An Englishman's Experiences of Life in Kaliningrad
Category Archives: Meanwhile in the UK
MEANWHILE IN THE UK
Meanwhile in the UK by Mick Hart, an expat Englishman living in Kaliningrad. A category of the blog expatkaliningrad.com
Meanwhile in the UK is a category of my blog expatkaliningrad.com. At its inception, I had fully intended it to be a minor category, allowing me to comment from time to time on UK current affairs but mainly to include innocuous pieces of a nostalgic or historical nature pertaining to life in the UK, possibly more as it was then than as it is now, and then along came coronavirus which, as we know, changed everything. At the time of writing (3 June 2020), thanks to coronavirus, this category would appear to contain as many if not more posts than some of the categories that I had envisaged would be salient, with due deference to my Diary category (2019/2020) which, again influenced by coronavirus, has expanded through my ‘Diary of a Self-isolator’ articles, a series that focuses specifically on Covid-19 in the Kaliningrad region and how the legal rules and social obligations enacted here to better control the virus have impacted our daily life.
MEANWHILE in the UK contains too many entries to preview in this category post, but as of 3 June 2020, the contents of this category comprise the following articles, arranged chronologically:
[caption id="attachment_1339" align="alignnone" width="225"] Hello! Hello! Hello![/caption]
[caption id="attachment_1228" align="alignnone" width="300"] UK Lockdown ~ a new board game to take your mind off lockdown[/caption]
I am aware that the tone and, indeed, the very composition of these pieces may not be to everybody’s taste. Quite obviously they are not supposed to be, so I shall not waste anybody’s time pretending that I feel in the least bit sorry about that. England is a great country ~ and the other chunks attached to it are not that bad either ~ BUT … (could this be an acronym for Britain Undermined Totally? Or is the only thing missing …TOCK?). He sang, didn’t he, ‘Let me take you by the hand I’ll lead you through the streets of London’. Well, yes, mainly London but also almost any and every UK city and town. Still, as the man who never deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature said (no, I am not referring to Obama, that was the Nobel Peace Prize, or Noble Appeasing Prize or something like that ~ but if the hoody fits, so to speak), ‘Times they are a-changing’. Let’s hope so, because for the UK at this present moment in time it is very much Paul McCartney, ‘Yesterday …’
Great minds think alike and think for those who will not think
Published: 29 October 2021 ~ Are Progressives Progressively Less Progressive?
In my pursuit of all things bright and beautiful, which is about as hopeful and hopeless as the quest for the Holy Grail, I read all sorts of things from all sorts of news media sources, some more dubious than others.
This was how I came across a media outlet of which before I was blissfully ignorant, in which the contributors continually refer to themselves and their ilk using the self-elevating term ‘progressive’.
Sounds like a bit of back-slapping aggrandisement to you? Yes, me too.
So, what is the definition of ‘progressive’?
The first definition I encountered was this: “happening or developing gradually or in stages”. And the example given was, “a progressive decline in popularity”.
This is interesting, because when we think of the term progressive in relation to the word progress, which I am sure is how ‘progressives’ use the term, we think of positive movement, of ‘forward’ and ‘up’, not, as in the example given, ‘negative’ and ‘down’.
However, if we allow ourselves a little latitude of thought, how many times have we heard the word ‘progress’ used ironically and/or pejoratively?
For example, a beautiful Victorian house is demolished to make way for a 1960s’ block of concrete flats: ‘That’s progress!’
Or an old church or chapel is converted into a cattle-market nightclub: ‘It’s called progress’.
From these examples alone, we can infer that ‘progress’ is like the small-print easily missed by the naive when entrusting their hard-earned cash to investments on the stock market ~ ‘The price of shares may change quickly, and they may go down as well as up’ ~ and that by extension, progressives, who see themselves wholly in a saintly and hallowed light, up there on a pedestal, can also belong to the twilight world, down there in the deluding shadows of fanatical devotion.
So, in simple, layman’s terms, what is this thing that calls itself progressive? In language other than complimentary, you or I would probably be tempted to say that progressive is just a fallacious synonym for the colloquialism ‘liberal-lefty’ and that the users of the misnomer have merely forgotten how the latter is spelt.
Are Progressives progressively less progressive?
The article that I chanced upon which goaded me to examine this aberration of linguistic etymology was published by an American online source, but there is no reason to suppose that the misapplication of the term ‘progressive’ is any less misapplied in Boris- as in Biden-land.
