[I'm still in freeform mode, here]
Of course, in an absolutely perfect world, I would not have chosen to write a provocation about how we had a better class of fascist bastard in the 1970s than the class of fascist bastard we have in the 2020s literally seven days before fascist bastards started rioting in cities across Britain, including my own fair city of Bristol.
It's not the first time we have had rioting in Bristol, but it's usually about something serious, like the site of a new supermarket.
I was out of town for the whole thing. Perhaps someone could write a surrealist drama about a group of people in a tent in an English seaside town listening to folk music while civil society collapses around them: perhaps it would be the British equivalent of Cabaret.
I only saw Cabaret, the movie, quite recently, although, weirdly, I knew the title song from Butlins end-of-the-pier shows. Songs about too much pills and liquor were not thought un-conducive the to the hi-di-hi atmosphere. I liked Cabaret very much indeed.
The little man whose name escapes me who comperes a lot of the Sidmouth gigs was cross about the riots as only an English person can be cross, and said (correctly) that the atmosphere of a folk festival, where there are no strangers, only friends you met in the tent last night and whose names you have totally forgotted, and where wholesome teenagers learn to morris dance and play the squeeze box represents the true spirit of England. Which it does. But trust Martin Simpson to look out into his audience and mention the elephant at the ceilidh -- that everyone present was privileged by virtue of their age and class and most particularly the colour of their skins. There were black performers -- two of my very favourite performers of the whole week were black people -- but vanishingly few black punters.
I think I mentioned that Martin did Woody Guthrie's song about the Mexicans who died on a plane to Los Gatos Canyon as a protest against the dehumanisation of immigrants. You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane; all that they'll call you will be deportees.
I don't think that Farage can be directly blamed for what happened; but then I don't think any one person can be directly blamed for what happened. I don't believe in Engrams. I don't believe in Woke Mind Viruses. But I don't believe in Fascist Mind Viruses either. I don't believe in free floating ideas that jump into people's heads and make them disown their parents and throw bricks at policemen. I don't believe that the world is being controlled by a cadre of Jewish Communists holed up in a cave in Frankfurt; but neither do I believe that the world is being controlled by a continuity Nazis from a bar in Argentina. I don't believe in Satan, not in the way that some evangelicals seems to envisage him, at any rate. This is probably the greatest trick he ever pulled.
But I do think that the process that brought us to where we are is bigger than one man and bigger than one party. If Hari Seldon had wanted to produce race riots in 2024, he might very well have started in 1984 by planting the idea of "political correctness" in the minds of nice, mild mannered and not even remotely fascist newspaper columnists and Radio 4 panel show hosts. Ha ha ha you can't say bald you have to say differently hirsute ha ha ha. And so the idea is planted that there are things that They Won't Let You Say. Let the idea fester and grow for forty years. Woke this, SJW that, actually-its-about-ethics-in-game-design, British Jobs For British People, critical race theory, make America great again.
Is Centrism a counter attack, intended to stop the forty year retreat from liberalism in its tracks? Or is Centrism, which by definition shifts the centre of gravity to the right, part of the Plan? Would a beardy Prime Minister in a cardigan who said "immigrants are nice" have brought the far-right to a stand still, or provoked them into being even farrer and ever righter? Will a sensible Prime Minister in a suit who says "immigrants are a problem, but not as much of a problem as some people think" make the universe less racist in the long run? Are the 2024 race riots the endgame, or are they another small step towards a fascist dictatorship? Or is Hari Seldon doing something much subtler? Perhaps psychohistory tells us that once we have seen the ugly face of patriotism, we will recoil from it and create a Corbynite utopia, in, say, 2064. History is very long indeed.
I don't believe in secret Foundations. I don't believe in memes or engrams. I just believe in Me. Yoko and Me.
In the 1970s, Irish republicans blew things up on the British mainland with alarming regularity. Mrs Thatcher consistently took the line that these attacks were nothing to do with politics, and were simple outbreaks of criminality. On the one hand, this was a perfectly pragmatic and indeed moral approach. Murder doesn't stop being murder because there is a political motivation behind it. If someone kills innocent people, it is no defence to say "But I honestly believed it would help a political cause I sincerely believed in." Terrorism is, I can say without fear of contradiction, bad. (Never mention Nelson Mandela.)
