What is it good for?

Nobody wants white people to talk about racism unless they say exactly what they are told to say. There can be no debate when one side is informed that everything it thinks is invalid and only words from the script written for it would even get a hearing. You must not, especially, try to demonstrate your non-racist credentials. Even the many white protesters professing solidarity with the BLM movement still cannot insist they are not racists. Hell, you could be a white kid adopted by a black family and have spent your life on protests for equality and still your opinions would count for nothing.

For this is where we are. It is no longer enough to enact legislation to protect everybody from discrimination, we must now disavow any protections which give white people agency. The test of freedom of speech used to be that, short of exhortations to violence and suchlike, you could say pretty much whatever you wished, and others had the absolute right to tell you what they thought of it. Now, you may not even speak out in defence of ‘all’ people having rights because only black lives, thoughts, speech, actions matter.

That police are even considering investigating the light aircraft flying a banner proclaiming the self-evident is indicative of the mess we are in. And it is all our own fault. Even CNN has bought into the madness, citing its own survey commissioned, it appears, to demonstrate just how irrelevant the views of white people are when it comes to discussing race. Their conclusion is that white people have no idea how racist the United Kingdom is. Except it isn’t. This survey is just another example of collecting data to prove a pre-formed thesis. It is bad science personified.

But even if it was valid it does nothing to help. If anything, it plays straight into a popular misrepresentation of Enoch Powell’s most famous speech and places the whip firmly in the hands of the aggrieved. All the survey (of only 1500 people, by the way) does is tell us something that we already knew; that black people’s perception of our mostly white (in parts) country is different from white people’s. We’ve been told that for decades now and whenever ‘we’ have tried to understand we’ve been told we simply can’t.

Fine. Good. We tried; god knows we’ve tried over the years, but every inch given results in another yard being demanded; every appeasement offered has triggered an insistence that it isn’t enough. The last few weeks have been a relentless attack on white people. It has been overt, it has been hostile and all attempts at reaching an accommodation have been rebutted. Our philosophy is invalid, our compassion is rejected, our empathy is denied. We have nowhere else to go, if indeed we want to go anywhere at all.

Maybe this is as far as it can go. We asked you what you wanted but you told us we couldn’t understand. It appears that nothing less than handing over power and influence in every area of this country’s affairs to black activists with hate in their hearts will do. Well, it won’t do. This country is conservative by nature. We evolve incrementally or we get nowhere. What BLM and its agitators are calling for is the actual destruction of something that has taken at least a thousand years to build. There is a word for this. It’s war.

Your life matters more

An interesting time was had on ‘The twitter’ the other day as people responded to the resumption of the Premier League behind closed doors and under the banner of Black Lives Matter. All dutifully got down on one knee, not all of them sincere you can guarantee, but woe betide a top-flight footballer daring to defy the woke new Premiership now that Marcus Rashford and Raheem Sterling have assumed command. Predictably there was a lot of metaphorical tearing up of season tickets and no doubt some burning of merchandise.

Let me say right from the off that ‘racism is a bad thing’. There, done it. To understand what racism is you don’t have to be black; that’s just a construct which allows the malcontents of the race industry to claim special circumstances for causing trouble. However, no matter how much they bleat about the slavery from which they have never suffered and we have never profited, they are wrong.

The modus operandi of the left have always been to disrupt, to obfuscate, to obscure meaning, to extrapolate from scant evidence and to dominate the narrative. Victimhood is a powerful place to start because what decent person would attack a victim? And we are, in the main, thoroughly decent, so, we listened as they spun a tale of racism which we didn’t recognise. We failed to recognise it not because we hadn’t lived their abused lives, but because it was false.

Useable definitions of racism seem to originate from the 1930s and variously and temporally are:

·       “racialism; the theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race.”

·       “racism; belief in the superiority of a particular race”

·       The UN: “The term "racial discrimination" shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin that has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”

·       “racism; prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group”

All of this was tackled long ago and few intelligent people consciously discriminate against people for factors beyond their control. But just in case you were guilty of any aversions, micro-aggressions or even fear, the Crown Prosecution Service defines a hate crime as an offence “which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person's disability or perceived disability; race or perceived race; or religion or perceived religion; or sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation or transgender identity or perceived transgender identity."

It has been decided that there is no genetic basis for humans to belong to anything other than a single race, so you would think there would be an end to it. But of course, within that single species are ethnicities, so there is still plenty of fertile ground in which to sow offence. When I say fertile I am of course thinking of manure, especially of the male bovine kind. An avalanche of the stuff is hurtling our way with no sign of it slowing down.

