Nymans, a NT garden in Sussex; May 2022

I’ve been a member of the National Trust, a British conservation charity which maintains a large number of estates including parks, stately homes, gardens and landscapes, since 2019. I’ve spent many an afternoon wandering around some of their homes and gardens in the south-east of England, taking pictures to share on my Flickr account. Last week Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie, accused the Trust of a “catastrophic dumbing-down” by hosting a Pokemon treasure hunt at 15 of their estates including Dyrham Park in Somerset, Sizergh in Cumbria, Hughenden in Buckinghamshire and Winkworth Arboretum in Surrey (archived copy here). He also claims that the Trust seems embarrassed about some of its country houses, treating them as “repositories of dull history, which happen to have absolutely fab running-around areas for the kids to have fun in” while their magazine, if it features their country houses at all, presents it as “a backdrop to some carefully curated, supposed ‘adventure'”. Their director of communications and fundraising, Celia Richardson, responded on Twitter: “Our Pokemon partnership isn’t unique. From the Van Gogh Museum to the Natural History Museum, & city‑wide experiences that lead visitors around landmarks like the Louvre, it’s a global pattern of cultural organisations experimenting with how people encounter heritage”.

Since Covid most of my visits to NT properties have been to the gardens and parks rather than into the houses; my first trip was to Petworth House in Sussex, which had a formidable collection of bits of Roman statuary, collected on “grand tours” of Europe when that was the done thing among the British upper class, wherever possible assembled into whole statues (photos here). Families visit their houses and gardens often, and there are often nature trails and other amusements for children, often with colourful signs and objects that don’t exactly blend into the scenery. Still, as an adult visitor, you can ignore these things and just wander round the park and enjoy the scenery and the trees and flowers and, of course, take lots of pictures. Winkworth is a place I visit often as it’s an easy drive from where I live; I rather hope that the Pokemon event is no more obtrusive than any of their other children’s amusements (the centrepiece will no doubt be in the new visitor centre that’s due open any day now). Running a large park and maintaining a garden does of course cost money and it’s worth noting that the NT maintains a lot of properties that do not charge for access, such as Morden Hall Park in south London. It would be nice for some adult visitors if places like Sheffield Park did not have amusements that stood out from the scenery like sore thumbs, but they have to attract all sorts, including families with children.

As for the NT’s magazine and the contrast with how private estates present their houses and gardens, the NT does not just run country houses but all sorts of other attractions, including landscapes which are not part of stately homes or formal gardens and where no admission charge applies. Some of their large parks and woodlands could be best marketed to families with children as good places for an adventure (Hatchlands and Winkworth Arboretum spring to mind). Some of the houses are not just showpiece country houses but house art collections and museums; the basement of Polesden Lacey in Surrey features a lot of wartime (as in WW2) technology and thus serves as a kind of museum of that time and of the “below stairs” life that many working-class young people went into then. The NT magazine is not just about old houses but about all the activities they undertake, such as (in the most recent edition) preserving a chalk figure, making their gardens resilient to climate change and some recent digs at the Saxon burial site Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk. There are also features on craft and food as well as promotional features for their  attractions, including a production of Othello by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men at venues owned by the NT, including (round here) Hatchlands and Morden Hall Park, which might be more up Harry Mount’s street.

They do, however, maintain a few mediocre houses here and there which aren’t cultural treasure troves, just rich men’s houses. Harry Mount mentions Clandon Park in Surrey, an 18th-century Palladian mansion that belonged to a local wealthy family, the Onslows, and was gutted by fire in 2015. I did not get to see this building before it burned down, but it was not my idea of a greatly beautiful building, basically a big red-brick box with turrets. Mount alleges that “rather than rebuilding it with their insurance payout, the brain-numbingly foolish Trust are preserving it as a ruin for ever”; if the building were restored to how it was before the accidental fire, it would not be the house the family that owned it lived in but a replica. That is why the NT chose to use the ruin as an exhibition and event space instead. They already have a proper stately home with a vastly superior garden a few miles down the road at Polesden Lacey.

That said, Sheffield Park, Cliveden, Mottisfont, Scotney Castle and no doubt many other NT attractions are worth the annual membership fees by themselves: well-maintained and curated outdoor and indoor attractions. I definitely don’t get the impression that they are run by morons or cretins; if they were, they would be overgrown and ramshackle by now. I will, I hope, be making good use of my membership fee at a couple of their parks or gardens this bank holiday weekend and if you have one near you, I recommend you make a visit. You won’t meet the executive committee, just the volunteers.

Last week Simon Heffer wrote a piece for the Spectator, a British Tory-associated news and opinion magazine, alleging that the politician Enoch Powell, an MP from 1950 to 1987 (with a break in 1974, at which he switched from the Tories to the Ulster Unionists and took a seat in Northern Ireland) who is best known for an inflammatory, racist speech against the admission of family members of Asian immigrant workers in the late 1960s although he had been responsible for some progressive policies and speeches including one in 1961 advocating reform of Britain’s mental health services which set in train the move away from asylums. Heffer claims that Powell came to be associated with “one utterance” and that “long after his death he found himself, in contemporary parlance, cancelled”, noting that his own biography of Powell was withdrawn from publication after the death of George Floyd in the US. He then compares the rejection of Powell with the erasure from history of people deemed to be “Unpersons” in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Having read the book, I can say that the comparison is ludicrous.

In 1984, an Unperson was someone who had been killed by the regime and whose name and deeds were erased from the records. The central character, Winston Smith, worked in the records department, rewriting history by simply making up stories to overwrite the real stories of people he had been informed were ‘Unpersons’. This could be because of a trivial faux pas — some expression of dissent that could have been said in his sleep, as happened to one of Smith’s colleagues. It was the Stalinist practice of airbrushing out of official pictures politicians who had fallen victim to Stalin’s purges taken to its logical conclusion. The comparison of Powell with this treatment is consistent with the way right-wingers claim to have been ‘cancelled’ despite enjoying columns in national newspapers and even seats in parliament. Enoch Powell remained a Tory MP for six years after this incident, and then secured a seat with the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland, and remained in parliament until being defeated by the nationalist SDLP in 1987, declining a life peerage because he had opposed their introduction in 1958.

