Abu Qatada

While British troops gallantly and pointlessly put themselves in peril’s way in Afghanistan, Iraq, and soon perhaps elsewhere, they must find great comfort knowing that back in Blighty, Abu Qatada (AKA “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”) is settling into a nice new home thanks to the kindly British taxpayer.

According to Qatada’s brother, the paunchy preacher is “the happiest man in England” and his wife and their five mini-Qatadas are “delighted” with the move to more commodious accommodations. Here the distinguished theologian lives life in the fast lane, “reading Islamic texts and watching Islamic TV channels” while musing on interfaith dialogue.

Wembley must be an improvement on Long Lartin Prison, where Qatada spent six-and-a-half years for links to sundry sanguinary monomaniacs until he was released in February. It is probably also an improvement on the Amman suburb our hero fled in 1993 in favor of Londonistan. He claimed he had been tortured in Jordan and was consequently granted asylum. Full of gratitude, he quickly involved himself in the most hardline variants of Islam then available, and his scholarly advice was soon being sought by such earnest truth-seekers as shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

In a series of equally well-reasoned judgments, he generously granted permission for apostates’ families to be eliminated, solicited money for Chechen militants, called for suicide attacks against Jews and Western soldiers, and generally insinuated his way into the small hearts and smaller minds of those who would become the 9/11 perpetrators. In 2001 he was placed in prison under new powers. This being ruled unlawful, he was placed under house arrest but was then rearrested and threatened with extradition to Jordan, where old friends are missing him. Thus began the present ping-pong against extradition, during all of which time he and his family have been subsidized by the same state whose soldiers he regards with such disfavor.

It is not yet known how much rent we pay for the great intellectual’s new accommodation, but the smaller house he just quit cost about £1,900 per month. And he cannot earn a living because, as his brother says, “there is so much hatred against him in England.” (Fancy that!) There are also food stamps, energy bills, child benefits, and healthcare if any of the precious pets gets paper cuts. These are added to the legal costs and the policing costs (the latter £100,000 a week). It would make sense to take the Italian approach in such matters.

Qatada is only one example of an unassimilable arriver whose pride, while fierce, is nevertheless flexible enough to allow him to accept infidel money. There is also Old Butterhooks, Abu Hamza, who according to one estimate has cost Britain £2.75 million in welfare and other costs. Then there is saintly Omar Bakri, who has managed to accrue an impressive £250,000 in handouts, and his chum Abu Waleed, who has it all worked out:

Obviously you want to make sure you walk with a limp when you leave the house just in case someone’s taking pictures.

Cases such as these give the phrase “benefits of immigration” an interesting new meaning. They must also make Britain’s war-weary soldiers ask whether the land they represent is fitter for zeros than for heroes.

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Most immigrants don’t cheat on benefits, although the knowledge that Britain has a welfare state is a powerful attractant. When they get here they are encouraged to apply for their “entitlements” with claims forms available in no fewer than 165 languages. Some who cheat may have been inspired by homegrown hucksters—such as the man who claimed £60,000 in disability payments for being unable to walk properly or dress himself yet won archery competitions and could drag trailers across fields. There was the rheumatoid arthritis sufferer filmed playing golf—and the woman who claimed child benefits for ten imaginary children and disability benefits for two real but non-disabled children. Then there was the Pirates of the Caribbean actor, the leading Paralympian, and an aristocrat of sorts. Even rock gods can fall: Iron Maiden’s former lead singer claimed almost £46,000 in disability, housing, and council tax payments for back problems. His error was in touring with the band while he was officially incapacitated and allowing these energetic performances to be broadcast on YouTube.

The previous government made halfhearted efforts to deal with benefit fraud—halfhearted because most of those they were investigating belonged to one or other of Labour’s client constituencies. In any case, they have a sentimental attachment to benefits, because the postwar left’s raison d’être has been to make extravagantly unaffordable promises to anyone, then shriek like banshees whenever an adult points out how feckless they’ve been.

In 2007/2008, the government spent £154 million to get £22 million back. In 2010, a trumpeted blitz on £93 million worth of benefit fraud recouped only £47,000. By the time the new government came in, the annual cost of fraud, error, and overpayments in the highly complex system (there are more than 50 benefits) was put at £5.2 billion; £1.5 billion of that was fraud.

The government proposed a “Universal Credit” to replace most existing benefits and started to assess 2.6 million disability-benefit claimants to see if they really were hors de combat. Judging from early results, the Department of Work and Pensions estimates that nearly 600,000 may be claiming sickness benefits (up to £99.85 per week) although they are fit for work—almost 40% of claimants.

In the meantime the bill continues to creep upward. Last November, the Audit Commission estimated that £2.1 billion had been lost in fraud from council budgets and only £185 million of this had been detected. So there is a long way to go, and progress will be slowed by the necessity of constantly comforting frightened Liberal Democrats.

