PASSION PLAYS

Added to ‘strong language’, ‘adult scenes’, ‘scenes of a sexual nature’ and ‘scenes some may find upsetting’ is a new inclusion in the lengthening list of paternalistic, post-watershed warnings that precipitate the screening of a drama aimed at grown-ups – ‘discriminatory language’. I’ve heard it applied twice this past week, on both occasions before a repeat of a TV play made over 40 years ago. The second time was for ‘A Hole in Babylon’, a 1979 entry in the ‘Play for Today’ strand based upon the true-life Spaghetti House Siege of 1975, in which a trio of black gunmen botched an armed robbery at a Knightsbridge Italian restaurant and spent six days in a cellar with hostages. The play was written by a black wordsmith and the leading cast members were all black. Even viewers back in 1979 would hardly have been expecting ‘Love Thy Neighbour’; but their equivalents today are obviously so sensitive that any authentic terminology from the actual times is guaranteed to send them running to their safe spaces. In fact, the only derogatory word I heard in the play was ‘wop’.

If the play was remade in 2020, every black character in it would be a noble victim rather than the multilayered human beings of 1979, and every white character would be to the right of Nick Griffin; such dramas are, of course, made by people who weren’t even born then and are prone to sweeping assumptions as to the reality of time and place. If today’s TV travels back to the 18th or 19th centuries, the Woke logic increases further as, away from living memory, modern multiracial Britain is transplanted to every period of history as proof we have always had 21st century levels of ‘diversity’ and all white people were just as horrendously racist then as they all evidently are now. The recent BBC2 series ‘Harlots’ is an enjoyable if somewhat soapy saga set in the whorehouses of Georgian London, though the only male characters in it who aren’t sadistic, unpleasant bastards are, of course, black. Virtually every white man in the cast – bar ‘the gay one’ – is a candidate for the worst human being who ever lived.

Of course there were coloured faces in certain British cities several hundred years ago – especially ports; and there were gay folk as well; and a few who pretended to be the opposite sex; and some straight white men who actually wanted a more tolerant and equal society by abolishing slavery and giving women the vote. But the natural ‘otherness’ of the non-white or non-heterosexual minorities made them stand out rather than blend in, and their individual stories are fascinating as a result; yet we don’t get that from historical drama today because it imposes a fantasy ideal on the reality that reduces all characters to bland contemporary caricatures. To rewrite history and present it as a Guardian columnist’s cartoonish impression of 21st century Britain is a profoundly dishonest distortion of history that’s as unrealistic as Raquel Welch being chased by dinosaurs. And that’s just if a drama is set in the past. Set it in the present and each character is even more of a two-dimensional archetype as every black character is there to represent their race, every gay character is there to represent the LGBT community, every woman is…yeah, we get it. Please put the sledgehammer down.

This is why – for all the appeal of a one-off, non-serial drama – it would be a bad idea to revive the likes of ‘Play for Today’ in 2020. It would probably be awful and be everything it was routinely accused of being back in the day. BBC4 recently screened a documentary about the series on account of this year marking its 50th anniversary and has repeated a handful. Taking over from the celebrated, if often controversial, ‘Wednesday Play’ of the 60s, the rebranded strand soon established itself as a showcase for some of the finest TV writers of an era abundant in them, giving many whose only visit to a theatre was to drag the kids to a Christmas pantomime a weekly cutting-edge theatrical production in their very own living rooms. And whilst ‘Play for Today’ gained an unfair critical reputation as being a Socialist Speaker’s Corner, peppered with grim kitchen-sink polemics on the class struggle, it had a far wider range of offerings than that.

Dennis Potter was a regular contributor from the start. His 1974 offering, ‘Joe’s Ark’ is a moving story of a student played by Angharad Rees of ‘Poldark’ fame who returns home to die when she contracts terminal cancer and is jealously guarded by her God-fearing father (played by Freddie Jones); 1979’s ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ has the genius premise of a group of rural WWII children played by an adult cast, and whilst funny is also tragically poignant in its portrayal of how children can be as cruel to each other as adults can; and, lest we forget, there is the infamous ‘Brimstone and Treacle’, produced in 1976 but withdrawn on the eve of transmission and not screened for a decade. This too is rich in black comedy, for all its undoubtedly dark themes as Michael Kitchen plays the Devil in human form infiltrating a repressive suburban household where he essentially f***s the mentally incapacitated daughter of a middle-aged married couple back to life.

If there was a tendency to overdo the subject of working-class life in ‘Play for Today’, so what? At its best – i.e. when the writers actually hailed from the working-class – it did so in a way that was brutally honest, funny and not necessarily about ‘the class struggle’, which was why the audience responded to the truth of it. These plays showed ordinary people dealing with ordinary problems, such as Colin Welland’s marvellous 1973 entry, ‘Kisses at Fifty’, in which Bill Maynard leaves his wife and grownup children to embark on a relationship with a barmaid; or Peter Terson’s ‘The Fishing Party’ from 1972, starring Brian Glover heading a trio of Yorkshire miners on a weekend’s break in Whitby; or Alan Bennett’s 1975 play, ‘Sunset Across the Bay’, a warm, elegiac tale of an ageing couple leaving Leeds for retirement by the seaside. None of these lived up to the stereotype of the series, and neither did Mike Leigh’s unforgettable 1976 outing, ‘Nuts in May’.

Leigh and his then-wife Alison Steadman returned to collaborate the following year on a ‘Play for Today’ production that continues to irk some critics whilst remaining hugely popular with audiences, ‘Abigail’s Party’. Anybody who grew-up in an aspirational working-class neighbourhood in the 1970s immediately got the joke. ‘Abigail’s Party’ is the upwardly-mobile working-classes spreading their wings and winning promotion to the lower middle-classes by aping the mores and mannerisms of what they see as their social betters; they’re the generation who would soon have a champion in Margaret Thatcher. However, the left-leaning middle-classes are the ones who regard ‘Abigail’s Party’ as a sneering assault on their mythical, romantic image of the oppressed working-class, those noble savages who are fine as long as they know their place and – to use a ghastly modern term – ‘stay in their lane’.

Even a good decade into its run, ‘Play for Today’ could still deliver some unexpectedly original goods, such as the time-travelling oddity starring Peter Firth, ‘The Flipside of Dominick Hide’; there was also the memorable ‘Billy’ trilogy, starring James Ellis and a young Kenneth Branagh – hardly the only drama of the era set in Northern Ireland, but one of the very few in which the Troubles were not the reason for being there. By the time the curtain finally came down on ‘Play for Today’ in 1984, the single play – which had been a mainstay of TV schedules since the medium’s earliest days – was seen as a spent force and has rarely reappeared since. Given the box-ticking, ideological agenda that has effectively turned home-grown TV drama into little more than the ‘model plays’ of the Cultural Revolution, perhaps it’s just as well.

© The Editor

FAIR-PLAY FOR TODAY

Anyone raised on a Cold War TV diet of ‘Callan’, ‘The Sandbaggers’, or ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ will have realised early on that one easily identifiable hallmark of the ideological conflict that distinguished Us from Them was the concept of a free press or at least the freedom to express an opinion contrary to the consensus of the ruling class without fear of State censure. Viewing the wrong side of the Iron Curtain from afar, we in the West became accustomed to the consequences facing those from the East who dared to veer from the party line. As a precursor to Vlad’s unique liquidation policy, the likes of exiled Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was silenced as a critique of his country’s Communist government on the streets of London in 1978, when a poisoned umbrella tip applied to his leg in a bus queue curtailed his broadcasts on the BBC World Service as well as his life. That was an extreme example of the punishment dished out to rebel journalists from totalitarian regimes; if they were lucky, they might get off with a show trial and an indeterminate sentence in a Gulag. Yes, that was one way in which we could draw a clear line between Us and Them. That didn’t happen here.