It’s true that Powell’s career was more than the 1968 Rivers of Blood speech (reproduced as a PDF here), and he supported some liberal positions and others commonly associated with the Left (such as unilateral nuclear disarmament) and criticised MPs who justified abuses of Kenyans during the so-called Mau-Mau uprising and called them subhuman, but that speech was heinous. He repeated claims from an anonymous letter about a woman in Wolverhampton, in a street that had declined from the moment the first Black person (or ‘Negro’ as he called them) moved in (a common racist trope), who had impoverished herself by refusing to rent rooms to immigrants and was told by the council “racial prejudice won’t get you anywhere”. When she went out, she was followed by the immigrants’ children, who taunted her with the only word of English the anonymous writer claimed they knew: “racialist”. He quoted a comment from a constituent who told him that he was making sure his children would resettle overseas because immigration made the UK not worth living in; “in this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man”. The speech was blamed for a rise in violent attacks on Black and Asian people, but decades later the phrase “Enoch was right” was heard when a Black or Asian person appeared anywhere that was not one of “their areas”. When the Radio 4 soap opera The Archers began to feature an Asian family, I heard a letter being read out on the same station’s Feedback programme, expressing scepticism that an Asian family would actually be so warmly received; when Asian families dared enter village pubs, the writer said, it was common for them to hear “Enoch was right”. Even in the 2000s, Muslim women commented on this blog that they did not feel safe walking in the English countryside.

It’s not uncommon for a politician to be remembered for one ugly speech or one bad policy if its effects on people were particularly bad. Tony Blair introduced many progressive pieces of legislation, especially in his first term in office, such as the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act and various anti-discrimination bills, but he is generally reviled in many quarters for getting us involved in the Iraq war. He still makes a good living from his think-tank and his services to politicians, including many dictators, the world over. He is in no sense ‘cancelled’ nor an ‘Unperson’ and neither was Powell. His Water Tower speech, for example, is often mentioned in articles about British mental health care and has been played in documentaries about it. But anyone who’s ever walked into a shop or pub and heard people say “Enoch was right” will remember him for one thing and that’s only to be expected.

Image source: Bill Peloquin, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0 licence.

Last week local elections were held in the UK, mainly for district and unitary authority councils in England but also for the Welsh and Scottish parliaments. For the second time, Reform UK gained majorities on a number of county councils as well as several large metropolitan boroughs in Yorkshire and the West Midlands. Last year, they gained majorities on a number of county and large unitary authorities in the Midlands: Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and both halves of Northamptonshire as well as Kent, Lancashire and the metropolitan borough of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. This time they gained Suffolk and Essex counties (both formerly Tory), two met boroughs in the West Midlands and, crucially for Labour, three more met boroughs in South and West Yorkshire: Kirklees (Huddersfield), Calderdale (Halifax) and Wakefield. The map on the right shows the county and metropolitan boroughs according to current dominant party, and the turquoise areas show Reform UK held councils. Labour have been scoring poorly in opinion polls ever since 2024, when they won with a lot of help from a right-wing vote divided between the Tories and the rapidly growing Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage who was formerly the leader of UKIP. As a result, there have been a lot of calls for the prime minister and Labour leader, Keir Starmer, to resign. Starmer’s supporters are variously calling it idiocy or madness, comparing it to “changing pilots in mid flight”, and pointing to everything Starmer’s government has done for us.

It’s true that on previous occasions when a governing party has suffered local election losses, they have neither changed leaders nor called a general election: John Major in 1995 and Tony Blair in the first term of his government have been mentioned. However, both of these had won majorities on the basis of more than 40% of the vote; Starmer won 2024 on the basis of less than 34%, a smaller share than Blair won in his last election, in 2005, or Jeremy Corbyn’s share in 2017. (John Major’s government, which was losing safe seat after safe seat in parliamentary by-elections, went down to defeat two years after those council elections.) Starmer won seats that Labour had never won before, including in their 1997 landslide; as with some of those seats, these are unlikely to be won again and the winning candidate won less than 30% of the popular vote and benefited from a split Tory vote. For much of the time since, Labour has been polling around 20%. While opinion polls have their flaws, it’s unheard of for a governing party to show this poorly, or anything like it, consistently over months or more than a year. Mid-term blues are a thing, but they are never this bad for a newly elected government which should be riding high. Council elections are not referendums or votes of confidence on the government, but voters often treat them as such.

As the resignations mounted earlier today, someone on BlueSky mentioned by way of a historical parallel a challenge to Gordon Brown’s leadership in June 2009, supported by three ministers (James Purnell, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith). In fact, the two women had resigned for reasons connected with their expenses. None of the three, they point out, are still in Parliament: one is in the Lords, one has retired and one is now a CEO of a company. Yet Gordon Brown lost the election the following year, so it does not really strengthen their case for Starmer remaining leader.

These results, in other words, are dire. Labour’s leaders should be painfully aware of the ephemeral nature of the 2024 result and some of the particular constituency results, that Labour won by the skin of its teeth, but it seems they are not. They should be worried about the flipping of former safe Tory county councils to Reform, because it points to the end of the split Tory vote that Starmer benefited from; they should worry about the fact that people are undeterred by the Council Tax rises and other broken promises, poor attendance, recurrent resignations and defections at Reform councils since last year; can we really assume that the immediate resignations this year, or the revelation that one of their winning candidates was a made-up name and an AI-generated picture, will put people off in future? I see his supporters flattering him on social media, appearing blind to his faults as Corbyn’s fans back in the 2010s were to his. They also keep sharing lists of Labour’s achievements since returning to power. These are mostly good things, but in politics “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”. People should not need to have the benefits of a Labour government explained to them; they should be able to feel it, otherwise it will be like the benefits of the EU: we will miss them when they are gone and it is too late. So, stop praising Starmer’s “steady hand” and “boring” or “unflashy” policies. This is not the time for that. People have to know about what they are doing, and feel the benefits.

The country is in dire danger. A party of incompetents and racists is growing rapidly, gaining control of councils from both Labour and the Tories that were considered safe ten years ago, exploiting the failures of both of those parties. Labour have neglected its working-class base for decades, treating them by turns as an embarrassment and as having nowhere else to go. It treats other people’s lives as just bargaining chips, things to calculate over, though these are millions of people and millions of votes. Disabled people, immigrants and their British families, the white working class, the Asian working class. They have just alienated too many major groups for their current strategies to stand a chance of winning another election. I once read a description of the last native prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Griffith), that he “simply fumbled his way to disaster” and this, as Jess Phillips’s letter shows, describes aspects of Starmer’s leadership. I am not convinced a new leader will change much; whoever wins will probably be much like Starmer in terms of policy, maintaining the attacks on disabled people’s welfare supports and harsh, unfair changes to immigration law, the attachment to Israel while it wages war on its neighbours and continues the genocide of Palestinian natives, but they might just be able to connect with people in a way Starmer cannot (experience in the US shows the danger of that); what the party needs is not just new leadership but new ideas, fast, to prevent a defeat in 2029 that will make 1983 and 2019 look mild (not least because the winning party was nowhere near as extreme) and allow the wretched Farage to drag this country into the abyss.

