What if British culture is part of the problem?

The claim that ‘no culture is better than another’ often tips over into an asymmetrical elevation of ‘the other’ and an abasement of the self. In Britain, advocates of hard multiculturalism tend to celebrate cultures belonging to migrants and their descendants, and to denigrate the culture of the historic, indigenous majority.

In an unwitting sense, the self-hating left-liberals have a point. What passes for ‘British culture’ is indeed rotten and debased in many ways. Ironically, what is most debased about it is the establishment position towards Islamism. Here we see nothing but cowardice, evasion, denial, dishonesty and an ethos of victimhood.

This was put into stark relief amid the 20th anniversary commemorations of the 7/7 London bombings last week. A long feature on the BBC website marking the occasion failed to use the words ‘Islamist’, ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’ even once in relation to a day of atrocities carried out by Islamist terrorists. King Charles’s banalities about ‘building a society where people of all faiths and backgrounds can live together with mutual respect and understanding’ encapsulated the spirit of our times, in that they failed to address the actual cause of the terror attack. This reluctance is born of mendacity and fear. The establishment fears that telling the truth will inflame both the supposedly unbridled passions of hot-headed Muslims, and stir the racist knuckleheads they imagine make up the white working class.

An article in the Guardian marking 7/7 hinted at another malaise. ‘For many in the British Muslim community, the tragedy of 7 July 2005 lives long in the memory’, it said, as the events have created ‘feelings of suspicion, isolation and hostility’ towards them. The conclusion one can only draw from the language used last week is that 7/7 is the date we should remember not for the Islamists who murdered people, but for Muslims who became the real victims.

Yet what could be more British today than playing the victim card? Our culture, and that of the West in general, has been one that has enabled self-pity and navel-gazing ever since it took a therapeutic turn in the 1990s. That was the decade in which ‘feelings’ came to the fore. We came to elevate emotion over reason. And we came to judge the external world through the prism of subjective perception and intuition.

The appeal to feelings in both senses – intuitions and emotions – has been intrinsic to advancing efforts to have ‘Islamophobia’ enshrined and codified by the British state. This concept is built on the subjective notion that if someone feels him or herself to be a victim of perceived discrimination, then that’s the end of the matter. It also rests on the idea that if someone’s feelings are hurt, that warrants state or police intervention.

A culture of self-centred victimhood is profoundly destructive. It’s closely related to the spirit of narcissistic self-abasement that the liberal elites excel at. When their members self-flagellate about what an awful and racist country Britain has always been, what they’re really doing is presenting themselves as more self-aware than, and morally superior to, you or me. Ostentatious self-abasement is the ultimate expression of sickly self-regard.

It’s right that we should talk openly about Islamism and the deficiencies of other cultures. But we will never be able to do so properly until we sort our own heads out first.

Tebbit spoke his mind and so should you

Whatever you might have thought of Norman Tebbit, the Tory grandee who died last week aged 94, one thing is for sure: he wouldn’t have cared.

That was his abiding virtue. He didn’t worry about respectable opinion or fashionable politics, whether it was that of the centrists or ‘wets’ in his own Conservative Party, or anywhere else. His politics, as he put it himself, were those of the ‘man in the pub’. They survive today in the attitude of today’s global ‘deplorables’: an approach to politics that is honest, frank, unfashionable and increasingly outspoken.

Lord Tebbit died in an age antithetical to the spirit in which he lived. The 21st century is a time in which too many obsess about the opinions of others. They do so at an individual level, seeking approval on social media or affirmation through choice of pronouns. And at a political level, in which the centrists and EU-philes exhort us to take heed of Britain’s ‘reputation’ before making any unilateral decisions on the international stage.

Tebbit didn’t worry about his reputation or ‘standing’. Nor should you.

Poets without borders

Under measures announced in May, the UK’s Labour government drew up a list of ‘shortage’ occupations eligible for skilled-worker visas. According to revelations by the Telegraph this week, among those who qualify are the following: diversity officers, social-media influencers, bloggers, DJs, magicians and poets.

In other words, we’re talking about utterly non-essential workers. The most vain and frivolous occupation in the world today must be that of the ‘influencer’, while the most actively counter-productive are ‘diversity officers’. Their contribution to society has largely been to foster division and resentment.

As for poets, apart from John Cooper Clarke, the only ones of note in past decades have been Titania McGrath and the Vogons. Both are fictional, the former being the creation of satirist Andrew Doyle, the latter being the brainchild of the late Douglas Adams in his saga, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

We should welcome Vogon poetry, not least because it has the virtue of being more intelligible than the delirious verbiage regurgitated by our diversity officers. Regard the following doggerel:

‘Oh fredled gruntbuggley, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid B
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles, or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t!’

We could learn much from the vibrant and enriching culture of the Vogons more broadly. These green, slug-like aliens could add so much colour to our beautiful and diverse rainbow landscape.

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.