionist and Labour MP Jack Dromey, she felt the need to tone down her accent.

Born on Harley Street to a barrister mother and doctor father, she was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School. Her family tree extends from illustrious politicians to the descendants of high-profile peers: Neville Chamberlain is in there, along with numerous countesses and earls; David Cameron is a relative; Boris Johnson’s godmother, Lady Rachel Billington, is her cousin.

Johnson is central to what is likely to be Harman’s last major role as a parliamentarian (our longest-serving female MP is retiring after 40 years) as chair of the House of Commons Privileges Committee investigating “Partygate”. The forthcoming hearing could bury what remains of Johnson’s reputation. Politically, he is the antithesis of everything Harman stands for. Personally, he epitomises all that she abhors about the men in the …

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When it comes to race and the left – certainly the wealthy white left, definitely the middle-class left – it is as if left-wingers have not progressed since being unceremoniously exposed as a type by Tom Wolfe, in his mammoth essay, ‘Radical Chic’, over half a century ago.

Other writers also had their number, including black authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The event Wolfe documents may not be familiar to a rising generation charting similar territory as chic revolutionaries on social media. It’s therefore worth providing a summary here. In the season of radical chic, as Wolfe refers to it, super-rich celebrities and socialites were indulging in a political cocktail of nostalgie de la boue and noblesse oblige, by staging fundraising parties – where sumptuous hors d’oeuvre were served – at New York duplexes on Park Avenue. Their pet causes were those raised by ethnic groups who were politicised – often rightfully so – by grievances that needed airing, axes that needed grinding.

Wolfe was present at a gathering hosted by hip maestro Leonard Bernstein in January 1970 to highlight the plight of the Black Panthers, some of whom were present, tucking into meatballs petites au Coq Hardi being dished out by white servants. The wealthy, wide-eyed guests were in awe; they had never met a Black Panther before. (Arguably, some of them had never met a black person before, apart from those handing them meatballs petites au Coq Hardi at Park Avenue parties before black power and white servants were de rigueur.) They were smitten: the Cuban shades, Shaft leathers and Afro Sheen. The lithe Panther wives could have stepped from the pages of Vogue which, as Wolfe points out, was in on the act with a ‘Soul Food’ column listing the ingredients for sweet-potato pone, and the interview in which an inane socialite excitedly announced, ‘the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes’.

Wolfe’s essay, for New York magazine, is brutal and forensic in exposing the crass hypocrisy on display. (Wolfe recalled: ‘The English, particularly, milked the story for all it was worth and seemed to derive one of the great cackles of the year from it.’) Bernstein was ostracised by some, ridiculed by many more, and, along with other rich Jewish radicals, distanced himself from the Panthers when it transpired their anti-Semitism was as virulent as their animosity towards ‘the Man’, the bourgeoisie and goys in general.

Well, that was 1970. More than half a century on, the left’s take on race, over there and over here, is still at the stage of those socialites waxing lyrical about ‘baby blacks’. In fact, it’s worse. For the left, black men and women continue to fall into one of two categories, often both: the poor victim oppressed by Big Bad Whitey; and the soulful exotic, with a natural sense of rhythm and a covetable spicy diet. It’s the contemporary equivalent of casting them as the slave or the maid. It’s old. It’s tired. But it never stops. Society has moved on in relation to race, but the white radicals who campaign for change have not.

In the decades since Wolfe’s essay was published racism has diminished rapidly, while laws introduced to tackle it have increased apace. A lucrative cottage industry has become a booming global business. Think of the unemployment if ‘racism’ were truly eradicated, particularly in the public sector. What would become of this massive protection racket that has capitalists, technocrats and mediacrats fearful the mob will come for them if they don’t pay up, by way of fulfilling diversity quotas and taking the knee? These days everyone is on the bus, and no one has to give up their seat.

Yet the goalposts are forever shifting because with racism, unlike with the end of, say, segregation, there is no finish line. The remit of the term is redefined as often as the words to describe ethnic minorities are rewritten. In ‘Radical Chic’, Wolfe refers to the racial etiquette that plagues ‘cultivated persons’ on the left: ‘one says blacks, of course. It is the only word, currently, that implicitly shows one’s awareness of the dignity of the black race.’ This went the way of ‘coloured’ for a while, to be surpassed by BAME and then POC, to fully represent the diversity and solidarity of the ethnic demographic. But these are no longer au courant, such is the moveable feast that is racial etiquette. ‘Black’ has now struck out on its own again, bigger and bolder than before, with the distinguishing feature of an official capital B.