In the meantime, we can relish some of the “explanations” fraudsters have offered:

I wasn’t using the ladders to clean windows, I carried them for therapy for my bad back.

My wallet was stolen so someone must have been using my identity, I haven’t been working.

He does come here every night and leave in the morning and although he has no other address I don’t regard him as living here.

It wasn’t me working, it was my identical twin.

But for the best excuse of all, we need to revisit Remi Fakorede, who invented phantom disabled children to amass an impressive £1 million. But it was not her fault, she told the judge in 2008. A “voodoo man” who had already killed her mother with a curse warned Remi that if she did not cooperate in the scam she would lose her fingers. To underscore her earnestness, she then reached into her pocket and took out the severed fingers of her daughter, who had lost them as a baby. And on that bombshell we leave her and the subject, symbolically sticking up her fingers at the speechless judge, and through her at the whole shambolic system.

Fabrice Muamba

It is sometimes said that football is like a religion to the English. As the legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once half-joked, football is more important than life or death.

Every Sunday, churches are echoingly empty while hundreds of thousands pay large sums to sit in chilly arenas wearing Chinese-made team colors as they cast aspersions on 22 men on a field far below. They make pointed observations about the referee’s inability to see properly or—for the sake of variety—his lack of neutrality, his relative intelligence, and the identities (if known) of his parents.

Footie’s feelers stretch beyond these scornful stadia into millions of Englishmen’s semi-detached castles. Expensive yet cheap-looking sofas bow under the weight of ever sturdier yeomen ingesting lager and crisps while they critique Burundians’ ball control or explain how they would have organized the lineup better than the trained coach.

These vicarious athletes live and breathe their faith between Sundays, too. On occasion they even assault others who prefer red shirts to blue ones, or the other way around. It is not uncommon when passing along England’s green and pleasant motorways to see car-window stickers bearing uplifting legends such as “I hate Man United” or “F**k Liverpool” (without the asterisks). There is an apocryphal but plausible French aphorism to the effect that “To the English, sport is war and war is sport.”

If football is a religion, the extraordinary events surrounding the on-field collapse of Bolton Wanderers player Fabrice Muamba during a game against Tottenham Hotspur on March 17 are reminiscent of a revivalist movement. The word ‘revivalist’ is appropriate, because the unlucky Muamba nearly died—his heart stopped for over an hour—out on that appalled pitch, as a never-detected cardiac problem suddenly manifested itself in the most dramatic way.

Luckily, Muamba’s life was saved, and he is starting to make some small recovery—thanks to the speed and professionalism of the staff at the ground and in the London Chest Hospital.

But many believe there is another, deeper explanation—one that lies beyond all this boring science stuff. Perhaps, people whisper, Fabrice is being aided by supernatural forces—as they used to say in Hammer horror films, by “someone—or something!”

Before you interject, “I don’t believe in all that baloney!”—which is always a very dangerous thing to say in horror films—consider the evidence.

The Sun and Star “newspapers” led the people’s paranormal investigation. The Sun and Star are not noted for their piety. Both journals have regrettable reputations for being more interested in portraying underwear than in piercing veils.

It is therefore all the more heartening to record that the sight of the toppled 23-year-old brought out their caring side and elicited some extremely useful observations. After pondering greatly, the Sun  doffed its metaphorical baseball cap and concluded at last that “God is in control.” This logic was so magisterial that all the Star could do was echo this beautiful sentiment and acknowledge that the affair was, indeed, now “In God’s Hands.” Whatever the well-meaning medicos did now, it would effectively make no difference, because the whole thing was beyond their control, out of their hands. It was now under the personal purview of a Supreme Being known for taking a personal interest in the beautiful game at least since 1986, when for reasons best known to Himself, He helped Diego Maradona push England out of the World Cup.

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There was only one thing now that would make any difference to the young man’s life chances. Chelsea footballer Gary Cahill was among the first to divine what needed to be done—have the words “Pray” and “Muamba” and the numeral 4 printed on a shirt, then show that selfsame shirt to the cameras. Fellow players and viewers soon cottoned on, and within seconds, warm waves of psychic energy were rolling in from all postal districts toward a certain hospital bed in London E9.

The effects were immediate, trumping all that ’round-the-clock intensive care by highly trained personnel. Worried watchers such as his fiancée became slightly less worried as the bombardment of blessings grew in volume and potency:

All your prayers are working people thank u so so much. Every prayer makes him stronger. To God be the glory.

Fabrice has felt every single prayer guys you’ve been INCREDIBLE!!!

The young lady’s strength of feeling is as laudable as it is predictable.

Bolton’s manager Owen Coyle was desperately anxious to see again his comrade’s “fantastic smile” and ensure he doesn’t shuffle off this mortal Coyle:

Everybody is praying for Fabrice, which is very important.

Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore reiterated the industry’s strategy in an interview:

We continue to pray.

