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.