The article itself is not worth reading, so there is little point in referencing it, but the premise is a revealing one as it illustrates beautifully the way in which a progressive’s mind works, or does not work as the case may be, and the way that as a group, progressives have no option but to conform to an ideological status quo that is about as liberal as a straightjacket. Succinctly put, the presumption is that ‘good progressives’, ‘good liberals’, do what they are told to do, say what they are told to say and keep their minds shut whilst doing and saying it ~ although, as even the most cursory observation reveals, in average liberal circles (are there any others?) there is an awful lot more saying than actually doing.
What do you mean, you already know that!
Please, no heckling!
Are Progressives progressively less progressive?
The story starts like this: Once upon a time in America there was a progressive living out his life in the New Restrictive Coronavirus Age. This progressive was thoroughly adjusted. He believed in and followed unquestioningly every rule and regulation handed down to him from the neoliberal globalists on high. Lockdowns, mask-wearing and vaccination in perpetuity were things that he subscribed to and, as is the way with liberal dogma, if he subscribed to them than everyone else in the world, or at least his world, must subscribe to them too, or else!
Loyal, devoted and brainwashed, this progressive nevertheless recognised that there are and would be dissenters, but the last place, the very last place, that he thought that he would find them was in the progressive heartland of the town from whence he hailed.
Thus, when he discovered that a number, and quite a considerable number, of folk from the progressive place that he had once called home, contained people who, in spite of their ordainment, were ant-vaccine oriented, he was shocked to his liberal core.
Unthinkable as it was, a faction of the party faithful had turned their backs on the official narrative and instead of baahhing like sheep, ‘Jab Today Pay-For-It Tomorrow’, were standing together in opposition to enforced mass vaccination. What were these people thinking of? Why were these liberals thinking?! Baaaahhhhh!
Devastated and confused, the author of this painful piece twists, writhes and hand wrings his way through something that is evidently quite beyond his comprehension. His fruitless journey takes him not in search of answers but in a desperate need to find an excuse, something, he hopes, which will look like a hook on which he can hang his confusion and leave it out to dry.
The decree handed down to loyal liberal subjects from the neoliberal globalists on high is as plain as the muzzle on your face: everyone should vaccinate and never cease vaccinating until either the word to halt is given or when common sense has been eclipsed and the Earth has frozen over, whichever happens first ~ and I think, children, we all know which of the two it will be!
The progressive author of this progressive article openly admits, as if he is pinning a badge of honour to his rompers, that he has severed ties with people from the blighted town to which he refers ‘because of their views on vaccines’. By which he means views that do not expressly conform to his views and the ideological credos in which his views are parroted. “Thanks for being my father, but I can no longer speak to or see you again because your views on enforced mass vaccination are different from mine. Your loveless, progressive son, A.W. Anchor.”
Well, throw my rattle out of my pram! A typical progressive reaction: do not agree with what you say, do not want to hear what you say, want to stick my fingers up, er, in my ears!
He then asks (and note how illuminating this is about progressives!), I paraphrase: how can ‘vaccine-hesitant progressives reconcile their decision not to vaccinate’, presumably with a dogmatic, unyielding, inflexible ideology that says that they must vaccinate. Here is the punch line: do they, progressives, ‘abandon progressivism and put personal choice first’?
So, there you have it in a nuthouse: an either/or situation. The implication is that personal choice is not something you can exercise if you want to be considered a good liberal and remain within the fold. (There are those sheep again!)
Back to the self-illuminating manuscript: With no ladders in his progressive mind, the author of this curious work continues to slide down the slippery snake, until eventually, with nothing else to appease himself with and nowhere else to go, he lands on square one, which is occupied by a female liberal journalist. Unfortunately, this female progressive does not provide him with the answer that he so desperately wants to hear, but the frustrated witch hunt ends with her.
Poor, benighted, fallen-from-grace, gender-certain, female progressive ~ and you may all shake your heads sadly at this point ~ she does not see “any disconnect between” the progressive values she espouses and her willingness to lean towards the anti-vaccine lobby, which, as the media would have us believe, is a demoniacal cult that must be confined at all costs to the ghost town Conspiracy Theory, a town that they have conveniently buried many light years away in an arid socio-political wilderness, a town that bears, some say, more than a passing and chilling resemblance to Auschwitz, not least because of the motto raised high above the globalist gate: : ‘Mass Vaccination will set You Free’.
“Well, hello there! Aren’t you Enoch Powell?”
“Go! Hence from here, forthwith. This is no place for progressives!!”
{The sound of sheep can be heard in the background.}
This poor outcast of a woman becomes, in one fell swoop, the personification of the liberal paradox: a first-class liberal who yet possesses enough resilience and independence of mind not to cow-toe to stereotyping mandates.