The meaning of racism has come a long way since solely being identified with evidential prejudice and discrimination. It has covered the waterfront: institutionalised racism, unwitting prejudice, systemic racism. It landed on white privilege, which is pretty much where we are now according to figures in the civil service and elsewhere. Everything from art galleries to rambling and knitting circles are racist, even though there are no Klansmen or water cannons preventing anyone from entering or participating. But actual evidence is not needed as proof when projection will suffice. Like Meghan Markle’s version of the truth, it is entirely subjective.

‘If you believe that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards’, Thomas Sowell has said, ‘that would have gotten you labelled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today’. A more positive development in that time is that the race debate no longer divides people along racial lines. On both sides of the divide created by identity politics, there is a crowd of diverse colours, faiths and affiliations. It’s simply that those critical of the detrimental impact of identitarianism are also diverse in their opinions and outlook. Coming out in this corner are lower-case uppity whites, Asians accused of ‘brown silence’, and Jews expecting to be subjected to anti-Semitism when, momentarily, white gentiles get a breather from being the beast of burden. Also here, black men and women – like those contenders in the Conservative leadership race – are cast as honorary honkies at best and ‘coons’ and ‘house niggers’ at worse. A white academic coined a phrase for their condition: ‘multiracial whiteness’. No, they are experiencing something black men and women have never ever intentionally subjected themselves to throughout their entire history… embarrassment. They are mortified by all that is being done in their name, and often by white people with the subtlety of the rich socialists and thick socialites Wolfe once mocked. Ralph Ellison’s words were written for a darker time, a different climate, but they strike a chord in the present with those being cast as the wrong type of black person. ‘What and how much had I lost’, he wrote, ‘by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?’.

It’s as though those on the left, so enamoured with multiculturalism and racial diversity, are equally insecure and uncertain around it. They rightly champion equality but are uncomfortable in treating ethnic groups as equals; whites are demonised and everyone else is canonised. Black is forever brilliant and beautiful; people with brown skins never do bad things. It’s a luxury, their caucasian compatriots, born on the wrong side of the tracks (for some of us – the wrong side of the Thames) don’t have. In the baby years of this century, I wrote in The Likes Of Us how the urban white working class had experienced black people as lovers, spouses, partners, neighbours, friends and carers, as well as racists, rapists, muggers and murderers. They saw in them the good, the bad and the ugly. In short, themselves.

I’ve rolled out this routine before, but to the equivalent of a matinee crowd in a half-empty house, so it’s worth reprising it here. Those of us who went to those schools and lived in those neighbourhoods had to accommodate immigration and confront race issues on real terms. We were not our parents. We had better opportunities and different outlooks. Our friends looked different to theirs. We had mates who were black and brown. Some of us took black boyfriends and homosexuality home when we were barely out of our teens. Years later, long after former partners had died long before their time, to rest beneath soil and stone in up and coming postcodes, the memory of them returns on anniversaries and autumn afternoons, and a line from Morrissey comes to mind: ‘My one true love is under the ground.’ But apparently even white people with black partners, who they’ve laughed, cried and climaxed with, can be unaware they are inherently racist. Maybe the love and the loyalty blinds them to the news that they are bigots.

Returning to that familiar routine, and that familiar theme, I’d add this: wecovered race years ago because of where we lived; because of who we lived among; because we had to. Yet here we are years later being schooled on this topic by provincial middle-class white people who lived white lives in white worlds until they graduated, moved to the city, moved into the media, politics or the equalities industry, and began educating us about racism. You couldn’t write it down – but some of us did, in a book now 18 years old. You couldn’t write it down – but we do, even though we bore ourselves as much as those on the left who see us as race pundits, grifters and uppity whites. We do so in the hope that one day we will drive the italicised point home, and park it. Like Wolfe, Baldwin, Ellison and a cast of millions: We have your number. We’ve had it for decades.

We had it in the 1970s, during the moral panic around ‘mugging’, when the assailants were disproportionately black, while those attacked were disproportionately white. This trend was dismissed as a myth, which meant the far right could claim it and create further racial division. The riots of the 1980s were written up by the left as the modern Peterloo, while the chaos, the violence, that devastated working-class neighbourhoods and the morale of the locals went overlooked. You could once argue that the failure of those to be critical of these episodes was attributable to being ignorant or disingenuous, but ultimately such excuses diminished when this became the official take, and then something of a tradition on the left. Years after the 2011 riots that decimated Clapham Junction, a fellow writer told me of a dinner party peopled by Guardian loyalists, during which guests expressed surprise that every shop had been raided except Waterstones. ‘That’s because the book is sacred’, one of those present put in, with no hint of irony. (Or perhaps the looters took off with plasma screens, consoles and computers because they didn’t have the manpower to lift the unabridged Proust.) Like I say, you couldn’t write it down, but we do, to constantly remind ourselves of the stupidity we’re up against.

