Douglas Murray is associate editor of The Spectator and author of The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, among other books.
Last Sunday night a capacity crowd of mainly young people packed into the Emmanuel Centre in London. Those who couldn’t find a seat stood at the back of the hall. When the speaker entered, the entire hall rose to its feet. It was his second lecture that day, the fourth across three days of sold-out
In the magazine this week I have written a piece about the Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson. He has been in the UK over the last week to talk about his new book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Among many other things – much more of which I go into in the piece
I am fascinated as well as appalled by the new morality being created in our country. Last night, Dawn Butler MP was on the television again (this time Question Time) making charges against Toby Young and doubling-down on a point she had made earlier in the week on the Daily Politics. The essence of it
If there is one lesson the world should have learned from Iran’s ‘Green Revolution’ of 2009 and the so-called Arab Spring that followed, it is this: the worst regimes stay. Rulers who are only averagely appalling (Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak) can be toppled by uprisings. Those who are willing to kill
The newspapers are full of end-of-year round ups, photographic highlights of the year and so on. And I thought I would add to the melee by mentioning my ‘person of the year’. There are plenty of people who I could think of who have made my year more interesting, more enjoyable and more besides. But
We’re closing 2017 by republishing our twelve most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 7: Douglas Murray on the sexual counter-revolution: We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries,
As Kim Jong-un might blow up the world next year, if not this, and people are forever trying to work out what is going on in his country, perhaps it is worth describing a military parade I attended in Pyongyang a few years back. The occasion was the centenary of the birth of the current
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, likes to make a stand. Specifically he likes to present himself (and the city in which he has been elected Mayor) as an antidote to global concerns about immigration, human unpleasantness in general and Donald Trump in particular. For instance, on the BBC on Sunday morning he explained his
On Friday the Guardian columnist and Corbyn-supporter Owen Jones sent out this Tweet to his followers: Palestinians urgently need our solidarity. Join me protesting Trump’s Jerusalem speech outside London’s US Embassy *tonight* >> https://t.co/JfGW6sTqjJ pic.twitter.com/2VPeqf21og — Owen Jones (@OwenJones84) December 8, 2017 As a video of the resulting demonstration shows, the crowd outside the embassy
One of the nicest things in life is the discovery that one-time enemies are in fact terrific, brave people who you might have been wrong about and have grown to respect. For instance, when I was growing up I had a rather marked dislike of Germaine Greer. Then, in recent years, I discovered she was
One of the most sinister noises in the world is that of dumb officialdom groping around to find some reason for a verdict that has already been arrived at. A Canadian university has just given the world a particularly fine example of the genre. Wilfrid Laurier is a university in Ontario, Canada with a surprisingly
Among the many things that have been puzzling me since Priti Patel’s resignation last week, one stands out. So far as I can see there doesn’t seem to be a single person on the Conservative – or conservative – side who has claimed that the campaign against Ms Patel (for campaign it most certainly was, within
We are in the middle of a profound shift in our attitude towards sex. A sexual counter-revolution, if you will. And whereas the 1960s saw a freeing up of attitudes towards sex, pushing at boundaries, this counter-swing is turning sexual freedom into sexual fear, and nearly all sexual opportunities into a legalistic minefield. The rules
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this well-edited and serious volume Thomas Hegghammer — one of the world’s foremost experts on jihadism — has put together a collection of essays by an impressive group of scholars analysing what culture Islamism’s most adamant
For many years, the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Tariq Ramadan, has been one of my closest enemies. In Switzerland and France this Islamist dauphin had a slightly hard time establishing his reputation. This was not just due to his poor scholarship (the basis of which lay in a fawning book about his
The German public have, as predicted, kept ahold of nurse. But it is the breakthrough of the AfD into the German Parliament that is causing headlines around the world. Of course the four-year old party’s electoral success is also unsurprising. In elections last September the AfD were elected to representative roles in most of the
It’s all a long time ago now isn’t it? All of three days since someone put a bomb on a London Underground train and then stepped out of the carriage. Thankfully the detonator went off without managing to trigger the main bomb, which isn’t a mistake we can hope for every time. 30 people were injured on
I’ve been in Los Angeles for the last week, and it takes a special set of occurrences for someone to return to the UK from LA and think that Britain is getting a bit weird. Yet we appear to have managed it. While I was away there was the row about Jacob Rees-Mogg expressing his
Four years ago, I pointed out here that today’s anti-fascists appeared to be getting rather fascistic. The occasion for that observation then was a group of ‘anti-fascists’ surrounding a man in Scotland and screaming at him to go back to where he came from. For some reason that action was deemed ‘anti-fascist’ rather than ‘fascist’ because
People sometimes accuse me of being an immovable pessimist about our continent’s future. And I normally reply with the simple truth that when the facts are pessimistic, I am pessimistic. Allow me to highlight three recent causes for pessimism. In my recent blog on the now routine, nay mundane, acts of terrorism occurring in Europe,