To excuse, pardon and absolve this pathetic creature is more than clemency can brook. In Victorian times they would have had her committed. In days of yore they would have burnt her at the stake. But in 2021, the next best thing is to cast aspersions on her ideological credentials and curse her for eternity. Should she ever have the temerity to air her heresies again, she can be sure of falling foul of those juvenile snotty-nosed know-nothings who play at politics in university crèches, known as student unions ~ led in the UK, naturally, by Oxford ~ and, with the help of the ‘ban them, bar them, block them’ social media mafia, will suffer herself to be finally hanged on the public deplatform of her own making. And doesn’t it serve her right! The deviating Bitch
Thus for all their progressiveness, progressives, it would seem, are not so progressive as to eschew ritual or to emancipate themselves from thoughts and actions that repeatedly define them as tedious and predictable.
For example, when neoliberals, those saints, those Gods on high ~ you know who I am talking about, the billionaire philanthropists, technology tycoons and the super-rich banking families ~ throw crumbs from their banqueting table, their otherwise submerged progressive pets obediently rise from the depths where no thoughts of their own are allowed to exist and gobble up what’s tossed to them, hook, line and sinker. This is the liberal way.
Like fish in a fish farm they mindlessly swallow everything that is fed to them, mistaking the net that draws them in as their masters’ reward for loyalty rather than see it for what it is, and all the while the clock ticks down to the hour of harvest festival.
In conclusion, therefore, the article submitted by the angst-ridden progressive is nothing more than a touch of seismic disbelief: ‘How could this possibly be?’ ‘How dare they think out of the box?’ ‘How dare these liberals think?’ ‘How dare they?’ ‘Just how dare they?’ ‘How?’
Is this your last word on the subject?
Why not grant that privilege to Nigel Farage. He’s really rather good where last words are concerned, and if anyone can put a full stop to this, then surely he is the man!
Woke Watch PC UK! {Case 4} Those Magnificent Gender-Neutrals in their Flying Machines
“This is your Captain speaking, I may have a male voice, but don’t let that fool you! Welcome to flight B for Bandit, three letters starting with a B, 0707 gender-neutral heaven. We are currently cruising at 35,000 feet under a rainbow with pink varnish on our toenails. Our estimated arrival at the Isle of Person is recommended as the weather is bright and gay, so I am not allowed to fly you anywhere else. Please continue to keep you seat belts fastened, as we are expecting some politically correctly turbulence as we fly through EU air space and flak over Berlin. May I take this opportunity to welcome you aboard. Thank you, whatever you think you are and what Nature will never allow you to be, for flying Woke Airlines today.”
Just when you thought that the UK could not get more Woke, the country’s flagship carrier British Airways leapfrogs into the PC queue with its announcement that it is dropping the very British and very correct salutation, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’. Presumably, concerned that the whingeing, whining, hand wringing, bed-wetting gender-neutral brigade might shoot them down with accusations of being too binary, British Airways have scrambled to copy airlines from other woke-oriented countries, such as Canada, for example, and Germany, lifting off on a non-scheduled flight to destinations unknown ~ in non-woke speak they have jettisoned an age-old and perfectly respectful tradition without, according to media reports, having any clear idea of what they will replace it with.
WOKE WATCH UK!
When I first heard the news that the Jerries had dropped the phrase ‘Ladies & Gentlemen’, it came as no surprise to me. I mean the Luftwaffe are well known for dropping things, usually thousands of tons of high explosives on Western Europe and the Soviet Union, and, let’s face it, they always were inclusive. I mean when they were out on a bombing spree, they didn’t fly around and around attempting to miss LGBTs. And then someone corrected me; not about the Luftwaffe and LGBTs but that it was another German company, not the Luftwaffe, that had dropped ‘Ladies & Gentlemen’. Sigh, some things never change.
Those Magnificent Gender-Neutrals in their Flying Machines
But what-a mistake-a to make-a. My sincere apologies. I am not much of a flyer. I would never have known that British Airways was anything to do with Britain if it was not written on the sides of their aircraft, and now that ‘Ladies & Gentlemen’ is about to be replaced with, what? ~ ‘Good morning LGBTs, its, others, refugees, multicults, perverts, terrorists, knee-takers, statue-removers and ‘I’ve had my vaccine’ Facebook clones etc’ ~ nor would you.
If it wasn’t for the fact that my suggested salutation is a fair appraisal of where we are at in modern-day UK, you would not know who they are, who you are and what that thing sitting next to you is, would you? Will they include extraterrestrials?
In the words of my retired scientist friend, Martin: “It’s all so peculiar. What shall we do first, blow the satellites out of the sky or gas the sink estates?”
