Katharine Birbalsingh, who appears as ‘Britain’s Strictest Headmistress’ in the ITV documentary series about Michaela School has appeared twice on the E2 Review Podcast.
In light of the launch of Britain’s Strictest Headmistress on ITV tonight we thought it made sense to re-share our interview and podcast with Katharine below.
Like all of our interviews you can either watch this on Youtube (link below) or listen to it as a podcast for free on any podcast app – just search for ‘E2 Review’ on any podcast app and it will show up!
Today marks 19 years since Islamist terrorists murdered 2977 innocent people in a series of coordinated attacks on the US. The events of September 11 2001 need no description; the images and videos are seared into our collective consciousness. I was just 11 at the time but can still vividly recall where I was when I found out what had happened, and the immediacy of the realisation that this was something truly awful and unprecedented.
No one event more starkly highlights the contrast between all that is precious about the secular, liberal way of life we enjoy in the West – all that we have achieved and must protect – and the medieval barbarism of the religious fanatics who sought, and still seek, to destroy it. The freedoms society affords us, its tolerance and dynamism, our democracy, our common humanity, assaulted so brazenly by the forces of division, hatred and illiberalism.
Then, as now, the response in many ‘progressive’ circles was revealing. While the horrific loss of life was mourned on all sides, some on the left and ‘liberal’ side of the political sphere were quick to suggest the attacks were somehow the fault of the US itself. Cambridge academic and commentator Mary Beard notoriously quipped that ‘the US had it coming’, less than one month after the attacks took place and while the rubble was still smouldering. In a piece filed for Slate in October 2001, the brilliant essayist Christopher Hitchens describes speaking at an event at which a Hollywood celebrity called the attacks ‘a revolt’ to the nodding approval of sections of the largely liberal audience. That celebrity later went on to draw comparisons between crowds cheering the attacks in Pakistan and the French revolutionaries.
‘Progressive’ attempts to make excuses for, or deflect attention away from, the ideology motivating jihadist killings remain absolutely par for the course. Radical Islamic terrorism claims significant numbers of innocent lives across the world annually, and the West has been racked by a large number of attacks in recent years. After each one, we are put through the same tired attempts to divert attention from the religious zealotry behind it, to equivocate, to blame ourselves. The usual tropes are repeated with mind-numbing predictability – the attacker must have been a lone wolf, the attackers were mentally ill, the attack had ‘nothing to do with Islam‘, it is only an Islamophobic backlash that we should fear rather than the next jihadist atrocity (can’t we fear both?), and so on.
Every new attack is followed by a round of self-flagellation and avoidance. Hitchens and others rightly called out the nauseating acceptability of this attitude in ‘liberal’ circles back in 2001, and we should continue to do so now. Of course anti-Muslim bigotry must be guarded against, but we can call out such bigotry while also speaking clearly about the need to fight and counter radicalism wherever it rears its ugly head. Beware those who would rather not, for ‘they are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals‘. Hitchens again.
Absolutely central to the Black Lives Matter narrative is the claim that the police disproportionately shoot and kill black people. Recent worrying cases, such as that of George Floyd and more recently Jacob Blake, have been cited as evidence of this fact. Are they? To find out, E2 Review spoke with Associate Professor Wilfred Reilly. He argues that in fact the majority of the statistics commonly cited by, and relating to, the black lives matter movement are seriously misleading. Watch a clip from the episode here:
Protests against the appalling killing of George Floyd by a US police officer are taking place around the world as we speak. The footage of a black man being choked to death by law enforcement has caused widespread revulsion, and it is entirely understandable that thousands have taken to the streets in protest. Many justifiably feel that this is yet another in a long line of such injustices perpetrated against African Americans, and are railing against the seeming ability for uniformed officers to carry out grave acts of misconduct with relative impunity.
Notwithstanding any of the above, it is nevertheless vital that the conclusions drawn are based on an accurate presentation, and understanding of, key facts.