The BBC’s Mark Easton asked,“Have you prayed for Fabrice Muamba today?” Easton’s interest was more scholarly—insofar as this area lends itself to rational examination. He referenced Galton’s celebrated 1872 paper Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer—which witheringly found it had none. Galton based his conclusion on the relatively short lives of monarchs, for centuries the chief recipients of the most fervent felicitations. So that he could tick the “balance” box, Easton also politely instanced a 1959 tome The Power of Prayer on Plants by one Franklin Loehr, who found that prayed-for plants did better than non-prayed-for ones—a fortunate finding, or else it might have made Loehr question his calling to the Presbyterian ministry. Easton also cited a 2004 BBC survey suggesting that some 60% of Britons still believe in a deity.

The warmth felt for Fabrice Muamba is genuine, and it does England great credit that so many are so concerned for this stricken stranger. Yet it is also superficial, and very soon the laser beam of love will be recalibrated on another recipient. But while it plays on him, it casts interesting light on England’s essential religiosity, a fact often overlooked in political debates. This impulse may presently be focused on football, but only because England’s impoverished public culture offers so few other outlets for faith. Football fanaticism is real, but it is a substitute for feelings otherwise forbidden to a fallen people.

English taxpayers awoke one morning in late February to discover that the nation’s gaiety had been greatly augmented. 

The BBC proclaimed joyous tidings—“Free HIV treatment on NHS for foreign nationals”—then the news was flashed from website to website, mouth to eager ear, setting pulses racing in patriotic pride, bringing the incense of global justice to a country tired of spending cuts. People told each other in rising excitement that the National Health Service had never been sick as they had always imagined—far from being broke, it obviously had zillions of spare funds. 

Not only that, but it appeared it was expanding in order to become an International Health Service. A whole new raft of hitherto unknown human rights was about to be conjured into being—all anomalies removed, all injustices smoothed away, the world’s wounds healed, and best of all there would be lots of new lawyers. No more would we witness that stain upon the English escutcheon whereby a lifelong provident citizen taxpayer had more rights than a promiscuous illegal immigrant. 

The modest instrument of this noble reform is a House of Lords select committee under Lord (Norman) Fowler, a former Conservative minister and party chairman previously best known for using the phrase “to spend more time with my family” to explain an unexpected resignation. As Secretary of State for Transport he drove through the legislation that made wearing car seatbelts compulsory. He contributed to the conservative canon with his 2008 jeremiad A Political Suicide, in which he caviled at lifelong party activists’ extremism and described himself with humility as “a media Jeeves for the politically oppressed.” Even at 76 he is a busy, busy baron, even finding the time to act as chairman of the Thomson Foundation, which promotes high journalistic standards. The Foundation’s website puts it masterfully—the Foundation’s team “learned their craft with some of [the] world’s leading media orgaisations [sic].”

He has long been interested in AIDS and in the mid-1980s headed the Thatcher government’s AIDS program, with “Don’t Die of Ignorance” superimposed on graphics of icebergs. Experts suggested that everyone was at risk of imminent and agonizing death.

But even these terrifying omens were not regarded as urgent enough by Elton John or George Michael, whose hard-earned revenues from their hard-to-listen-to songs helped propel the tiny Terrence Higgins Trust into a multi-million-pound organization employing 300. The Trust’s famous red ribbons made judicious appearances on the lapels of ambitious politicians and ostentatiously anxious celebrities.

Further out again, there is the out-there outfit OutRage!, which views a complex cosmos through an arguably narrow prism and is always urging ACTION on ingenious pretexts: 

The world ignores the fate of gay Iraqis at its peril. Their fate today is the fate of all Iraqis tomorrow.

Iraq is more bathhouse than Ba’athist, it seems.

In 2003, Norman Fowler was still plugging away, proposing that the EU should appoint an AIDS coordinator with ambassadorial rank. Last year, he and his lordly lieutenants were meeting in noble conclave to discuss this disease which had “fallen off the radar” even though diagnoses had doubled since the 1990s. His committee estimated there would be 100,000 people in Britain living with HIV (about 25,000 undiagnosed) by 2012 and calculated costs in 2009-2010 at £760m, with this expected to rise quickly to almost £1bn. 

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Reports have shown major mismanagement of monies allotted to fight AIDS, most notably in London, where 30,000 victims reside. Of 17 AIDS projects in the capital, only two “merited continued commissioning.” A year later all 17 were still receiving full funding. 

There are also increasing intra-rainbow wrangles about who should get the most cash, with the well-funded (and overwhelmingly white) homosexual organizations facing increasing competition from African activists. Africans constitute 32% of newly diagnosed AIDS sufferers despite making up only around 3% of the total UK population. The African Health Policy Network (AHPN) is proud to aver that it

…has used research to lobby the Home Office to delay the removal of people living with HIV from the UK until antiretroviral treatment becomes more widely accessible and has provided the Government with 10 key asks to improve the health and wellbeing of Africans in the UK.

