OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: Outraged by grooming gangs? You’re an extremist.
I hear you’re a fascist now. Indeed, if the Home Office’s leaked review into extremism is anything to go by, the details of which are splashed across the newspapers today, potentially millions of Brits are falling for ‘right-wing extremist narratives’.
Home secretary Yvette Cooper commissioned this ‘rapid analytical sprint’ last summer, following the horrific Southport murders and the race riots that followed. True to form, the end product seems oddly preoccupied with smearing ordinary people, at the expense of tackling those who advocate genuine hatred, violence and terrorism.
The Policy Exchange think-tank got its hand on a copy of the review and was stunned to find – alongside the usual stuff about Islamists, neo-Nazis and the like – passages that portray even mainstream criticisms of the multicultural state as somehow dodgy and beyond-the-pale.
Apparently, complaints of ‘two-tier policing’ are one example of a ‘right-wing extremist narrative’. Far-rightists, we’re told, also ‘frequently exploit cases of alleged group-based sexual abuse’ (ie, grooming gangs). Remarkably, this is the primary reference to the rape-gangs scandal in the report, even though there is an entire section devoted to misogyny, looking at incels and pick-up artists.
Flashback: The BBC expected contrition from Kemi Badenoch. It owes us an apology instead.
“Have you seen ‘Adolescence’?” Yes, Mein Fuhrer: but I’m starting to wish I hadn’t. Oh, to inhabit the world of Kemi Badenoch, who innocently went on BBC Breakfast imagining they’d talk solely about tariffs, China or thermonuclear war – the sooner it comes, the better – but was invited to review the telly instead.
“Have you watched ‘Adolescence’ yet?” asked Charlie Stayt. The “yet” was impatient, as if Charlie were tapping a baseball bat in his hand. Kemi is notorious for not yet watching the TV show everyone who works in TV is talking about – and when she replied that she still hadn’t and “probably won’t”, co-host Naga Munchetty looked tempted to call Prevent.
“It’s prompting conversations about toxic masculinity,” she said, plus “smartphone use… Why do you not want to know what people are talking about?”
“All important issues”, replied Kemi. “But in the same way I don’t need to watch ‘Casualty’ to know what’s going on in the NHS, I don’t need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what’s going on.” BBC Breakfast’s viewers sat up in their hospital beds. Finally: someone speaks for reality! The only thing Kemi got wrong is that ‘Casualty’ has little to do with the NHS any more. Or medicine. I think it’s mostly about sex.
Badenoch wasn’t missing much by skipping it, as once again a moral panic focuses entirely on the wrong issue because, to coin a phrase, “better dead than rude:”