The official point at which crimes where victims were white and perpetrators were not were deracialised followed the murder of Richard Everitt in London in 1994, the year after Stephen Lawrence was killed. The two tragedies were strikingly similar, except that Everitt was an innocent white teenager murdered by a gang of Bangladeshis. The organisations, the quangos, the lawyers who took the prosecution side in the Lawrence case, took the part of the defence in the aftermath of the Everitt murder. Where racism became central to the Lawrence case, actual proof of racism was deemed irrelevant in the Everitt case. When one of the culprits in Everitt’s murder was charged on the principle of joint enterprise, because blood on his clothing put him at the scene of the crime, the anti-racist lobby took to the streets in protest. In 2012, that same lobby was celebrating when clothing with specks of blood, belonging to the Lawrence suspects, came to light. Lawrence’s killers were sentenced on the principle of joint enterprise.

This marked a tradition that has continued ever since for crimes in which perpetrators are black, brown or Muslim and the victims are – generally or largely – white. We’ve been privy to it after too many Islamist attacks to list here, where the lone-wolf motif and mental illness are swiftly introduced, as race and ideology are removed from the equation. We solemnly remember those slaughtered and forget the motivation of the culprit. A similar ritual, a similar silence is found each time another exposé on Pakistani grooming gangs emerges. For the contemporary left it is as if racism, rape and terrorism only warrant rage when those responsible are white.

It’s not that the lives of the white victims of these crimes don’t matter, it’s that the ethnicity or faith of the perpetrators does, which is why we’re expected to keep schtum and move on. It’s not that lives of white victims in race crimes don’t matter, it’s that they can’t be seen to matter as much as when the victims are black – unless the murderer is as well. Then silence descends, and we’re expected to keep schtum and move on… again. ‘To yell “black-on-black crime”’, author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, ‘is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding’. Even if they – or any of us – could make sense of this statement, it would be of little comfort to the family of Sasha Johnson. The British Black Lives Matter foot soldier remains in a hospital bed, paralysed, taken down by bullets from a black man with a gun. As soon as news of the attack spread, the usual race pundits and grifters rallied. In a misguided moment of lucidity, Labour MP Diane Abbott implied in a tweet that Johnson had been shot by racists because ‘she stood up for racial justice’. In the clearing, before the truth came to light and the obligatory silence shut everything down – because some black lives matter more than others – it looked like the season of radical chic could be upon us again. Venues set; hors d’oeuvres assembled. Can you imagine?

But it is 50 years later, society has evolved, yet we are left with slogans, placards and chants as archaic as the Black Panther cosplay of Cuban shades, berets and raised leather fists. The theatrical antics of a discredited 21st-century movement that swept up a rising generation of spoilt white kids, who cast themselves as online revolutionaries, and wealthy elders reviving the radicalism of their youth. They are of a similar class, but generations apart, unified by their efforts to ‘rethink their attitudes’. To educate themselves. Just like that American socialite on the pages of Vogue, in less enlightened times, they are in awe of the sophistication of the baby blacks.

Originlly published in Spiked.

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Drag has come a long way since television presenter Robert Robinson, speaking on the BBC arts series The Look At The Week in 1967, implied it was a shady phenomenon creeping through respectable society.

Robinson, more wary than wry, referred to this burgeoning trend as something previously confined to the illicit world of homosexuality, which was legalised that year.

Homosexuality had spread to vicars and scout masters according to the press — now drag was muscling in on dockers and stevedores in cockney hinterlands. The programme featured the drag act Phil Starr at the City Tavern, Millwall. Starr, a wallpaper salesman by day, and someone akin to a brickie in a wig at night, explained how his best audience were women. They were even more appreciative than the male prisoners at his Wormwood Scrubs performances.

In Britain, drag was finding its way out of gay clubs and into east end pubs, as well as onto the stage of the Royal Variety Performance, where Danny La Rue was a regular sight into the 1970s. But Robert Robinson’s concerns were premature. It’s in the 21st century that drag has become “a new and concerning phenomenon”, as well as a familiar fixture as light entertainment. Beyond RuPaul’s Drag Race, it’s in ads, art galleries and on the catwalk.

More recently, and more worrying for some, it has found a footing elsewhere. From this month (in which the world celebrates International Drag Day) through to September, Drag Queen Story Hour UK will be touring British schools and libraries, holding classes for 3-11 year olds. Established in 2015 in the US, it claims to “inspire a love of reading, while teaching deeper lessons on diversity, self-love and an appreciation of others”. Sceptics are unsettled by this justification, believing that it contradicts safeguarding principles and government guidelines. Others level charges of misogyny.