That is probably not the answer. But, instead of ingratiating themselves with the wrong uns, couldn’t British Airways and the other dominoes simply have replaced the no-smoking symbol with an illuminated red bar that lights up across the word WOKE as their planes prepare for take-off? Or even just edit the old signs: ‘No Smoking’ to ‘No Woking’ ~ being careful, of course, to ensure that whoever undertakes this task knows how to spell the word ‘Woking’. There’s no point in being too accurate.
Those Magnificent Gender-Neutrals in their Flying Machines
If it wasn’t so amusing, it would jerk out more tears than Gone With The Wind ~ which just about sums it up really. It’s nothing but a storm in a teacup, or should that be an airline company in a colander?
Whilst I wait expectantly for the gender-neutral sequel of Star Trek, “to gayly go where no man thing has gone before”, previous generations of legacy English ladies and gentlemen observing our world from a better past might find consolation in the incontrovertible fact that as any street after 11 pm in any town in the UK denotes, there are very few ‘ladies & gentlemen’ left to address. In the present twisted nature of things, we could always argue our case on the basis of minority, but there really seems little point. If we are to ‘gayly go’ at warped speed to the gender-bending place that they are so bent on sending us, why make the trip in a handcart when you can travel first class Woke. Just fasten your seat belts, extinguish political correctness and don’t forget to laugh. History certainly will.
Thank you, Ladies & Gentlemen, for reading my post.
Published: 10 October 2021 ~ £1000 Fines for Graffiti Vandals!
Republished with kind permission of Defacing Public Property Inc
Coronavirus may have grabbed the headlines for the past 18 months, but it is not only a sea of sensationalism and disinformation in which we are drowning, the societal disease litter pollution is on the rise and continues to go unchecked as does noise pollution and, as for the king of urban squalor, graffiti, instead of it being addressed as the behoodied plague that it is, the usual partisan suspects are more than content to talk it up as the next best thing to a boat full of migrants on their way to a 5-star hotel.
Consider this definition of graffiti from a certain British newspaper that neither you nor I would want to cut into squares and tie to a piece of string in our outside toilet even if the last roll of bog paper had been snatched up by panic-buyers in an orgy of ‘aren’t they all gormless, let’s just have their money’!
“From its roots as a means of visual communication for disenfranchised youth to both hide and be seen, graffiti has developed into a bona fide art form, a legitimate force for economic, cultural and social good …” [their emphasis]
Well, it goes without saying that if they say it is a ‘legitimate force for economic, cultural and social good’you can bet your life it ‘aint (the same as urban slang is not).
I suppose it all depends on whether it is your wall, your gate, your fence etc, etc which disenfranchised yoof are using as as an ‘art canvas’.
Legitimate, in the legal sense, it is not, although, because measures to tackle vandalism are taken lightly and hardly ever enforced, especially in the UK, for fear that the police and judiciary might have their work cut out and inadvertently step on too many ‘rights’ toes, nothing ever gets done.
In so-called disadvantaged neighbourhoods where the deprived don’t go to work and therefore have lots of time to run around defacing public property and lots of taxpayers’ money to spend on paint, great ugly globs of spray-can paint, garish meaningless scrawl and all manner of lols and innits, add to and reinforce the contemptible ‘art’ image much cultivated by sociologists, both professional and homemade, who it would seem have nothing better to do than get paid too much whilst they sit about applauding yobbos and celebrate acts of vandalism.
In better areas, the sort that the champions of such illegal practices despise, which is why they encourage it, shite on walls scrawled by the disenfranchised gormless using their dole money, lowers the tone of the neighbourhood, although it does have one positive, which is that it serves to remind us that as with the poor who ‘are always with us’ so, unfortunately, are the stupid.
£1000 Fines for Graffiti Vandals!
A quick, effective and timely expedient which would nip this pitiful practice neatly in the bud would be first to arrest the culprits (that would be a start!) and then sentence them, after a hefty fine, to a month of intense graffiti cleaning wherever it may be and, if necessary, make them restore the damaged surfaces to their original pristine condition.
The fine should be a meaningful one, say a thousand pounds, and the convicted should be made to wear high-viz jackets, preferably with graffiti sprayed across the back, ie ‘Lol what a Twat I am!” Something they would be sure to understand. Hmm, that’s not necessarily so?
As for the newspaper or its online media alternative who chose to publish such gnats’ bollocks, viz “graffiti has developed into a bona fide art form, a legitimate force for economic, cultural and social good“, I suppose that as they provide nothing worth communicating to anyone, the next best thing is graffiti.
If you suffer from graffiti in your neighbourhood and fail to agree with the Guardbunkle that it is a bona fide art form, or that it gives you a boner as it must do the staff of the (mention no names) Guardinnit, complaints should be written, preferably in spray paint, on your nearest police tunic, on the walls of the Guardbog or/and on the Benefit and Illegal Immigration Office at Number 10 DoNothing Street.
