Last night’s appalling events in Manchester once again force every reasonable person on the planet to think beyond facile soundbites about why these atrocities happen, and how the élites in the West respond to them. This post is about one disturbing aspect of government reaction over the last twenty-four hours. It raises questions, but is unable to provide answers. I don’t apologise for that. I suggest only that this latest tragedy offers disturbing evidence of a cancer in our midst: the belief that denying hate – and manufacturing fake hate – will create a society based on mutual respect.
The best place to start is at the beginning. At 11.45 pm CET last night, I was about to switch off my pc when I saw a tweet – including photo – from an attendee at the Arena gig. The tweet – from 11Shoeshine – showed a scene of carnage. I checked back to the bloke’s account, and the thread made it obvious he’d been there to see the show’s star.
I turned on the TV. Both Sky and the BBC were showing screen banners talking of ‘an incident’. I retweeted 11Shoeshine’s tweet plus picture as follows:
Shortly afterwards, this tweet appeared:
Funny thing to tweet, on the whole – especially when it was an outright lie. And even odder that this chap André Walker is a journalist. He works for the New York Observer; ironically, it’s owned by Jared Kushner, Trump’s les than likeable son-in-law. But as we shall see, I don’t think Mr Walker was acting in the interests of his employers: I think he was aiding and abetting denialism.
To be honest with you, it’s hard for me to work out what on Earth was going through André Walker’s mind when he tweeted something about which he seems to know nothing. You see, the above shot is a picture of Arena exits in Manchester after the blast. How the myth that it wasn’t from the Manchester atrocity got started we shall perhaps never find out; but who among the general population would start such a social media black op….which, by the way, included the astonishing “Ignore this picture, it is from a police excercise last year”?
That too was a lie. But André’s gone to ground: he hasn’t responded to tweets and emails from me today. However, the ruse – whoever dreamed it up, Walker or A N Other – worked: within twenty minutes, I had dozens of the 48% on my head. I was trying to stir up trouble. I was – you’ll never guess – ‘scum’.
Hold that thought, and ripple dissolve back to the “news” coverage on BBC and Sky. By now wide awake – Manchester is, after all, my home town – I watch transfixed as the Beeb’s Clive Myrie (left) went round in circles saying (at first) nothing and then taking witness phone calls largely in an effort to suggest they might be wrong. “The situation seems very confused,” said Clive at one point, “do you think it might have been balloons going off or something?”
Eventually, a video clip was shown of panic-stricken kids running from their seats to the exit from fear of terrorist balloons, or something. This turned up on Sky too, where the same charade was being acted out, and the Manchester police were still saying ‘we think it’s an incident.’ Both channels accepted this bland half-truth of the obvious without demur.
Reality check: the BBC is our national broadcaster and Sky is a vastly wealthy news organisation. This was 75 minutes after the explosion, but they couldn’t get anyone to the scene?
It was about the most blatant example of information-shutdown I’ve witnessed on British soil. I’ve witnessed far more spectacular examples – in Greece, for example, and Spain – but not on this scale in the UK: it was obvious someone had said, “Don’t show anything until we’ve seen it first.”
I’m not stupid; I understand the security reasons for that kind of command, and I’m not so much of a press freedom freak that I oppose it in extremis. A very nice senior Liverpudlian copper three years ago asked me to take down a “grooming” Slogpost that could have caused a mistrial of seven Pakistani abusers, and I said yes without a moment’s hesitation: justice is more important than hits.
But this was not, I suspect, the motive here. There was no need to tell lies to maintain security in this context. The only reason the Establishment lies (beyond the Security Services) is when it wants a quiet life.
It would be hard to find a more muddled statement to support my contention than that issued by MPS Chief Constable Ian Hopkins this morning:
Do not tolerate hate. But if we are not to tolerate hate, how are we to tolerate the brainless murder of 22 young people by a mad religious sect? A mad organisation, one might add, that had life breathed into it by the US arms industry five years ago…just to help the American élite replace Basshar Assad and thus keep their bloodstained fingers on that precious oil pipeline.
It is not my desire to stir up hatred. You do that by killing innocent people, and cheating them of eighty years of life. I am a pacifist – albeit a late convert – and I remain one. But I am sick to death of listening to fluffy claptrap about diverse communities. And Ian Hopkins has form in that area:
Britain is full of strong and diverse communities…..despite Thatcher’s attempts to destroy any of them that didn’t like her Corporate Statist view of life. But the UK must not tolerate the sort of community diversity that hates democracy, spits on liberty, and would use the most vile means to establish a brutal dictatorship from the Fifth Century. It is not Ian Hopkins’ job to appease fanatics, it is his job to stop them before they kill. He should be announcing – first and foremost – that he will not tolerate those who would fellow-travel with the perpetrators.
The senior ranks of the British police long ago opted to become politicised, and curry favour with the trendy minority interests of the day….or politicians and media owners keen to cover up their abuse of children and perversion of justice. As part of this process, Plod looked the other way in Rotherham, in Wakefield, in Birmingham, in Leicester, in Barnes, in Wapping and other places as yet undiscovered. Their boss meanwhile – the incompetent former Home Secretary Theresa May – allowed a situation to develop in which (the Home Office itself accepts) there are some 20,000 Jihadists at large in the UK.
Chief Constable Hopkins and his ilk have learned nothing from this experience. The rigidly denialist Labour Party fantasists like Yvette Cooper and the 48% ignore the hate thrown against Greece every day by the EU, but dismiss those who would oppose it as bigoted fascists. Similarly, they call for multicultural diversity without accepting any of the responsibility that goes with promoting it. Worse still, they do so in the face of overwhelming historical evidence of multiculturalism’s disastrous track record in India, in Nigeria, in Ireland and in the EU itself.
I set out below two challenges for those who peddle the fiction of universal cultural tolerance as if it was a received and absolute Truth. I do so not to be divisive, but rather to promote a return to empiricism in the service of protecting the great majority. That is -lest we forget – the first job of every sovereign power and every apolitical police force.
- There is much talk of tolerance, but toleration of the obviously malign Nazi Party before 1933 led to the rapid collapse of the German Weimar Republic, and the establishment of a dictatorship. Islamism and those who promote it are a threat to liberal democracy. Can we any longer tolerate those who would deny to us the freedoms we give to them?
- The rights of the vulnerable, and the privilege accorded to minorities (be they bankers or Daesh supporters) are incompatible. We do not have a political problem here, we have a culturo-constitutional one. Where are the politicians who find the needs of the old, the poor, the decent and the kind a higher priority than the ignorant, the rich, the amoral corporations and the cruel religious maniacs?
The cultural heritage of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, mutual societies, Methodists, Evangelists, Sikhs, Buddhists, charities, craft industries, homosexuals, the Arts and pet lovers in Britain is overwhelmingly benign. The aims of bankers, globalists, EU bureaucrats and Islamists clearly aren’t.
The much-maligned but on the whole welcoming British People are fed up of Boris Johnson ordering us to love City reptiles, and Yvette Cooper insisting that Calais migrants are harmless, homeless children.
But above all, they deserve better than a multivariate Establishment whose primary concern is to keep itself in clover, and its citizens under the cosh.
This, I submit, is the real story behind The Big Story today.
The Slog 