A central tenet of the narrative subscribed to and spread by many protesters as well as countless celebrities, politicians, journalists, activists and so on, is that the police are racist, and that such racism means they are far more likely to randomly kill black people. A key claim, repeated in countless articles, as well as by high profile politicians and activists, is that ‘black Americans are 2.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by police.’ But this is, at best, a huge and misleading oversimplification.
Though forming a perfectly clear picture from ‘the statistics’ is next to impossible, research does suggest that black people are not necessarily overrepresented among police shooting victims once a basic adjustment for group crime rates is made.
As Wilfred Reilly, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kentucky State University, notes: ‘Several scholars have pointed out that the percentage of people killed by police who happen to be black – 22 per cent in this case – is higher than the overall percentage of blacks in US society, which is 12 to 13 per cent. Fair enough. But…this difference disappears if we adjust for the higher black crime rate. It is this that largely predicts encounters with police. The black crime rate was 2.4 times the white crime rate, according to the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics report. Short take: there is no police war on black people.‘
Moreover, as Zaid Jilani, has noted (referencing a study by American researchers),
‘“Using population as a benchmark makes the strong assumption that white and black civilians have equal exposure to situations that result in fatal officer-involved shootings… If there are racial differences in exposure to these situations, calculations of racial disparity based on population benchmarks will be misleading.”
The researchers found that the factor that most predicted the race of a citizen fatally shot was homicide rates for those groups in particular counties. For instance, in counties where whites committed a higher percentage of homicides, victims of police shootings are 3.5 times more likely to be white; in counties where blacks commit more homicides, victims are 3.7 times more likely to be black.
This suggests that violent crime rates correlate to—and perhaps may be used to predict—fatal interactions between police and citizens. The Washington Post’s police shootings database, which serves to document every fatal police shooting in the country, provides more evidence in this regard. Of the 505 fatal police shootings catalogued in 2019 as of this writing [Jilani’s article was written in 2019], only 20 involved a victim who was unarmed (although 12 of the victims carried toy weapons). If these victims were being targeted for reasons unrelated to their possible identity as criminal suspects, one would not expect that 96 percent would be armed.‘
There is evidence that this over-simplistic narrative has actively cost black lives. The police presence was significantly reduced in some black areas in which homicide rates are extremely high, in response to demands by protesters. This allowed gun violence and other crimes to increase.
Wilfred Reilly again:
‘FBI data indicates that US murders increased by a remarkable 1,530 between 2015 and 2016 [following large scale ‘black lives matter’ protests], surging from 15,883 to 17,413. This increase came on top of an earlier jump from 14,164 murders in 2014, the year of the Michael Brown shooting, to 15,883 in 2015. While Hispanic and white ethnic communities were hit hard by this unexpected crimewave, its impact was greatest among black Americans.‘
To re-emphasise, none of this is to say that police killings, like that of George Floyd, are not an absolute outrage, or that people are not legitimately angry at the social injustices faced by black Americans, many with long and shameful roots in historic racism and inequality. Nor is it to say that individual racist police officers do not exist, that all accusations of police racism are untrue (clearly they are not), or that there are not certain ways in which black Americans suffer disproportionately in their interactions with law enforcement.
However, the either deliberately or unwittingly misleading way in which the narrative of police racism has been spun is also of profound significance, has cost lives, and must be called out.
I spoke to Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress at Michaela Community School in London, for the E2 Review Podcast. We discussed everything from why progressive groupthink is actually holding kids back, to what it’s like to be a conservative in education (hint: you stop getting invited to almost everything). Katharine argues that we need to teach kids the value of personal responsibility, and thinks the left has largely abandoned this approach in favour of telling kids ‘the system’ is out to get them. Watch the full interview below, or listen to it as a podcast by searching for ‘E2 Review’ on your podcast app (or clicking here)
Watch the full E2 Review interview with Noam Dworman, in which we discuss everything from Trump and Biden, to Israel, identity politics and #metoo, here (or listen to it on your podcast app by searching ‘E2 Review’):
My interview with Noam Dworman, owner of the world famous Comedy Cellar in NYC, for the E2 Review Podcast.
