Britain Archives | Page 42 of 46 | MelaniePhillips.com

Justice is warped by hysteria over sex crimes

March 14, 2017 Melanie

We’ve lost our collective marbles over sexual offences. What’s been junked is any notion that women might be held to account for their behaviour, not just by acting prudently but by taking some responsibility for ambiguous sexual encounters. The ferocious reaction to such a suggestion has so cowed police and prosecutors that the justice system has become a statistical battleground. The real reason there is such a hue and cry over sexual offences is the collapse of moral responsibility in our non-judgmental sexual free-for-all, in which victimhood is the ultimate…

Audio Britain

Virtue signals in the moral maze

March 12, 2017 Melanie

On BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze, we tackled “virtue signalling” – the practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate our good character or the moral correctness of our beliefs. I argued that this wasn’t virtuous at all, since the poses being struck were designed to demonise and silence those with opposing views. I also tried to suggest that those who defended western or European national identity were demonised by “virtue signallers” who smeared them all as white nationalists – simply because western national identity was historically white.…

Britain

My reply to the Irish ambassador

March 9, 2017March 9, 2017 Melanie

Ireland’s ambassador to the UK, HE Dan Mulhall, has written a letter in the Times in response to my column published earlier this week. Pondering the complexities that occur when national aspirations and identities come into conflict with each other, I wrote of Irish nationalism that “the claim to unite Ireland is tenuous since Ireland itself has a tenuous claim to nationhood, having seceded from Britain as the Irish Free State only in 1922. Britain, by contrast, is an authentic unitary nation.” The ambassador has taken a dim view of…

Britain

Britain is the authentic nation in this battle

March 7, 2017 Melanie

If national aspirations are now validated for the UK, what about the national aspirations of its constituent parts? Do all national identities have equal status? What happens when one is in direct competition with another? Scotland says it is a nation. Republicans in Northern Ireland say Britain dismembered their nation which they want to unify again. Are these claims to national identity valid? If so, where does that leave the UK? To read the whole of my Times column (£) please click here.

Britain USA

Viewing antisemitism through a glass darkly

March 2, 2017March 2, 2017 Melanie

Suddenly, everyone’s worried about surging antisemitism. Remarkable. In recent decades, antisemitism has been the prejudice that dare not speak its name. The “Israel apartheid weeks” on campus, the blood libels about Israelis wantonly killing Arab children, the high proportion of attacks on Jews by Muslims – no one was allowed to call this anti-Jewish hatred. Anyone who did so was accused of Islamophobia, sanitizing the crimes of Israel by waving the shroud of the Holocaust and so on. Now people are shouting about antisemitism almost every day. Recent events are…

Britain

Soft-pedalling won’t quash Islamist extremism

February 28, 2017 Melanie

Ever since 9/11, Whitehall has been dominated by those who want to take the path of least resistance over the problem of Islamist extremism. The problem is not simply an Islamist Trojan Horse in our schools. It is a presumption of cultural surrender in the British official mind. To read my entire column in The Times of London, please click here (subscription only).

Britain USA

The left dies in daylight

February 24, 2017February 25, 2017 Melanie

The British political and media class is today poring over the entrails of yesterday’s by-elections. The Tories won an unprecedented victory in Copeland, while Labour defeated the UKIP leader in Stoke. The discussion is over whether Labour’s hapless far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn is finished or will use the victory in Stoke to stagger on, and whether the useless UKIP leader Paul Nuttall made a strategic error in targeting Labour rather than Conservative voters. This all misses the point. The by-elections point to something rather bigger that is now taking place.…

Britain USA

The moral maze of fake news

February 23, 2017February 23, 2017 Melanie

Can you ever believe a word you read or hear nowadays on the media, mainstream or otherwise? Do journalists still uphold the distinction between fact and opinion? Listen to me here discussing fake news with my colleagues Michael Portillo, Matthew Taylor and Claire Fox on BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze.

Britain USA

Political correctness kick-started populism

February 20, 2017 Melanie

The reason nobody saw the people’s revolt coming is that political correctness is too easily dismissed. Reason has been supplanted by a secular inquisition, complete with an index of prohibited ideas. It is in effect a dictatorship of virtue, drawing upon the doctrine first promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of forcing people to be free. Of course it’s not freedom at all but a form of moral extortion: extracting a free pass for bad or questionable behaviour under threat of character assassination and social opprobrium. My column in The Times of…

Britain USA

Moral obscenity at the LRB

February 15, 2017February 18, 2017 Melanie

Every day we hear of folk who are simply terrified out of their wits by what Donald Trump may do and the terrible things he supposedly represents, amongst them violence and fascism. The London Review of Books is a highbrow literary magazine whose staff and contributors might be assumed overwhelmingly to think President Trump is a menace to humanity. It might be imagined that such sensitively attuned souls are themselves, in stark contrast, blessed not just with an elevated aesthetic sense but also with the highest moral sensibilities commensurate with…