WHAT a truly awful week. The shocking death of Henry Nowak revealed on police bodycam was beyond terrible, but the subsequent doubling down, denial and threatened oppression of dissent by Labour feels almost worse. At the start of the week I thought – naively – that the Nowak case had to be the wake-up moment for this government. With all the details of police race ‘training’ emerging, the government surely must acknowledge their own culpability. Or to put it more kindly (this is the best interpretation of it), the misguidedness of their suicidal empathy. For a short sharp elucidation by Gad Saad of this concept watch here.
But no, what a fool I was. Our oily-quiffed and expensively suited Prime Minister doubled down again and shifted the blame on to Nigel Farage, who had correctly told the country it was a moment of reckoning.
Later Starmer was to stand at the despatch box as though Mandelson had never been born and his leadership never in question, where he doubled down again. Pointing his outraged finger at the BBC-traduced Farage, he turned him into the guilty party and buried the real problem. Brazen, shameless in his confidence.
If you had any doubts about Starmer’s capacity for dictatorship, don’t. His is the playbook of oppressors. His are the classic personality traits – an empathy gap, manipulativeness, authoritarianism and sociopathy – and hubris.
Farage and the Southampton protests (which X commentator Jim Chimirie is right about) gave Starmer the rope he needed to hang the dissenters. Nigel could have forestalled it by predicting it. He didn’t.
So all at once he became the threat to democracy. And just the excuse Labour needed on Friday to announce another outrageous misinformation clampdown, targeted at its only real rival, yes – Reform. Covid all over again. I really hope Rupert Lowe sees this, the bigger issue that threatens us.
I have little doubt that Starmer wants to provoke mass unrest which he can ‘justifiably’ use to suppress further dissent with more of the brutal police action documented by Tommy Robinson in Southampton. The MSM reports protests only one way, in their worst colours. All attention in this case was on the disruptive elements – the one brick and scooter thrown.
It all felt back to the future – witnessing once again the ‘right’ failing to understand, let alone capture the moment, as the left turned the tables: turning justifiable anger about the effects of the divisive policies they instituted into the thing that is divisive and of course racist. Typically amplified by Labour’s Southampton ‘diversity’ MP Satvir Kaur’s (would-be moral high ground) platitudes about us ‘needing to be one’. That old chestnut for shutting dissenters up and pretending there is no injustice.
Kemi Badenoch’s utterly hopeless and confused response underlined the disaster she is. What a muddle of a statement. Seemingly blissfully unaware of the identity politics her own party is primarily responsible for – their passage of the Equality Act, the National Police Race Awareness Policy that Suella Braverman fought, but that the Government Kemi was part of put in place, she failed to ask the question of who appointed Alexis Boon, the shameless Chief Constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, the man who is refusing to resign. It was the ‘Conservative’ Police Commissioner Donna Jones, responsible for all the Hampshire constabulary’s policies including all their Race Awareness ones.
Then attacking Farage, planting her feet firmly on Starmer’s ground. Saying he was completely wrong to say that the ‘rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities’ are words she should come to regret. To say that his was ‘the language of the Black Lives Matter movement in reverse – inflaming tensions, emphasising difference’ was beyond misguided, demonising and unfair. It is not toxic tribal politics that divide our country, Kemi, but unjust laws and the destructive policing of thought that Gustavo Jalife wrote so brilliantly about in TCW yesterday. Changes that ‘did not come from nowhere’, but from the erosion of ‘a principle once considered foundational to civilisation: words are not remotely equivalent to physical aggression’.
Once again Tommy Robinson was closer than anyone else in what needed to be said. Once again he went unreported: ‘If Henry wasn’t white he wouldn’t have been handcuffed . . . this is about race. He was murdered because he was white. The white boy who had done nothing was handcuffed. The murderer, in possession of a knife who stabbed five times, was not even handcuffed’ – all the way to the police station, he pointed out. And the fact that his brother ‘is still walking the streets of Southampton is insane’.
Where in the MSM has the issue of Vickrum Digwa’s brother and father walking free on the streets of Southampton on bail been questioned? Men charged with a total of 22 weapons offences from a family that tried to cover up the crime. A flick knife, an extendable baton known as an asp, knuckledusters, a machete, swords and kusaris (Japanese weapons consisting of weighted chains) some allegedly carried in public; the full catalogue is here. Not exactly religious symbols, are they? Why have these by definition threatening men not been fast-tracked for justice when Lucy Connolly was jailed almost instantly for a tweet?
Not questions addressed by the BBC or LBC. The last person they would have had on Question Time last week to confront Andy (silent on Nowak) Burnham not just on racial bias in the police but ‘all through our institutions’ was Tommy. And his plentiful ammunition on active discrimination against whites. The latest being middle-class white men banned from public sector jobs. Or men who dare question Islam in diversity training.
Instead what we got on Question Time was an exposition of dumb and dumber – the lowest-grade calibre of panellist (including the cardboard cut-out that is Andy Burnham) in what the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley nailed as a terrifying glimpse of modern Britain.
Reform’s sexism-denying plumber’s conversation with the even stupider Green about immigration and housing was nothing to celebrate.
What last week demonstrated once again is the weakness of the official ‘right’ in defying the left. They have yet to read Ben Shapiro’s book How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument, a book TCW recommended in 2014 when it was published.
How pathetically satisfied so-called right-wing commentators were with such tiny and inadequate victories as Nick Ferrari’s so-called skewering of David Lammy depressed me too. No self-respecting interviewer should have laughed along in agreement, as Ferrari did, when Lammy said ‘Oh come on, Nick, you and I have known each other for years. Let’s be clear, we know what Tommy Robinson’s about . . . all your listeners know what Tommy Robinson is about . . .’
There was no ‘Do we?’ or ‘and what, in your view, exactly is that?’ Instead he conspired with this cosy shared assumption leaving what should have been a hapless Lammy smiling.
Then there was the smug glibness – and silliness – that is tone of the Spectator under its former Conservative Cabinet Minister Editor, Michael Gove (he of the anti-liberty, vaccine tyrants’ lockdown quad) who, in another comfortable chat with the Telegraph, claimed to be more ‘right-wing’ than Farage and dissed Reform as ‘a protest party’ and not serious at one and the same time.
If that’s all he can come up when a left-wing dictatorship is coming down the road at speed, he must be on something.
If this fate does befall us, all I can say is it won’t be for want of stating the case at TCW. And how well our writers did just that this week. They excelled themselves, as Frank Palmer was so kind as to email me. I agree. Their writing has been exceptional: Clayton Wood, Danny Lockwood here and here, Steve Doughty, Daniel Jupp and Gustavo Jalife.
Whatever else, TCW is a record of the truly rightminded.
