Ihad entirely missed the online furore in which my colleague Douglas Murray was engulfed recently and only found out about it through a dubious article on the Guardian website by Kenan Malik. So I was slow off the mark, the reason being that I never read Twitter and have not the slightest interest in what anybody has to say on that absurd forum. (This includes whatever is said by the several people on there who are pretending to be me, incidentally.) Missing out on Douglas’s misery was a fairly crushing blow: there is nothing one enjoys more than revelling in the misfortunes of a colleague, especially if that colleague is also a good friend. I am way past the age when schadenfreude first eclipsed sexual intercourse as my principal enjoyment in life.
Hope Not Hate simply wishes the lower orders to shut up about things which concern them
Malik’s piece gave me the bones of the issue, although it is questionable as to whether anything can have bones on such an ectoplasmic medium as Twitter. You, by now, will have read what Douglas said in a conversation with the Australian former deputy prime minister John Anderson last year. The stuff about the British soul awakening, stirred by righteous anger, and how the police had lost control of the streets. ‘If the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.’ Malik, who is usually one of the left’s more sensible and conscientious commentators, said: ‘The comments might sound like a prescient warning. They sound also like a dangerous apology for the violence.’
Now, Malik had already conceded the conversation took place nine months ago, so how does he explain that second sentence? How could it possibly be an apology for something which hadn’t happened? I yield to nobody in my admiration for Douglas Murray, but he can’t bloody time travel, can he? Malik was merely trying to fan the flames beneath the pyre on which Douglas had been placed and the fact that in order to do so he had to make an idiot of himself, semantically, did not matter. What Murray said was, obviously, a warning – and his fear that the coming rebellion would be ‘very brutal’ did not, to my mind, suggest he was much looking forward to it.
I later learned that one of the first people to cloak himself in confected outrage at Douglas’s comments about Muslim immigrants was a certain Alastair Campbell. This struck me as a little ironic. Douglas may not always come across as the most steadfast supporter of Islam, but so far as I am aware he was not responsible for the deaths of 460,000 Muslims, as in my opinion Campbell was in his odious dissembling prior to the UK and USA’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Campbell prepared the ground for perhaps the most egregious and lethal foreign policy decision in British history. The man should be in a prison cell, not gobbing off on Twitter or chewing the fat with a supposed political opponent, Rory Stewart, who actually agrees with him about everything and looks up to him, dewy-eyed and worshipful, in the manner of a pussy-whipped prep-school fresher desperate to curry the favour of a particularly demented Flashman.
Hope Not Hate were also involved, of course, which is a more serious concern. This organisation spends its time and considerable amounts of money attempting to silence any form of debate on issues regarding race and immigration. It is the most anti-democratic organisation in the country. Hope Not Hate – an asinine name, incidentally – simply wishes the lower orders to shut up about things which concern them; any suggestion that immigration may not have been exclusively a marvel, to be cherished by us all, identifies them as ‘racist’ and thus to be reported to the police for extremism and racial hatred.
If one were to apply HNH’s criteria for what constitutes incitement to the organisation itself, its boss Nick Lowles would certainly find himself in the dock. It magnifies supposed infractions against the Muslim community to such an extent that it cannot but engender a sense of fear, alienation and in the end defiance, perhaps violent defiance. As I write this, the idiot Lowles is in the process of trying to extricate himself from censure for talking of an acid attack on a Muslim woman in Middlesbrough. There had been no such attack. In what sense is that not incitement? The truth is that Lowles yearns for confrontation every bit as much as those coked-up hoolies setting fire to Nissan Jukes. His livelihood, as well as his imbecilic world view, depends upon it.
Both Campbell and Lowles demanded that The Spectator – and the Daily Telegraph – distance themselves from Douglas (as well as Campbell demanding the police should get involved). Well, let me, briefly, distance myself from what Douglas had to say – on the grounds that I do not think it is true.
Those recent riots were, as I suggested last week, perpetrated by bored and fractious football yobbos and dissipated at the first sign of rain and indeed – as I mentioned – the start of the new football season. That was not the uprising Douglas had predicted. But then, I do not see much evidence of a righteous fury brewing among the general public. The numbers taking part in those riots were minuscule and the thuggery was condemned by everyone.
The truth is that we are walking towards a grim, dystopic future rather dutifully, marching along without – for the most part – daring to raise our voices in objection. Every person I met in Middlesbrough last week lamented the level of immigration, the consequential crime levels, and how they were not allowed to talk about it for fear of being called racist. But not on the record. Douglas is quite wrong. We are all doing as we are told, and Hope Not Hate has won.
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