Here is an example of what to write: “Please do something!”
Please note: Graffiti originated in America, travelled to the UK through the porous borders of no common sense and then spread across the world like the benighted scourge in Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires. Wherever it may be, it is up to you to stamp this evil out! 😎
Published: 20 September 2021 ~ Trust the Greatest Victim of Coronavirus
One year and six months into the coronavirus era or, according to your perception of it, the pandemic, plandemic, Great Reset, call it what you will, and the people of the world have gone from being recipients of ‘friendly’, almost parental, advice to stay home and stay safe, to being victims of emotional and moral blackmail, hinged to the requirement, mandatory requirement, to get themselves injected with fast-tracked vaccines, none of which have been conclusively cleared by the usual testing protocols.
In my native country, the UK, already divided along the socio-political faultline of legacy patriotism and social engineering, the imposition of lockdowns, masks and the big issue, vaccination, have galvanised attitudes and entrenched beliefs on either side of a great divide.
Some postulate that the Covid plan, or one dimension of that the plan, is based on the divide and rule paradigm that underpins mass, unwanted immigration for the ends advanced by Coudenhove-Kalergi, contemporaneously run in western liberal countries under the codename ‘diversity’ and sugar-coated as being the best thing since more curry.
Others lean towards the speculation that manifests from a suspected unholy alliance between the WHO, Bill Gates and the Big Pharma connection, or, to put it in its simplest form, discounting for the moment chipping people and culling the world’s population, profit.
This article, ‘While the Poor Get Sick, Bill Gates Just Gets Richer’, is worth considering if only because of this statement: “’The last person I would want to tell me if a vaccine was ready to go is a person who has an investment in the vaccine,’ Krimsky said”1. ‘The last person’ is a reference to Mr Gates; Mr Krimsky is a professor of humanities and social sciences at Tufts University.
And from the same article, “According to Forbes’s estimates, Bill Gates’s private wealth, estimated at around $115 billion, has increased by more than $10 billion during the pandemic. It is unknown if the Gateses have personal investments in companies working on Covid.”1🐷
Gates, his wealth and his objectives aside, it is the socio-ethical repercussions, the fallout from restrictions and new laws within the Covid orbit, that urgently need addressing, as differences in opinion regarding primarily mask wearing and co-opted mass vaccination is in the UK rapidly creating a two-tier society polarised by those who have been vaccinated and who, supposedly, willingly or unwittingly, support repetitive vaccination, and those who strongly oppose it.
The vaccinated are divisible into two sub-groups, determined by obedience and motive. One group consists of people who believe everything that the powers that be and their media tells them. They question nothing and do as they are told and then, having passed through the chrysalis stage, emerge as moral high-grounders, preaching to all in sundry who are hesitant to take or who are staunchly opposed to the vaccine that their recalcitrance is inexcusable, that it poses a threat to the health of others, and for this they must be blamed and shamed and subject to prohibitions.
The other vaccinated group consists of reluctant ‘volunteers’, those that have accepted the vaccine under duress of saving their jobs and livelihoods. In other words they have been coerced into having a foreign body injected into their body with no convincing assurance that it will not eventually harm them, possibly terminally.
The moral high-grounders, who unreasoningly follow the WHO, their governments and whatever the media tells them, condemn those who reject mass and mandatory vaccination outright on ethical and rational grounds by resorting to terminology custom-made for the purpose by ruling elites and their media factotums. Stigmastisation by the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label is the liberal equivalent of shouting ‘racist’, a means when all else fails of avoiding the issue and closing debate.
The moral low-grounding conspiracy theorists are averse to becoming one of the herd possibly because of the connation that herds are silly things that go willingly off to slaughter, but more likely because unlike the moral high-grounders they are suspicious of the links that exist between so-called non-government organisations, charitable foundations, Big Pharma etc.
Some of their persuasion believe that pharmaceutical companies, global investment groups and billionaire philanthropists deliberately conspired to instigate the COVID-19 pandemic; others that the conspiracy between them is more likely to have been formulated as an exploitation of Covid circumstances as and when they developed.
This ‘wait and see’ faction are less likely to concede that the practices of social media gurus to ‘protect’ vaccine vacillators from ‘false news’ and ‘false vaccine information’ is conducted on an equitable basis for altruistic ends, and more likely to consider the self-styled fact checking employed by social media giant Facebook and others as being a simple but effective means of censoring and suppressing legitimate, alternative, critical views on (a) the so-called protective measures adopted for dealing with coronavirus, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to enforced mask wearing and (b) more incisively, to the socio-ethical debate on fast-tracked and mandatory vaccination, where the term ‘mandatory’ encompasses not only legal directives but also the Orwellian implementation and ‘legal’ enforcement of vaccination passports, together with strong-arm fear mongering and emotional and moral blackmail.
