Occidental Partridge

Today is Bangladeshi Independence Day. I know this thanks only to a good-humoured and educational chat I had with a chap in a Subway in Leytonstone a few months back. A conversation about how spicy we like our toppings quickly gave way to the richer and more interesting topic of our countries of origin. Not for him the affected wincing at being asked about his homeland (who knew that in 2020 curiosity about your fellow human beings would be classed as offensive?); he jumped at the chance to share a little about his country's proud and traumatic transition from 'East Pakistan' to independent Bangladesh.  He told me about the annulled 1970 election in which 'East Pakistan' returned a huge majority for the nationalists, the following Pakistani military campaign to take out well known nationalists and the resulting (and successful) Bangladeshi Liberation War of 1971, concluding the potted history lesson with the playful postscript that today's Bangladesh continua...

For World Down Syndrome Day, 21/03/20 “I find it deeply offensive” , says 24-year-old campaigner on breakfast talkshow slot . My fellow conservatives might eye-roll with weary familiarity. Who’s this latest young grievance-monger come bidding for boomer recognition of some imagined injustice? Here to shoehorn some alien pronoun into the English language, no doubt, or to tack yet another letter onto the ever-sprawling ‘LGBTQIA+’?  Continue reading at  Orthodox Conservatives

My elicit affair with the weird and wonderful folk of Happy Science continues. It's last Sunday and I have been lured to an old haunt, the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square, with the promise of a free ticket to the London premier of Immortal Hero , the new religion's latest cinematic effort to spread enlightenment across the globe. There is a gaggle of HS members bearing the usual literature and membership forms - the first time I've seen a number of them 'on active service'. I tell one young fellow that I am looking for Hiro, and that I already have a free ticket booked. "Yay!" he says.                                                                                                              ...

It's Valentine's Day evening and I have a blind date. I'm sitting in the lobby of a well-known London campus waiting to meet a first-year student who has just finished his day's lectures. OK, it's not really a date in that both parties expect the affair to be entirely platonic, and it's not really blind as we have met once before. But it's only when he spots and waves at me, and I take a second or so to register, that it strikes me I haven't seen his face before. For when we met, on a January demonstration opposite the Chinese Embassy on Portland Place, he was wearing a face mask. Having attended a number of pro-Hong Kong marches last year, the sight of masked East Asians had become very much a norm to me. So what compelled me to talk to this young man in particular? Namely, the fact he was also wearing the Chinese Olympic tracksuit, and holding a homemade banner saying "Love China. Love Democracy." My story-senses were tingling: a mainlander...

Against the advice of some of my better read friends, I will still from time to time reach for that  Evening Standard on the bus or London Underground. It exposes me to stories I would never usually click on when they drift through my social media feeds, to the juicy politically-charged gossip of the 'The Londoner' pages and, above all, can be a nice free ride with original high-quality thinkers who I'd usually have to pay for in The Economist or Standpoint (yes I mean Anne McElvoy). This week though it was Matthew D'Ancona whose Comment piece piqued my interest. This is unusual because D'Ancona, being among those Remainers with whom I parted company after the referendum, could for the last year at least be found using his Lebedev inches to preach Remoaner miserabilism with a consistency comparable to certain Anglican vicars I could name.  But it is time for us all to move on and in any case the subject matter was intriguing enough to draw me in: a eulogy-cum...

We're all fairly comfortable with the knowledge that our actions have consequences. But how often do we apply the same to our words? Certainly in our interpersonal relationships - whether romantic, familial, professional etc. - we are generally sure to mind our manners; anything less risks the fragile social harmony of an open-plan office space, or a tipsy Boxing Day.  But what about in the political sphere, and the impact our voiced and written thoughts may have on people we may never meet? Especially when those words aren't meant to bully or cause harm, but are simply the expression of sincere moral conscience? Actually it's something the UK plc office has been dealing with rather a lot lately: perhaps it's not the most sensitive example, but it's usually forgotten that a  now notorious comparison of niqab-wearers to letterboxes  was part of a defence of the very right to wear such things, and thus doubly belonging to a very British liberal tradition of stick...

So, we're out. How was your first week?  I voted (reluctantly) to Remain, but I told myself the day of the referendum that whatever the result, I would remain proud of this country. The fact that we were holding such a referendum - uniquely so far - was in itself something to take pride in. I'm happy to say that that pride has held out. It took some blows; for instance, in the immediate aftermath of the referendum when a minority of bigots felt emboldened to enact their savage prejudices toward immigrants; when Theresa May's government (to my shock and dismay) failed to immediately guarantee the continued rights of residence of 3.2m EU residents of the UK; and when Mrs May's government thought so little of this country that they were willing to sign her into a state of vassalage, in which we would take EU law but have no say in its making. But all societies have their share of racism, and the UK, it must be said, has a notably meagre one, at least as suggested by...