Has identity politics got anything to do with the way that Israel is viewed in ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ circles? Do the majority of people who hate Israel know its history? We discuss this (and much more). Here’s the clip:
In his recent interview on the E2 Review Podcast, author James Lindsay described how he managed to get deliberately nonsensical academic papers, including one arguing that men should insert objects in their bums to fight transphobia, and another that dog parks are ‘petri dishes of canine rape culture’, published in leading progressive academic journals.What Lindsay achieved is hilarious. More importantly though, it also highlights profound issues with the state of today’s radical political thought.
The aim of the papers was to demonstrate the problem of poor academic scholarship within ‘Grievance Studies Academia’ (broadly, theoretical branches of social sciences academia dominated by postmodern and critical theory-influenced research including Gender Studies, Race Studies and so on). These lie at the absolute heart of modern ‘progressive’ outrage culture. Academics from within these fields are routinely cited as experts by journalists and politicians, and provide the intellectual foundation of so much of what passes for meaningful discourse in arts, culture and politics today.
“One paper, a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, ‘rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory’, was shockingly accepted by the Gender Studies journal Affilia.“
The papers were authored as part of the Grievance Studies Affair, the project of a team of three authors, Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and academic Peter Boghossian, designed to reveal the methodological and theoretical flaws within this strand of progressive academic thought. Other papers included one that argued that no criticism should be allowed of ‘Social Justice’, and another that ‘it is only oppressive cultural norms which make society regard the building of muscle rather than fat admirable” and that “bodybuilding and activism on behalf of the fat could be benefited by including fat bodies displayed in non-competitive ways.’ One paper, a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in the language of Intersectionality theory, was accepted by the Gender Studies journal Affilia.
In his interview Lindsay discusses how he wrote the papers, and what it felt like watching on as a number were accepted by respected journals, published, and in one case even lauded as an example of academic excellence.
In the preposterously named ‘Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon’, fictional academic Helen Wilson (nom de plume) describes dog parks as “oppressive spaces that lock both humans and animals into hegemonic patterns of gender conformity that effectively resist bids for emancipatory change”, noting that “dog parks are petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’”. This was actually published in Gender, Place and Culture.
‘Our goal was to show that these journals will publish things that are absolutely crazy because they think they’re good ideas…They think training men like you train dogs to prevent rape culture is a good idea…Our paper won an award. The specific parameters of the award were that it (the paper) was exemplary of what the field should be doing.’
While the papers themselves were written and published in 2017 and 2018, Lindsay’s interview on The E2 Review Podcast nevertheless provides a disconcerting reminder of the continuing prevalence of shoddy scholarship, and unfalsifiable ideological dogma, on university campuses across the western world in 2020. This stuff has a powerful impact on cultural and political life, it informs everything from the tearful political speeches we hear being given by celebrities on an almost daily basis, to the increasing tendency to label conservative thoughts and arguments ‘far right’ and thus in need of censorship (which, in turn, has contributed to the rise of populism). By revealing the fraudulent, pseudo-intellectual nature of so much of the theory upon which these arguments are built, Lindsay and co have done the world an enormous service.
Watch the full interview with James Lindsay on the E2 Review Podcast here:
WE DISCUSS IN THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF OUR SHOW, THE E2 REVIEW. IT’S ALSO POSSIBLE TO LISTEN TO SHOW AS A PODCAST ON ITUNES, SPOTIFY AND A NUMBER OF OTHER PODCAST APPS.
Summary: Labour suffered a huge defeat in the recent general election. Why was this? Partly because they simply refused to respect the Brexit vote despite repeatedly promising to do so. And partly because they (and others on the left more broadly) have a tendency to seek to depict any views they disagree with as beyond the pale, to have the people expressing those views no platformed, and so on. There is also the issue of Corbyn hanging around with some of the most unsavoury, bigoted characters on earth, and the hypocrisy of that.