What’s often forgotten in all this, however, is the clever way in which the powers-that-be of the Eastern Bloc justified their harsh treatment of ‘dissidents’ to their own people. They didn’t just remove prominent figures from the streets and offer no explanation for their abrupt disappearance; they went to the trouble of providing a reason they imagined would suffice, albeit of a kind not dissimilar to how China justifies the mass arrest and imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims in effective concentration camps today; the CCP brands those prisoners undergoing re-education as ‘Radical Islamists’, just as anyone questioning the wisdom of Moscow-sponsored administrations was branded an enemy of the State and a threat to national security back in the day.

Over here, any foolhardy souls contravening the Official Secrets Act could always face severe penalties, but so touchy were the security services during this period that the odd journalist would be plunged into hot water should they say certain things out loud. An infamous 1976 feature in ‘Time Out’ titled ‘The Eavesdroppers’ committed the cardinal sin of actually naming GCHQ at a time when even the existence of MI5 and MI6 was publicly denied; penned by British-based American journalist Mark Hosenball and Brit Duncan Campbell, the furore that followed saw both threatened with deportation on national security grounds, though only Hosenball was successfully forced to leave the country as a result of the article; Campbell instead suffered life under MI5 surveillance. During the Cold War, the ideological battle-lines were clearly drawn between East and West, but the ideological differences of the 21st century are less geographical and tend to share the same uneasy soil.

A Conservative commentator mainly active online – as are many in these days of increasingly partisan current affairs reporting within the MSM – Darren Grimes is not the most obvious candidate that springs to mind whenever one thinks of libertine radicals; but news was announced yesterday that our proudest bastion of fair-play policing, the Met, is investigating Mr Grimes on the grounds of ‘stirring up racial hatred’. I thought they got down on their knees before those guilty of such an offence? I must be mistaken. Anyway, this accusation stems from an infamous interview Grimes conducted with the reliably cantankerous and combative historian David Starkey at the height of BLM protests during the summer.

Already well-known for his outspoken opinions that perhaps often only seem so because everyone else in the public eye is either coached within an inch of their media lives or is mindful of damaging their career prospects, Starkey delights in provoking hostile responses, though even he may have come to regret some of the things said in the Grimes interview – albeit not as much as a star-struck Grimes may now be for not reining Starkey in a little and failing to challenge him once. Starkey’s punishment was to lose academic posts at Canterbury Christ Church University and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge as well as his publishing contract with HarperCollins, whereas Grimes – who didn’t actually say anything ‘contentious’ during the interview – is now being summoned under caution by the Met to answer for his heinous crimes.

There are far more subtle ways and means of making a valid point about these troubled times than the glib, clumsy approach Starkey chose to take, but it would seem Grimes is more at fault for daring to air the interview warts-and-all. The official Scotland Yard statement reads, ‘On July 4 the Metropolitan Police Service was passed an allegation from Durham Police of a public order offence relating to a social media video posted on June 30. The matter is currently being investigated.’ Grimes’ response? ‘At a time when many in our country are facing uncertainty and financial hardship,’ he said, ‘I cannot imagine a more contemptible way for the Metropolitan Police to abuse taxpayers’ money and the trust of citizen than by investigating this vexatious claim.’

What makes Grimes more vulnerable than he would have been way back when old-school ‘libertines’ invoked the ire of the establishment during the Cold War is that the battle-lines now aren’t between East and West or young and old or even left and right, but between those indoctrinated in the unforgiving segregationist dogma of Identity Politics – which our leading institutions are all completely in thrall to – and those who adhere to the archaic rule of everyone being equal in the eyes of the law. Under normal circumstances, the likes of reactionary posh-boy journo Toby Young would hardly be portrayed as a radical voice, but it’s a measure of how far we’ve moved from genuine fair-play that someone such as Young heads an undoubtedly necessary organisation like the Free Speech Union to intervene on Grimes’ behalf; as Young pointed out, are similar Met investigations being carried out into the Sky News presenter whose interview with rapper Wiley produced several anti-Semitic comments around the same time as the Starkey confrontation that proved so incendiary?

Of course, the establishment has always promoted the interests of the few over the many – usually because the establishment tends to comprise several similar groups sharing the same worldview, usually at odds with that of the many. We merely have a different set of ideological dos and don’ts governing that establishment in 2020 to the ones we had 40 or 50 years ago, and everything from airing common-sense truisms to outright provocation aimed at the establishment’s cherished value system is guaranteed to prompt reprisals in the current climate. It helps the establishment that the divisive polarisation of the culture wars means Darren Grimes will elicit little sympathy or support from those on the other side who, though they may regard themselves as opposed to any form of State censorship, will be extremely flexible if only ‘the enemy’ ever feels the full force of the establishment. But it doesn’t matter where your political allegiances are situated in a scenario such as this; assuming only the Darren Grimes’s of this world are liable for a Met investigation is a naive ostrich approach to what is a worrying and serious threat to free speech in this country. Think they’ll stop at him if they succeed? Dream on – and don’t forget to wear a mask while you do…forever.

© The Editor

LAND OF WOKE AND GLORY

Lest we forget, this is an age in which Marks & Spencer can apologise on behalf of a brown-coloured bra because its name – tobacco – offended a customer for whom it evoked the spirit of George Floyd; yup, everything is racist in 2020, even lingerie. And if you reckon colour is merely skin deep, according to an edict issued by the British Library, that’s tantamount to ‘covert white supremacy’; mind you, I know someone who used to work at the British Library, and from what she told me of her former employers, they’re not quite as enlightened as this latest opportunistic PR stunt paints them. How surprising, as the preachers of Identity Politics are usually such open-minded souls. Yes, we all know by now that more or less every public body, corporation, company and cultural institution in this country is under the Woke yolk, so I suppose the situation becoming even sillier is a natural progression; but the thing with Identity Politics is that one can never give enough inches to the mob when there are so many miles to take.

Somewhat predictably, museums are again ‘reviewing’ their contents, debating whether to return some of their overseas artefacts to their country of origin because educating the public on historic civilisations and cultures is obviously racist too; the fact that a fair share of these exhibits emanate from some of the world’s most unstable regions means many could well have gone the way of Nimrud in Iraq had they not been ‘plundered’; but, hey, at least ISIS smashing them to smithereens isn’t racist. It’s so much better not to have wicked imperialists marching in and salvaging the neglected riches of the Ancient World when one can have home-grown philistines reducing them to rubble. The British Museum has now removed the bust of its 18th century founder from public display, and the institution’s director has also stated that we the British people need to revisit our troubled history; he’s German, by the way. Topf, wasserkocher, schwarz, as they say in the fatherland.

So, as ice cream manufacturers deliver lectures on illegal immigrants and Woke celebs line-up on the shore to embrace those fleeing the deadly war-zones of mainland Europe – though probably not giving over their spare rooms – I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised that Last Night of the Proms has provoked predictable debate in this fevered, f***ed-up climate. I remember writing a post on here either last year or the year before on how much I love the Proms, but I made it clear that I’ve never been a big fan of the Last Night; it bears little relation to the rest of the festival and gives a false impression of this Great British institution to the passing viewer. Considering the heavy investment the BBC has in the Proms, the jingoistic pomp of the Last Night must stick in the Beeb’s throat, so anachronistic is it to the corporation’s worldview – like granddad gate-crashing the last course at an Islington dinner party and treating the guests to a rant about ‘darkies’.