The moral high-grounders believe what they are told to believe and do what they are told to do; the moral low-grounders question the validity and credulity of this approach, not only in regard to the approach itself, which is blind and unquestionable, but also from a critical analysis of the people doing the telling and the links between these people, their previous stated objectives and the ever-present profit motive.🐷
Trust the Greatest Victim of Coronavirus
The social media monopolisers, led by Facebook, now operate a blanket and in-depth censorship programme, which blocks content, eradicates comment and routinely reroutes readers to the WHO website or affiliated articles that purport to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Should anyone attempt to post anything that contradicts or challenges the official narrative on coronavirus, especially, but not exclusively, with regard to mask wearing and vaccination, they are vetted, censored and blocked. The same media groups encourage the compliant to advertise their compliancy by changing their avatars to virtue-signalling roundels, ‘I have had my vaccine’. For the initiated, one can only surmise that these rainbow encircled discs are worn as badges of honour; for those who are less easily led, or tend toward skepticism, they are seen as nothing more than misplaced trust and confessions of naivety.
“Currently, Facebook has more than 60 partners who fact-check content in more than 50 languages worldwide. As Remix News has previously reported, 18 out of 20 members of Facebook’s global fact-checking board have ties to George Soros, who has provided funding to liberal causes around the world, including over $50 million he’s spent on defeating President Donald Trump and efforts to undermine conservative governments in Hungary and Poland.”2
The man referred to in the quote above is the same man that the liberal-controlled western media is keen to refer to as a ‘billionaire philanthropist’ and is the same man allegedly whose non-government organisations (NGOs) have facilitated and continue to facilitate the mass mobilisation of people from third world countries into Europe. It is an irony of fate that this man is arguably the de facto precipitant of Brexit.
Eighteen months into the pandemic and the biggest casualty of all is Trust ~ misplaced or abandoned. By the time the ‘pandemic’ is over, by which I mean exposed for what it is or simply eroded by the passage of time and the demise of the main protagonists, will we ever feel able to trust them again? More to the point, do they really care? In the last analysis, trust is a silent commodity whereas money, as we know to our cost, talks …
Updated: 12 March 2022 | Published: 8 August 2021 ~ For Russians Moving to UK Towns not London
Warning! In response to Russia’s special operation aimed at ‘demilitarising and de-Nazifying Ukraine’, the UK media has embarked upon and is actively pursuing an intensive propaganda programme which is resulting in widespread anti-Russian sentiment and Russophobia. Aimed at cancelling Russian culture and demonising Russian citizens at every level, incidents of verbal abuse and physical aggression towards Russian nationals have been reported in various western countries, including the UK. This comes against the backdrop of reports suggesting that Facebook is greenlighting hate speech against Russians on its social media platform. You are advised to travel to the UK only for essential reasons and whilst there to exercise caution.
This is the third in a series of blog articles in which I provide Russian’s who are considering emigrating to the UK real advice, as opposed to the jaunty ‘I’m off to uni’ kind that has about as much gravitas as the WHO in the midst of a pandemic.
It is a ‘taken for granted’ that all who read this are fully apprised of the latest situation pertaining to coronavirus, as defined by the UK government, and equally are fully cognisant of UK travel and entry requirements regarding Covid-19 testing, quarantine and the many and numerous Covid-related restrictions that apply within the UK, especially with regard to ‘vaccination passports’.
This accepted, I write this guide with the honest but bemused assumption that in spite of common sense there are still people who, possibly because they have recently missed their psychiatric appointments, are yet to be dissuaded from moving to Plague Island, and it is with them in mind that I do proceed. Forgive me.
When anybody asks me in Russia where did I live in the UK, they expect me to answer London, and if I miss out the fact that I did live in London choosing instead to mention one of the 14 other places where I also lived whilst in the UK, they are either stumped or do not want to know. This is because most Russians, like a lot of other people around the world, confuse London with England and have precious little knowledge of anything else about the UK.
This is not their fault, because after all London is the capital city of the United Kingdom, but the disproportionate focus on London at the expense of the rest of the country has been a transformatory one, effectively turning London from capital into country and eclipsing England in the process.
The way in which the UK, and England in particular, is portrayed falsely implies that where London leads the rest of the country follows, which, as my Indian friend would politely put it, is ‘bullshit’! (He’s a real refuge from Idi Amin!) Everything, especially the socio-political makeup of the UK is filtered through a metropolitan media that writes about issues that have no relevance for anyone except a certain political class that lives in a world of virtual reality known to them as London. The UK media is little more than the public relations arm of what is commonly referred to as the ‘Islington set’, a catchall that speaks for itself, as Islington is the London borough that symbolises the unholy ground of neoliberal elitism.
