Contrary to what I had expected, the Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, lost his vote of no confidence by a whopping margin and will now have to resign. More than 70 per cent of Union members voted for the semi-literate, dreadlocked leftie to lose his job following his apparent delight at the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Intimidation and hostility was reported as his supporters sought to disrupt proceedings by hampering the work of the returning officer and Abaraonye, in the manner of a presidential candidate who has been defeated in a general election in a country composed largely of what we are now enjoined to call the global majority, refused to accept the verdict. The ballot was, however, marvellously conclusive – 1,228 out of the 1,746 who voted said he should go. And so he will be gone, by popular demand: good riddance.
I bet that Warwick university will be heaving sighs of relief – they had turned him down for a place, either on the strength of his grades (A, B, B) or because they had met him. Woke Oxford, supposedly a superior university but currently engaged in a bid to slither as far down the university tables as is humanly possible, took him on and we all know why.
I would be cheered if whoever made that decision might also resign, but two bits of good news in one week is too much to expect, I suppose. There is a case for saying that Abaraonye should have been given the boot before his odious comments online about Kirk. He had said on social media that he chose not to ‘frequent white establishments’. I think you can imagine what would happen to a white student who said that he did not choose to frequent black establishments, but this comment passed with just a collective shrug of the shoulders, as if it were fair enough. It seems to me the very essence of racism, as well as the very essence of irony, seeing as the bloke accepted a place at Oxford university.
More worrying for me is why I, like Abaraonye, had expected the verdict to go the other way – or at least have been a lot tighter than it turned out. He was certain he was going to win, which is why he took the unusual step of putting his presidency on the line in this way. But then you look at the vote in which he was elected to the position of president, held in June this year. He managed just 611 first preferences, and beat his rivals only because the large majority of members couldn’t be arsed to cast their ballot.
That is how trade union ballots are won by mentalists from the far left: they have a noisy, active caucus which shrieks, portrays its enemies as fascists and is nothing if not obsessive, while everybody else just gets on with their lives. This has a deluding effect upon the far left: it leads them to believe that they quite genuinely have popular support. Which is what Abaraonye thought all along – until the results were read out.
The bulk of Oxford Union members made it clear they found Abaraonye a repellent embarrassment
I was taken in as well this time, to my discredit frankly. I should have remembered that the progressive left has the support of about 15 to 20 per cent of the country and even within Oxford university not much more than that. They scream about the importance of democracy but are always defeated by it – another self-contradiction in a manifesto consisting solely of self-contradictions. Queers for Palestine, George for president.
I think I preferred it when the far left mistrusted democracy every bit as much as it mistrusted capitalists in big top hats: a bourgeois appurtenance not to be taken seriously, a con perpetrated on the revolutionary class. Anyway, when the bulk of the Union’s members turned out to vote, they made it clear that they found Abaraonye a repellent embarrassment.
You might hope that the same fate somehow befalls Zarah Sultana, who has been raisin’ currant concerns about the visit of Jewish supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv to Birmingham. (I tried to get mixed dried peel into that sentence, but failed; ditto with regard to cinnamon.) I suppose her comments, made in the House of Commons, were no more than you might expect from someone whose party is what we should perhaps deem a fragile alliance between Islamists and sexual deviants. Sultana said that the football supporters should not merely be barred from entry to Villa Park, but be investigated for their complicity in the ‘genocide’ of Palestinians.
It was in my view an outrageous and unequivocally anti-Semitic outburst and though it may have cheered some of those among her Coventry South constituency’s Muslim community, they represent only about 11 per cent of the voters. You might hope, therefore, that come the next election, her obnoxious grandstanding will convince the majority to kick her out, but I suppose it will all be forgotten by then.
Truth be told, the issue of Gaza and Israel is another where the shrieking from the keffiyeh-clad idiots had me convinced for a while that the tide of public opinion was on their side, regardless of the fact that they were wrong. We are continually told that Israel has lost the propaganda war, after all – so perhaps, I thought, it really is the case that the British people now owed their allegiance to the Palestinians. And then, rather wonderfully, that opinion poll was published which showed almost 90 per cent of the population was opposed to the UK unconditionally recognising Palestine as an independent state.
The far left deludes itself, wrapped up in social media sites which only those who agree with them are allowed to enter. It must, by the same process, have seemed a vote-winner to Keir Starmer too. Au contraire. The public may have a few misgivings about Benjamin Netanyahu, but they know where they stand with regard to Hamas.
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