Last year, they attempted to drape the event in the rainbow flag and even opened proceedings with a new composition actually titled ‘Woke’ (instant classic); having ticked the LGBTXYZ box on the diversity checklist, this year the BBC is clearly having a crack at racism – and what could be more racist in the current catch-all meaning of the word than the self-indulgent, flag-waving patriotic excesses of Last Night of the Proms? Culturally governed as we are by those with an inbuilt hatred of our culture, I guess a good definition of institutional racism is the Last Night. A nation repeatedly informed it needs to carry collective guilt over the crimes of its long-deceased sons and daughters surely cannot expect the climax of the Proms to evade censure. After all, this is one evening of the year being handed over to a shameless celebration of a country’s past glories via a few irrelevant old tunes; it’s hardly a nationalistic call-to-arms heralding a declaration of war. It’s as harmlessly sentimental to the British as Republican ‘Rebel’ songs are to the Irish. However, one suspects the Beeb has been itching for an excuse to oust the traditional season finale medley of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’ for quite some time, and Covid-19 appears to have provided it.

Under normal circumstances, the Proms season would be in full swing by now. For me, it’s up there with Wimbledon as a summer signpost; but, of course, these aren’t normal circumstances. Just as many of the gaps in the TV schedules caused by cancelled sporting events were filled by rerunning memorable moments from the events’ pasts, the depleted Proms of 2020 has taken a similar approach. This year’s re-jigged festival has so far consisted of a kind of ‘greatest hits’ – with a smattering of new performances to follow shortly. Not that, as both listener and viewer, I’m complaining; the standard has been as high as ever, and if I hadn’t been informed beforehand that the majority of this year’s broadcast concerts were archive ones from the past 15 years or so, I’d probably be none the wiser. However, it would seem the Last Night will be going ahead as usual, albeit in some surreal, socially-distanced shape.

Initially, it was announced that the Last Night sing-along would be dropped, presumably because there’d be no chinless wonders packing the Albert Hall to sing-along. I wasn’t too bothered because I’m not especially keen on it, anyway. Then, following the expected outcry from the likes of the Telegraph and the Mail, the BBC said it would keep the medley, but only in the form of an instrumental version; again, I wasn’t too bothered because I think it works better as a purely instrumental piece, anyway. But I just knew the absence of an audience wasn’t the reason behind the decision. It would appear the scheduled conductor for the Last Night, who happens to be Finnish, had expressed his belief the event could do with a facelift – something to do with that renowned patron of classical music, George Floyd, I think.

At one time, opposition to such a move by the Beeb would be limited to the anticipated editorials from the Right side of Fleet Street; but in the internet age, everyone can have their say; and, as we all know, it doesn’t take much time to galvanise angry folk online. Promoted by the man who is the antichrist to the Woke brigade, actor Laurence Fox, a mischievous campaign was swiftly instigated to embarrass the Beeb by putting Vera Lynn at the top of what today passes for the charts; the song sung by Dame Vera was, of course, her version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and the response has seen the recently-departed National Treasure take over the entire top ten in Amazon’s best-selling songs. The Amazon music chart may or not be the actual top ten in 2020 – I’ve no idea; but along with an online petition signed by tens of thousands demanding the BBC reinstate the missing lyrics of the Last Night medley, the public reaction has highlighted once again the gaping chasm between those who pay the licence fee and those who impose it.

Considering there are calls from some quarters on both sides of the Atlantic to establish ‘all-black’ universities – segregated education based on skin colour; wonder why nobody’s ever thought of that before? – it’s no surprise the Identitarian obsessions of academia have spilled over into the workplaces that many graduates of the leading universities are steered towards. The arts and cultural institutions are overrun with them, with the BBC being perhaps the most visible example to Joe Public in that it is subsidised by the bigoted masses. If the Beeb wants to diminish its standing even further by indulging in another narcissistic bout of self-flagellation, let it; but the patience of its paymasters can only be stretched so many times before it snaps completely.

© The Editor

DRESSED TO CHILL

The staggering roll-call of lives claimed by the First World War understandably overshadows another casualty of the conflict, which was the end of Europe’s great royal houses. These centuries-old hereditary dynasties had survived Napoleon’s temporary interregnum and simply restored themselves as though nothing had happened after Waterloo. History didn’t repeat itself in 1918, however; Kaiser Wilhelm II can take much of the blame. His doomed ambition to echo the achievements of Frederick the Great of Prussia inspired a massive German rearmament programme that alienated his country’s allies, provoked the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 and led to the consequent decimation of a generation – including the Kaiser’s numerous regal relations; and all because little Willie liked dressing up as a soldier. Military uniforms can have that kind of effect on some people.

100 years earlier, Lord Byron had abandoned his open-necked shirts in favour of a new, supposedly less frivolous image to reflect his last passion – the cause of Greek liberation from Ottoman rule; the image in question was military, and he employed his artistry to design a suitably dashing uniform. Having successfully marketed himself as a Romantic hero, Byron used the same techniques to portray the poet as a Romantic ideal of a soldier. For those not belonging to an official army who nevertheless understand the potent propaganda in the look, this has proven to be an enduring move. From Oswald Mosley to Fidel Castro and from the Black Panthers to the IRA, looking sufficiently military sends out a powerful message.

The latest BLM/Antifa hybrid took to the streets of Brixton on Sunday and dipped into the whole pseudo-military dressing-up box once again. These faux-uniforms tend to fit their respective eras, and the ones on display yesterday looked like a Hollywood idea of a black supremacist paramilitary platoon. Importing a uniquely American brand of divisive racial dogma to a country whose mixed bag of non-white residents are largely not descended from slaves is a recipe for disaster that stands to set back UK race relations a good few decades. But, of course, this is the aim. Emboldened by the overnight capitulation and supine endorsement of an establishment terrified of being labelled racist, the cynical weaponising of an emotive issue by this toxic organisation continues unchallenged. Buoyed with confidence, it goosesteps into a celebrated black neighbourhood and a cowering mainstream media fails to afford it the kind of reporting a white far-right equivalent would receive before the first fist punched the air.

Half-a-century ago, another pantomime army committed to racial harmony, the National Front, used to make its presence known not by marching through the kind of neighbourhoods where one might have expected it to garner support, i.e. all-white, but locations where it would attract the most attention from opposition, i.e. those with a high immigrant population. Civil disorder would usually ensue and those within the NF who enjoyed a punch-up had a ball, even if such stunts guaranteed it remained an extremist platform for neo-colonial fruitcakes and racist thugs in the eyes of most people. Unlike BLM, the NF was a political pariah, denounced by both Labour and the Conservatives; the mainstream parties then were led by men who’d played a part in the Second World War and had seen with their own eyes the damage that can be done when ideology based on the premise that one race is superior to another gets out of hand. They also shared a collective shudder when recalling the British Union of Fascists.

However, both Labour and the Tories had a sizeable chunk of members and voters who weren’t as favourable towards non-white Commonwealth immigration as the leadership. Some Tories hadn’t accepted the wisdom of Harold MacMillan’s sagacity in the early 60s and had continued to resist the Wind of Change by retaining links with South Africa and Rhodesia; some of Labour’s grassroots support, working in industries and living in areas most affected by the influx of immigrants in the 50s and 60s, were no more welcoming to the changing face of British cities. These two seemingly incompatible strands of the electorate voiced their mutual agreement with Enoch Powell in the wake of that 1968 speech; and while Powell’s ego relished his new role as a voice in the wilderness, he showed no interest in forming his own racially-charged breakaway party as Mosley had done thirty-odd years before.

Perhaps feeling their concerns were being ignored by mainstream politics, some of those who had supported Powell were easy prey for the National Front. Founded by an ex-member of Mosley’s BUF, the fact that the organisation had its roots in one called the League of Empire Loyalists makes it clear how much its hierarchy was a sad little club for diehard imperialists struggling to acknowledge the sun was setting – as well as attracting those raised on the ‘romance’ of Empire. Martin Webster, second-in-command to NF leader John Tyndall, was an expelled Young Conservative who enjoyed dressing-up in Nazi regalia and fantasising about forming a far-right paramilitary outfit consisting of angry young proles led by posh boys like him. But, as with all organisations that draw strength from discontent and discord and exploit both ignorance and uncertainty, the climate needs to be conducive to its message; the National Front gained a foothold in the public consciousness when the country was at its most economically perilous and socially divided. Yeah, that sounds familiar.