Image source: Open Council Data.

The arrest of the suspect in the Golders Green and Great Dover Street stabbings.

Last week three men were stabbed in London by the same individual, a man born in Somalia though now a British citizen who had previously been imprisoned for stabbing a police officer and his dog and had recently been released from a south London psychiatric unit. The first man stabbed was attacked at Great Dover Street on the south-eastern edge of central London and was also of Somali origin. The other two were Jewish men, attacked at Golders Green, an area of north London which is actually mixed but is also a centre of the Jewish community. After this, he was arrested by a group of officers who used a Taser and kicked him repeatedly in the head. The second two stabbings were proclaimed a terrorist incident by the Metropolitan Police; the terrorism threat level was raised from substantial to severe, the second highest of five levels (low, moderate, substantial, severe and critical; since 2006 it has never been lower than substantial). The incident prompted a lecture from the Prime Minister and much hand-wringing in the mainstream print and broadcast media: calls to “stand with the Jewish community”, people claiming antisemitism was now a matter of national security, and that the marches against the Gaza genocide which have been taking place every two or three weeks in central London since the start of the Gaza genocide should be curtailed, or that what the protesters are allowed to say be policed a lot more because it “makes Jews feel intimidated” and contributes to antisemitism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now X) saw tweets from broadcasters such as Sky News referring to the incident as a double stabbing when in fact the man had been charged with three counts of attempted murder.

Melanie Phillips posted a tweet moaning that “the really terrible thing is that the lies told about Israel day in, day out have poisoned British discourse so badly that people don’t want to hear about the Holocaust or Jewish suffering ever again”. That tweet embedded a video in which Rabbi Doron Birnbaum said he had received the news of the stabbings while accompanying a group from a London Jewish school to Poland, suggesting that one day someone might lead Jewish schoolchildren around London as he had just done in Krakow, pointing to inscriptions on walls and saying “a Jew lived here”. The real reason people are weary of protestations of Jewish victimhood is that we have had a bellyful of it since 2015: one spurious or exaggerated claim of ‘antisemitism’ after another, many of them from people with columns in national newspapers or seats in Parliament. After a two-and-a-half year genocide, amply documented by the victims and in some cases the perpetrators in both mainstream and social media, the idea that a few stabbings and arson attacks in London are the first killings of a new Holocaust or a harbinger of pogroms looks fanciful. Phillips’s tweets was shared by “La Scapigliata” (Maja Bowen), a Serbian bigot most notorious for her doctrinaire stance on transgender issues and waving her medical degree to prove that her stance must be right, who then complained about the “lies told about Serbia and Repblic Srpska (sic), day in, day out” etc. The people who inhabit Republika Srpska ran concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims in the early 90s, in some of which women and girls were gang-raped by men who had been their neighbours months earlier. They massacred the men and boys of Srebrenica after the town fell, an acknowledged act of genocide. Some of their atrocities, like the Sarajevo bread queue massacre, have been echoed (or copied) in acts by the Israelis during the genocide in Gaza. Anyone over 40 remembers this; nobody except the very old remembers anything that happened during World War II, which ended 81 years ago.

The word ‘terrorist’ is being widely misused, including officially, detached from what most people understand by it. Those of us who lived through any part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland know what terrorism looks like and what it involves: principally, bombs and bullets, used to stage mass-casualty events. The same effect can be achieved through vehicular impact and the sabotaging of equipment or computer networks (though these two activities are not always terrorism). One man with a knife, acting without instruction from anyone, cannot commit a terrorist attack. A political motive, or a presumed one, is not enough. The state, within hours of last Thursday’s stabbings, rushed to apply the label of ‘terrorism’ and raised the “terror alert level” before knowing anything about the perpetrator, including his history of mental illness and his criminal record, let alone another stabbing he carried out hours earlier, purely because the victims were Jewish, a measure not taken after attacks by white racists on members of other minorities. A racist attack is not a terrorist attack; a terrorist attack is a mass-casualty attack (or one intended as such) on members of the public. It does not cause mere disruption but loss of life or injury.

Skegness: anti-immigrant protester destroys a rainbow umbrella

Twice since the last general election, we have seen mob attacks on Muslim and immigrant communities in this country. The first was because of a triple murder wrongly believed on the basis of rumour to have been a Pakistani; the second was because of a report of a rape that turned out to be false. There have been a Muslim woman deliberately hit by a car and two Sikh women, believed to be Muslims, raped. Social media has been full of the most insane slurs on Muslims and Islam that I have seen at any time, even exceeding the worst of the pro-war mid-2000s blogosphere, much of it being boosted by accounts belonging to certain feminists or serving or former police officers. By contrast, there has been no mob attack on Jews any time since the genocide began and nobody raped; campaigners for Palestinians’ rights are careful to mention Israel and Zionists or Zionism rather than Jews in general. The only violence anyone in the campaign defends is the sabotage of military hardware being manufactured here that is known will be used on civilians. Yet, the dominant pro-Israel voices in the mainstream media refer to our peaceful protests as “hate marches” and accuse us of fomenting antisemitism or even terrorism, while using words like ‘protesters’ in reference to the mobs which roam around looking for immigrants or their homes to attack (as I write, they are fomenting another ‘protest’ in Skegness).

Nobody needs to have gone on any protest to know what Israel has been doing. We do not know if the Golders Green knifeman or any of the people who have carried out the small numbers of attacks on Jews this year — their total number is considerably fewer than those who descended on Epsom to avenge a rape that never happened — attended a single protest. They just have to have seen any of the vast number of videos that come out of the West Bank, Gaza and now Lebanon. The fact that attacks on Jews and Jewish properties in London only started happening on a regular basis in March this year, just as Israel and the US attacked Iran, suggests that most of the recent spate is not the work of ordinary Muslims or Palestinian sympathisers outraged at Israel’s massacres but of Iranian-backed groups and that the Palestine solidarity campaign and its protests are innocent of any involvement or contribution. However, anyone who must ask why everyone is not “standing with the Jewish community” has to look at the attitude that community has displayed since the genocide began. True, ordinary British Jews are not the state of Israel but many of its official bodies act as de facto press offices for it.

