Woke privilege

With all the current debate about tariffs and trade, it would seem timely to talk about one of the worst American exports ever: the concept of ‘white privilege’. This notion – that you can have an automatic and decisive advantage in life because of your skin pigmentation, regardless of your class, sex or where you live – is one of the most divisive myths of our times.

It’s never been applicable or appropriate to the United Kingdom. This is a country that never had a significant population of slaves, and whose much smaller black population are descendants of those who came here not in chains but of their own volition.

The inherent absurdity of this idea was laid bare in a recent Telegraph report, in which we read that Westminster City Council in London is instructing staff to undergo a ‘privilege’ test as part of a package of ‘unconscious-bias and inclusive-recruitment training’. Managers who fail to shortlist ‘global majority’ candidates for recruitment are obliged to contact the council’s chief executive, Stuart Love.

The test is much like the ones that Viz used to send up, asking for instance: ‘Are you a Toff or a Tramp?’ Except Westminster’s privilege checklist is even less scientific. Add five points if you answer in the affirmative that your ‘parents or guardians read to me when I was a child’, ‘English is my first language’ or ‘I drive a new car’. Add 15 points if you respond, ‘I am a white male’. Minus five if: ‘I see members of my race, ethnic group, gender… negatively portrayed on TV.’

The whole thing is nonsense. It’s no surprise to discover that Stuart Love is himself a white man, originally from South Africa, a country with a far greater legacy of racism than Britain. This initiative reeks of white liberal guilt, as does the notion of ‘white privilege’ in its entirety. It is the product of a white overclass desperate to boast its moral superiority through attention-seeking performances of self-flagellation.

When it comes to politics, ostentatious self-hatred is but a crafty means of self-aggrandisement.

John Oliver: biology denier

The Mail reports this week that British slang has become fashionable in the United States. With this in mind, here are some tips for our American friends on the correct way to describe British HBO presenter John Oliver. He’s a berk. A wally. A pillock. He spouts bollocks and talks out of his arse.

Earlier this week, this bell-end from Britain devoted 40 minutes of his Last Week Tonight show to the matter of transwomen in sports. His conclusion was that men have only a trifling advantage over women, that biological men seldom win in female sports, that having a big frame or more muscle is a disadvantage only in some fields, and that sports in junior schools are mixed anyway.

Oliver managed to find an exceptional case to make each of his points, but he ignored the important generalities. Essentially, the issue is that men tend to be larger and stronger. This is especially the case from puberty onwards. Of course there will be exceptions, as there are in all walks of life. Men are generally taller than women, but it takes a fourth-rate mind to conclude from this that all men must therefore be taller than all women.

It was ironic that Oliver should have made his remarks around the same time as, back in his home country, a final of a women’s pool tournament was taking place between two biological men. Some would no doubt protest that this is a non-issue, as pool is a non-contact sport. But this particular case poses a challenge not merely for trans apologists, but for many feminists, too.

In recent years, some feminists have belatedly come to admit the importance of biology, after decades of maintaining that everything is determined by culture and society. What if that pool pairing was unfair because men have better depth perception than women, just as women might be inherently better at languages? What if men and women’s brains are different in general?

That’s the next challenge for those who now accept that biology matters. If men and women are constructed differently on the outside, are they likewise on the inside?

The world needs to know about Top Secret!

Many of us were saddened to hear of the death of Val Kilmer, the film icon best known for his roles in Top Gun, The Doors and Heat. But it was disappointing to see in his obituaries only passing mention of perhaps his finest moment, his starring – and singing – role in the 1984 movie, Top Secret!.

This under-rated spoof is one of the classics of the genre, and one of the most intelligent. Although its storyline is less intelligible than those other Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker masterpieces, Airplane! and The Naked Gun (the first about an aircraft in trouble, the other about a dumb cop), its incoherence is its very strength. It’s simultaneously a send-up of Second World War films, conspicuously Casablanca and The Great Escape, but at the same time set in the Cold War, with its allusions to James Bond and Elvis Presley movies. Top Secret! is bafflingly and gloriously located in an East Germany run by Communists, yet in which all the soldiers are in Nazi uniform. This spoof of ‘historical’ movies savages all the genre’s pretensions to realism. (Note to Adolescence obsessives: on-screen fiction is not the same as reality.)

For linguists, Top Secret! is something special: it features brilliantly daft German spoken on the learning cassette (‘There is Sauerkraut in my Lederhosen’). Peter Cushing’s character is rendered ‘Swedish’ by his dialogue being played backwards. Plus, there are the swooning German teens with their ‘Velcome Neek’ (Welcome Nick) banner and the names of the French Resistance members: Latrine, Deja Vu and the deeply inappropriate Chocolate Mousse.

To top it off, the film has one of the best combined visual and linguistic gags in movie history: ‘I know a little German… he’s over there.’ Funny and clever, not least because this joke wouldn’t work in German itself (look it up, or ask einen Freund).

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