Last week saw yet more reports on the sex abuse scandals in Rotherham, accompanied by yet more mugshots of dangerous brown men – the predators convicted of raping and harassing girls from impoverished towns in the north and west Midlands. The widespread sexual exploitation of girls by Asian men was allowed to continue because authorities were scared of being called racist. It’s an outrage. It’s bloody, noisome wokery. It’s chuffing cowardice, it’s nothing else.  Well, actually, it is something else. My family moved to Rotherham when I was nine, where I attended the local comprehensive. Like most other girls I knew during my t(w)eens, I saw – and experienced – plenty of sexual harassment and assault. None of it was by men of ...

Like an old man yelling at the clouds, the now ex-chairman of the Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden, has managed to pick a fight with an exhausting number of inanimate objects, concepts and organisations. In his time as culture secretary, he denounced the National Trust, the BBC, the cricket, pronouns, young people, social media, schools, universities and museums, to name just a few. Indeed, Dowden has long been warrior-in-chief of the government's divisive culture battle. Stoking divisions for electoral gain has fast become the Tories' bread and butter – which, as culture secretary, presumably made Dowden their head baker. Back in February, Dowden told the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing US think tank, that there was a “painful woke psychodrama” sweeping the West, and ...

This week has seen the government’s Bill of Rights Bill introduced to the House of Commons by Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary. It follows an independent review and a public consultation, both of which seem to have been largely ignored. When enacted, it will be called simply the “Bill of Rights 2022” (not “Act”, like every other act of parliament). So it must be something special, you would think. It is certainly an important piece of legislation. The bill repeals and supplants the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), one of the most significant constitutional reforms of that Labour government. However, not everything changes. The UK remains (for now) party to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and the rights covered by ...

This week on the High Performance Podcast, the former England footballer Gary Lineker revealed he had experienced racist abuse from other footballers during his career. Candidly, he stated, “I was this tiny geeky kid, with darkish skin and I had pretty much racist abuse although I’m not, I’m as English as they come.” His comments have attracted derision from a variety of commentators, who laugh at the idea that a public figure we largely understand to be white could claim to have experienced anything close to racist abuse. Unfortunately, those negative reactions demonstrate a lack of understanding about something that should be fundamental to any anti-racism approach: race isn’t biologically real.  Since the summer of 2020, when conversations on race sharply ...

The Walt Disney corporation is currently showing us that woke capitalism is a lot harder than it looks. Earlier this year, Florida passed state legislation that bans primary school teachers from instructing children in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students”. LGBTQ activists hotly criticised the law, which they branded “Don’t Say Gay”. Disney, which has theme parks in Florida, is one of the state’s largest private sector employers. Historically, it has exerted enormous sway in Florida politics. It makes donations to politicians from both parties, deploys an army of lobbyists, and has won some very favourable tax breaks from the state. But its cosy relationship with lawmakers ...

On the morning of Tuesday 21 June, the Office for National Statistics decided to bring a little sunshine to our lives with the latest round of inflation figures. Between April and May, thanks largely to increases in the cost of food and non-alcoholic drinks, prices rose at a speed which, if continued, would amount to an annual rate of 9.1 per cent. The most dramatic increases in price were those of staples such as bread, cereals and meat. Alcoholic drinks are rising by quite a lot less, which is good, because after reading the following figures you might need one. This is the highest inflation has been in over 40 years. During the financial crisis it spiked a couple of times ...

On Sunday afternoon (19 June) two protests took place in Bristol. The first of these was led by the platinum-haired rabble-rouser Posie Parker (real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull), who has established a reputation as one of the savviest and most provocative gender-critical activists in the UK. The second was a counter-protest led by trans activists, including a group called "Bristol Against Hate".   The clash between the two groups ended, as it always does, in carnage. One masked person was photographed holding a sign that read “Terfs can suck my dick” ("Terfs" being trans-exclusionary radical feminists). Videos circulated online of two gravelly-voiced protesters screaming at the top of their lungs that Parker and her allies should “get in the sea" and were going to "die out” and ordering the ...

Over the past couple of days, a thread on Twitter has grown. Professor Sunny Singh has asked her followers to compete to write satirical descriptions of me, and is retweeting them with laughing and crying emojis of "lol". The focus of the jokes has become about my grief for my parents, who died with Covid last January, but in the thread there are pornographic fantasies and passages such as "blancmange thighs trembled under the oppressive weight of white saviourism". I think we can agree it is a thoroughly 21st-century spectacle. It’s compelling, too. I keep peeking, looking for another reference to my thin skin or the grief mug. The mug was where this started: when Gaby Hinsliff of the Guardian came ...