BY EFFIE DEANS They joy of being a civil servant in Scotland has just increased. The Scottish Government is backing proposals to encourage eight thousand of them to take a pronoun pledge. Fortunately, this will not involve abstaining from alcohol as previous pledges once did, nor will it involve polishing wooden furniture. Rather it will merely involve adding a few lines to the end of … Continue reading Pick Your Pronouns Wisely
BY PAUL R BRIAN Much has been made of the urban-rural split and the vote breakdown for Brexit. Broadly speaking: many Londoners and urbanites wanted to remain in the EU, while many country-dwellers and small city folks wanted to leave. Plenty of convincing analyses have been made of the socioeconomic reasons for this, but one aspect which hasn’t been focused on is the success of … Continue reading Performative Politics
BY EFFIE DEANS There were no black children in either my primary or secondary schools. Racist words were commonplace. When I moved to Edinburgh middle class students used racist words to describe shops run by people of Pakistani origin and takeaways run by people of Chinese origin. We didn’t do this in a hostile fashion. It was simply the language of the time. A form … Continue reading Britain Is Being Trolled
BY DAVID EYLES In the recent cabinet reshuffle, Suella Braverman MP was promoted to Attorney General. In an ordinary world, this appointment would scarcely have registered in the consciousness of the mainstream and social media. However, these are not ordinary times and it looks as if the usual trolls of the Twittersphere, spearheaded by The Guardian, are about to go off on one of their … Continue reading The Left & “Cultural Marxism”
BY FRANK HAVILAND Of all the pandemics the world has faced, equality may be the most dangerous. Not egalitarian principles or equal rights (which I fully support), but enforced equality: the notion that people must be equal. In the post-truth age, facts are only relative to the sympathy you can garner pretending to be offended by them; truth is out, social constructs are in. Intelligence … Continue reading Gender Wars: Penguin Edition
BY JAMES BEMBRIDGE Any school which The Guardian describes as “controversial” is probably worth looking into, even more so when you discover that the school’s GCSE results are four times higher than the national average. The fact that this school espouses traditional small-c conservative values, such as personal responsibility, often sends lefties into a whirlwind of furious twitter diatribes, leaving them walleyed and writhing in … Continue reading The Katherine Birbalsingh Interview
BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD Ripples of laughter could be heard from the Senior Common Room where undergraduates dressed in ‘I am a feminist’ hoodies wrestled on the sofas. The LGBTQQIAAP+ dinner had just finished, and the students had retired to the SCR ‘safe-space’ to let off steam and gossip about who they found ‘dangerous’. This was not Oxford. The SCR sherry and newspapers were long … Continue reading University Has Changed, Parents
BY GARY MCGHEE Cluck, cluck. An almighty furore has developed between Muslim primary school protesters and Local Labour MP Jess Foghorn Phillips. If you didn’t know already she has ordered an exclusion zone be put around the school to prevent the demonstration from being outside the school. Meanwhile LGBT groups are also demonstrating about the right of gay relationships to be taught in schools, though … Continue reading Intersectionality Chickens Home to Roost
BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN The word “privilege” has been co-opted by the Marxists alongside words which used to be marvellous, like “liberal” and “progressive”. Privilege – once a motive for thankfulness – is now just another weapon in their postmodern arsenal of intersectionality. It’s the favoured baseball bat with which these comrades club their prime targets – white men – around the heads. Especially when white … Continue reading The Myth of Privilege
BY PAUL NEWALL When I read about the gender reassignment of the Doctor, I confess I let out an audible groan. Not because I couldn’t cope with one of my childhood favourites becoming a woman – I’d already been prepared for that eventuality by the “Doctors wife” episode in the Matt Smith era. The new show runner Chris Chibnall apparently made it a contractual issue … Continue reading It’s Just a Phase, Doctor