In this high season of identity politics — with Stonewall exhausting every avenue in an effort to remain relevant and boost its revenue — you wonder if it’s a question of time before drag queens establish themselves as an imperilled and marginalised minority. Their politicisation has been in the offing for a while, as is evident with events like Drag Con, which began as a meet and greet for drag aficionados. Will there soon be a place on the Progress flag? Further hate crime legislation in the offing? Beyond the diminishing right wing evangelicals, always the folk devils in these fights, coming out fighting in the opposite corner are women who have an issue with female impersonation in whatever form it takes, whether drag or transgenderism.

Writing for The Critic in 2021, Dr Em had this to say: “Drag performers frequently reduce women to hyper sexualised, big breasted, big haired bimbos. Celebrated men in drag have names that objectify, sexualise or make light of women’s issues.” Women are split over the concept of drag — but perhaps they always were.

Those that found it misogynistic were overshadowed by the feminists and queer theorists in academia who perceived it to be an art form that subverted gender norms. In the 1990s, Camille Paglia referred to herself as the forerunner of “Drag Queen Feminism”, citing the transvestism of Warhol superstars like Candy Darling as her introduction to the form.

Before that there was Susan Sontag and her infamous essay which gave Camp the academic seal of approval, listing drag and androgyny — two very different things, actually — as central to the canon. In “Notes On Camp” (1964) she describes Camp as a sensibility, a private code among small urban cliques. Homosexuals were synonymous with this in her view, but capitalism and consumerism also played a part. Camp can only truly thrive in an affluent society.

Drag and camp are interchangeable because each derives from themes central to Sontag’s thesis: a love of the unnatural by way of artifice and exaggeration, particularly regarding sexual characteristics and personality traits. Things being what they are not. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style, according to Sontag, and style that is artifice is ultimately epicene. “Not a woman, but a ‘woman’,” she writes.

What has changed since the publication of Sontag’s essay is that the quotation marks have disappeared. Disturbingly, the very notion of what constitutes a woman is up for grabs. Meanwhile, the concerns and grievances of minority groups have found a voice in the mainstream, where the solidarity presumed to exist among them in the margins has imploded. At a time when the charge of cultural appropriation is a serious one, and the crime of “blackface” rallies the lynch mob, gay men become parodies of women and straight men graft themselves onto the trend for a cheap thrill or a cheap joke.

Following Ant & Dec appearing in drag on Saturday Night Takeaway, Julie Burchill expanded on the crudeness of the current take on “womanface”: “The drag queens of today do not seek to embody the elegance of women — as did Danny La Rue, the first drag queen to find fame on primetime TV — but a crude misogynistic stereotype, reflected in their names: Cheryl Hole, A’Whora and worse.”

Drag is no longer a harmless homage to the Hollywood of old, an act fuelled by blue jokes and bawdy innuendo. It’s taken on a sinister aspect, in which women’s bodies and genitalia are the punchline. The recent McCain ad featured drag queen Baga Chipz talking about “my big knockers”. The middle class graduates at the fore of alternative comedy attacked this approach when it was the schtick of working class comedians in the 1980s. Now their contemporary equivalents are its audience.

The prominence of drag in mainstream culture is part of a trend that embraces Sontag’s take on camp. But it also breaks with it. According to Sontag it was never political; it made the serious frivolous. Contemporary camp also makes the frivolous serious. It has lost its outsider status despite fervently clinging to it; it is no longer a subversive subculture. In 2013, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce wrote an essay in which he revised and updated Sontag’s original. He took her to task for arguing that Camp was apolitical, claiming that’s exactly what it was — until now, an age in which he sees “bad straight camp” and “conservative camp”.

Several years on, bad camp sums up what radical politics and political activism have become. The serious has become frivolous. The exaggeration, theatre and artifice of camp and drag colour the antics of Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion and the supporting cast of agitators that take to the streets, whether it’s women dressing as extras from The Handmaid’s Tale or Black Lives Matter foot soldiers reprising Black Panther costumes. In the aftermath of his death, George Floyd was inducted into the contemporary canon of bad camp. Even before his canonisation his open golden casket was displayed for the curious crowds — there was keening; there was mourning — as though he were Mandela or Evita.

Over here, British culture has been consumed by bad camp, particularly in the realm of politics and activism. This plummeted to new depths last month during Pride, when Progress flags were suspended across Regent Street (when there were Union Jacks during jubilee celebrations, “progressives” compared the country to Nazi Germany). On those same streets for the big finale, pantomime dame Keir Starmer with glitter on his cheeks and “Pride” on his t-shirt led the big parade accompanied by Angela Rayner dad-dancing to the outmoded, but obligatory, gay anthem as the London Mayor whipped up the crowd.