These benefactors of Britain may as well ask an 11th ask—better diagram-drawing software. As if the world’s worst diagrams weren’t enough of a hindrance to African health and happiness, AHPN’s efforts are also hampered by well-meaning interventions from enthusiastic amateurs such as Forbes Rich Lister Pastor T. B. Joshua, whose cheerily ecumenical Synagogue Church of All Nations offers “cancer-healing” and “HIV-AIDS healing” thanks to “anointing water” which allows patients to dispense with the inconvenience of antiretrovirals. The church’s methods have met with signal success, with at least three sufferers already raptured away to Higher Ground. Meanwhile, even AIDS specialists can get distracted by domestic problems.

Another key consideration is indirect discrimination by the (too white, too straight, boo) medical establishment. As long ago as December 2009, the Guardian’s Hazel Barrett was losing sleep, fearing there were 

…very few culturally sensitive outreach sexual health promotion programs aimed at different immigrant groups from high HIV-prevalence source regions in the west Midlands.

Faced with all this and more, Lord Fowler and his committee chums want to amend the Health and Social Care Bill to extend free treatment to all who have been in the UK for six months or longer, and ministers have promised to incorporate it—without running a cost-benefit analysis. There have been grumbles that the NHS can’t afford this and that the policy will merely encourage “health tourism”—a practice politicians profess to oppose and which is already losing the NHS millions. Public health minister Anne Milton promised that “tough guidance will ensure this measure is not abused”—this tough guidance no doubt something like the tough guidance presently governing immigration policy. 

But the cynics who mutter about potential problems are missing the point. It doesn’t matter if the new policy does encourage thousands more AIDS victims to holiday or study in Britain, or if the £1bn becomes 2, 3, or even 4. After all, as his Lordship says, with all his customary close reasoning:

The case for change is overwhelming in human terms. The proposal almost speaks for itself and every group is in favor of this change.

I can think of at least one group that has never been asked for its opinion.

Eric Joyce MP

On Tuesday February 22nd, police were called to the Strangers’ Bar in the House of Commons to remove a man who had allegedly gone berserk, assaulting several others and breaking a door. The alleged assailant was 51-year-old Eric Joyce, Labour MP for Falkirk. His victims were mostly Conservative MPs—AKA “f***ing Tories,” as Joyce reportedly called them immediately before launching into his hands-on debating style. The former judo champion was fair-minded enough to extend the horseplay to a Labour colleague who intervened to restrain him. Joyce was removed to Belgravia Police Station for 24 hours until he felt less tired. The following day he was charged with three counts of assault and suspended by Labour. It was a mother of a scuffle for the Mother of Parliaments—an unfortunate and undignified affair for someone once seen as a potential PM.

His political career had started so promisingly, too, with a mass denunciation of friends. After an army career starting as a private in the Black Watch and ending up as a major in the Education Corps—a rare peacetime accomplishment, especially as he was given lengthy sabbaticals—in 1997 he suddenly realized he had always despised his comrades. He authored a Fabian Society pamphlet called Arms and the Man, the “outspoken” premise of which was that soldiers were white, male, racist, etc. His sally was greeted with some disfavor and he was threatened with dismissal, after which nothing happened for 18 months while the Tories murmured the government was protecting him. And as good luck would have it, the honest major was soon on a list of approved Labour candidates. He also worked in public relations for the Commission for Racial Equality—more Black Watching, you could say. As the Daily Record commented, more in sorrow than spleen, he was viewed as

…a bold leader with a bright future, [and] his square-jawed, military bearing and smooth-talking style made him ideal material….

Since ex-soldiers with theology degrees are almost as rare among Labour MPs as ex-social workers with AIDS are among Tory MPs, he was elected as expected. He worked for several ministers, including Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth—although he resigned over Afghanistan. He edited a stirring work entitled Now’s the Hour: New Thinking for Holyrood and served as Chair of the National Executive of the Fabian Society, helping them to promote “an accountable, tolerant, and active democracy.”

He racked up hugely impressive titles—Chairman of the Great Lakes Africa All-Party Parliamentary Group, Vice Chair (digital) of Parliamentary Internet Communications and Technology Forum, and Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Skills. It will therefore come as no surprise to learn that our Eric is one of politics’ preeminent Tweeters, messaging incessantly on important subjects even during Prime Minister’s Questions. It is impossible to do justice to the depth of his thinking. In fact, some of his communications are beyond comprehension:

OK, who’s the hardest boxing correspondent in the country? Only one way to find out…

head in oven, feet in fridge; overall quite comfortable?

Just watched last 4 episodes of Killing 2. Scooby-Doo, Agatha Christie, Crossroads

Bloated hippo carcass on C4. Doesn’t look appetising. Predators accessing through anus and penis. We’re too harsh on humans, sometimes.

I’m in front of mirror in shorts,Das Kapital in one hand, @playethic in other.Putitwhereuwantit playing. Not promising.