A large contingent of the Jewish community, including a number of mainstream Jewish community groups, Synagogue chains and senior leaders, in the western world actively supports Israel. This does not just mean believing in principle that there should be a state of Israel, much as believing women should have the right to vote does not make you a feminist in 2026. It means amplifying its propaganda, repeating false claims about anything from the 1948 Nakba to the 2023 attacks on Israel and beyond, sowing and then reinforcing false doubts about Israeli abuses in both Gaza and the West Bank and blaming victims. It means organised letter writing to the media, complaining of ‘bias’ whenever a newspaper or broadcaster fails to echo Israel’s version of events. It means trying to drive Muslim professionals out of their jobs by complaints to regulators such as the GMC. It means making demands that reminders that Palestinians exist, such as children’s artwork, be removed because it “goes against neutrality” or “makes Jews feel unsafe” or some other concocted reason. It means making false complaints about ‘antisemitism’ while straining the definition of that through the needle’s eye; this includes any mention or acknowledgment the existence of Jewish or pro-Israeli lobbies, or Jewish influence on the mainstream media or political parties. It means demanding the censorship and silencing of opposition to Israel and its oppressions. It means crying antisemitism when Jews are linked to Israel while maintaining actual links, not only to Israel itself but its armed forces, settlers and extremist organisations.

If you are one of the people doing any of this, don’t blame those who marched peacefully against Israel’s depredations on the natives of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon for the lack of sympathy from people other than your friends in high places when you play the victim. We have simply heard these protestations far too many times already.

A boy throws a missile at police during Wednesday’s Epsom ‘protest’

Last weekend a woman reported that she had been raped by a gang of men outside a church in Epsom, Surrey (this is a few miles from where I live), between 2am and 4am after leaving the Labyrinth night-club. Over the past few days, the police have not issued any descriptions of the alleged attackers, leading people online to “put two and two together” and assume that this means the attackers must have been asylum seekers living in nearby hotels or houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) or at the very least were not white. Comments like “no description is a description” and “it’s those doctors and engineers again” can be found under any link to a newspaper article about the alleged incident on Facebook. Yesterday, a ‘demonstration’ took place in Epsom town centre, in the middle of rush hour, allegedly by “angry locals” but no doubt supported by organised groups of racists from outside town; their supporters on social media have been taunting the police whose job it was to contain them, calling them ‘traitors’ and the demonstrators “English patriots who have had enough”, cheering as ‘projectiles’ are thrown at them and they took a step back as the ‘demonstrators’ moved forward up Epsom high street. Epsom is fairly posh, with the exception of a council estate (or former council estate) to the north of the town centre; the seat was solidly Tory from its inception in 1974, regularly returning its MPs with more than 50% or even 60%, until 2024 when a Liberal Democrat was elected. It is unlikely that most of the ‘demonstrators’ depicted are anything like local.

Complaints about “two-tier policing”, first heard after the riots following the 2024 Southport triple murder, have been heard in relation to this ‘protest’, both on social media and on the new-right TV channels like Talk TV. The complaint is that the police are nowhere near as heavy-handed with pro-Palestinian protesters in London as they are with “decent honest English” when they protest against “third world vermin raping our women”. The obvious reason is that these mobs, including many with convictions for domestic violence and other criminal behaviour, went on the rampage after the Southport murders in an attempted pogrom against Britain’s ethnic minorities and immigrant communities; they did not distinguish between the two then and still do not. Demonstrations against the Gaza genocide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, and many of the arrests have been for politically manufactured speech crimes such as holding up placards supporting Palestine Action, the banned group that sabotaged military hardware intended for use by the Israeli military. The protests have been subject to restrictions: a demonstration outside BBC Broadcasting House was banned because it was near a synagogue on a Sunday, while an order was issued that pots and pans not be used (to ensure that the noise could be heard in the Israeli embassy) in one demonstration in Kensington. The policing of the ‘demonstration’ in Epsom yesterday was not especially heavy-handed; riot police were deployed with shields because previous protests in similar circumstances based on similar accusations have turned violent.

The conspiracy theory as to why no description of the attackers has been published by the police is that that they are asylum seekers and that the police and politicians are more concerned for asylum seekers’ welfare than for the rights of the ordinary citizen. A variant on it is that the attackers will claim to be under 18 and that the police will not identify them after arrest or charge because of this claim. (A man touting this theory has been putting out videos on Twitter, alleging that the police know who the men are and are lying to the public.) Ex-cops both on Twitter and in the new-right media have been repeating variations on these theories when they should know better. One reason they have not been able to release descriptions of the men is that they are still patiently trying to get information out of a traumatised victim; another is that they do indeed know who they are but need to gather actionable evidence to arrest them, so that they will not have to release them under investigation a few days later. Another reason is that they are trying to find corroborating evidence for the claim and maybe even that they are having trouble doing that. (A few years ago in Oxford, a teenage girl reported being raped by two men who arrived in a van; police could not find any evidence that said van was in the area at all, and closed the case.) The fact that the area of the alleged rape is covered by CCTV has been amply mentioned by the racists on social media, but this possibility never occurs to them.

Yes, no word from the police for several days might look suspicious, but sometimes the police have to watch what information they put in the public domain to avoid endangering the inquiry. Racists, the sort who assume that such an attack must be the doing of a Black or Asian person, an immigrant or an asylum seeker, do not have the right to have their assumptions confirmed or addressed by the police when they are trying to solve a report of a serious crime. 

Tamara Jernigan, American astronaut

Earlier today I saw a short video on Facebook or Instagram, I forget which, by a woman called Tamara who migrated from Croatia to the United States (I don’t know which part). I saw the video when I had just arrived from work; when I tried to open the app again to re-watch the video and maybe reply, the app had refreshed and the video had gone, so I have no way of finding it or its author. Tamara is married to a man I’m guessing is from Taiwan: he has a Chinese name spelled the “old way” which I also can’t remember. Their new friends habitually call her ‘T’ and her husband also a pair of letters because their names are supposedly too foreign or unfamiliar for them to try to pronounce. Americans, she said, always favour ‘comfort’ over accuracy and it was nothing personal. I disagree: to not even bother to try to pronounce someone’s name is simply lazy and disrespectful.

The name Tamara is not even difficult to pronounce in the least. It’s not even a name that is unknown in the US. Wikipedia has a list of famous people with that name and there are a number in the US: Tamara Braun (actress), Tamara Brooks (choral conductor), Tamara Feldman (actress), Tamara Hope (Canadian actress and musician), Tamara Johnson-George (volleyball player), Tamara Stocks (basketball player), Tamara Jernigan (astronaut), though maybe that’s over these people’s heads, figuratively if not literally. In Judy Blume’s ‘Fudge’ book series, the title character has a younger sister born during the series called Tamara Roxanne, though they end up calling her Tootsie. Americans tend to pronounce it with the stress on the middle syllable rather than the first as the Croatian Tamara pronounces her name, but still, it’s not at all unfamiliar. When I mentioned this in a social media post earlier, someone pointed out that the name Tamara has the same consonants as the word ‘tomorrow’, so there’s no real excuse to just shorten it to ‘T’ (not even Tammy or for that matter Tootsie).