The stated enemies of the National Front were no great surprise – those old favourites the Jews figured especially high on the hit-list; but a far easier issue for the NF to manipulate was fear within the communities whose demographics had been considerably altered by post-war immigration policies, and these were more or less all working-class ones. Although it had always been able to depend on the support of ex-colonials sent packing to the mother country in the aftermath of independence – who could, ironically, have been referred to as immigrants – renegade middle-class Tories weren’t much use in a fight; the places where the NF engaged in an aggressive recruitment drive were the very places where immigration had stoked grievances.

The NF achieved its most popular support in the mid-70s, when it was rumoured to have a membership of around 17,000, but it couldn’t translate this to the ballot box. Any extremist organisation that puts a suit on and attempts to present its raison d’être in a more reasonable manner is always eventually undone by its inherent extremism as the less palatable elements quickly seep out and render it beyond the pale – as happened with NF splinter group the BNP. Had not political uniforms been outlawed in 1936, perhaps the NF could have just minced about in combat gear. That alone would have killed it far quicker, for there is something undeniably ridiculous when a civilian dons the uniform and strikes the pose; it should always be laughed at and viewed as no more scary than Freddie Starr dressed as Hitler.

And we could do with a laugh right now. In the space of seven hours on Friday, five people were shot in London, yet BLM has nothing to say about this because it doesn’t fit a narrative in which the oppressed and the oppressor are clearly designated roles. It has a blatant agenda in which black-on-black crime has no place. God knows this is far from being a perfect country, but widening the existing divide and doing so along racial lines is no more a solution today than it was 50 years ago. Yet that’s presuming BLM wants a solution – and it doesn’t. People of good heart bearing every irrelevant skin-deep pigment on the colour chart don’t want this and they don’t need it.

© The Editor

AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

I watched one of those remarkable interviews the other day, the kind that television used to specialise in back when programmes like ‘Panorama’ or ‘World in Action’ presented hard news stories to an audience of millions, the kind that vindicated the work put in by committed and thorough investigate journalists, the kind that used to make such a powerful impact that they would lead to a change in the law, the kind that once you start watching you don’t pause to put the kettle on because your attention is captured wholly for the duration. It was dealing with a relevant story that has affected thousands of lives in this country for decades – thousands of extremely vulnerable lives. Only, it wasn’t on television. It was on YouTube. And it wasn’t an interview conducted by an investigative journalist, but by two comedians. It aired on the Triggernometry channel, hosted by Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin, and the interviewee was Dr Ella Hill, a Rotherham grooming gang survivor.

The fact the only place this interview could be found was on Triggernometry is either a damning indictment of the cowardice and prejudice of ‘impartial’ MSM news outlets and broadcasters or simply highlights that they are now as redundant as the print medium. This was an interview that should have been screened in a primetime slot on a mainstream TV channel – and would’ve been at one time; but it was never gonna happen in 2020. What Ella Hill’s emotive, moving and frankly horrific testimony offered was an eye-witness account of an appalling scandal that utterly trashes the contemporary narrative on issues of race; and the MSM – along with every other UK institution, corporation and higher education establishment – has invested far too much in this narrative for it to be contradicted by an uncomfortable truth.

This is a story loaded with two key elements that constitute the fundamental foundations of Identity Politics ideology – it has violence against women and it has toxic masculinity; it should have been immediately seized upon by the practitioners of that ideology and promoted as the outrage it is. But it wasn’t treated in the way one might imagine because the toxic males committing the violence against women were Muslims, a demographic ranking high on the Identitarian league tables of Oppressed Minorities; and the women – or girls – were white, and therefore not important. Only those with white skin can be racist, lest we forget, for racism can only be committed by the ‘privileged’ majority. Turns out it wasn’t a Hate Crime after all.

‘Racially and religiously-aggravated rape’ is Ella Hill’s own personal definition of the grooming gang raison d’être, ‘or network-based rape, very often of underage girls.’ She estimates upwards of half-a-million girls have been victims of this particularly repugnant crime over the past forty years, yet how long had it been going on before it broke over-ground? And remember how the MSM reacted when it did – choosing instead to give distracting airtime to frauds and fantasists spouting conspiracy theories of historical Westminster paedophile rings and soft targets like dead or decrepit 70s celebrities? Much easier to deal with than the fact that organised groups of British Muslims of Pakistani origin were sexually abusing what they regarded as subhuman ‘white trash’ and destroying the multicultural myth in the process. Ella Hill herself was sucked into this vile netherworld in her teens by an Asian boyfriend who subjugated her with physical and mental abuse once he began sharing her with the rest of the gang; even when she survived attempted murder at their hands and spent a week in hospital with her injuries, reporting the full story to the police on five separate occasions was met with the response ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

The toxic legacy of the Stephen Lawrence murder has swung the police forces of this country from one extreme to the other rather than having rebalanced the scales; the reprehensible refusal to help a physically, mentally and sexually abused young woman in the interests of preserving racial harmony – and because she was the ‘wrong’ kind of victim – is the natural outcome of this mindset. And by shutting up ‘for the sake of diversity’, it leaves the field clear for the opportunistic Far Right to weaponise the subject, thus placing it further beyond the pale of polite conversation.

In a society in which white people are now being encouraged to believe they are born with the Original Sin of racism, it’s no wonder such an outrage as grooming gangs has been allowed to fester unimpeded by inconveniences like prosecution and imprisonment. Grooming gangs show up Identity Politics as the sham it is, and its most fanatical advocates will not tolerate this. During the interview, Ella Hill admitted she’d been scared to take part in it, not down to fears of revenge attacks by those who abused her, but from the Far Left who hounded her off social media. ‘I get called a Nazi,’ she said. ‘I get called a fascist, I get called a bigot, I get called an enemy of Islam…and’ (perhaps evoking her abusers’ view of her as ‘easy meat’) ‘one of the things that really hurts is being called gammon.’

Of course, what the existence of this particular division of Islam in Britain does by indulging in such gruesome practices is to tarnish the entire ‘Muslim Community’, not to mention highlighting the ridiculousness of pigeonholing millions of people who happen to share the same faith as a one-size-fits-all demographic. If the Identitarian agenda didn’t insist on grouping together disparate individuals on the basis of skin colour, religion, sex, gender and sexual preference then the grooming gangs would’ve been rightly outed as the organised paedophile networks that they are; but because the powers-that-be have bought into the Identity Politics philosophy, all Muslims are therefore affiliated with grooming gangs due to all Muslims belonging in the same box – and over-publicising the scandal would therefore inspire hatred of, and violence against, all Muslims. Whose fault is this, then – The Far Right? Muslims themselves? I don’t think so.

Rotherham MP Sarah Champion wrote a tabloid piece about this subject a couple of years back and was forced to resign from Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet as a reward – as well as having to keep a low profile in the face of a hate-fuelled social media campaign against her. Fellow Labour MP Naz Shah described the article as ‘incendiary and irresponsible’ before reiterating the safe narrative that ‘90% of child sexual abusers are white men’. Meanwhile, the official Home Office report into grooming gangs remains suppressed and the police this week announced they were considering dropping terms such as ‘Islamic Terrorism’ and ‘Jihadists’ for fear of causing offence to ‘the Muslim Community’. One would imagine they should be more concerned with the offence caused by the crimes of such criminals.

