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You can’t appease everyone

When Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was paying attention at Reigate Grammar School in the 1970s and I wasn’t, he may have come across that old conundrum; What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? (It’s an illegitimate question, by the way, due to its inappropriate use of temporality, but that’s for another day.) If he was not previously aware of this intellectual teaser, he will be now.

If Starmer and his people have not dreaded this moment since October 7 then they must not have seen it coming. From the moment Muslims and Jews started fighting, Starmer’s fight had also begun, his implausible aim being to placate both the Muslim and the Jewish camps in the United Kingdom.

In terms of voting blocs, there are only half a million Jews in Britain to the four million or so Muslims, so that is not the issue for Starmer. It isn’t the nationwide ballot that matters. But while Jewish influence on the UK’s government does not wear the livery of Jewry, working as always in the shadows and alcoves, Muslim political influence is becoming increasingly visible, increasingly powerful, and increasingly violent at the local and national levels.

Gaza, well over 2,000 miles from Westminster, is dominating the British political landscape in this General Election year. When it comes to backing one horse or the other, there can be no abstaining, and this is Starmer’s worst nightmare as practically Prime Minister-elect. Defending Israel’s right to defend itself alienates Muslims, and a call for a ceasefire has the same effect on the Jewish lobby.

Starmer took Labour’s reins in the wake of various charges of anti-Semitism that were levelled at the party under his predecessor, the very Left-wing Jeremy Corbyn, so Starmer had to clean house for Jewish inspection from his first day in Downing Street. While -isms and -phobias abound, anti-Semitism still merits an extra-tight clutch of the pearls.

But there has been a new development, and the Jewish troops may have been outflanked. A vote on a ceasefire in Gaza — tokenistic, but all part of grand political theater — was interfered with by the Speaker of the House, to whom we will return below.

Pulling away from the eternal animosity between Jews and Muslims, the British people — anyone in Westminster remember them? — might be entitled to ask (politely) why events 2,000 miles away are dominating parliamentary time while in Britain the borders are open, the economy has just officially gone into recession, crime is heading towards the rampant levels seen in the United States, freedom of speech is being blatantly stifled, and the queue for a National Health dentist looks like this.

So, although Starmer may win the General Election, his troubles could only be beginning. Obsessing over attempting to appease two utterly antithetical tribes is going to lead to a nasty case of cognitive dissonance the morning after the Labour victory.

A lot of time has been spent, diplomatic and otherwise, over decades to try to please both Israel and Palestine, and Starmer will be well aware of tensions in the Middle East — and happy that someone else has had to deal with them. Now, the man regarded as a racing certainty to be the next British Prime Minister has to attempt it as well, not yet (but probably soon) at international levels of diplomacy but rather in his own back yard, a space in which the proxies are squabbling.

Given that Starmer was a year below me at the old place, I would bet he had his own love affair with The Smiths when the time came, as did I. If he did, he will be familiar with one of Morrissey’s greatest lines: “I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, now it’s happening in mine.”

Rebranding Black Lives Matter

Imarn Ayrton is a young, successful, British businesswoman and, given that she is also black, she should be an obvious ambassador for the success of UK race relations. Unfortunately, race relations is her business: She’s a grifter. This is a growth industry in the UK, taking its lead as ever from the US and its Al Sharpton School of Race Hustling.

Ayrton is a piece of public-relations cosmetics by Black Lives Matter UK, whose spokeswoman she has become now that the brand is slipping. BLM have been weakened in the public perception by corruption, too close an association with Marxism, and the shooting of Sasha Johnson. Ayrton has televisual presence and a superior and knowing attitude which would not be tolerated in a white chat-show guest. She is glamorous in the vulgar black manner, and her website shows that she has celebrity pretensions. Quite possibly, her conjunction with BLM was just a sharp career move. She is articulate, with the proviso that her ease with language is due to the fact that all she ever does is rehash a pre-packed lexicon embodying a set of non-negotiable assumptions expressed as diktats. She is blatantly anti-white and, like all critical race theory sales staff, if you find her the cultural practice involving white people, she’ll find you the racism.

An example: The suggestion that the British countryside is racist because black people don’t tend to do their thang there has been simmering for two years, stepping into the media limelight now and again on a slow news week. Ayrton’s approach is to explain the problem to her white, male TV host in the manner of a patient schoolteacher showing a slow child how to do sums.

“What a lot of people don’t understand,” she begins, opening with one of history’s most irritating phrases, “is that when black people go to the countryside, they see a lot of people who are not like them, but who share customs and habits which may make black people feel uncomfortable.” That’s it. No data, no vox pop, nothing else, just another one of what I call ex cathedra pronouncements made ex nihilo, indisputable truths formed out of nothing.

The point is well worth making again that a lack of blacks in the British countryside is the cherry on top of an already wonderful cake. The hills and dales of England are all the greener and more pleasant for the absence of what are essentially urban creatures. That whites are a group unto themselves with their own set of habits and customs is a saving grace for our people, and the countryside is as good a place as any to practice it away from those whose habits and customs are very, very different from ours. So, keep the racism coming, O countryside. You’ll be all the better for it.