But on the other hand "the Provisional Irish Republican Army has nothing to do with politics" was a blatantly false statement. The idea of a person waking and thinking "Top of the morning, to ye, to be sure to be sure, I surely would like to blow something up just for the craic, so I'll pretend to be opposed to the partition of Ireland and join an illegal paramilitary organisation, so I will" is beyond far-fetched. The "solution" if you can call it that, to the "troubles", if you can call them that, turned out to be political.
What should we call this month's riots and this months rioters? Our beloved Prime Ministers may god bless him is largely going down the Thatcher route of saying that they are simply criminal thugs. I agree that calling them anything else would give then spurious credibility. Starmer could probably have used the army to quell the unrest, but that would have fed into to the lunatic theory that we were experiencing the first shots of a European civil war.
But clearly, the rioters are not just criminal thugs, although criminal thuggery certainly occurred. A person may steal a sausage roll during a period of civil unrest without particularly caring what the other civilians are getting restless about.
It is tempting to wonder if what we were experiencing was a very British take on January 6th? You and me and Jeremy Corbyn believe Kier Starmer to be a very moderate socialist; or perhaps even a slightly less conservative Conservative than Rishi Sunak. Some of us think he has betrayed his political principles; some of us think that he is engaged in some very practical political pragmatism; some us think that both of those things might be true at the same time. But hardly any of us think he is a lefty. But if you read the Daily Telegraph (which you shouldn't) or the online hate site formerly known as Twitter (which you definitely shouldn't) you will discover that very many people think that Starmer is a Stalinist, a creature of the hardcore Left, a manifestation of the phenomenon called Woke, and an actual Communist. And if the Woke is literally going to reduce the UK to a nuclear wasteland and a third world shit-hole, then resistance is obligatory.
Elon Musk says that civil war in Europe is inevitable, that the "the present situation" is precisely analogous to that in Star Wars, the Matrix and V for Vendetta, and that is incumbent on people to "join the resistance".
A civil war between whom, incidentally? White people and brown people? The cross and the crescent? The People and the Government? Or is his theory that the woke engram can be defeated with sticks and petrol bombs?
Meanwhile Farage says this kind of thing.
"Remember, of course, he [Kier Starmer] doesn't have much legitimacy any way. The party only got 33.8% of those that voted. Only 20% of the eligible electorate put this man in power. He needs to start listening to the people."
Our electoral system yields wildly disproportionate results. Everyone knows that. But the idea of a "less legitimate" or "illegitimate" prime minister -- and a separate, authoritative "voice of the people" expressed other than through the ballot box, is alarming. It feels like standing in front of a mob of psychotic knights and wondering out loud is anyone will rid you of a particular priest.
What percentage of the eligible electorate voted for your Brexit, Nigel? Can you remember?
There is a story in the Canterbury Tales about how a Jew cuts a Christian child's throat and throws him down a well. So the local people kill all the Jews. There is a folk song, the Jew's Garden, on a similar theme. Some Christian children are murdered: a rumour breaks out that the murderer was Jewish; a mob starts attacking Synagogues and ghettos.
We don't yet know exactly what happened in Stockport. We do know that an unimaginably horrible, and so far as anyone knows, pointlessly motiveless murder took place.
Strict empiricism says that up to now, water happens to have always boiled when we apply heat to it; but that it doesn't follow from this that heating water causes it to boil. We can't definitely say that the murder "caused" the riot. Many things "caused" the riot. But sing "merely pointless criminality" until you raise the roof, the riot was in some way related to the unimaginably horrible murder.
The murder happened and then the riots happened is a story; the riots happened because the murder happened is a plot.
"Enough of this madness now. We need to permanently remove Islam from Great Britain. Completely and entirely" wrote Laurence Fox, a few hours after the murder. It is unclear how you remove a religion from a country. Is the plan to deport all the people who practice the religion -- or all the people who look as they might -- to some foreign country? (To where? Rawanda?) Are there going to be forced conversions? Will the Muslims have to embrace Christianity or is merely renouncing their current faith sufficient? But what if some people renounced their faith in public and continue to practice it in secret? Something like that happened in Spain in the fifteenth century. Will there be some organisation whose job it is to ask former Muslims tough questions about their new found lack of faith? To have, in fact, an inquiry? I never expected that.
There is a word for "attacking the Jewish quarter because you think a Jew has killed a Christian". I think the word also applies to "attacking Muslim communities because you think a Muslim has killed a white person." I think we should start using that word.
As a matter of face the presumed killer was neither Muslim nor an immigrant, although he did have dark coloured skin. But that is really neither here nor there.