I was reminded of the chapter in Maya Angelou’s childhood autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, where she works as a servant to a wealthy local white woman, Viola Cullinan. She was named Marguerite Johnson at birth; the employer first calls her Margaret and then, at her friends’ suggestion, Mary. A colleague had been similarly renamed from Hallelujah to Glory, simply because she couldn’t be bothered to call her by her real name. (Angelou’s family called her Ritie; the name Maya originated with her brother who always called her “my sister” and this became My and then Maya.) The young Maya was not going to “let a white woman change her name for her own convenience” and explained that most Black people she knew were horrified by being “called out of their name”, in large part from being referred to by derogatory racial terms for generations. She dropped some precious crockery which Cullinan’s mother had brought from Virginia, and Cullinan was distraught. Her friend demanded, “was it Mary?” to which Cullinan responded, “her name’s Margaret, God damn it!”. As she fled the scene and never went back to the house, we don’t know if Viola Cullinan continued treating her employees in that way.

Chinese names are a bit more tricky, as they are tonal and getting the tone wrong can make a name mean something completely different (the word ‘Ma’ in Mandarin has five meanings including mother and horse, all differing by tone), but refusing to pronounce a mildly foreign name just sounds like racism. The attitude is that they are the dominant race in the world’s biggest superpower and they have no need to learn anything about any language or culture besides their own. Whether the people concerned say it’s “nothing personal” is immaterial; it’s plain rude and insulting to refuse to call someone by their name.

Image source: NASA.

In the last couple of weeks, two articles by white feminists have been published in the British right-wing media attacking the niqab, and peddling some very familiar generalisations about women who wear it. The first article, “No feminist should defend the niqab”, published on the website Unherd on 23rd February, was written by Joan Smith; the second, There’s nothing progressive about the niqab, was published by the Daily Telegraph on the 24th and was written by Julie Bindel. What the two articles have in common is that they rehash the same old arguments that we thought had been rebutted decades ago, and that neither show any sign of the author having spoken to any Muslim women who wear hijab or niqab at all.

Joan Smith kicks off by recounting an exchange between Zoe Gardner, a campaigner for immigrants’ welfare, and Colin Brazier, a GB News presenter whose Twitter feed consists of the familiar whinges about ‘illegals’, ‘woke’ and other bogeymen and women of the new far right. Brazier moaned about walking down Oxford Street and seeing evidence that Arabs or Muslims used the street:

Every time I walk down Oxford Street feels like an exercise in forgetting what – until recently – London was. The Arabic caterwauling. The waft of dope. The pimped cars. The Gulf vibe. The women in niqabs. The tat shops. A place of foregone grandeur and an irrecoverable England.

Zoe Gardner denounced the tweet as “total bollocks, but more importantly racist as fuck”. I’ve been to Oxford Street many a time and the western end of it is close to Edgware Road, which is one of London’s main Arab centres and has a number of Arab-run businesses including some cultural businesses such as restaurants. Oxford Street does have an Arabian Oud (perfume) shop at number 435 but apart from that, the businesses along Oxford Street are the standard British department and chain stores. The decline of Oxford Street has much to do with the decline of so many other British high streets and town centre malls, with the added disadvantage of being further away from most people’s homes than their actual town centre and being choked with traffic; yes, private cars and trucks cannot use it but buses and taxis are still traffic and there are still a few diesels (especially the cabs) even if many London buses are now electric. It’s not a pleasant place to shop and never has been; who wouldn’t rather go to a covered or at least pedestrianised mall than squeeze along the pavement of a road like Oxford Street?

But here’s the real issue with this exchange: a white man made a false, racist claim and a woman countered it, and here is Joan Smith, siding with a white man who whinged on Twitter about seeing signs of another culture and took a pot-shot against ‘foreign’ looking women rather than with the woman who defended other women — and yes, countering bigotry targeted at the niqab is defending women, not the men Smith and Bindel imagine force them to wear it. If anyone is mystified about why feminists who used to write for the Guardian are now showing up on right-wing websites, this is it: white feminism has become a reactionary ideology. It lines up with racists, even to the detriment of women’s rights. White feminists presume they know best; they do not listen to women, other than those that tell them what they want to hear. (To be clear: not all feminism by white women is white feminism. White feminism is a particular tendency.)

I’ve been Muslim for 27 years. I’ve known a number of women who wear hijab or niqab. They do so for different reasons but “men’s will”, as Bindel calls it, is usually not among them. Many simply wear it because it is a way of following Islam and following the way of the first generation of Muslims “to the max” and the women Companions (those who knew the Prophet, sall’ Allahu ‘alaihi wa sallam) did indeed cover their faces. Sometimes these are women who have converted or have got more religious at some point in their lives, sometimes not; sometimes their mothers, aunts etc. wore it, sometimes not. Some wear black or dull colours; some do not. Some wear it specifically to cut men out of their lives, to keep the male gaze off their bodies. I know one lady who lives in Morocco with her daughters and ex mother-in-law, and a few cats, and wears niqab when outside for that very reason; her former marriage was abusive, and she wants nothing to do with men. The behaviour and attitudes of many men in this day and age means that there are more women seeking ways to do that, and Islam offers a very obvious one. Back in 2006, I interviewed a sister who had been wearing it in Canada since her high-school days; that interview is here.

Smith compares it to the debate over “cultural relativism” in regard to FGM in the 1980s: feminists she argued with defended immigrant families’ right to practise FGM because “it’s their culture”. Well, if niqab meant injuring a woman’s face, that comparison might hold some value but it does not. FGM is irreversible, and girls die from it; niqab can just be taken off. “Feminists who criticise the niqab or the burqa are not attacking the women who wear it, but the ideology which promotes it,” she claims. But this exchange began when a bigot moaned about foreigners in the street, a woman hit back at him, and the ‘feminist’ took the white bigot’s side. Those people absolutely are attacking the women, and if feminists claim to care for women, they should consider the consequences for them of lining up with racists when they attack women for wearing something they disapprove of or practising some aspect of their culture they don’t understand. 

Image source: Pixabay.

