The pillars of society we built are crumbling

Britain is caught in an ideological experiment that is transforming the fabric of our society. Our governing class has dumped the traditional pragmatism that secured our past greatness and replaced it with progressive dogma. Now some of the pillars of our civilisation – including order, tolerance, freedom and the rule of law – are starting to crumble.

Politicians repeatedly assure us family structures do not matter, yet our urban landscape is plagued by violence from young men growing up without father figures. They have been equally misguided in their attachment to soft jail terms and so-called “community punishments”, which have shattered faith in the justice system. This spirit of leniency led to the disgracefully inadequate sentence of Valdo Calocane, who stabbed to death students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and caretaker Ian Coates, in Nottingham, but whom may be out in three years.

Both the police and Armed Forces have been grievously weakened by crude identity politics, leading to the RAF’s bizarre ban on recruiting white men to boost its diversity targets. An open-door policy was presented as the route to prosperity, but record levels of mass immigration have ushered in economic stagnation, falling standards of living and a crippling strain on the civic infrastructure.

“Diversity is our strength,” parrot our rulers, even as social cohesion frays and the political process is poisoned by extremism, terrorism and sectarianism. The Prime Minister complained of “mob rule” during recent ugly protests over Gaza, but the Government’s own failure to uphold effective border controls has helped to unleash such anarchy.

Then there’s Westminster’s manufactured hysteria over Islamophobia, a dubious concept designed to deter criticism of the Muslim faith. In a free society, no religion should have a force field around itself, protected by blackmail, bullying and blasphemy laws.

But that is what we are sliding towards. You need look no further than the disturbing case of the Batley schoolteacher, still in hiding after getting death threats for holding a discussion on the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre by Islamists in Paris.

The flame of liberty is burning low in modern Britain. The official creed of social inclusion is enforced by an army of 10,000 commissars, rooting out heresies and indoctrinating the workforce. Our universities are turning into citadels of groupthink, while too many of our public institutions are more interested in social engineering than delivering services. It is extraordinary that this should happen after almost 14 years with the Conservatives in office, though, as novelist Evelyn Waugh once said, “The Tories have not put back the clock a single second.”

What could be less Conservative than the juggernaut of deranged transgenderism pushed by unaccountable pressure groups like Stonewall, with its denial of biological realities, disdain for childhood innocence and contempt for women’s rights? What sort of Conservative government presides over training schemes in “unconscious bias” for the public sector?

Whitehall has even set up a cross-government network “to build a supportive community that helps develop introverts”. It is no wonder strikes and sick leave are soaring among public servants. Under Tory rule, we have record-breaking levels of taxation, expenditure, bureaucracy and welfare dependency. Our society is fragmenting, our work ethic fading and our British nationhood vanishing. Under Labour, such trends will only accelerate.

Anderson could speed up a new dawn for Right

After outspoken Tory MP Lee Anderson criticised London Mayor Sadiq Khan, politicians on all sides lined up to denounce him – many of whom showed far more indignation about his words than they have ever done about grooming gangs or people traffickers.

Suspended by the Conservatives, Anderson may stand for the Reform Party in his Ashfield constituency later this year.

Given the powerful support he enjoys from many voters, who prefer his earthy robustness to the establishment’s woke duplicity, he would provide a real boost for Reform.

One survey this week revealed 19 per cent of the public have a “favourable” view of Reform, a figure that would rise to 25 per cent if Nigel Farage became leader.

British politics could be on the verge of a historic re-alignment, where Reform supplants the Conservatives as the standard-bearer of the right.

Growing culture of introspection around mental health makes us weaker

Speaking of Britain’s victory in the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote that the nation “had the lion’s heart but I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar”.

Sadly if there was a battle for survival today, the sound from the public might be a whimper rather than a roar. That is partly because the current institutional obsession with mental health is sapping our resilience.

Rudyard Kipling’s wonderful poem “If” used to be seen as the embodiment of the British character, extolling the virtues of courage and stoicism in adversity. But the stiff upper lip has given way to the babble of the therapy session. In place of self-sacrifice, we are encouraged to sink into introspection, to analyse every setback and emotion.

The extent of this vulnerability was exposed in a report this week from the left-leaning Resolution Foundation, stating a third of young people have experienced symptoms of mental illness. Inevitably, these findings provoked calls for a massive rise in government support for mental health services. But this approach looks increasingly counter-productive. The vast mental health industry seems to worsen the very problems it was created to resolve. Just as dishing out anti-depressants increases the incidence of depression, the more people talk about their feelings, the more miserable they become.

■ Ahead of the Budget, the quality of customer service at HM Revenue and Customs has reached “an all-time low”, according to the Commons Public Accounts Committee. One leading tax adviser even called HMRC’s performance “diabolical”. As so often happens in the low-wattage public sector, the blame is heaped on “understaffing” – but that is unconvincing. HMRC’s workforce grew significantly from 56,000 in 2014/5 to 67,500 last year. The real explanation is poor management and weak productivity, reflected in an annual sickness rate of 8.1 days lost on average per employee.

“Tax doesn’t have to be taxing”, proclaims the HMRC’s advertising campaign – words that today ring hollow.

■ I have grown weary of big Hollywood films, with their childish plots, two-dimensional characters and dreary woke messages. So it was a relief to watch the sumptuous French film The Taste of Things, which tells the romantic story of a celebrated gourmet and his cook, brilliantly played by Juliette Binoche. Set in a Loire Valley chateau in the 1880s, it is a paean to French cuisine and enduring love. There was more charm in it than anything that has come out of Hollywood in years.

■ The BBC’s determination to promote the woke agenda can result in grotesquely misleading propaganda, as in the depraved case of Scarlett Blake, who killed a cat, live-streaming its dissection, and then murdered a man in Oxford by strangulation and drowning.

In its initial coverage of the court proceedings, the BBC consistently referred to the defendant as “she” and “a woman”, which made the depraved violence all the more shocking. Several newspapers took the same line as the BBC, but their reports were a shameful conspiracy to deceive. Blake was actually born a man but “identified” as a trans woman. So the crimes were, in fact, acts of extreme masculine brutality. The heroic feminist and author JK Rowling declared that she was “sick” of such manipulation.

“This is not a woman. These are not our crimes,” she wrote.