‘The Black Lives Matter movement is frightening to me,’ said Ella Hill. ‘I was forced to bend the knee, I was forced to kneel down and kiss my perpetrator’s feet…I was forced to literally kneel at his feet as part of the abuse I received…and when I see the footballers kneeling, and when I see leading politicians kneeling, to me I’m seeing them kneeling to my perpetrators – and it breaks my heart.’ Considering the dreadful abuse she suffered and the injustices of that abuse going unpunished, it would be understandable if Dr Ella Hill was hell-bent on revenge; yet, she cites her Christian faith as her salvation and expresses astonishingly charitable forgiveness towards her abusers. Her interview is no easy viewing experience, but her refreshing humanity is genuinely uplifting in a climate that appears to have learnt nothing from decades of blind eyes being turned. It really is worth a watch, and Ella Hill’s beautiful spirit saves it from being an exercise in vicarious misery for the viewer. Hers is a story that needed to be told and one that needs to be heard.

© The Editor

SOME KIND OF A SUMMER

If there was such a thing as new month resolutions, they’d probably turn out to be as unrealisable as New Year resolutions; a tad more commitment would be required on the part of the person making the resolution, but as most struggle to stick to them on an annual basis, a monthly equivalent seems overly ambitious. After all, remember the beginning of the lockdown, when everyone on social media was boasting about the new languages they were going to become fluent in or the instruments they were going to learn to play or the unread novels they were finally going to tackle – let alone the novel they were actually going to write? Within a couple of weeks, it seemed all those spouting grandiose plans had reverted to the comfort zone of a lazy Sunday, spending all day in their pyjamas and getting fat by binging on Netflix and takeaway pizzas rather than getting fit with Joe Wicks. Still, the notion of a clean slate coming on the first day of every new month does have its appeal on paper.

How nice it would be to erase June 2020 from the calendar, for example; June 2020, as we all know, was the month the world went mad. After the surreal novelty of April and then the stir craziness of May, June saw the first concrete evidence of how damaging this unprecedented global experiment has been as the mental health effects of a worldwide curfew were released from behind closed doors and let loose into the public arena. The cyberspace personas of thousands materialised in the real world and were even uglier in the flesh than on Twitter. The true economic effects of the lockdown will probably begin to hit hard as the second half of the year unravels, but the midway point has shown what happens to people’s grasp of sanity when you cut them off from the rest of the world en masse.

An organisation like Black Lives Matter has exploited the situation with the mastery of Madison Avenue. They have the logo and they have the slogan, which is a good start; but the way in which they have taken ownership of such an emotive issue and weaponised it as the Trojan horse through which to smuggle their true, neo-Marxist agenda into the mainstream has been quite an achievement. Racism is something many people of good heart have genuine concerns about, so what better subject to copyright? Extinction Rebellion have done the same with climate change, ensuring any questioning or criticism of their ideology can provoke a retort that labels the critic a climate change ‘denier’, just as any disputing of BLM wisdom can be silenced with the word ‘racist’ – or, for all that, criticism of MeToo makes you a misogynist. Genius. BLM have been presented with an utterly unique set of circumstances to capitalise on and even they must have been surprised at how the system they seek to destroy has crumbled before their eyes with the speed of a Rich Tea biscuit coming into contact with a hot cup of coffee.

But of course, even they weren’t completely prepared for such a rapid capitulation and haven’t yet worked out that you’re not supposed to risk newfound support by giving everything away too early; that was highlighted with a BLM Tweet yesterday that exposed that familiar old far-left trope of pro-Palestine/anti-Israel sentiments to those who’d quickly donned the T-shirt without examining the small-print. With their sudden high profile, BLM would’ve kept quiet about that a little longer if the plan hadn’t surpassed its schedule; perhaps they got carried away in the face of such swift success and figured those who were there solely because they agreed with the simple central message would also swallow plans to defund the police and breakup the nuclear family as well as going along with anti-Semitism masquerading as ‘just’ hatred of the State of Israel. It would appear conquering so much enemy soil so speedily has imbued them with a strain of naive overconfidence.

Mind you, how delicious it was to see cheerleaders like Piers Moron backtracking on the more…erm…’difficult’ elements of the manifesto that he hadn’t bothered to read up on in his haste to virtue signal. Ditto the facile Keir Starmer, who’d been so eager to get down on one knee that he hadn’t even realised the organisation had a little bit more to it than a pat catchphrase and a cynical photo op. In the rush to be seen to be ‘on trend’, these fools are now having to modify their support, inserting caveats that weren’t there before. I can’t help but feel them expressing their disagreement with all the awkward bits whilst continuing to emphasise the one thing they thought it was all about isn’t a million miles away from the old solitary defence of the Third Reich, the one that claimed they at least ensured the trains ran on time.

So, if the lockdown must take a large portion of the blame for June’s insane excesses, how must the good people of Leicester feel now that their city has been singled out as the first example of a ‘regional’ lockdown, imposed as the rest of the country is slowly reopening for business? Just when they thought it was safe to venture out in public again, they’re being told they’ve got to go back indoors. Some of us argued a couple of months ago that a one-size-fits-all national lockdown was probably a mistake in the first place. The pandemic had barely impacted on the more sparsely populated corners of the country whilst naturally thriving in metropolitan sprawls, so it did appear to make sense for such factors to be taken into consideration. Perhaps the prospect of second-home outsiders descending upon clean countryside communities from infected cities risked spreading the virus far and wide, so the same measures applying everywhere was logical; but the highest death toll still took place in urban areas, even with identical restrictions being imposed across the whole country.

Maybe from now on, any isolated upsurge in cases will make the regional lockdown the preferred option, sealing-off the worst affected area in the hope it can be contained – not unlike the method used during the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, which turned rural neighbourhoods into no-go zones whilst towns and cities carried on as normal. Naturally, this will require a greater degree of cooperation between Westminster and local government, not to mention delegating responsibility and powers; but even if the ‘pilot scheme’ in Leicester works, what additional damage will it do to Leicester itself – both economically and emotionally? For most people, life hasn’t quite returned to what it was before lockdown, but a few more shops opening and even a version of football fulfilling the fixture list is at least a facade of normality. For that little glimmer of normality to then vanish again will be a blow for many. The sacrifices the majority were prepared to make in the beginning had already been severely fraying at the edges, whether manifested as crowding the beach, reviving illegal raves or indulging in a spot of statue-dismantling; but how much more can a populace take?

I explained at the very start that, as I was accustomed to spending extended periods in solitary confinement in order to get on with my work, the lockdown was actually no great imposition on my personal liberty. I actually enjoyed the initial absence of traffic from the uncharacteristically quiet streets and, apart from reducing daily shopping expeditions to weekly occurrences, nothing really changed for me beyond not seeing anyone in person. However, there are some friends I now haven’t seen for months and I have to admit I am missing the stimulation of conversation. Most today text rather than talk on the phone and some don’t like to Skype, so typing has now replaced the spoken word, which I find a very flat form of communication between friends. Even not being a resident of Leicester doesn’t mean we are as we were, and that’s bad enough; but the thought of reverting to the stricter conditions of April and May isn’t an especially appetising one – and hardly suggests we can bid good riddance to June as though July will be an improvement.

© The Editor

THIS BLESSED PLOT

Liverpool FC are League Champions again. They deserve it, even if they won it in an atmosphere evocative of a reserve game at Torquay United. Maybe the team can celebrate down on the beach – as long as they pick the right resort. Of course, had the multitudes crammed onto the beach at Bournemouth been waving BLM or rainbow flags, perhaps their flouting of social distancing etiquette wouldn’t have led to their presence being regarded as a ‘major incident’. Instead of throwing their hands up in despair when confronted by such uncontrollable numbers, the police could have stripped down to their trunks and done ‘a gay dance’ on the sands or maybe taken the knee. Clearly, the latter addition to the police training manual didn’t work in Brixton the night before; or maybe a Force already regarded as an ineffective joke in the capital were facing the inevitable consequences when submissive virtue-signalling has portrayed them even further as weak and spineless. Well, they only have themselves to blame.