What this means is that the behaviour, beliefs, dogma, political prejudices, attitudes, in fact most everything that you read about UK life as conveyed by its mainstream media is hopelessly skewed and distorted. It represents the minority view of a small percentage of people who live in the Island of London within the British Isles, most of which are as English as Genghis Khan (isn’t he the mayor of London?) and only just make British by virtue of a paper pledge bubble-gum stuck to rights that could be whipped away at a moment’s notice by any political wind depending on where it is coming from and the force of its emission.
Well said that man!
In order for you to know England, not the UK or the spurious Britain in which hardly any Britons live, you need to get out of London and go elsewhere in the country. I am not advocating that you give up on London altogether, far from it. For all its faults and pitfalls, London is ~ still is ~ an interesting and dynamic place, so not to go there would be doing yourself a great disservice. But going there does not mean that you have to live there; you might not even want to live there. So, by all means travel to London to see what it is like, buy yourself some union jack underpants, put them on smartishly so as not to offend the ‘minorities’ and, if you have any money left after you’ve paid your rail fare and been duly mugged in Enrichment Street, you can tell your friends you’ve been to London, and they will be impressed, if only because you’ve been to London and lived to tell the tale. Alternatively, you could save yourself the risk, the bother and the cash, have a cheap day out in Scunthorpe and tell a fib instead!
Experience over or conscience placated, it is now time to get a feel of what England is really like. I will say that again: what England is really like and what English life is about. To do this, you should venture forth, like the fictional character Blackadder, into England’s provincial towns and villages.
I am not suggesting that you substitute London for Manchester, Brum (Birmingham), Leeds and so on. A large city is a large city, and all of England’s cities have suffered the irretrievable fate of the ignominious liberal experiment. Of course, if that is what you have come to see and want to experience, then go to these places you must. But I should warn you that most sane people in the UK, those who have not been indoctrinated and are still free thinkers, most of whom live in the provinces, would only end up in these places if they accidently caught the wrong bus, and then they would not admit to having been there. However, as you are ‘not from ’round ‘ere’ no one can really blame you. I should mention at this point, however, that many of the UK’s smaller towns, especially those ‘up North’ also have the blight. Size is not a guarantee, but sometimes you might be lucky..
Methodology
In the scope of this post and considering that I want to go for a beer, it is not possible, you’ll be pleased to know, for me to ramble on about every town and village in England, so with this in mind, and that pint or six I’m waiting for, I’ll confine myself to outlines and pointers and then we’ll move on to housing costs.
For the sake of brevity and extremes, I am going to follow the simplistic plan of dividing England along its traditional faultline, North and South, but whilst skirting adroitly around London, please do bear in mind that there are many other towns, and indeed villages, from which you can learn about English life other than the two examples that I have chosen here.
For Russians Moving to UK Towns not London: Cornwall
We will start with Cornwall in the southwest of England. It is an interesting place for many reasons, one being that a small group of Cornish nationalists, whilst not pushing for complete independence from England in the way that the Crimea yearned to return to Russia to avoid becoming a vassal EU state, have none the less made protestations for their county to be granted some degree of regional autonomy. This is quite ironic, as I am sure I am not alone in my estimation that Cornwall (and its neighbouring counties Devon, Dorset and Somerset) is one of the most English places in England. I will underline that again English, emphasised because the term British has been hijacked, misappropriated and rendered virtually meaningless by invasion-abetted politics and its confederate appeasement policies.
Where Cornwall is exactly can easily be determined by a cursory glance at the map of the British Isles. It is the last county at the tapering end of the country, a peninsula of wild moorland, small atmospheric towns and ancient villages. Its two coastlines, no more than 22 miles apart, offer holidaymakers beautiful sandy beaches on the south side and a dramatic shoreline of precipitous cliffs on the north. The south coast, with its quaint harbour villages and sandy coves has earnt itself the name of the Cornish Riviera; the north as the place to go for dynamic seascapes and surfing. At the furthermost tip of Cornwall lies Land’s End, the most westerly point in mainland England. It is rugged, dynamic and a little bit spoilt by over-commercialisation but nevertheless remains one of the country’s most famous landmarks.
Like the sound of it already? Then let’s take a look at how much it costs to rent or buy a property in this little corner of southwest England.
For no other reason other than that I have been there, the first town that I have chosen for this exercise is Penzance.