No discussion? Then you are truly pathetic. Where’s your wind? Arse.

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One can hardly blame such a (digital) philosopher for becoming violently frustrated when compelled to commingle with non-digital intellects. After all, we’re too harsh on humans sometimes. 

There are yet more skills to his credit. Or perhaps that should be credit ledger, because in 2011 he distinguished himself by being the first MP to claim more than £200,000 in expenses. It was not the first time he had topped the prestigious list of MP expense claims, but he always had an excellent reason for everything. Asked why he had spent £180 on paintings, he responded with a connoisseur’s confidence—“because they look nice.”  

How could anyone dislike such a man? And yet behind the Perth-to-Parliament fairytale, there were mutterings of the kind that too often dog great men—anger mismanagement, a failing marriage, attempted coups among Labour activists trying to oust him, and a certain fondness for l’eau de vie that perhaps encouraged him to imbibe more than his fair share of the £5.8M of taxpayer-subsidized tipples in Parliamentary watering holes (how proud it must make Britons that even in these belt-tightening times we can still afford to underwrite MPs’ refreshments). In 2008, he was banned from driving for six months. In 2010 as Shadow Northern Ireland Minister, he was widely criticized for suggesting that middle-class voters were liars, hypocrites, and racists. Ed Milliband may have been privately relieved when shortly afterward Eric was arrested for failing to provide a breath test after a motoring misunderstanding. He was fined £400 and banned for 12 months. He resigned his shadow ministry but—to quote the Record again—“few shed a tear.” 

Even if the preux chevalier from Perth is found guilty of assault, he can still serve as an independent MP if the sentence is under 12 months, drawing his full salary (plus expenses) until the general election. Labour may be unwilling to force a by-election because of the Scottish National Party’s present political balance. One Labour source said off the record to the Daily Record:

They really would rather have a nutter in that seat than a Nat.

Note how high the interests of Falkirk’s electors are ranked in this calculation.

Still, Eric’s rapid rise has passed its apex. As one anonymous Labour insider observed:

Eric Joyce’s political career is over…Many of us are amazed that he has never been deselected by his own constituency or taken off the candidates’ list by the party. It’s been a complete mystery why he has survived this long.

The master communicator himself is more succinct. As he once wistfully observed in one of his soon-to-be-legendary Tweets:

Er, looks like that’s dead, then.

Prime Minister David Cameron

It all started, says Darcus Howe, as 

an insurrection of a generation of poor, primarily, black people from the Caribbean and from Africa.

Then it raced like a savannah fire from its Tottenham flashpoint to other areas of London and cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Nottingham, and Luton. The racial ramifications became partially subsumed within a wider outlawry in which the political became personal and the personal a pretext for profiteering. Suddenly, it was not only the Wretched of the Earth who needed to be liberated, but also plasma TVs and the personal possessions of Malaysian students plucked by their “rescuers.”

Police were shot at in Birmingham, and five people died elsewhere—including three Asian men mown down by a car outside shops they were guarding. A 68-year-old man died later of injuries suffered when he was attacked for trying to extinguish a fire in Ealing—as did another man shot in Croydon on the Surreymost edge of London.

After riots always come reactions, then reactions to the reactions—a concatenation of vignettes and vindications, anecdotes and alibis, urban myths and scapegoats, dividing along predictable political lines. 

The dependably disgusted right demanded to know why dum-dums weren’t deployed against the dumb-dumbs, while Max Hastings wrote hyperbolically in the Daily Mail:

They are essentially wild beasts…My dogs are better behaved and subscribe to a higher code of values than the young rioters of Tottenham, Hackney, Clapham and Birmingham.

Meanwhile, the always outraged left felt mayhem and even murder must be seen in the context of Conservative cuts.

The World Socialists are in the running for the Most Fatuous Comment Award:

The bourgeoisie is aware that it has entered a second stage in the global crisis of capitalism that will exacerbate the class divisions already exposed across Europe, the Middle East and internationally….

How odd so few other observers have discerned this cross-frontier classist conspiracy against the workers! Admittedly, it takes advanced dialectical skills to see the rioters as being workers, considering that none of them seem to have been employed.

The Socialist Workers’ Party offered a characteristically sensible response:

The Tories…are parading around the country spouting bigotry and trying to shift the blame for what’s wrong onto ordinary people.

Among those striving to realize international workers’ solidarity was a 17-year-old from Suffolk who issued an impassioned Facebook war cry:

I think we should start rioting…come on rioters.

It has to be said that this is not one of the great calls to arms, but at any rate no one hearkened to the pimpled Proudhon. 

Nor did the benighted bourgeoisie of Northwich, Cheshire opt to “Smash down in Northwich Town,” notwithstanding detailed Facebook instructions from one of the town’s more towering thinkers to meet “behind maccies [the local McDonald’s] to get this kickin’ off all over.”

