Britain's cultural revolution

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

Royston as a town and Hertfordshire as a county have been dominated by the Conservatives almost without a break since the creation of elected local government in the nineteenth century. Yet Royston Council allowed Mrs Odent to become the curator of its town museum. It allowed this in 2015 – five years into a Conservative Government. To her credit, she did not lie her way into the job. Once more according to The Daily Mail, she claims that she negotiated a contract with her employers that allowed her to “decolonise and diversify” the museum, and that her employers gave her a “safe platform” that she could use to “piss off some racists.” She adds: “a) my boss thinks I'm funny, b) she also supports BLM, and c) I'm the one reading [your direct messages].”

Ever ready to pose as the spokesman for a disenfranchised majority, Andrew Rosindell, the Conservative Member for Romford, announced that the spreading wave of vandalism was being driven by “a politically-correct gang of anarchists who hate everything about this country.” Fair enough, so far as these people do hate England. But this is not an insurrection of anarchists – not even the kind who like the power to destroy. It is an insurrection driven by the wealthy and the well-connected. Mrs Odone is the daughter of an American college president and the wife of a banker. She is part of a network of the rich who feel no twentieth century shame about their wealth, so long as they believe and act on their beliefs in a repeat of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And they have been given the power to make this revolution by Conservative Governments.

A government of conservatives would long since have purged these people from every institution within its orbit of control or influence. It would have remodelled some and shut others down. This Conservative Government has instead left or even put them in charge of these institutions, and they are now acting in mockery of the parliamentary majority won just six months ago.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not approve of police brutality. Indeed, I have long believed in abolishing the police. I am no fan of Winston Churchill. I do not believe, had I been alive at the time, that I would have supported slavery or the slave trade. I do not think, in retrospect, that having a big empire was a good idea. But the events that have been made the excuse for what is now happening took place in a foreign country, or a long time ago. What we now have is, I repeat, a cultural revolution – a cultural revolution led by what amounts to the ruling class. The BBC has incited it. Big business and the rich are cheering it on. The police have no wish to stop it.

It is also a cultural revolution that will not end with pulling down the statues of men whose actions may not have been spotless. Again, I quote Mrs Odent, whose honesty, if nothing else, is to be commended: “[W]e all immediately forget history when statues are destroyed.”

And a Conservative Government that, last December, swore blind it would stand by us has abdicated what little control it might still have. If disappointment is reasonable, we have no reason to be shocked. The Conservatives are, and always have been, unfit for any honest purpose. Sooner or later, I have no doubt – if it has not already happened – Mrs Odent and Boris Johnson will meet at some smart dinner. They will get on very well. Why not? She may despise him. Being herself intelligent, she has no choice. Being intelligent, though, she can also be sure that, unlike the average reader of The Daily Mail, he is not her enemy.

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The ugly rise of left-wing racism

The contemporary British left has lost the moral high ground when it comes to debates over race. Many of us have known this for some time, but recent events have made it all the more clear.

In a remarkable exchange in the House of Commons recently, Labour backbencher Florence Eshalomi questioned whether home secretary Priti Patel truly understood racism in the UK. Essentially being hectored into doing so by Eshalomi, Patel discussed her personal experiences of racism in front of her parliamentary colleagues. This included recounting childhood experiences of being called a ‘paki’ in the school playground, as well as recently being the subject of an anti-Hindu cartoon published by that bastion of chattering-class intolerance, the Guardian. In response, Labour MPs sent Patel a letter, accusing her of ‘gaslighting other ethnic-minority communities’ – essentially of using her own heritage and experiences to downplay other forms of racism. As well as striking an unsavoury tone, the letter itself was authored by Bradford West MP Naz Shah – who is hardly the strongest authority on race relations.

Then there was the backlash to the announcement that Munira Mirza, head of No10’s policy unit, would be heading up a new commission on racial inequalities. Since the announcement she has been subjected to the most appalling forms of racism from the bigoted left. Mirza has previously criticised the politics of grievance, which she says acts as a barrier to meaningful policy change on issues of racial inequality. Leftist figures, in predictable fashion, have wasted little time in directing racially charged slurs towards her. Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar has labelled Mirza a ‘racial gatekeeper’ – a term used for non-white people who supposedly provide political cover for perceived injustices based on race. Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, arguably one of the most poisonous voices in Britain’s race-relations debate, labelled Mirza a ‘brown executioner’ of ‘white supremacy’. University of Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal conducted a class-based analysis on the background of South Asian surnames, in a desperate attempt to tie Mirza with a position of natural privilege. This was strange, not least because Mirza is the daughter of a factory worker and Gopal is the daughter of a diplomat.

It seems that this distinctly left-wing form of racism has almost become normalised.

While there is a serious discussion to be had on enduring forms of racial discrimination in the UK’s labour market, the existence of socio-economic ethnic inequalities is a complex phenomenon. Mirza’s role has ruffled feathers because, going on her past work in this area, she will not shy away from delving into politically sensitive territory. This would include, for instance, exploring how problematic internal cultural norms and social behaviours feed into economic disparities between British ethnic groups. This is deeply unsettling for the feelings-over-facts critical-race theorists, who refuse to acknowledge the possibility that family dynamics, lack of female empowerment, and a general failure to cultivate aspirational attitudes may be stalling the progress of certain non-white communities in the UK.

This reflects the hypocrisy and contradictions contained within Britain’s anti-racist movement. A growing number on the left are not welcoming of ethnic-minority advancement, unless the successful individuals fall neatly into their own political agenda on a range of matters – particularly ‘cultural’ issues such as immigration, multiculturalism and social cohesion.

