Yes, Minister?

There has to be a British answer to all this unrest. It won’t come from the serried ranks of BLM, Antifa, the activists of LBGTQI++Whatever, the islamic lobby and all the other pseudo-political malcontents and popinjays who daily flout the mores by which Judeo-Christian societies live. The revisionists, the revolutionaries, the ego-driven left-wing commentators such as Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar, and the dreadful Alibhai-Brown creature. There are many more, too numerous to list – would anybody care to name a right winger who gets such regular airtime?

This hotchpotch of victim-based demands on the majority population dominate the media and academic discourse and those who peddle it despise the very people from whom they demand reparation. Reparation not for any tangible thing in most cases, but for historical slights or ultra-minority concerns which in a more rational society would be dealt with out of the public eye. It is distinctly not the British way to make a fuss and some of the claims are simply embarrassing.

The trans thing_{[pun intended]} represents almost nobody in the wider population yet Nadia Whittome the child MP for Nottingham East, has demanded that trans people are represented in Parliament. Rounded to whole figures and including both houses of Parliament that comes to exactly zero representatives. But going by the heightened attention it gets in the press you would imagine that perhaps one in ten of the population were gender conflicted. In reality the true numbers are so small that they effectively don’t exist at all, although recent education has done its best to promote transgenderism as a lifestyle choice for children.

Think about that. The harm done to impressionable young minds is incalculable and may be difficult to reverse, but that is just seen as necessary collateral damage in the identity wars. It is simply not acceptable. In other misleading statistics we are told that a fifth of the population – a fifth – are disabled. I expect a multiple amputee would have grounds for disgruntlement to be regarded in the same category as somebody with an exaggerated aversion to spiders, or a hangnail.

Our universities, civils service, education establishment are stuffed to the gills with diversity and equality and HR and other bureaucratic functionaries, which do nothing to further the aims of the organisations. When the bureaucrats take over, nothing is ever achieved except the need for more bureaucracy; it is exactly the same when the idiots take over. We used to think we could recognise stupidity with barely a pause for thought, but as we become less British, that essential skill set is diluted so far it may as well be a homeopathic remedy; the ability to laugh at each other ceases to exist, except as a dim memory.

The British are supposed to be phlegmatic, matter of fact, somewhat fatalistic and until something gets right in our face are likely to just find a way to avoid confrontation. But push too hard and something has to give. Our sense of humour has already been sacrificed; our last bulwark against the taking up of arms has been neutered. I really do sense that the time has come for real, root and branch change. With the departure of Sir Humphrey, let us hope that change starts now.

Genius Lives Matter

It must be Opposites Day, in which case I can present a contender for Genius Idea Of The Day to the utter, utter superbrain that is Melz Owusu. She is a crusader and a fearless champion of black values, or as we generally refer to such leading lights, a right pain in the arse who any rational establishment would be glad to see the back of. Melz wants to create a ‘decolonised curriculum’, a meaningless phrase into which much thought has gone. Erasing history would be a clearer statement of intent.

But she has run into the entirely predictable difficulty of perfectly decent people not wishing to be berated for their whiteness and steadfastly refusing to change everything about society to fit the feelings of a few malcontents with ideas way above their merits. In her own words, “I was like, hmm, this idea of transforming the university from the inside and having a decolonised curriculum isn’t going to happen with the way the structures of the university are.” Whatever that actually means. Because, of course, when black academics make statements it doesn’t matter if they make no sense.

So having failed to eradicate whiteness from multicultural campuses she has hit on the genius idea of apartheid. Black universities for black students. Perfect when you think about it because just as people like Owusu claim to feel unsafe in spaces shared with white people it is an absolute no-brainer that white people feel a good deal less safe in spaces shared with black people. So far her crowdfunding has raised £60,000, so she can afford one mediocre ‘perfessor’ for a year and perhaps a desk. Well done.

But wait, there’s more, she expects – of course she does – white people to pay for it by somehow extracting funding from existing universities. As ever with some communities of ‘the oppressed’ they want to break free from their chains and flee their bounds only to come back begging for their bus fare. But there is some merit in what she is trying to achieve; not for the benefit and betterment of the black community but for everybody else.  

Imagine if you will, an environment where speech is actually free. A place you can say what you think and argue the toss without the risk of inadvertently losing your education your future livelihood and even your personal safety by accidentally using words which were perfectly acceptable yesterday but last night were banned by some shadowy committee. Imagine a place where white lives actually do matter and that isn’t a controversial thing to say. Whiteyversity sounds like a place where business can be done.