Rupert Lowe, the MP for Great Yarmouth elected on a Reform UK slate in 2024 who subsequently went independent because his views on immigration were too extreme even for Nigel Farage, has now formed his own party, Restore Britain. Its policies include abolishing the BBC licence fee, abolishing inheritance tax, abolishing hosepipe bans (cutting immigration is meant to help with that), restricting postal voting, “restoring” the British pub and the High Street (by clamping down on immigrant associated businesses such as barber shops), abolishing foreign aid and the mass deportation of not only illegal migrants but also legal immigrants who they regard as unproductive or burdensome, and the removal of “COVID relics” and the annulment of convictions for breaking lockdown rules incurred during “the darkest time in recent British history, a time where our freedoms were trampled over all in the name of bent ‘science’”. They have not, so far, scored any defections by MPs but a few councillors have defected and some local activists previously associated with Reform, such as the leader of the “Pink Ladies” Orla Minihane (who a few weeks ago told us she wasn’t going to run for a council seat for Reform but dedicate herself to her new Rhiannon Whyte Foundation, named after a worker in a migrant hotel who was murdered by one of its residents; now we know why).

The party and its sole MP have been putting out lots of videos, mostly of Lowe giving speeches and attacking Nigel Farage more than any other single politician. There’s a video of Nigel Farage apparently backtracking on one policy statement and then another, with The Who’s song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as a backing track (not sure if Pete Townshend’s lawyers are onto it). Another is titled “National Restoration” and consists of a flickering array of old images of 20th-century England: steam trains, ladies in floral prints walking in pretty streets of small towns and sitting down to tea, red squirrels, the cliffs of Dover, RT buses, military band performances. “In 1997, Britain was in good shape,” the voice-over informs us. “We knew who we were, we were still one country; most importantly, the population was stable and immigration was under control.” 1997? Oh yes, the year Tony Blair was elected and eighteen years of Tory government ended. If Rupert Lowe likes Tory government so much, why doesn’t he just become a Tory? But the mention of 1997 makes all the images absurd. AEC Regent or RT buses were a London Transport mainstay from World War II through to the 60s which was finally withdrawn from service in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher first came to power; the route shown, number 152, had last used that type of bus in 1970. Red squirrels were as rare in most of England in 1997 as they are now. Steam trains only ran on preserved lines, as now. You don’t see too many women dressed quite like those in RB’s clips in 2024, but fashions change.

I remember 1997. I was 20 that year. Labour won the election with a landslide and pro-European, progressive parties won a very comfortable majority of the popular vote, with the Tories reduced to 30.6% and wiped out in Wales and Scotland. There was much demand for self-rule from both Wales and Scotland and for peace in Northern Ireland, which everyone knew would not be achieved with permanent direct rule. Immigration had been reduced since the late 1960s, but it was still possible to bring spouses very easily from the “New Commonwealth” countries such as India and Pakistan and many did; the 2001 Oldham riots and the terrorist attacks that year led to spousal migration being restricted so that anyone not making a good salary was excluded (Lowe’s policies include an end to this for countries not included on his “red list”). The Tories were widely derided, were hopelessly divided over Europe with the prime minister calling some of his own cabinet ‘bastards’ and reported as threatening to “f**king crucify” others; they had a reputation for meanness, imposing VAT on domestic fuel in breach of their manifesto, and attacking single mothers from the conference podium (at the time, the electronic dance band The Prodigy released a single called “Smack My Bitch Up”, which caused much controversy as you might guess; a BBC radio comedy show quoted a politician as saying the title was acceptable as it referred to a single mother).

The Blair dream went sour in his second term, but in 1997 there was a lot of optimism and joy at the result. There’s nothing to be optimistic about from Lowe’s pronouncements. Like Farage before him, he blames immigration for everything. Just today, he posted a rant about litter by the side of Britain’s motorways, moaning that “our country is increasingly becoming a third world dump”, and then proclaiming that his government will put “healthy Brits who consistently refuse work” out to work cleaning it up (this is actually a job we currently pay people for) and that there would be “no foreigners on benefits” under his rule either. Elsewhere on his Twitter feed, he has a side-swipe at “the healthy British shirking class”. In another one-minute video posted on Twitter, he tells people who “don’t want to work” not to vote for him and rails against doctors signing people off work on “sick notes” because of headaches and other trivialities, against a backdrop of what looks like 50s London. All just recycled prejudices culled from Sun editorials and Tory party conference speeches.

Restore Britain is a backward- and inward-looking party that appeals to the same people who produce nostalgia videos about the once-great British high street, back when everyone was white and men were men and women were women. Lowe has gained much publicity from his unofficial “rape gang inquiry” over the past few weeks, but in truth he does not care much for the British working class: he proclaims in the 1997 video that “the individual is good, the state is bad” (except when it’s rounding up and deporting people, of course). Restore might not be a neo-Nazi party as it doesn’t have that heritage (although it has attracted a few supporters from that quarter), but he is still a politician that appeals to bigotry while romanticising a past that was never real, offering policies that will leave most people worse off.

There’s a certain type of politician and political activist who is quick to take credit when his party wins, but will blame everyone but himself and his allies when they lose, and can be very inventive in doing so. In the aftermath of the 2015 election, when the Liberal Democrats lost many of their seats both in the affluent suburbs and the rural south-west where they were the major exception to the Labour/Tory two-party politics of the rest of England, the theory was put about that they lost so many seats because the public had been warned by the Tories of the danger of a Labour/SNP coalition in the event of a hung parliament (i.e. one with no party majority), anything but admit that their conduct during the coalition government had angered many of their former supporters and that many of the others actually wanted the promised referendum on EU membership. The other day, I came across an article on the previous election, in 2010, in which Labour lost power and were replaced by that Tory/Liberal coalition which implemented austerity measures so as to quickly pay back the debts the previous government had incurred while bailing out banks to ensure that people did not lose their savings, while also sneaking through some tax cuts so that a future Labour government could not reverse them. The blog article blamed the Guardian for endorsing the Lib Dems and the intellectual Left for voting for them instead of Labour.

A brief look at election maps of the 2010 and 2005 elections will show that Labour lost considerably more seats to the Tories than they did to the Lib Dems (though they did lose a few, such as Norwich South). In 2005 there was a swathe of red on the map running eastwards from north Wales to the Humber estuary, taking in all of the urban areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire; in 2010, there were two, smaller, separate red sections. The “Red Wall” had already started to fragment. Labour also lost a swathe of seats running southwards from the Pennines down to the Midlands, which we might call the “Red Column”, to the Tories as well as a number of seats in the Thames estuary and the large towns (as opposed to cities) of the south, the Midlands and East Anglia. The Lib Dems, although they increased their voter share by around 1%, actually lost five seats (this is an estimate, as electoral boundaries had changed). Labour’s vote in the north Midlands was reduced to just the urban areas, while the urban islands further south disappeared.  This could not have been down to a Guardian editorial; the decision of the Sun newspaper to switch its support to the Tories would have been more significant, but there is no reflection on why Labour lost so much support in this part of the country.