An outrage storm is currently raging. Remain MPs, twitter and much of the media have deemed Boris Johnson to have been using ‘toxic rhetoric’ that is supposedly putting MPs lives at risk. Central to these claims is the fact that the PM used the word ‘surrender’ in relation to the Benn Act that aims to stop Britain leaving the EU without a deal, and that he insisted the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox would be to ‘get Brexit done’.
Boris’ comments were not pleasant, and the way he referred to an MP killed by a murderous supremacist was particularly disrespectful to say the least. Nevertheless, the speed with which a particular narrative emerged and has been uncritically adopted – namely that remain MPs are bravely fighting against a PM and leave movement who are almost single handedly responsible for ramping up the rhetoric to dangerous levels – is shocking. MP after MP, columnist after columnist, has come out bemoaning the use of inflammatory language, as if they are opposed to it on the level of principle. But anyone with a memory more than 25 seconds long knows that simply isn’t the case.
If these were people who had never used heated rhetoric themselves or who opposed it equally as vehemently when used by those they agree with their protestations might carry more weight. But these very MP’s and commentators have, time and again, used the most exaggerated, hysterical language possible to describe leavers, the prime minister included.
There are almost too many examples of astounding double standards here to choose from. Take Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, for example. She has been vocal in her furious criticism of the PM for his use of language. This is the same Jess Phillips who equated the government to the Nazis less than a month ago. David Lammy, another remain MP, has said that comparing leave figures to the Nazis is not only accurate, but ‘doesn’t go far enough’. We have leading politicians seriously arguing that the term ‘Surrender Bill’ is an abominiation, that it is far beyond the pale, that it puts them in danger, while simultaneously comparing politicians with a different point of view to their own to the most brutal, genocidal political regime in history and expecting that to be treated as entirely acceptable.
The Lib Dems, whose slogan is ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ (i.e. the thing that 17.4 million people voted for) and whose members recently chanted ‘Tony Blair can fuck off and die’ at their conference have joined in the criticism. Ed Davey, who not long ago campaigned, referring to Boris Johnson, to ‘decapitate that blond head in Uxbridge and South Ruislip’, led criticism of, yes, Boris Johnson’s language. Owen Jones called the prime minister ‘fucking disgusting’ (which presumably is not too heated?). Commentators and politicians who for years have spent every day tweeting and insisting that Brexiteers are fascists, racists, idiots, that the government is ‘criminal’, is ‘leading a coup’ and so on, have suddenly turned around in unison in apparent horror at the use of untempered language. How on earth can we be expected to take this seriously?
A particularly slapstick example is the behaviour of Labour and remain MP Neil Coyle. At the very moment his labour colleagues were bemoaning Boris’ use of foul language, he tweeted that Piers Morgan, who disagreed with him, should ‘go fuck himself’…said he is a ‘waste of air, space and skin’, called him a ‘scrote’ who makes him sick, and accused leavers of being fascists. It’s like an episode of South Park. ‘Excuse me Sir but I am opposed to foul language so please go fuck yourself you disgusting fascist supporting scrote’. Politics does not get any more juvenile or hypocritical.
In politics, strong language is often used. That is not necessarily a bad thing. What has been seen in the house of commons recently however has bordered on the hysterical, and needs to be reined in on all sides. People legitimately disagree about Brexit and all range of other issues; no-one should be in a position where they fear for their physical safety as a result. Also, none of this excuses Johnson or other leavers’ language. There is undoubtedly hypocrisy at play in the selective outrage here but that does not mean that some of the criticisms levelled against leaver rhetoric are not valid. If remain MPs are worried that his language is putting them in danger, their concerns should be heeded, not merely dismissed.
Ultimately however, many, if not virtually all of these criticisms, could be applied to certain remain figures. If you are happy for terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘facsist’, ‘disgrace’, ‘coup’ and so on to be used against opponents, but are outraged by the term ‘surrender bill’, you are quite simply a massive hypocrite, or blinded by partisanship. Criticism of Brexit, the current state of politics, the discourse used or ideas discussed are all valid. Extreme and selective outrage mobs, however, are not.
E2 REVIEW 