As for Ayrton, if you want a sample of this glamorous black chatbot, and if you can stand Piers Morgan, she can be seen in action here. She begins her answer to the opening question by saying, “It depends on the context,” the last refuge of the intellectually negligible. The UK race-hustling industry is open for business and hiring, and we can expect a lot more British Sunny Hostins.

“Piers, YOU Are Racially Prejudiced!” Imarn Ayton Confronts Piers Morgan In HEATED Debate

Saint Julian the Martyr

It is rare that the United States requires anything from its old masters other than regular trade deals and geopolitical compliance, but now there is something it would like sent over the herring pond by express delivery — or rather, someone. The story of Julian Assange is surely familiar. When you have been portrayed on screen by English actor Benedict Cumberbatch, you are definitely a person of import.

Although it is the US who want to try Assange over the 2010 WikiLeaks dump (both Trump and Biden agree on the desirability of this), he has spent the last 14 years in England — although not, technically, all of them on English soil. Due to that strange transubstantiation that national embassies pull off, Assange was actually in Ecuador while taking refuge in that country’s embassy in London.

For the last five years, Assange has been held in London’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, a Category A jail which holds terror suspects, incendiary Muslim clerics, and dangerous criminals, and which is affectionately known as “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay.” Assange is, of course, a journalist rather than a hate preacher, terrorist, or armed robber, but the process is part of the punishment, and the UK government were never going to put Assange in what British criminals call “a nice, easy nick.” That would have angered the Biden administration, and the President himself already has little love for the UK.

And now Assange is drinking at the Last Chance Saloon in the shape of a final appeal against extradition heard at the Royal Courts of Justice, Britain’s Supreme Court. And still he has to wait. The two presiding judges have delayed their verdict, claiming that they need time both to review the evidence and to wait until March 4, the last day on which fresh evidence can be admitted.

It could be that the UK is being used as a holding pen for Assange as neither Democrats or Republicans know the best use to put him to, politically speaking. Assange being led across the tarmac in Washington, perhaps on a mobile gurney like Hannibal Lecter, zip-cuffed and wearing an orange suit, would make great optics just before or just after the US presidential election.

Union Jackal Hero of the Month

This inaugural award of Union Jackal Hero of the Month has links with the British Museum, but it is not a curator or manager of that venerable institution. They are undoubtedly busy cooking up some new woke outrage with which to besmirch white people, rewrite history to feature ever-more blacks (like movies and ads), and generally subvert what they are supposed to be doing.

Instead, we turn to Easter Island, officially part of Chile despite being 2,000 miles off the coast of South America. The island is famously home to the Easter Island statues, grim-looking and very ancient chaps up to 30 feet tall and 80 tons in weight. That didn’t stop two of them ending up in the British Museum, where they remain despite a campaign backed by the Chilean President to have them returned, similar to the long-lasting feud between Britain and Greece over the Elgin Marbles, also housed at the British Museum.

The Mayor of Easter Island might be expected to add his voice to any chorus for repatriation of the statues, so let’s see what Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa has to say: “We thank the British Museum and the British crown for taking such good care of our ancestors, at such a long distance from us.”

In a charming image, Mayor Paoa went on to describe the two statues as “ambassadors” for the island’s culture. So, one man’s colonial oppressor is another man’s responsible curator.

Actually, the statues may come in useful in London just at the moment. The larger of the pair, the Hoa Hakananai’a, was traditionally associated with preventing clan warfare, which means he might be one immigrant to the UK with an actual job to go to. In the meantime, Mayor Pedro is the no doubt the proud recipient of the inaugural Union Jackal Hero of the Month award.

Union Jackass of the Month

The Speaker of the British House of Commons is a more formal position than his American counterpart, with far less constitutional power, and so usually Speakers manage to stay out of trouble. The incumbent — just, at the time of writing — Lyndsay Hoyle, has changed all that by tinkering with the constitution, quite possibly under political pressure from our man Starmer.

While the House of Commons debate on British borders was attended by a handful of MPs who were probably tired of the subsidized bar, the debate on a Gaza ceasefire saw the venerable house packed to the roof-beams. The British Parliament is rapidly becoming a moral catwalk, and realpolitik on a domestic level is being overlooked for the baubles of international posturing.

Oliver Cromwell would have known what to do.

Hoyle went against constitutional protocol and forced the vote on a ceasefire in Gaza (I bet Hamas were crowded round the wireless biting their nails before the result) on the premise that he feared for the safety of MPs as they left the House, there being something of a pitchforks-and-blazing-torches vibe about Westminster at that precise moment. Contrary to advice he had received, Hoyle went ahead and allowed a baying mob to affect — and effect — a parliamentary vote for probably the first time since the Peasants’ Revolt.

So, although it is like judging Best Amoeba in Show, the first-ever Union Jackass of the Month is Lindsay Hoyle.

Steady the Buffs!

The Union Jackal