As somebody instinctively immune to the delights of either intense heat or crowds, the scenes at Bournemouth and Brighton would have resembled Hell on Earth to me, anyway – regardless of pandemic issues; but the minute mass demonstrations swept across several British cities when so many restrictions had yet to be lifted, the game was up; applauding those with a cause and condemning those without looks suspiciously like double standards. Neither type of gathering was a good idea for the containment of an infectious virus, but you can’t give the thumbs up to one and the thumbs down to the other because you’re scared of what will become of you should you stand up to the relentless emotional bullying of the loudest voice.

Indeed, as our old pal Mr Orwell said, ‘At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.’ The lexicon of undesirable labels to lob into the debating arena and instantly curtail criticism of the consensus is sold as a means of upholding democratic rights, though the beneficiaries of these rights are entirely selective in the New World Order, lest we forget. ‘In other words,’ added Orwell, ‘defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.’

And they’ve come for Rebecca Long-Bailey now. The cancel culture so beloved of the regressive left has turned round and bitten one of their own on account of Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘first priority’ as Labour leader being to get a grip on the anti-Semitism rife in his party. Ms Double-Barrelled Socialist was ejected as Shadow Education Secretary for re-tweeting an interview with actress (and renowned Corbyn groupie) Maxine Peake, who spun a conspiracy theory yarn that the tactics used to squeeze the last breath from the lungs of George Floyd had been taught to the US police by Mossad. The chief Auton saw this promotion of yet another imaginary association with wicked old Israel as a good excuse to sack his former leadership rival and one-time heir to Jezza.

Whilst few outside of Momentum would mourn the exile of Long-Bailey from the Opposition frontbench, Starmer has a job on his hands if he truly intends to purge Labour of something so intrinsic to the extreme Identity Politics agenda that has both bolstered its membership and alienated its traditional voting base. Filling his Shadow Cabinet with yes-men entirely sympathetic to his own ‘Identitarian-Lite’ vision is not a unifying tactic anymore than Corbyn filling his with his own yes-persons was. Neither can call upon the considerable skill of Harold Wilson in holding together a frontbench of diverse opinions that were forced to work together for the greater good. Maxine Peake was quick to issue the standard humbling apology, perhaps mindful of her career receiving a Laurence Fox-type period of extended ‘resting’ as a consequence, and though Long-Bailey has also bent over backwards to stress she is NOT anti-Semitic, it made no difference to her reduced status.

If only Long-Bailey had been a Woman of Colour and an academic to boot, such as Cambridge charmer Priyamvada Gopal, who tweeted the following heart-felt message of love and harmony – ‘Now we have the opportunity to carry out a resolute offensive against the whites, break their resistance, eliminate them as a class and replace their livelihoods with the livelihoods of people of colour and LGBTQ.’ A fairly routine and not remotely controversial opinion to hold within the hallowed walls that have served as the nursery for contemporary groupthink and enough to secure Dr Gopal promotion rather than the no-platforming reserved for academics whose opinions are the ‘wrong’ ones. Flying a banner over a football stadium bearing the legend ‘White Lives Matter’ is not a great idea, of course, but the race-baiters got what they wanted there, so why the fuss? It was bad racism and the idiot behind it has lost his job while that nice Dr Gopal has kept hers because she’d said ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’, which is good racism. Both dicks, but only one currently claiming Universal Credit, funnily enough.

At least we can rely on the BBC for a semblance of sanity. They might have quietly shuffled the horrific murder of three gay men in Reading to the back of the queue because the nasty man that did it might invite…ooh…’Islamophobic’ responses, but I’m sure the trio of victims received a respectful minutes’ silence in the Commons, didn’t they? Anyway, Auntie is getting her house in order by promising to spend £100 million of your licence fee on ‘diverse and inclusive content’. About time too. It’d be nice to think the BBC would extend its concept of diversity and inclusivity to encompass diversity of thought, opinion and – more than anything – class, but I suspect the Oxbridge graduates will keep their jobs and continue to portray the entire country as an Islington dinner-party ideal of a multicultural, LGBTXYZ Britain akin to the old Coca-Cola ad that taught the world to sing. We can probably look forward to an all-trans version of ‘Henry V’ once production resumes on the corporation’s drama output; in the meantime, it needs to keep the iPlayer clean of any embarrassing old uncles that contradict the narrative.

Failing that, the Beeb could simply do what the rest of the bankruptcy-threatened Arts have done. Woke infestation had already placed them on life-support, but Covid-19 could well deliver the fatal blow that the creative industries have brought upon themselves. As Maoist principles are chic again, it’s worth remembering how any plays, books or films deemed even vaguely critical of the regime were banned during the Cultural Revolution and replaced with regime-approved propaganda substitutes that ticked all the right boxes, the so-called Model Dramas. Look at the output of the BBC, Hollywood and the publishing industry under the rewritten rules and regulations and tell me we’re not being served-up our very own Model Dramas right now. It might explain why they’re all so shite, I guess. Suppress the dissenting voice of the individual and kill creativity in the process. That’s the kind of diversity and inclusivity we like in 2020. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a long summer.

© The Editor

COMMUNITY CHARGE

Anyone wondering where the current chaos may carry us and what possible future awaits the most comfortable, safe and secure society in the largely uncomfortable, unsafe and insecure history of western civilisation needs look no further than CHAZ. A twisted 21st century take on the 1871 Paris Commune, CHAZ stands for Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; God’s gift to the privileged desperately seeking a struggle, it rose from the ashes of the rioting that swept across America following the viral video of the George Floyd killing. This no-go area is a neighbourhood in Seattle covering six blocks and has been reborn as the blueprint for the Identitarian Utopia, whereby everyone stays in their designated lanes, and a society is segregated along racial, sexual and gender lines; it’s Identity Politics apartheid transferred from the Woke drawing board to the streets of a major American city.

In what sounds chillingly like a real-life replay of ‘Assault on Precinct 13’, Seattle police abandoned their station in the east precinct and left locals to their own devices as Antifa and their affiliated anarchists seized control. CHAZ is a lawless Wild West Dystopia with makeshift barricades keeping out unwelcome visitors that are patrolled by armed militia. Reports of what’s happening behind those barricades evoke descriptions of the towns that fell to ISIS in Syria – well, that and a mix of Waco and Jonestown with a dash of ‘Lord of the Flies’. The community has essentially been endorsed by both the State Governor and the Mayor of Seattle – both Democrats, unsurprisingly – and the official PR is of a ‘safe space’ on an unprecedented scale, a peaceful illegal occupation; I guess if your definition of peaceful is community policing via self-appointed armed security guards making up the rules as they go along, then CHAZ is the place to be. And as we’ve already had one toxic strain of Americana successfully imported to Blighty, maybe CHAZ is the way forward for town planning in the UK.

All those who observed lockdown rules for the greater good and sacrificed personal freedoms – those who were divided from friends and family for months and became house-bound because they were repeatedly informed deviating from the advice would lead to the NHS being swamped with coronavirus casualties and would turn hospitals into morgues – have had to stay indoors and stay alert whilst watching thousands of others then disregard all social distancing guidelines to congregate in public spaces. Adherents to the lockdown couldn’t go to the pub or cinema or meet in numbers exceeding half-a-dozen, but protestors were given carte blanche to spurn the rules governing ordinary social interaction because they had a superior moral cause, one that would allow them to deface, destroy and desecrate the surroundings they marched through whilst the same police force who harassed and hassled law-abiding observers of the pandemic manual stood back and knelt down before them. Is it any wonder the Law looks like one hell of an ass to millions of people right now?