Nor yet did the revanchist residents in that Stalingrad of Gloucestershire—Bream, Forest of Dean—who clearly do not feel quite as strongly about the local Spar store as the 19-year-old who suggested they might think about attacking it. 

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In a widely anathematized BBC intervention, historian David Starkey said Enoch Powell had been correct in 1968 to warn of large-scale civil unrest caused by immigration. But Starkey noted that something other racial violence had occurred:

The whites have become black.…A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion…[which is] why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign country.

Rather than all blacks assimilating upward to the habits of Kingston, Surrey, as multiculturalists pleasantly assumed they would, many working-class whites have instead assimilated downward to the habits of Kingston, Jamaica. 

Starkey’s comments elicited frustration from Dreda Say Mitchell:

Are the debates about “race” and criminality that were supposed to have been fought and won decades ago going to have to be rehashed?

Who “supposed” all this? And when were those “debates”?

Both she and her bête blanc Prof. Starkey may be too quick to write off the possibility of interracial conflict. While on the one hand black solidarity extended to a temporary gang truce, anti-black outbreaks were planned by Asians seeking retaliation for the three shopkeepers’ deaths—mercifully averted thanks to the murdered men’s families. 

Working-class whites (nastily nicknamed “chavs”) fared badly in all accounts. Those who weren’t accused of being bleached-out gangstas or brainless burglars were accused of white racism after some banded together to patrol Enfield and Eltham. While the actions of Asians defending their property were held up as examples of communal can-do, identical actions by these men were “vigilantism,” and the police broke them up. As Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill observed:

The riots have confirmed, once more, the gaping chasm between Britain’s elites and its white working-class natives. In the eyes of our betters and rulers, these whites are the true aliens.

Diversity is a gift that keeps on giving, and merely because ethnic unpleasantness is avoided on one occasion doesn’t mean it won’t recur on some other equally lively occasion. 

So far, almost 2,000 people have been arrested, and magistrates in some areas have been sitting all night to cope. Shaken and stirred, civil society has been cheered by the “tough” sentences handed out, with 70% of those convicted being imprisoned, as opposed to the usual 2%, and sentences on average 25% longer than usual for public-order offenses. As of August 19, the prison population of England and Wales was increasing by nearly 100 every day and had already reached a record level of 86,654. Ironic, under a government that wants to close prisons. 

Other crowd-pleasing government proposals seemed likely to run into the sand for lack of money or because they would clash with the Human Rights Act. The government must have been devastated that Tony Blair accused them of “muddled thinking.” No doubt the situation would improve rapidly if only the ex-PM could bring his Iraq-era acuity into play!

There is one thing lots of people do agree on, though, although few could it express it as succinctly as David Starkey:

The riots are the symptom of a profound rupture in our body politic and sense of national identity. If the rupture is not healed and a sense of common purpose recovered, they will recur—bigger, nastier and more frequently.

Iain Duncan Smith also predicted portentously in the Speccie:

This is our warning. That wasn’t the crisis, but the crisis is coming. We can’t let this go on any more….

In 1653, the year Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, there appeared the first edition of what would become a classic—Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. A country then devastated by war turned gratefully to the pastoral peregrinations of “Piscator,” “Auceps,” and “Venator,” who pass through what is now Tottenham on the road out of London and argue good-naturedly about the relative merits of fly-fishing, falconry, and hunting.

But the Tottenham that the fictive sportsmen traversed has become an especially insalubrious suburb whose name was flashed around the world over the weekend as massive race riots followed Thursday’s fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan, AKA “Starrish Mark.”

Duggan’s girlfriend said she was shocked he had a gun but admitted he had become paranoid after a rapper cousin was stabbed to death. A 53-year-old friend commented, “Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person.” It appears the police agreed with the first half of that sentence if not the second, because this was a pre-planned operation. Fifteen minutes before he died, Duggan sent a BlackBerry message telling friends that undercover police had “jammed me up,” and his paranoia may have been justified.

There is a well-known colloquialism about Tottenham, first recorded in 1536—“Totynham shall turn French,” to refer to an unlikely or remarkable change. But Africanization is an even unlikelier metamorphosis.

Tottenham (whose western boundary is marked appropriately by Black Boy Lane) was poor in the 1950s and therefore attracted immigrants—it still does. The borough’s southern part is one of Europe’s most ethnically diverse areas, with nearly 300 languages spoken—but the dominant group is Afro-Caribbean. The sad suburb is accordingly an epicenter of “Operation Trident,” the Metropolitan Police’s always busy unit that deals with black gun crime. (Roughly 95% of gun crime in London involves at least one black participant, according to a police officer cited in the Daily Telegraph.)

A wide-eyed Wikipedia says,

Although Tottenham is a cultural center, it has also been one of the main hotspots for gangs and gun crime in the United Kingdom during the past three decades.

My, who’d have thought that?