Labour’s strategy in the late 90s was to target the same voters who had defected to Thatcher’s Tories in 1979 and after: lower-middle class or ‘C2’ voters, as well as voters in the Midlands and those from working-class backgrounds in places like Essex who had moved beyond the cities as their circumstances improved. The theory of the time was that for Labour, the classes above C2 (meaning the wealthy and salaried professionals, classes A to C1) will never vote Labour in large numbers while those below (D and E) always will, so need not be targeted. To target the working class was seen as electoral suicide; people who talked of it were perceived as Scargillites or dinosaurs. Blair’s government was influenced by the now disgraced (and always regarded with much suspicion) Peter Mandelson, who early on in the Blair government told Peter Hain, a minister of state in early Blair cabinets and a cabinet minister later, that the working class had nowhere else to go. A little over twenty years later, that same working class sent Boris Johnson back into Downing Street with a substantial majority. A major contributory factor may have been Blair’s decision to allow migration of workers from eastern Europe into the UK in 2004, when other EU countries did not, as was the norm when weaker economies joined the union. I have written about the effect this had on the labour market in the UK at the time and it was not as simple as “they’re taking our jobs”: a ready supply of migrant workers frees employers from having to invest in or take risks on local talent, and when many of them are not setting up homes here but living in rooms and sending money home, they will not demand wages appropriate for living and raising a family in the UK. Academics like to stick their fingers in their ears and talk of the “lump of labour fallacy”, but in a country with a labour market as loosely regulated as ours is, a buyer’s market does not favour the working class.

Blair won a landslide in 1997 and a respectable majority in 2001 on a pro-European and pro-Maastricht platform. Leaving the EU was lunatic fringe politics at that time; Labour had lost elections it fought on the pledge of leaving the EEC in the 1980s. By 2010, the Tories could gain the largest share of the vote and by 2015 a majority on the basis of a pledge for an EU referendum in their manifesto. As they were in coalition with the Lib Dems in the 2010 parliament, they could not deliver it as the Lib Dems were opposed; they finally did in 2016. The 2015 election and Labour’s performance is often judged as Miliband’s failure — either by running on an “old left” platform or being too indistinguishable from the Tories — but the 2016 referendum result shows otherwise: that was a Brexit election, and Tony Blair had lost it in 2004 before Ed Miliband ever ran for leadership. It is possible that, had the Tories won a majority in 2010 and held the referendum a few years earlier, maybe in the afterglow of the 2012 Olympics, the result would have gone the other way, but we can only speculate. The Lib Dems in coalition only postponed the inevitable as regards the EU referendum and did little to mitigate the Tories’ austerity drive.

The Blairite faction has a tendency to take the credit for Labour’s wins when they are in charge, but blame everyone else (and especially the Left) for the losses (if one of theirs loses, as with Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, he will be accused of tacking too far left). They assume Blair won because he was Tony Blair, and because he alone knew what had to be done, and ignore the factors in his favour, particularly the constant scandals that afflict late-term Tory governments and the Tory vote being split with a hardline anti-Europe faction such as the Referendum Party, Brexit Party or Reform UK; they also ignore the fact that his actions led to a dramatic loss in the party’s fortunes in their third term which the new leadership failed to put right after Blair got out before his mess hit the fan. The 2005 result, where Labour won a majority off 35.2% of the popular vote, should have been a wake-up call, but it was not heeded and the party let Gordon Brown run unopposed for the leadership as if he had a right to it (when you point out that Blair won this election by the skin of his teeth, his fans simply counter “he won”). They are also as messianic and blind to their leaders’ faults as the Corbyn cult were to their leader’s: they mistake cowardice and meanness for wisdom and they trivialise major mistakes, even crimes: our involvement with the Iraq war in Blair’s case, the collusion in the Gaza genocide in Starmer’s. They expect lifelong Labour supporters to just accept this as the cost of winning. They expect whole sections of society to just accept getting shafted for the same reason, because they’re not as important as another group of people whose votes they need, whether it’s the old working class under Blair or Muslims under Starmer, and are shocked and angry when there is no acceptance.

There is also a tendency towards superstitious reasoning. This also affects Democrat supporters in the US. The previous two times a Labour party went into an election in government but with a different prime minister to the elected one, Labour lost, they say, so Labour should just get behind Starmer despite such things as the party’s persistent low opinion poll ratings, sometimes well below 20% with Reform UK polling over 30%. Labour have never actually ousted a sitting prime minister; Harold Wilson resigned of his own accord in 1976, and Blair in 2007 having stated in 2004 that he would not seek a fourth term, i.e. contest an election in 2009 or 2010. I heard the same reasoning from the late Victoria Brownworth, a Democrat-supporting journalist in the US, about whether Joe Biden should have stood down as candidate on account of his failing mental state during his presidency: the last time a Democratic president declined to stand for a second term (Lyndon Johnson in 1968), his successor lost, as did Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president who succeeded him as candidate. That’s two occasions each in each country. There just aren’t enough cases to establish a pattern; James Callaghan and Gordon Brown served three years each and failed to be re-elected for different reasons.

Labour are a year and a half into a five year term; they have all that time to give people a reason to vote Labour in 2029. Mid-term blues are not a new thing but Labour or the Tories continually scoring 21% or less definitely is. It could be that the Reform vote will tear itself apart come 2029 as Restore Britain absorbs much of the racist vote that previously went to Farage’s party, but that is not a risk Labour can take. Labour must understand that if they do not cater to people’s needs, Reform or Restore Britain will cater to their prejudices while their “thinking vote” will not show up if there is any alternative and sometimes even where there is none. There is a sense that we expect better of the Labour party: this sentiment was heard often during the antisemitism debate, and should be heard louder in any debate on the Government’s support for Israel during its genocide in Gaza and its repression towards those who oppose it here. We also do not vote Labour expecting swingeing cuts to disability benefits or special educational needs and disability (SEND) provision in schools. The prospect of a far-right government led by Nigel Farage, let alone Rupert Lowe, off 30% of the vote because of the legacy parties’ unpopularity is a dire one; the leaders will get by on law work, public speaking and think tanks, while ordinary people suffer. If Keir Starmer cannot take this on, he should step aside and leave the job to someone who can; if the party continues to perform poorly in local elections and by-elections, it must take the initiative before it is too late; if you go into the next election and poll the predicted 19% to Farage’s 30%, you will not have the Left or the Guardian to blame.