Where there was once pride there is now embarrassment. In the absence of a clear and valid cause there is bad camp and Drag Queen Story Hour. But as long as the dancing continues and the music plays, no one will hear the praiseworthy feminists, gay activists and civil rights campaigners of the past spinning in their graves. Many of the changes they agitated for have been achieved; many battles they fought have been won. What’s left in their wake is the bad camp, bad drag and cosplay of those that have yet to accept that society has moved on, and the parade has passed them by.

Originally published in The Critic.

Even before Brexit, the attitude of many in the Labour party towards traditional working class voters had been closer to contempt than camaraderie.

Last week was not only the sixth anniversary of the result, but the point when the left momentarily ditched minority issues. Trade unionism replaced transgenderism as a priority, in support of the RMT union — an organisation left-wing Remainers previously condemned for urging its members to vote Leave.

These workers were once again comrades-in-arms, because the industrial action was an opportunity to create chaos and, possibly, bring down a Tory government. Labour has failed to do as much via the ballot box for over a decade. Last week the party also clawed back a seat in the red wall which it lost in the 2019 general election, and failed to reclaim in the recent council elections. Yet the Wakefield by-election may be a false dawn, as many former Labour voters di…

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In a bid to restore its reputation, widen its remit and replenish its diminishing funds, Stonewall has begun to focus on less familiar groups within the infinite alphabet of LGBTQIA rights.

This follows the withdrawal of financial support for the charity’s Diversity Champions programme promoting inclusivity in the workplace when Channel 4, Ofsted, the Cabinet Office and the Equality and Human Rights Commission jettisoned the initiative. Driving Stonewall’s fall from grace has been its belligerent attitude to those with a different take on trans rights. Like society more broadly, Stonewall, which was established in 1989, has come a long way from the riot at New York’s Stonewall Inn twenty years earlier (an event Barack Obama compared with Selma and Seneca Falls, moments that transformed civil rights and the women’s suffrage movement).

In the intervening years, its goalposts have shifted in the pursuit of an elusive “equality” until it has taken a form the founders wouldn’t recognise. The…

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William F. Buckley once said that Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams should never be on the same flight because if the plane went down it would mean the death of America’s only black conservatives.

Somehow the right summing up these two brilliant, maverick intellectuals as conservative seemed to sell them short, while their rational stance on race pitted them against a left that expected like-minded views from black Americans on this topic. Even in his dotage Sowell is subjected to this, as when one of his books was reviewed by an academic from the London School of Economics who assumed the author was “a rich white man”.

Sowell has referred to the predominantly white intellectual elite of the left — those quick to classify the minds of minorities — as “the anointed”. He, Williams and the fellow travellers inspired and influenced by these men’s output over the years, have been called other names along the way. In the eyes of say, President Biden, thes…

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Despite the slogan on the child-like cardboard placards held above the heads of Black Lives Matter protesters, the silence of us lower-case whites is not violence.

For a while it was something considered as objectionable as racism — indifference.We neither canonised nor fetishised black men and women as our experience of them was too diverse to classify them as a placid victim or an exotic rara avis. They were ultimately as dull and workaday as the rest of us, harbouring similar hopes and grudges. That’s how it is when you move from society’s margins to the mainstream. (This is the price of equality, at least the equality — it’s an amorphous creature — Britain was trudging towards before identity politics became the pub bore that emptied the bar.)

The upside is you’re not solely knife-wielding, drug-dealing absent fathers (the classical view of the far right); the downside: you’re not simply the carnival-loving soul man in fear of the policeman’s knee and the neigh…

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Some stories stay with you and never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them.

One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.mThe details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton…

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In the opening years of this century I wrote a book, The Likes Of Us, on the white working class.

Several newspapers bid to run an excerpt. I opted for the Guardian as it was those on the left from the middle class upwards that were the most disparaging about this particular tribe. They mocked them and demonised them. Currently they order them to check their “privilege”; to kowtow to the false narratives of the Black Lives Matter cult. Yet this class remains the cornerstone of a silent majority whose angry silence makes itself known via the polling booth, rather than toxic riots.

The Likes Of Us won the Orwell Book Prize. The runner-up, Andrew Marr, wrote in his Telegraph column the next day the win was a testament to Blair’s meritocratic Britain. (In short, I was an interloper, a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place.) I’d used my experience growing up in south-east London as the springboard for the story of a…

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