The suburb is also notorious even by London standards for muggings, drugs, and rapes. It is therefore not only the police who get a bloody good hiding from “the community,” but “the community” itself, and the national taxpayer through benefits bills.

A farmer named Tota, mentioned in The Domesday Book and believed to have owned the land that is now Tottenham, would be bemused by the fate of his former fields. So would the Scottish royal family, who owned lands here until the 14th century. So would the 15th-century humorist who wrote The Turnament of Totenham, a lyrical ballad about drunken peasants jousting, using scythes instead of swords, and blowing wooden trumpets.

So would Henry VIII, who hunted in “Totnam” Wood and came to Bruce Castle (still standing in Lordship Lane) in 1516 to meet his sister Margaret. So would locals such as Luke Howard, the meteorologist who named the clouds; Rowland Hill, who introduced postage stamps; and Dr. Barnardo, the philanthropist of children’s-homes celebrity.

Last weekend offered a new “turnament” to beguile the borough, complete with a cumulonimbus of petrol bombs and a “democratic shopping” bonanza during which TVs, mobile phones, jewelry, carpets, reading glasses, and chemist’s products were looted by trolley-pushing activists “protesting” the “injustice” of Mr. Duggan’s “martyrdom.” They can ponder on philosophical matters while they admire their thick gold chains or apply their new hemorrhoid ointment—unless they’re like the dissatisfied client overheard talking of returning to the branch of H&M she had helped ransack in order to exchange her booty for better. If only she had been as wise as the other after-hours customers spotted trying on their new trainers before making their purchases—sorry, escapes!

On Sunday night, there were smaller disturbances in nearby Enfield, Walthamstow, and Dalston, in the center of town at Oxford Circus, and south of the river in Brixton—apparently organized by BlackBerry Messenger (recommended retail price £175) and reached in new Golf GTIs (£15,685). Not everyone was so prepared, though—some Brixton locals were reportedly surprised that looters asked them for directions to shops and banks.

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So far at least 35 police officers and three others have been injured—which indicates the efficacy of police methods—and over 200 people have been arrested. Large parts of the area are still sealed off as a massive investigation begins and the police are tensed for more frolics. Home Secretary Theresa May and London Mayor Boris Johnson have even cut short their holidays so they can utter banalities from closer to home.

The events aroused raw memories of 1985, when Police Constable Keith Blakelock was hacked to death by a machete-wielding mob below the squalid towers of the Broadwater Farm estate. Bernie Grant, a black man who was then the Labour MP, remarked, “The police got a bloody good hiding”—which enraged the tabloids but endeared him to his co-racial constituents and the ever-responsible Labour Party. The killing led to life sentences for the “Tottenham Three” (not to be confused with Piscator and his chums), but the convictions were quashed in 1991 after it emerged that police might have tampered with Winston Silcott’s confession. (The saintly Silcott remained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure until 2003, serving time for another murder.) Since then, police have felt “community” pain and sought to palliate it through “dialogue” and “outreach.”

Like the fires that ravaged Tottenham, these protests will soon be tamped down. Somewhat ludicrously, the Guardian’s Claudia Webbe referred to Tottenham as:

…an area so fractured, steeped in inequality and disadvantage that a significant minority have no pride in their community and don’t want to protect it.

Is there a long-term future for Tottenham? It is plain that the present approach to policing has failed and that there is almost as much resentment of the police now as there was in 1985.

Responding to the weekend’s events, the rapper who calls himself “Scorcher” Tweeted:

25 years ago police killed my grandma in her house in Tottenham and the whole ends rioted, 25 years on and they’re still keepin up fuckry

Police R here 2 uphold the law leading by example, so when they openly abuse & brake the law its a natural reaction civilians 2 do the same

He added a helpful postscript to emphasize his appreciation of nearly 30 years of outreach:

F**k the police *RIPMarkDuggen.

While Scorcher represents an especially ignorant minority which cannot even count or spell, it only takes a rabble to riot. And neutralizing the numbskulls is not as easy as it might once have been. More robust methodology is invariably greeted by shrieks. A favorite target is “stop and search,” when police search anyone who may be concealing weapons or drugs. This naturally often means black youths. The fact that these disproportionate searches are disproportionately effective doesn’t stop the claims that they are, err, disproportionate. The police’s appetite to tackle these things has been considerably lessened by budgetary constraints.

And beyond these minor operational points are much wider and deeper questions about alienation, assimilation, and multiculturalism—questions which are difficult even to ask, let alone answer. All these kinds of questions should now be asked, but they almost certainly won’t be as another London summer fizzles out in drizzle and the ashes settle sadly over the gutted edifices of Carpetright and community policing.

Rebecca Black

As an aficionado of the atrocious, I thought I’d sneak a peek at Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.” For those too engrossed in such small matters as Libya to notice, the song has been almost universally derided by “negative Nancies” as “the worst song ever made,” “hilariously dreadful,” and “inept.” Even TIME shook its grizzled locks in disbelief.

