Plodding along

You would like to think that the police, with their much-vaunted initiatives to keep a finger on the pulse would know better. You would think that the police, who are supposed to both represent us and understand us, would think twice before they publicised the extent to which they have become tools; tools not for law and order, but for the furtherance of political agenda, criminalising all dissenters from the new orthodoxy.

No doubt Wiltshire Plod thought that getting their twitter intern to post, un-proof-read, an antagonistic tweet was a good idea. And that the use of a couple of iPhone emojis would impart an air of being down with the zeitgeist. But ‘your’ for ‘you are’ and ‘boys & gals’? Who else wonders whether they were paying attention during their gender sensitivity re-programming session? Here’s the ‘offending’ tweet, suggesting a reach way beyond even their Thought Police competence and budget.

Naturally, Twitter went to town; if there is one tradition that runs strong in this country it is pricking the pomposity of those who seek to bully and clumsily impose authority from afar. The police have long been accused of detachment from the front line and disengagement from the policed; this could have been an opportunity for them to admit their mistakes and play along.

But no, lessons have not been learned. After a day of light-hearted mild abuse and the odd more strongly worded criticism they got what they thought was a grown-up to write a response. Talk about putting out the fire with petrol. This sinister warning shows a grave misreading of the public mood and an utter lack of understanding about who or what controls and operates social media.

If the threatening language was intended to make us feel like criminals it worked. I now understand that anybody who dares to criticise the official line is as bad as a murderer or a rapist; not a muslim rape-gang rapist, of course, they are off limits to the long arm of the stupid. Quite apart from the sheer idiocy of pushing back against an online presence many times their size and geographically spread worldwide, the police seem to have forgotten that they police by our consent.

When they left the beat they began to lose our trust and respect. When they began to strut about like paramilitaries they put themselves apart from the public they used to be a part of. When they start to openly threaten potentially large numbers of ordinary people just having a laugh, they have exceeded their remit. The crowd turns on the slightest of whims; those size ten boots could so easily be on other feet.

A Nasty Taste in the Mouth

My drive home is the best part of my day, providing the weather isn’t appalling. Last night it was still light, the sun was setting in a glorious red blaze and no insensitive idiot had managed to kill himself and snarl up the traffic. (Am I alone in hoping all motorway accidents that hold me up are fatal ones? Somebody must pay, as far as I’m concerned, damn it!) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, driving home I get to listen to all sorts of people interviewed on Radio 4, my station du jour, every jour.

On The Media Show last night I heard professional offendee Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She who wishes for white men to become extinct was bitterly whining about never getting a Press Award because, you guessed it, there is a conspiracy of white men against wimmin. (There was also another guest who could not pronounce the plural ‘women’ insisting on referring to many ‘woman’. I’m guessing this was in a bid to show some lexical parity with ‘sheep’.) I always love listening to YAB because it reminds me how truly glorious it is to be rational, level-headed, devoid of hate and oh yes, white and male.

Then, on PM, we got Jonathan Freedland reporting on the Trump sensation and how it had taken by surprise everybody except the millions upon millions who absolutely get it. In trying to explain the phenomenon he revealed his own prejudices by adopting a slightly smug tone and describing Trump as extreme and repellent, on the assumption that everybody listening would nod along and share his exasperated sighs. Oh, what a nasty taste he was having to experience on our behalf. I do love it so when the bubble dwellers peer out of their misted-up portals and imagine the soft focus, dream-lit ‘beyond’ bears any resemblance to those who actually inhabit it.

All very harmless you might think, this inability to imagine a contrary narrative, until you contemplate that it is exactly this willing blindness to other people's reality that was highlighted yesterday by the tip-of-the-iceberg conviction of six Pakistani rapists in Rotherham. We're all talking about it now but for years although their crimes were common knowledge, the many officials to whom it was repeatedly reported, refused to believe it. Turns out that ‘progressive’ thought is actually harmful; not merely hurt feelings, but real bodily and mental harm with lifelong consequences.

And still the social justice warriors actually believe their own tribal sloganeering and their wistful brotherhood-of-man lyrics. They believe everybody ought to think as they do and if they were in charge you would be compelled to. Naturally there is a referendum element too. This article by the insufferable Rafael Behr yet again totally misreads the motives and the commitment behind those of us who wish to be rid of the uber-socialist Kleptocracy of the EU. And of course, Polly Toynbee does her level best to tell her loyal readers how to despise and pity the poor, stupid people who just won’t think properly.

But outside the narrow confines of the sneering elite socialist thought factory, Brexit is not something musingly wished for by a minority of shallow thinking Little Englanders. It is a long-desired outcome of around 50% of the voting age population of the UK – especially those who can actually remember an optimistic world before the cloying embrace of all that legislation to control what we do or say or think, or even look like. The Yasmins and Jonathans and Rafaels and Pollys and all the little cogs in the statist machine don’t have the wit to imagine that anybody could think outside their little red box. Here’s hoping for (if not quite expecting) a rude awakening come the referendum.