Rupert Lowe

The grooming gangs issue has been all over social media the past few weeks: three weeks ago, a group called Open Justice UK published the transcripts of the 2019 Bradford trial in which nine men, eight Asian and one white, were handed lengthy sentences (all but two received between 16 and 20 years) and promised a three-part podcast in which one of the two victims, Fiona Goddard, gave an interview about her experiences to the feminist campaigner and writer Julie Bindel. That was “next week” three weeks ago and finally appeared on Wednesday (on YouTube and other podcast platforms). In the meantime I went down something of a rabbit hole, looking for podcasts on the issue to listen to as I drove around the south-east delivering flooring products, and stumbled upon a couple of interviews with one Raja Miah, a former adviser to Tony Blair on counter-extremism who was accusing all and sundry in the Labour party especially of complicity with the gangs in a search for votes. This week, in response to some testimony given at the “Rape Gang Inquiry” being chaired by the Reform splinter group MP Rupert Lowe (right), there was an exchange on GB News alleging that British Muslims would rape “working-class white girls” for Eid; a racist Twitter account called “Britain is Broken” shared it with the words “In the UK, evidence is mounting that suggests Muslims spend Eid by inviting their families round to rape little white girls”, subsequently shared by GB News correspondent, Patrick Christys.

I did some digging for information on Raja Miah and it turns out that he has an axe to grind: he ran two free schools which failed and was secretly blacklisted from further involvement in education. He makes wild accusations against local Labour MPs and councillors and when inquiries do not support his claims, he calls them a whitewash. On one of the podcasts, he claimed that Axel Rudukabana, the teenager who carried out the triple stabbing in Southport that sparked the 2024 race riots, was an Islamist and the fact that he had ricin, a poison used in past assassinations and which has become associated with terrorism, proves it; in fact, the precursors for ricin, such as castor oil beans and the plant that produces them, are readily available and Rudukabana had a long history of violent behaviour at school, going back to his early teens, was obsessed with violence and was not Muslim at all. He accuses Labour politicians of collusion in postal vote fraud, and rails against what he calls sectarian candidates for parliament, but fails to consider that much postal vote fraud was intended to prevent young people voting for precisely these candidates, and during the Blair years, for candidates such as George Galloway and Salma Yaqoub. This is not a very rational individual. However, he did make one useful observation, which was that the ‘Pakistani’ grooming gangs nearly all traced back to around three villages in the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir and were basically one big family. This is not a problem endemic in the entire Muslim community; its core is a criminal element in a sub-group of a sub-group. Racists commonly allege that the gang members are of “Pakistani ethnicity”; anyone who knows anything about Pakistan knows that there is no such thing. It is just a category used in British bureaucracy, for statistics, diversity monitoring and so on.

There is a widespread assumption that the Muslim community as a whole is responsible because it sheltered the abusers or failed to turn them in to the police. “There isn’t enough said about how SHAMEFUL the Islamic community in the UK is for shielding their men who r*ped and groomed British girls,” proclaimed the Australian “writer/artist” Alexandra Marshall. Everyone knew, she alleges, from their wives to the neighbours to the mosques and community leaders. This is simply not true: the Muslim community is spread across the country, is very diverse, featuring people whose origins are all over the world, not just in Pakistan or even south Asia but also the Middle East, Africa and Europe itself, including the UK. We do not all know what is going on in towns 150 miles or more away, and even if we are aware of something untoward happening, that does not mean we know exactly what, or who is involved. Not every minority group, whether it’s religious, ethnic or (say) disability-based, is so close-knit that everyone knows each other, as people outside them often assume.

There is, however, plenty of evidence that both police and social services, care home staff and other authorities knew already, turning a blind eye because they regarded the victims as ‘difficult’, “their own worst enemies”, “child prostitutes” and various other victim-blaming descriptions. The police “locker-room culture” in which women are assumed to be asking for it or to be unreliable witnesses, and which protects officers who abuse their partners or colleagues, is well-known; let’s not forget that one of the police forces in Yorkshire preferred to believe a tape with a man’s voice on it than women who said their attacker was local and missed many opportunities to catch the Yorkshire Ripper earlier. Fiona Goddard mentioned that the police arrested her and let one of her abusers get away, and that care home staff knew she was missing for days and shut her out when she came back drunk. The system did not, and does not, allow care staff to physically prevent children from going out even if they are known to be at risk of exploitation or abuse unless the home is a registered secure home, of which there are only 14 in the country (only one, in Peterborough, is just for girls), and there have been accounts on Twitter from people who worked in such places that they had to let the girls go because it would have been illegal to prevent them. Of course, some people who run away are fleeing abusive situations, but there needs to be a way to protect girls from this type of abuse and right now there is none.

As for the accusations of “Eid rape” made on GB News, that little cabal are pretending not to understand why that claim is racist, and indeed dangerous. The reason is that it was phrased, both in the TV clip and in the tweet from a third party, shared by one of the participants, in such a way as to imply that this behaviour is normal for Muslims in the UK — that we get together to rape young white working-class girls, rather than going to the mosque or the open-air prayer in the morning then home for a family meal in the afternoon, which is what we actually do. I’m sure they’ve heard of the blood libel, because the phrase is bandied around whenever war crimes by the Israelis are documented in Gaza; the actual blood libel started when a boy was found murdered in a Jewish quarter in England, and a myth was spun that his blood had been used as a food ingredient on Passover. The crime of one, or maybe a small group, or maybe as in this case a criminal family and their scummy friends and clients, was assumed to be the practice of all. If anyone professes not to understand why this claim was racist, they are either racist themselves, or stupid, or both.

I’m not calling Fiona Goddard or any other victim of the grooming gangs a liar (though some of the racist politicians and hack journalists who have latched onto this story undoubtedly are), but the only people with any blame for this apart from the perpetrators themselves are the politicians, councillors, police officers, social workers and others who allowed this to happen for several decades, leaving a trail of broken lives in numerous towns and cities, not because they were scared of being called racist but because they thought the same of the girls being abused that their abusers did. Lastly, anyone tempted to support Rupert Lowe’s new party imagining that they will usher in misogyny-free new age should read the words of his candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, Nick Buckley MBE:

Many British young women are wh*res but don’t realise they are. The days of morality & decorum are over. They make poor wives & poor mothers. They also contribute to the idea that all women are easy & can be abused.