The 13-year-old Californian chanteuse has been the target of innumerable scornful, bitchy, and even threatening messages from the music-loving mob. The song has gone viral with over 63 million YouTube views as of March 29, and despite all the criticism Becky doubtless has a career ahead. (She and the company have already earned some $1 million.) She has defiantly told critics she will not “give the haters the satisfaction that they got me so bad I gave up.” Nevertheless obviously stung, she performed an acoustic version to show she doesn’t rely entirely on Auto-Tune and has said she will donate some of her earnings to charity.

The song is thin, adenoidal, and accompanied by—what else?—“the worst video ever.” But at least the lyrics contain chronological insights:

Gettin’ down on Friday…
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

But life is not all partyin’. Important choices await we-we-we:

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

And even before that dilemma, urgent tasks must be performed:

Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Thin gruel though “Friday” is, it is as good as thousands of other songs released every year. Had it not been for the hyperbole, I wouldn’t have paid it any attention—except to switch off the radio hastily if it took me unawares. The tune is catchy, Rebecca has a pleasant smile, her hedonism seems harmless, and the lyrics are at least as good as those of a lot of bands people idolize. “Friday” is certainly more meaningful than the much-vaunted U2’s “Elevation”:

I’ve lost all self control
Been living like a mole
Now going down, excavation
I and I in the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high….

To return briefly to cereal, the well-known Pop-Tart Madonna also lowered the lyric bar in “I Love New York”:

I don’t like cities, but I like New York
Other places make me feel like a dork

Only feel like? But then Ms. Ciccone doesn’t care what people think of her lyrics, and she trills feelingly:

If you don’t like my attitude, then you can ‘F’ off

Madonna is not the only performer-philosopher. In “Spice Up Your Life,” the Spice Girls point out sagely:

Yellow man in Timbucktoo [sic]
Color for both me and you
Kung Fu fighting dancing queen
Tribal spaceman and all that’s in between

Speaking of spacemen, what vision does REM’s cerebral Michael Stipe adumbrate in “Man on the Moon”?

Mott the Hoople and the Game of Life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Andy Kaufman in the wrestling match. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Monopoly, twenty-one, checkers, and chess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Mister Fred Blassie in a breakfast mess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

That is almost certainly the best song ever written about Fred Blassie.

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Lists such as these could be extended indefinitely and would include most famous performers. Pop music is intended to be sold to as many people as possible, and therefore it mostly converges in transatlantic sameness. Rebecca is different only in degree from Rihanna, Britney, or Kylie—and maybe she too will become so famous that people barely bother to learn her surname.

Even when popsters write about more fibrous subjects than cereal, they oftentimes err. Here I must confess that I was the ‘singer’ of a band called Quasar and cowrote a ‘song’ called “Megalomania.” Most of the words have faded into kindly obscurity, but one of the verses ended:

The pigs in government, they got no guts
They’re all a pack of stupid f***s

So perhaps it ill behooves me to criticize others’ efforts, but in my defense, M’Lud, I was 16 and spent a lot of time reading and ingesting assorted intoxicants.

Punk-to-funk philosopher Paul Weller was older and probably not ingesting when he piped plaintively to a doomed generation just as they turned into Thatcher’s children. He was a prime mover of Red Wedge, a grimly earnest collective of ‘alternative’ pop-ulists launched with much razzmatazz in 1985. Their joyless output included The Communards’ daring attack on the Church of England’s mad mullahs:

It ain’t necessarily so
The things that you’re liable
To read in the Bible
It ain’t necessarily so.

Paul’s own “Walls Come Tumbling Down” was equally thoughtful:

Governments crack and systems fail
’Cause unity is powerful….
The competition is a color TV
We’re on still pause with the video machine….
Are you gonna realize
The class war’s real and not mythologized?

These explications struck such a chord with the public that Red Wedge itself came tumbling down in 1990.

The folk singer William “Billy” Bragg shared similar ‘radical’ views, but “All You Fascists” was more specific about what he wanted to see:

People of every color marching side by side
Marching across the fields where a million fascists died

This democratic enthusiasm is in marked contrast to Billy’s gentler “The Milkman of Human Kindness,” in which he combined a useful working-class job with an unexpected interest in diseases of the genitourinary tract:

I am the milkman of human kindness
I will leave an extra pint.…
If your bed is wet, I will dry your tears

Perhaps it was even Bill’s Bilious Bottle that left the milk to garnish Becky’s Bowl. What is certain is that PC plectrum-wielders are somehow seen as gurus of the grooves (and geist), while a cheesy, cheery 13-year-old who has never said anything nearly so stupid is cyber-savaged by the supercilious. Rebecca Black’s forthcoming track—yes, I’m afraid so—is provisionally called “LOL”—yes, I’m afraid so. But even while we-we-we endure she-she-she, we should remember that it could have been even worse-worse-worse.