Oh – and the Collected Works of Shakespeare. I forgot to mention that last week: that among the books on the reading list that could be a sign of ‘right-wing radicalisation’, some genius public servant came up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Nobody knows what the attitude of Prevent’s ‘Research Information and Communications Unit’ (RICU) would be towards someone found in possession of, say, a quarto edition of All’s Well that Ends Well. Perhaps they should be deemed to be on the conveyer belt to right-wing extremism?
It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that we have officials who think owning the work of our national poet is a sign of right-wing extremism. Because in recent days it seems that everything has been such a sign.
Take events in Liverpool. Recently a video did the rounds on social media showing a man propositioning a local 15-year-old in her school uniform. The girl saw the adult migrant off, but not all of the locals viewed the interaction benevolently. One additional problem was that the authorities in their great wisdom had decided to put a lot of migrants who have entered the country illegally in recent years into Knowsley – one of the most deprived areas of the country.
Brave counter-protestors screamed ‘fascist scum’. An interesting reaction to a traffic-zoning dispute
A mix of factors led to several nights of unrest. Locals protested outside a hotel housing migrants and a police van was seton fire. As well as condemning any violence, a number of things might be observed about this. One is to note that during a cost-of-living crisis many people do not appreciate those who have gamed the system living in a hotel at the expense of taxpayers who could not afford to live there themselves. The public also take a dim view of men assaulting (or attempting to assault) schoolgirls. Call it a local prejudice of our own.
Fortunately a goodly portion of our media has no time for such backward views. Instead, in reaction to events in Liverpool the media largely did what a portion of it does best: they tried to excommunicate the general public. The Guardian, for instance, went with ‘Far-right protestors clash with police at Merseyside hotel housing asylum seekers’. There are at least two things to admire in that headline. One is the turning of all illegal migrants into ‘asylum seekers’. The second is the turning of any concerned member of the British public into a ‘far-right protestor’. Quite the work of art that.
Others, like the activist group ‘Stand up to Racism’, blamed the protests on Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman ‘scapegoating refugees’ and ‘giving space to the racists and the far-right’. This far-left group went on to express solidarity with all the ‘antiracists and antifascists’ who were turning up in Liverpool to counter the, er, general public.
But it wasn’t just groups like Stand up to Racism who tried to pin the disturbances on the Prime Minister and Home Secretary. A once admirable, if politically ambitious, prosecutor called Nazir Afzal claimed that Braverman was committing ‘victim-blaming of the highest order’ against the migrants. Other pundits insisted that the events were the inevitable result of ‘anti-immigrant’ rhetoric from the Home Secretary. Because if there is one thing we all know about the people of Merseyside, it is that they sit on a knife-edge awaiting their latest instructions from the Conservative Home Secretary.
A few days after these media ninnies performed this drive-by against the protestors in Liverpool, they went a little quiet. Especially when it turned out that four teenage Afghan migrants had just been arrested for the rape of a different 15-year-old schoolgirl in Kent. Also that in just one east London hotel housing migrants, there were at least two cases of sexual assault of underage boys in a couple of weeks.
Naturally, there is nothing that anyone could or should say about this. For if you were to take a dim view of these attacks and you happened not to have a column in a national newspaper, you might seek to make your voice heard. You might even take to the street to say you’re not cool with all these people breaking into the country, getting free housing and – in a small number of cases – harassing the local kids. Except that then, by the rules of the era, you’d be far-right and that’s your reputation gone.
Yet as the days progress I wonder if anything cannot now be called ‘far-right’. Lately, in Oxford city centre, a bizarre array of obstacles have been set up to make vehicle movement around the city centre even more difficult than it has been in recent years. This is because the local council has decided that Oxford should be a ‘15-minute city’. This is a new piece of jargon in the urban-planning world predicated on the idea that everything you need should be within a 15-minute journey. Not because they want to make our city centres more beautiful – God knows what kind of maniac would want to do that – but rather it is done to achieve some net-zero, anti-carbon emission, green stuff that is the only directing cause in some local politicians’ lives.
In places like Oxford, this means that the local population have had their ability to drive around massively restricted. Not everybody is happy about it. The other day there was a quite popular protest against these traffic restrictions.
Perhaps there were some people present who think that the World Economic Forum is planning to make us all stay in our houses and be vaccinated to death, and are just using Oxford city centre as their dastardly testing ground. Years like the ones we have just been through will do that to some people. But most attendees just don’t like the new traffic laws.
Yet who came out in force to oppose these people? Why various ‘antifascist’ groups, of course, all decked out in black to denote that they are not themselves fascists. These brave counter-protestors screamed ‘fascist scum’ at the protestors and promised, as ever, to ‘smash’ them.
An interesting reaction to a traffic-zoning dispute. But then, as with the Complete Works of Shakespeare,perhaps we must just accept that we live in a culture where everything is now described as ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’ if it does not please people who seem to me, at any rate, unpleasable.
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