Angela Rayner decries the online airing of a video apparently capturing the weekend’s gruesome knife attack and murder of three people in Reading; rightly so – who the hell would want to watch, let alone add to the trauma of those who knew or were related to the murdered? Yet, is that Rayner’s motive? Maybe the killer – a Libyan national, by all accounts – was the ‘wrong’ kind of killer (just like the girls scarred for life by grooming gangs in Rotherham were the ‘wrong’ kind of victims), thus adding an additional layer of unpleasantness to the video. Of course, the George Floyd video was on a virtual loop for weeks, becoming the Instagram generation’s equivalent of the Zapruder Footage; no problem with that one being repeatedly screened because it enforced the narrative and served as justification for the exploiters and manipulators of genuine grievances and authentic fears to hijack them, absorbing them into an agenda that has become a sponge for every campus cause hotwired into the world beyond the gates of academia via abundant MSM mouthpieces.

All pressing issues have been claimed by ‘the movement’ that operates under a variety of brands; but it matters not if this week’s chosen slogan is Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion, for the aims are the same. The rights of those this movement claims to be fighting on behalf of are little more than a convenient smokescreen to obscure the actual intention, a facade to dupe and deceive the well-meaning; after all, who with half-a-brain would condone racism or the destruction of the planet? These are contemporary concerns that have been cannily copyrighted and owned by the movement so that any opposition to it can be instantly deflected back at the opponent. Not particularly keen on your culture or history being torn down before your eyes? Obviously, that makes you a racist. The movement hasn’t selected its patsies randomly. Had just one footballer in the resurrected Premier League refused to wear BLM on his shirt or said out loud that taking the knee was a humiliating, submissive, virtue-signalling gesture that had nothing to do with attempts to eradicate genuine racism would have seen his career collapse quicker than you can say free transfer. When emotional blackmail makes the optional compulsory, you know you’re not in the realm of reason.

It’s a clever ploy to suppress debate and to brand anyone daring to raise their head above the parapet as a ‘right-wing extremist’; and if they still won’t shut up after being called a nasty name, the trolls are released and the online campaign continues until they are silenced. However, just in case Twitter doesn’t deliver, the movement can depend upon the cynical endorsement of bandwagon-jumping corporations that profit from modern-day slavery effectively cancelling said ‘right-wing extremist’ because being on the right side of history will ensure their shareholders can ride the post-lockdown economic storm. Google, YouTube and Facebook – as with all other companies, public bodies and institutions – are in the hands of the movement, anyway, so they’re not going to let the side down.

The movement’s wealthy white manipulators continue to play the race card as their ace, yet any ‘person of colour’ who has actually expressed a dislike of white ‘liberals’ patronising them and speaking on their behalf are regarded as traitors to their race, effective Uncle Toms. Being non-white is supposed to be a collective experience, is it not? Groupthink rules, OK, and People of Colour must all share the same viewpoint and politics, whether your roots are in the West Indies, West Africa, the Subcontinent or the Deep South. You’re all the same, right, you coloured folks? Adhere to the narrative and we white folks will pat you on the head for being good little victims as we add you to our trophy cabinet of oppressed minorities. Don’t get ideas above your station, such as becoming Home Secretary, for God’s sake. That buggers everything up.

Be under no illusions. We all want peace on earth and so on, but this isn’t it; this is a power-grab by charlatans posing as freedom-fighters; if they believed in freedom, that would also encompass thought and speech; but it doesn’t. Anyone who knows history knows what happens when authorities leave their posts and the mob move in to fill the vacuum; it happened during the Terror and it happened during the Cultural Revolution; relics of the old society are symbolically destroyed because the new society cannot get a foothold when surrounded by reminders of what is being lost. People might then actually regret losing them. Anyway, as for national monuments, Jake Thackray once highlighted how you can make much more inventive use of them…

© The Editor

THE FIRST DIVISION

There’s a telling interview with Jim Morrison from 1970 in which the Doors frontman reflects on the place of ‘nudity in Art’ following his…erm…’trouble’ in Miami, where he was alleged to have exposed himself on stage during a gig. ‘I think that nudity is really a cyclical phenomenon,’ he says. ‘It comes, it gets very liberal and extreme, then it goes back and reacts the other way and it just seems to be a cycle in entertainment…in the realm of art and theatre, I do think there should be complete freedom for the artist and performer.’ It’s a fascinating snapshot of one of the most literate and intelligent artists of that era before he succumbed to the self-indulgent excesses of the expectations placed upon him by an audience that desired a performing monkey to live out their vicarious fantasies. Morrison was speaking 20 years on from the persecutions of the McCarthy witch-hunts, but at a time when the worst crimes of the Cultural Revolution in China were still fresh in the minds of many. He recognised the importance of retaining artistic freedom in the face of inevitable pressure from philistine puritans with no understanding of the nuances that accompany the best Art has to offer.

Edward VI did it; Stalin did it; Mao did it; Pol Pot did it; the Taliban did it; ISIS did it; educated fleas may well have done it, but for now it is the Identitarian extremists of Black Lives Matter and their affiliated anarchists that have done it. The circumstances may differ, but the zealous, iconoclastic self-righteousness remains the same, along with the song. From the pathetic grovelling apologies of David Walliams and Matt Lucas – both of whom lost all lingering credibility or respect in an instant – to the hilariously humourless and oh-so sincere atonement video issued by white Hollywood ‘stars’ self-flagellating to save their careers, the gutless, capitulating cowardice of the established order cannot help but evoke historical throwbacks to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings at the turn of the 50s. Everyone is too concerned with saving their own scared skin to stand up to the relentless bullying of the latest slogan to which we must all submit.

There may not be an official equivalent of the ‘Hollywood Blacklist’ today, but be in no doubt we are back in the Dark Ages that Jim Morrison only experienced the tail-end of in Miami; Morrison’s philosophical perspective on how genuine liberalism swings back and forth gave hope for the future, but he was fortunate to be at the vanguard of something that freed culture from the stranglehold of Puritanism for the best part of three decades. The notion that someone could once be condemned and cast out for something positive (and subsequently discarded) they had penned about Communism in a student rag 20 years before had rightly been regarded as ridiculous after the event, yet how is that any different from someone who created a character on a popular TV comedy series 20 years before now being forced to desperately beg for forgiveness that will never come?

A friend of a FB ‘friend’ in the wake of Leigh Francis’s deluded confessional the other week actually said in reply, ‘David Baddiel also needs to apologise for the same thing – and if he has apologised, maybe now is the time to do it again.’ Within that sentence is implicit the evidence that one apology isn’t enough, and who’s to say two will do? These people really believe they are liberal, free-thinking and in the right; they are utterly blind to the reality of their own prejudicial and illiberal attitudes to anyone who contradicts their worldview, and completely opposed to freedom of speech. The enemy must be punished, humiliated and forced to atone for their sins, end of – and even though he will never be entirely forgiven, we shall enjoy watching him suffer. The demands will become increasingly ludicrous if the authorities keep giving in to them and effectively endorsing purges, for the appetite of a fanatic is insatiable as they attempt to claim ownership of both the private and the public space. But to say this out loud is to get into bed with Tommy Robinson, and I’ve heard he has a habit of hogging the duvet, so sod that. And, of course, under the sun there is nothing new.