Some right wingers believe in an ethnostate: an England purged of people with dark skin and unusual names. People who think that you are only British if your father and forefathers unto the tenth generation were English. I saw a man on the hate-site formally known as Twitter stating that left-wing comedy writer Armando Iannucci was not British despite having been born in Glasgow. "Being born in a stable doesn't make you a horse" he explained. But some right wingers believe in cultural hegemony, in Powell's theory of flags and institutions and churches; in Tebbit's cricket test.
After the murder but before the riots, Nigel Farage released a video podcast. He said that the police described the murder as a "non terror incident"; but that he "wondered if the truth was being withheld from us". He said that he thought this was a "legitimate question".
Legitimate. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If "legitimate" means "conforming to the law" then "are the police lying to us?" is indeed "legitimate" question. There is not and should not be any law against asking if the police are telling fibs. They sometimes do. There isn't an shouldn't be any law against me asking whether Kier Starmer is a shop window dummy being controlled by an alien consciousness resembling a giant octopus. "Is Kier Starmer an auton?" a legitimate question. But it is also a bloody silly one.
But if "legitimate" means "conforming to logic", I am not quite so sure. The idea that the police would say that something was not a terrorist attack when something, in fact, was a terrorist attack requires you to believe a whole set of things about the police, and the state, and government, which are not, I think, supported by logic.
Policemen do tell lies. They certainly withhold the truth. That is why twenty-seven year old men are always helping the police with their enquiries; and officers are always pursuing multiple lines of investigation; and suspects sometimes cannot be named for legal reasons. Some secrecy, some withholding of information goes with the territory.
"Are the police lying?" may be a legitimate question. But legitimate or otherwise, I would not have a high opinion of a man who stood in crowded theatre and said "As a thought experiment I would like you to entertain the possibility that the management is withholding information and this building is as a matter of fact on fire."
People on the online hate site formally known as Twitter said "well of course it was a terror incident don't you think those poor kids were terrified?" This is not an argument. It barely even qualifies as a pun. It's on level with the man who says that civilians are subject to naval law because we address judges as "your wor-ship" and that the royal family must all be pedophiles because some gay men refer to themselves as "queens".
But perhaps it would have helped is the police spokesman had said "not a terrorist incident", "not politically motivated" or "not part of an organisation". It turns out they were telling the truth: it was in fact none of these things.
Farage concluded that "something is going horribly wrong in our once beautiful country". Well: yes and no. Yes, murders are horrible and wrong. But no, unimaginably terrible murders don't happen very often; that is why they are so terrible and so hard to imagine. To draw a general conclusion about the state of the country from one abhorrent event is silly. No-one sensible would look at a single horrible incident of a child being killed by two other children and infer an epidemic of child-on-child violence; and conclude that we need a new political party to deal with it.
Later that day, Farage explicitly framed the rioting as a putative revolution.
"Our country is being destroyed, our values trashed and the public on the point of revolt."
And two days later, he wrote:
"The majority of our population can see the fracturing of our communities as a result of, mass, uncontrolled immigration, whether legal or illegal. Yet to attempt to debate this in the public arena leads to immediate howls of condemnation. A population explosion without integration was always going to end badly. I have said this for many years."
It isn't exactly clear what "integration" would look like: Farage frequently claims that Reform can't be a racist or right wing party because there are Muslims who support Reform. These are presumably good Muslims, assimilated Muslims; where the Muslims being terrorised by the rioters were bad Muslims, un-integrated Muslims; Muslim Muslims. What's the difference? It can't really just come down to clothes and accent and a preference for spicy food, can it?
But the message is clear. Population explosion without integration. Always going to end badly. I have said this for many years. I said a long time ago that if we let too many people into Britain; and if they didn't immediately start living like British people and doing what British people do then a very bad thing would happen, and now the very bad thing is happening and if we aren't careful it is going to carry on happening and happen even worse and this will be the fault of everybody except the people actually doing the bad thing. One wonders if he ever saw the Tiber frothing with much blood?
Farage is asking legitimate questions. The people rioting against immigrants are expressing legitimate concerns. Starmer is not a legitimate Prime Minister. Fine word, legitimate. The most common meaning, of course, is "a child born to parents who are married" as opposed to one born out of wedlock.
I think the people who keep insisting that their questions and their concerns are legitimate do so because deep down, on some unconscious level, they know that they are bastards.
