When I first saw the headline I was highly optimistic. Sir Keir Starmer had identified the threat to society posed by ‘young men in their bedrooms’. What would follow, surely, must be a polemic in the style of Robert Baden-Powell or John Harvey Kellogg on the dangers of masturbation.
It’s about time this was politicised, I reckoned – the terrible sapping of a young man’s strength and soul by the indiscriminate spillage of his precious bodily fluids. Perhaps Sir Keir would demand that parents order their wayward teenage offspring to put down the Kleenex, open the bedroom door, come downstairs and either eat a bowl of nutritious cornflakes or join the Boy Scouts. This is the sort of policy which might get a little bit of cut-through and I could hear, in my head, Sir Keir addressing next year’s party conference: ‘Let me be very clear. We, as a government, will not tolerate monkey-spanking. No More Monkey-Spanking!’
But I read on and sadly this was not what he meant. He was not trying to stop ‘young men’ from grilling the tiger – he wanted to stop them murdering people in terrorist attacks and he had identified the fact that what the perpetrators had in common was that they were often alone, isolated in their bedrooms. So are bedrooms implicated in these barbaric outrages? That was the thing Sir Keir homed in on.
Perhaps he is right. There has been a trend in the past 20 years for bedrooms to be painted, rather than decorated with wallpaper. I have always held that wallpaper inculcates a calming, civilising temperament. Perhaps that is why Fusilier Lee Rigby was hacked to death in 2013, and why 22 young people were killed at the Manchester Arena in 2017, and why those three little girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King – were knifed to death by Axel Rudakubana in Southport last year. An absence of a pleasing William Morris motif on the walls of each killer’s bedroom.
Is that the one thing which unites these acts of savagery – or could something else be implicated? I wondered about this for a while and, looking back through the countless examples of terrorist attacks in the UK, discovered a most strange fact. Did you know that almost all of the attacks were carried out by Islamists, or jihadis? And isn’t it this, rather than isolated young men in their bedrooms, that provides what we might call a common link between pretty much all of these atrocities?
Words matter. How we articulate problems facing society matters. It helps, for example, if we tell the truth, even if in doing so we compromise our own idiotic ideologies, or worry that some people might get a little bit angry. Sir Keir is still in a state of denial, either out of stupidity or because he is lying to himself and the nation, or perhaps both.
The mass immigration of the past 20 years has been hugely injurious to the country socially and economically
In a sensible society it would be inconceivable, when talking about the murder of those three tiny girls in Southport, not to address the issue of radical Islam, given that radical Islam was the motive for so many previous and similar acts of barbarity. But we do not live in a sensible society, nor a truthful one. We live in a society where we are lied to on a fairly regular basis and where some of our leading politicians (and commentators) deliberately obscure the motives for violent attacks because to admit what the motive was would be to undermine their ideology.
The truth is very simple. We have invited into this country millions and millions of people, far more than the country is able to sustain. Also, a smallish proportion of those incomers want us dead and will continue to try to kill us until we open our eyes a little bit. They do this because they are Islamists. Further, a large proportion of people coming into the country are Muslim.
The millions of incomers undoubtedly include some good people and immigration in the past has brought benefits along with the deficits. However, the mass immigration of the past 20 years has been hugely injurious to the country socially and economically, even if each new wave does provide a brief boost to the Treasury. And it has imported violence, bloodshed and rape.
I am at a loss with Starmer. He failed to even mention Islamism when dealing with terrorist attacks in this country. It simply was not on his radar. It did not matter, it was a coincidence. All those murders down the years – coincidences. We were far more honest when dealing with the savagery of the IRA: they were identified each time as being Irish nationalists who wished the UK to get out of Northern Ireland.
Not so now. In a quite astonishing reply when he was being asked about whether or not we should have a full public inquiry into the almost exclusively Muslim rape gangs, Starmer said that those who clamoured for an inquiry were climbing on a ‘far-right bandwagon’.
How can he not comprehend that this blanket dismissal of those who wish to hold our authorities to account betrays exactly the same attitude which allowed those crimes to go uninvestigated for so long? How can he not grasp that? The police, the social services, the politicians disdained to take any action because they didn’t want to be seen as being ‘right-wing’ or ‘racist’. And the consequence was that the crimes went on and on and are still happening today – because people like Starmer (and Jess Phillips, for that matter) will not tell the truth, the whole truth.
I assume that this article is ‘racist’ because I do make the link between Islamism and terrorism. But as I’ve said, I would argue with some conviction that those who do not regard these outrages as springing from the same source are deluded. They are basically sitting in their bedrooms with the sheets pulled over their heads, spanking the monkey like billy-o.
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