Meanwhile in Blackiversity, they can wallow in their imaginary racism and dream up ever more perverse ways in which they are discriminated against. They can hate white people all they like and never be challenged and then when they come to leave the institution with an embedded sense of both entitlement and victimhood they will discover that they have actually created the world they thought they had fled from. No employer outside of the township campus they have just left will have any use for them; they will be forever dependent on handouts from the hated white state.

Just another campus party...

So, all in all, I see very few downsides. Not all black people are race baiting imbeciles; I suspect very few of them fall into this category, so here is the ideal place to corral them, far away from the public view. Removed from the normal world their writings will be unread, their utterances unbroadcast and anywhere outside their own little bubble of loathing they will be completely unknown. The more I look at this, the more I like it. Hell, let’s build the place ourselves!

University Challenge

I’m seriously considering taking an Open University MSc in engineering, specialising in electrical. If I go for it, it will take eight years, minimum, add nothing to my earning potential and, should I stay the course, I would be graduating some time after my 70^th birthday. This is fine and I still intend to be working to at least that age because I’m in the knowledge business and I strive to improve year on year; no idling down to retirement for me. Preparatory to making that decision I am working through some of the many free courses the OU offers while I’m in my last fortnight of lockdown.

I was struck by a massive disparity in the length of time I have been taking to complete certain courses compared to the recommended times. For instance, I have just completed a 40-hour unit in about four hours. Naturally, being a bit of a bighead, I was tempted to scoff and speculate about the quality of undergrads that so much content seemed to be targeted at such low levels of cognition and former education.

But then I stopped and, as I have been trying to educate myself to do for some years now, began to think of reasons, rather than just naysay education generally. See, it can’t be true that kids of today are less intelligent than kids of my vintage, given that brainpower has a massive evolutionary element to it and a baby whisked here from, say, 1000 A.D could almost certainly be raised and completely assimilated into today’s society without any measurable difference from the current native population.

Attitudes, learning, physical prowess, socialisation and general behaviour are mostly, we now know, the products of nurture. The appearance of heredity is given by the unfortunate cycle that condemns kids raised in dysfunctional households to go on to head up more dysfunctional households. Instead of tackling the appalling black hole of aspiration successive societies (government, community leaders, pressure groups and individuals) have ‘progressively’ relaxed the social pressures that our more puritan forebears applied.

It is no longer considered humane to suggest that people should better themselves, that they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps; what Victorian nonsense is this? But it isn’t Victorian, it is – or rather, it was – one of the guiding principles of the working class. Parents did not want for their kids what they had endured themselves, but they didn’t expect anything to be handed to them. Work hard, get ahead.

Back to the university business. My generation of working-class kids was really the first to have a genuine chance to attend university in any number; certainly we were the first to see it as a real possibility, rather than a rare entitlement. And although we went up far better tutored in the basics, the real point of university – and one which, I freely admit, was lost on me – was to broaden one’s horizons. The degree, while a stepping-stone to better careers, was in some cases almost secondary, certainly in the burgeoning ‘new’ disciplines.

Most students weren’t and aren’t activists. Most are getting on, using what they have to the best of their abilities – which includes attention span, competing demands and all the rest – to try and better themselves. (Or is that a pejorative phrase nowadays?) But I believe there is a significant and growing proportion of students, at establishments which actively facilitate it, whose entire raison d’être is to challenge the structure of society itself. They attend pre-radicalised and use universities and many tutors as a base for inevitably left-wing activist causes.

This is a gross misuse of education facilities and resources and dilutes the objectivity and purpose of higher education. When I last attended a university full time (1999-2000 MSc) this was already apparent, but I fear it has slipped further. Maybe it is time to stop pretending that every school-leaver is university material? Maybe it is time to recognise that the various degrees whose title ends in ‘studies’ (Black Studies, Women’s Studies and so on) are vanity courses with little positive to add to the national experience?

Time, once again, to have that conversation; what is the purpose of higher education and to what extent should it be publicly funded? How about this: state assistance and grants for universities which specialise in science, engineering, medicine and other essential and necessarily elite disciplines. Funded polytechnics for business studies, technical diplomas and the like. Specialist art and music colleges with funding for the genuinely talented. Tech colleges for all the skills, again funded.

Given that very few student loans are repaid at all, we fund higher education anyway, but why should we fund those whose sole purpose is to cause trouble, to demand special treatment, to set black against white, gay against straight, gender against… everything else? How about zero funding for Universities of ‘Studies’? Let them fund themselves and let’s have that funding right out in the open. If you want to wage war on the state, then do it on your own dime.

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.