There was once a tried-and-trusted KGB method of destabilising the Soviet Union’s enemies by stealth, not through dropping bombs or even smearing nerve agents on doorknobs, but by infiltrating the public bodies, institutions and academia of a nation through neo-Marxist dogma masquerading as progressive liberal ideology. This long-term project could take 20 years or more to come to fruition, but by the time at least one generation had been indoctrinated, the instigators of the infiltration could sit back and watch society begin to destroy itself. Fill said generation with self-loathing, a hatred of their country and its history, and a desire to reduce it to cultural ashes; they would do the work for you. For many, this took root in the heady atmosphere of political turmoil that swept across Western Europe in 1968, giving birth to the likes of the Baader-Meinhof Gang at one end and a proliferation of Che Guevara T-shirts at the other; but anyone assuming it was a fashionable flash-in-the-pan that disappeared with the dissolution of the USSR needs to pause and ponder on the possibility it might have worked after all.

Whilst neither Putin nor lizards were necessarily involved, the 21st century equivalent of this operation was initially to divide men and women via Radical Feminism, though – despite intense efforts – it ultimately failed because at the end of the day the opposite sexes tend to be dependent on each other; then the intervention of Trans-activism threw a spanner in the works that continues to place women themselves in a state of crisis; dividing black and white seemed the easiest option – easy enough in a country with such a troubled racial history as the USA. And this one appears to really be working; we witnessed decades of progression towards colour blindness – decades that resulted in the election of a black President, lest we forget – yet the constant conditioning of being told one is a perpetually oppressed victim and that skin colour defines one’s identity above everything else (just like authentic white supremacists have been preaching for years, funnily enough) ensures the continuation of the division that numerous organisations require in order to stay in business.

Yes, there are cycles to this, just as Jim Morrison pointed out half-a-century ago; the pendulum swings to one extreme and then gradually swings back to a place in which we can actually all get along – though this frustratingly takes time. BLM have an advantage at the moment in that raising any doubts as to the wisdom of their demands can lead to one being instantly dismissed as a racist, just as those of us who doubted the wisdom of Operation Yewtree a decade ago were instantly dismissed as Paedos. And who’d relish being either a racist or a Paedo? Therefore, Premier League football can resume with Black Lives Matter printed on shirts and no one says a damn thing. They wouldn’t dare. Would anyone have protested if the Northern Ireland team had taken to the field with shirts advertising the IRA in the 1970s? Probably, though not in those parts of the UK where any dissent could result in a kneecapping. Already, there are signs of despair on social media over the defacing of the ‘wrong’ statues. Come on, children – did you really think they’d stop at all the ‘right’ ones?

© The Editor

PROPHET AND LOSS

A shadow backbench MP nobody beyond her constituency had heard of was ‘owned’ by the Home Secretary last week. Hot on the heels of a staggeringly condescending letter to Priti Patel signed by various Labour MPs that accused the Home Secretary of using her race to ‘gaslight other minority communities’, this latest desperate leap on the BLM bandwagon by Her Majesty’s Opposition wheeled out the usual Labour copyright claim on race issues. Florence Eshalomi sought to uphold the oppressed immigrant victim narrative so beloved of the left and it was immediately evident the gambit had backfired brilliantly. Priti Patel disputed the accusation that her government doesn’t understand racial inequality.

‘On that basis,’ Patel retorted, ‘it must have been a very different Home Secretary who as a child was frequently called a paki in the playground, a very different Home Secretary who was racially abused in the streets or even advised to drop her surname and use her husband’s in order to advance her career, a different Home Secretary recently characterised in the Guardian newspaper as a fat cow with a ring through its nose, something that was not only racist but offensive both culturally and religiously. This is hardly an example of respect, equality, tolerance or fairness; so when it comes to racism, sexism, tolerance or social justice, I will not take lectures from the other side of the House…and sadly, too many people are too willing, too casual to dismiss the contributions of those who don’t necessarily conform to preconceived views or ideas about how ethnic minorities should behave or think. This…is racist in itself.’

The Labour MP didn’t call Patel an ‘Uncle Tom’, but the implication was inherent in her arrogant assumption that only Labour has the right to narrate this saga. Four great Offices of State and two of them held by British Asians rather than the evil white men who should always occupy them in order to validate the left’s story arc – that wasn’t in the script. And what a script; primarily penned by the self-loathing white middle-class that has echoes across the Atlantic at the heart of the Democratic Party, the politically-correct facade of tolerance obscuring a myriad of old-school bigotry and nastiness. Priti Patel doesn’t fit the narrative, so she’s fair game to be demonised in a racist character assassination as vile as any the left routinely accuses its enemies of.

Ditto the recent graffiti on the statue of Queen Victoria in Leeds – look beyond the historically inaccurate ‘slavery’ sloganeering and notice the statue’s breasts and genitals have been highlighted in spray-paint; what does that say to you about the ‘artist’s’ attitudes to women? Funny how so many who wear their Woke colours with pride are – beneath the approved T-shirt and the perceived immunity that comes from occupying the moral high ground – utterly guilty of everything they are quick to weaponise and aim at anyone who doesn’t fall into line; one might conclude the shame over their own thought-crimes is manifested as transferring them onto the enemy. One particular Facebook ‘friend’ of mine is such a prolific virtue-signaller for all the correct causes that her posts imply she’s one of the kindest, most compassionate people you could ever wish to meet, when she is in fact one of the most unpleasantly manipulative and nastiest individuals imaginable. But I keep her in my newsfeed because I derive amusement from her hypocrisy.

At times like this, it’s always apt to defer to a man who nailed it 80 years ago – George Orwell. How long, one wonders, before some possessed fanatic discovers such a wry critic of the British Empire in its decrepit redundancy was actually employed as a colonial copper in Burma and decides his statue outside the BBC deserves the ‘racist’ epithet? You heard it here first. Of course, Orwell’s impression of the Empire came from the one thing today’s obsessive experts on it don’t have – first-hand experience; but his experience – and gradual disillusionment with – the left in this country seems the most relevant and timeless when placed in a contemporary context. His 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’, is as well worth a read as either of his two most famous works of fiction in what it has to say about where we are now.

‘It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense Left,’ he writes – and with the mainstream media of 2020 forbidding any diversity of thought or opinion, that certainly rings true. ‘The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half-a-dozen weekly and monthly papers,’ he goes on. ‘The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion.’ When was the last time you saw anything but what he describes in the pages of the Guardian? Everything is shit, everything is rotten and corrupt, everything is beyond repair, and – it goes without saying – everything is racist.

When he writes ‘under this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia – their severance from the common culture of the country,’ one cannot help but instantly think of the political class’s failure to anticipate – and its reaction to – Brexit. ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality,’ he writes. ‘In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.’ The contemporary left narrative certainly endorses that statement; in Orwell’s day, naturally, most Englishmen were white; if one were to insert the word ‘white’ before the word ‘Englishman’, that last quoted passage would make even more sense in 2020, where the disgrace is embodied in ‘taking the knee’.

But perhaps his opinion on how the left of the 1930s was complicit in creating a sense of the English being a defeated, redundant race that they themselves should be ashamed of highlights how doing so leaves the English vulnerable to the enemy within. ‘All through the critical years,’ he writes, ‘many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were decadent and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the left was partly responsible.’ Witness the response to what happened last weekend – or this – from the left; the violent desecration by their side was justified because the hymn sheet is the same one passed around the whole congregation, and those at the top have been distributing it for years.

Fear of reprisals governs discourse. One is not allowed to question or query the incoherent manifesto of an organisation that wants to defund the police, destroy the nuclear family and effectively reorganise society along the lines of a neo-Marxist kibbutz. As the FA follows the same cynical line as all other public bodies, institutions, companies and corporations in enforcing BLM on football shirts with the ‘you must wear this or else’ decree previously applied to the LGBT rainbow logo, any resistance will result in instant dismissal; ditto the black square on social media. Funnily enough, the same sporting authority informed any England player refusing to give the Nazi salute when the team lined-up to play Germany in Berlin in 1938 that they would never be picked for their country again. Wonder if Orwell watched the game?

© The Editor