The age of ‘nice but dim’ politics

Britain has always been a nation given to tweeness, sentimentality and bland niceness. In the past, our weakness here could be seen in how many adults still enjoyed Winnie-the-Pooh, in television shows such as The Good Life, or in our still undiminished reverence for certain ‘national treasures’. Recently, this proclivity for sweet, inoffensive affability has not only been in ascendence in popular culture – it is also making alarming incursions into the formerly serious area of politics.

This year, another fictional bear, Paddington, was elevated into an icon of ‘inclusivity’. When a judge chastised a group of vandals as being ‘the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for’, it became obvious to many that a new order had arrived. Earlier symptoms included that inane exhortation, ‘Be Kind’, and those now ubiquitous centrist-dad watchwords, ‘decency’ and ‘compassion’. There has also been the rise of well-meaning clown Ed Davey, the most electorally successful Lib Dem leader in history. Davey is a real-life version of Harry Enfield’s 1990s character, Tim Nice-But-Dim.

Our age of ‘nice but dim’ politics has been on unmistakable show in the aftermath of Sir Keir Starmer’s speech on immigration, in which he warned last week that Britain risked becoming an ‘island of strangers’ without lower migration and better integration.

Perhaps the most telling response was a now-deleted post on X from political commentator Tan Smith, better known on social media as Supertanskii. To assuage the fears that might have been caused by Starmer’s words, she disclosed: ‘In recent days I’ve taken my Nepalese neighbours a candle, complimented a transwoman on her sunhat and was overly friendly to the immigrant workers making my deliveries.’ It’s hard to judge whether this post was a spoof or an in-joke, but even if it was, it went viral because its language of witless compassion rang true.

On the other hand, Larry the Cat, an X account that purports to be the ‘chief mouser’ of 10 Downing Street, itself a personification of political twee, was undoubtedly sincere in its response. The cat account replied to a mean-sounding Conservative Party post on immigration thus: ‘You would have deported Mo Farah, who came to the UK illegally as a child? Really?’ Cramming ‘Mo Farah’, the Team GB Gold medallist, and ‘the children’ into one sentence is some achievement.

BBC radio presenter Richard Bacon is also a master at midwit bingo. When news broke this week that Gary Lineker would be leaving the BBC, after unwittingly sharing an Instagram post featuring an anti-Semitic trope, Bacon said of his icon and former colleague: ‘He cares deeply about children… He is kind and decent.’ Full house!

Elsewhere, broadcaster Sangita Myska reposted with approval this insight: ‘Sangita when you think about it we are all strangers to people we have never met before.’ The trite wisdom of ‘inspirational’ Facebook memes is apparently what passes for political commentary now. Coming up next: ‘Strangers to our shores only want to be the best versions of themselves.’

In the mainstream media, the Guardian unveiled a poem by children’s author Michael Rosen, who had a critical encounter with Covid-19 five years ago. His ode to the migrant NHS workers who attended to him begins:

‘I lay in bed
hardly able to breathe
but there were people to sedate me,
pump air into me
calm me down when I thrashed around
hold my hand and reassure me
play me songs my family sent in
turn me over to help my lungs
shave me, wash me, feed me
check my medication
perform the tracheostomy
people on this “island of strangers”
from China, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland
India, USA, Nigeria and Greece.’

Any human being would feel sympathy for Rosen and admiration for the health workers, but poetry does not belong in the opinion section of a serious newspaper. But that’s how contagious this performative niceness has become.

Emotion has always played a role in political persuasion, but now there are no actual arguments being made by the liberal-left – there is only saccharin slop. The leftist archetype is becoming a hybrid of Emily Maitlis and Madeline Bassett, that PG Wodehouse grotesque who instils fear and trepidation in Bertie Wooster, what with her airy cooing that ‘the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born’.

This is the tyranny of nice-but-dimmism.

Why they’re rewriting history

Did you know that Stonehenge was, apparently, built by black people? According to research by Policy Exchange, this obvious falsehood is actually being taught in Britain’s schools, as part of a wider programme to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum. The revised origins of Stonehenge emerge from a book widely used by teachers, Brilliant Black British History, which asserts that ‘Britain was a black country for more than 7,000 years before white people came’. (This is based on studies that suggest ancient Britons, such as the 12,000-year-old ‘Cheddar Man’, had dark skin, although this does not imply they were ‘black’ in the modern sense, of having African heritage.)

While this revelation is shocking, it’s not surprising. We’ve become attuned to the mania for ‘decolonisation’ that has ravaged education since 2020. The compulsion to decolonise has extended to the unlikely areas of maths and science, while it has consolidated its position in the humanities, where it’s already entrenched. No longer content to overstate the role played by immigrants in forging this country, hyper-liberal ideology now presents outright fantasy as fact.

This is what often happens with idealists. They veer to extremes and further from reality. Devotees are in an unspoken competition to prove themselves purer than their contemporaries, to demonstrate more devotion and commitment to the cause. To be ‘on the right side of history’. And this is why they always push things too far.

It happened with the anti-racism movement, which began in the 1960s with an aspiration to colourblindness, which then later shifted to the need to affirm racial difference, before reaching today’s woke dead end, with its irrational and neo-racist obsession with ‘whiteness’. A similar fate befell a movement that initially sought equality for those of a different sexual orientation. The LGBT+ movement today is an almost anti-gay creed, advocating instead for those believing themselves a different gender or even different sex, based on some mystical, inner ‘essence’.

Always beware those who proclaim to be ‘on the right side of history’. They speak in magical terms, hoping that their fantasies will one day come true.

Speak English, por favor

Ever since the UK government proposed that all new immigrants should speak English at a decent level, the smart alecks have been out in force pointing to the irony and hypocrisy that British expats abroad don’t usually learn their adopted country’s language. As one self-satisfied letter in The Times proposed: ‘All UK citizens taking up residence in Spain and France should be required to be fluent in the language of their home.’

This is a bogus parallel. Britons who retire in Spain, while often living a self-contained existence, mostly do so unobtrusively. The presence of these migrants does not pose a disruptive and destabilising threat to the local culture and native mores, something that many people in Britain fear is happening as a result of recent mass migration.

Accusations of double standards overlook the fact that, after us, the people in Europe worst for learning a foreign language are the Spanish. This doesn’t owe to stupidity or arrogance, a charge implied in observations on Britons’ monolingualism, but to the fact that the Spanish also speak a global language, with 600million other speakers. Just like us, they don’t need to learn a second language to communicate with the world.

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