Nor are they willing to discuss admittedly sensitive factors that are holding back the social progress of certain non-white ethnic groups in the UK. It is critically important that debates on race relations and ethnic inequalities are not hijacked by these ideologues. They label themselves as progressive anti-racists but are uninterested in truly getting to grips with and tackling what is driving inequality.

Worse still, they are guilty of indulging in one of the most dehumanising forms of racism: insisting individuals must think a certain way, purely on the basis of their racial identity. This ultimately strips non-white people of agency, and rejects the idea that they can think for themselves.

Mirza will no doubt be subjected to more left-wing racism. As a high-achieving, working-class northern woman of Pakistani-Muslim origin, and as someone who refuses to give an inch to tribal identity politics, she is a natural target of bigoted leftists. The same can be said for Priti Patel, a state-educated woman of Indian origin who has little time for metropolitan leftists and their attitudes towards immigration, crime and terrorism.

The foul treatment of these two ethinic-minority women, who refuse to play the role ascribed to them, shows how ugly – and racist – identity politics is.

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Ignoring Black-on-Black Victimization

The deafening silence from Democrat Party race hustlers and their Leftmedia propagandists about the murder of thousands of black citizens.

Mark Alexander

In my column Wednesday, “Talking With a Democrat About ‘Systemic Racism,’” regarding the cognitive/emotive breakdown when discussing contentious issues, I also highlighted the gross racial disparity regarding interracial and intraracial crimes. I noted, “Don’t expect to hear a single objection about either of those issues from Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer.”

A friend and career federal agent recalled our post regarding a racially charged incident in Milwaukee in 2014, and it is worth revisiting.

In November of that year, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn, a liberal Democrat, participated in a contentious meeting with black community leaders and residents after a Milwaukee PD officer shot and killed a schizophrenic black man. After the meeting, a reporter confronted Chief Flynn, asserting he had been rudely disrespectful because he was texting during the meeting.

Flynn responded: “This is a tragedy for the family. It’s a tragedy for the community. … But there are a lot of people lining up to take advantage of this tragedy to promote their own agendas. … If some of the [protesters] here gave a good G-d damn about the victimization of people in this community … I would take some of their invective more seriously. The greatest racial disparity in Milwaukee is getting shot and killed. Eighty percent of my homicide victims are African American. Eighty percent of our aggravated assault victims are African American.

Now [the protesters] know all about the last three people who have been killed by the Milwaukee Police Department in the last few years, but there is not one of them who can name one of the last three homicide victims we’ve had in this city. There is room for everybody in fixing this police department and … we’re not without sin. But this community is at risk alright. And it is not because men and women in blue risk their lives protecting it. … The [protesters] are absolutely MIA when it comes to the true threats facing this community.”

Today, those protesters and rioters, and the Democrat Party race hustlers and their Leftmedia propagandists who incite them in the name of “George Floyd,” maintain a deafening silence about the thousands of black citizens murdered by other black citizens. That does not fit their political narrative.

As a long-time Patriot Post supporter concurred: “As a black American male who was raised in the inner city, I am angry at the reaction of the hypocrites in Congress, corporate America, and their media outlets. If ‘black lives (really) mattered,’ they would stop ignoring the pandemic of black on black crime that has been raging through their cities for years. Hypocrisy won’t solve the real problems in our urban centers, but changing the policies that keep poor black Americans enslaved on what amount to ‘poverty plantations’ will.”

Barack Obama demonized cops with deadly results — for cops. Today’s leftist Democrats have taken that rhetoric to a dangerous new level, manipulating data to support their false narrative, and absurdly promoting efforts to “defund the police.” A quick look at the results in Seattle reveals where that will lead

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Australia: Channel 7, Sam Armytage and Prue MacSween sued for racial vilification

Channel Seven, Sunrise host Samantha Armytage and commentator Prue MacSween are being sued for racial vilification over a 2018 discussion on the network’s breakfast program.

The decision to take the complaint to Federal Court was made after settlement discussions at the Australian Human Rights Commission crumbled.

The court case stems from a segment on Sunrise in March 2018 where the panel – which including Armytage, MacSween and radio host Ben Davis – suggested a second stolen generation was needed to help Aboriginal children.

“Just like the first stolen generation where a lot of kids were taken for their wellbeing, we need to do it again,” MacSween said on the program.

The discrimination case is being led by legal firm Susan Moriarty and Associates, which in a statement said the eight Aboriginal complainants were “forced” to take their case to the Federal Court after settlement discussions collapsed.

Indigenous elder Aunty Rhonda, who is leading the complaint, said the group just wanted “accountability and equality”.

“This nationwide broadcast by Channel Seven in March 2018 was another symbol of national shame and another appalling example of the deeply entrenched virus of racism that still plagues white platforms of privilege in this country,” she said.

“Channel Seven’s subsequent disingenuous downcast eyes and ‘we’re so sorry’ murmurs, after we protested and their racism was called out, mean nothing to us when they refuse all reasonable requests for proper repatriation of the pulverising hate, humiliation and distress we feel every day of our lives.”

Dozens of protesters chanted outside Sunrise’s Sydney studio in March 2018 in the days after the segment.

The Australian Communication and Media Authority also found the segment to be in breach of the Commercial Television Industry Code Of Practice.

The ACMA forced Channel Seven to independently audit the production process behind Sunrise and all editorial staff were required to undertake training on racism and Aboriginal affairs.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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