This is where it ends... every time

But just as real avalanches eventually come to a shuddering, grinding, destructive halt this metaphorical cascade of ordure will eventually obey gravity, settle in the lower levels and stink up the place. The currently deprived inner-city areas will cease to be ‘diverse’ and will become cesspools of third world crime, disease and poverty. Just like the places many wanted to escape from. I don’t think the answer is to try and address their concerns at all. I think the answer is to find your own people and look after your own concerns. The overt racism of the Black Lives Matter movement has scored a massive own goal.

Winston's Story

Winston Smith slid another scrap of hastily erased history into the memory hole and lit a Victory cigarette. The acrid smoke burned his eyes as the dry tobacco sputtered and burned too quickly. He realised his daily ration was running out, but the clerks in the Ministry of Truth had been promised extra because of the unusually heavy workload, so he was practically chain smoking. Winston had worked the whole weekend through, busily correcting and updating accounts of recent events and any past events now seen in a new, more accurate, light.

The war with Eurasia still raged, or was it Eastasia now? Even though he had only just re-drafted a broadsheet headline he couldn’t quite remember, but it didn’t matter; Oceania had always been at war with whoever they were at war with now. The history books faithfully recorded this, no matter how many times they had to be revised. History, even though its study was banned for the purposes of keeping law and order, had become somewhat of an obsession for Smith.

On one of his rare expeditions with Julia into the prole zone he had discovered, in the back of Mr Charrington’s dusty shop, a weighty tome in four volumes written by a man called Churchill. Winston. It was called A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Smith liked to believe he had been named after the great English champion, but his parents, in the brief time he had known them, had never vouchsafed any such intelligence. He was also a little uncertain as to what or where England was, or had been.

When the Thought Police barged the door down and took Julia and Winston away to the Ministry of Love, he was still clutching the first volume in his bony hands. Their arrest was brutal and swift and as he was bundled down the stairs from the mean little flat above the shop, Winston thought he caught a glance of Mr Charrington himself, in conversation with an officer. After that his memory faded.

“Look in the mirror, Winston” said O’Brien in his calming, measured tones. “What do you see?” A pale, gaunt figure stared back. Winston knew he was poorly nourished, but the haunted face looking at him had the appearance of a man dying of starvation. “How long have I been here?” he asked. O’Brien tapped the mirror. “What do you see, Winston?” Winston didn’t quite understand the question and hesitated. A stammer rendered his query unintelligible.

“Describe yourself to me,” said O’Brien. Winston began “A… a pale, middle-aged white man…” The pain was indescribable. Winston’s body convulsed as the current coursed through his frame. “Again!” demanded O’Brien. “A hungry white…” Winston’s involuntary muscular contractions strained at his bindings and his rictus grin loomed in the mirror. O’Brien turned off the current. He held up a book.

It was much smaller and with many fewer pages than Winston remembered, but it must be ‘the book’ because there was the title, as before: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, with a monochrome photograph of Winston Churchill adorning the cover. “Look at him, Winston. Is he not black, like you?” Winston hesitated; O’Brien continued: “Am I not black, Winston? Is Chan over there not black? Or Rodriquez?” Winston realised what was required and quickly corrected himself. “In the mirror I see me, a black man, in good health after the party has cared for me.”

O’Brien was not fooled. “Oh, Winston,” he said, “it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter, for instance, how enthusiastically you shout the party slogans. It doesn’t matter how vociferous you are during the two-minute white hate. If you don’t believe it, you are just lying to yourself. And to us, which is worse.” Winston braced for the shock. Instead, O’Brien said, with a sad tone, “Do you know what is in Room 101, Winston?”

The day was cold but bright and Winston, flanked by two officers of the Thought Police left the Ministry of Truth. It felt good to breathe clean fresh air again, even though it made him cough violently. In his handkerchief, speckles of blood mixed with the sputum, but this was nothing new. He retrieved a Victory cigarette from a crumpled packet in his thin overcoat, begged a light from one of the officers and inhaled deeply. The coughing started up again, but this time it was almost soothing. The condemned man, he knew, was due one last pleasure.

They walked past his old workplace, where the statue to that long dead writer had recently been removed. Continuing down Reggae Street and past Pickaninny and eventually on into Blackhall, Winston observed how the hateful false history of his youth had been replaced by the truth, as old plinths now supported new, vibrant celebrations of the lively monoculture of Oceania. Eventually, they came to Parliament Square and Winston dutifully took a knee before the statue of Winston Churchill. He looked at the statue and its ebony features seemed to look back at him. Tears filled his eyes as he knew, he finally knew, he loved Black Brother.