For Russians Moving to UK Towns not London: Penzance
Penzance is the last major town in Cornwall before the land runs out at Land’s End. Hey, you don’t think that’s why they called it Land’s End, do you?! It is a market town, whose historical claim to fame is that in the latter years of the 19th century it was the only coastal town in Cornwall to have its own promenade. Also in the 19th century, the Great Western Railway reached the end of the line at Penzance, a culmination that swiftly diversified its age-old status as a thriving port to that of a major holiday resort. Some say that its holiday appeal has tapered off in recent years, but how much this has to do with the fickleness of tourist preference and how much with being locked down in your own home whilst wearing a mask and putting ‘I’ve had my vaccine’ on your rainbow-tinted Facebook avatar is anybody’s guess and, in all likelihood, tomorrow’s documentary.
What I can say is that to help me with my inquiries regarding renting and buying properties in Penzance, my first port of call was to what has been described as the UK’s largest online real-estate portal and property website. I can see that you are impressed!
Renting property in Penzance
Surprisingly, the largest property-search website in the UK returned no more than four properties to rent in Penzance, and this return was based on a non-filtered search query.
Bottom of the barrel and top of the least expensive list was a one-bedroom property at £460 per calendar month, offering the potential tenant a mouth-watering zero-deposit carrot.
About the deposit: In my previous article on renting property in London, I mentioned the dreaded deposit. This is a lump sum that the prospective tenant pays in addition to one month’s rent in advance as surety to the landlord that on leaving the property the bricks, mortar, fixtures, fittings and furnishings (if there are any) are in the same condition as when the tenant moved in.
The deposit is usually, but not always, equal to a month’s rent. It is a built-in safeguard for the landlord that the tenant treats his property with respect, based on a legal agreement that on vacation of the property should any damage or excessive wear and tear be evident, the cost of repair and/or replacement will be deducted from the deposit. In the event that the property is in tip-top shape on the day that the tenant leaves, theoretically the deposit that he or she has paid should be refunded in full.
This all sounds reasonable enough, until the time comes for you to leave the property. It is then that your scurrilous landlord, or rather the crooked estate agent acting on his behalf, accuses you of all sorts of vandalism, for which you have no redress, and consequently holds back a large proportion of your deposit to compensate for fictitious damage and/or depreciation. So, it is a real boon if you can rent a property in the UK where the deposit is waived, although my advice to you is deposit or no deposit, before you move in take as many photos as possible of the flat/house and all its contents and make sure the photos are date stamped. Even better, send copies to the estate agent, making sure to home in on any existing damage and anything else that is worn and jaded.
This property, the one-bedroomed one advertised in Penzance , offers the inducement of ‘zero deposit available’. Why ‘available’ and not just ‘zero deposit’ is I suspect a difference to be ultimately determined by the score that your credit-rating check returns, a game-changing factor which can ultimately make the difference between getting that flat you are after or being flatly refused. And incidentally, credit scoring is by no means as straightforward as you might think. If you have never had or never used a credit card, then you will have a zero-credit rating: that’s bad. If you have used your credit card(s) and missed payments, even once or twice: that’s bad. If you owe an awful lot of money but have consistently paid your lender back the capital you have borrowed plus their extortionate interest on top: that’s good. Just saying.
Back to the one-bedroom ‘property’ at £460 per calendar month. By UK standards this is not expensive for a one-bedroom flat. But wait a moment, this is not a flat. It is, and I quote, “a double bedroom in a house of multiple occupancy”? A ‘house of multiple occupancy’, whilst it might sound like a nice way of saying brothel, is, I am sorry to disappoint you, just a posh way of saying bedsits. Your ‘double bedroom’ for £460 per calendar month is in fact no more than a room in a converted Victorian/Edwardian house that has been rabbit-hutched into bedsits.
Note that the room is ‘single occupancy only’, so no migrants with eight children please, or a stream of live-in lovers. It is ‘fully furnished’, which means it has a bed, sofa, small fridge, bedside table and chest of drawers ~ cheap but perhaps not cheerful. There are five other rooms in this ‘house of multiple occupancy’ so let’s hope that you all get on with one another because the kitchen, which is small, is shared, as is the bog and bathroom.
Having been in bargain basement for longer than I cared to be, I then went up-barrel to see what a house would cost to rent in Penzance and found a two-bedroom terraced house at £850 per calendar month. Admittedly, this property, which is unfurnished, has been refurbished in a style that will be attractive to some, especially younger people (it would be interesting to see an interior photograph of this property as it was in the 1930s!), but it is still a terraced house. There is no garden, front or back, not even a few feet of owned space between the front door and the pavement. If this is unimportant to you, no sweat. What you see is what you will get.
Eight hundred and fifty pounds per calendar month for a two-bedroomed terrace house in Penzance would seem to compare favourably with the £1,152 you would need to stump up for a two-bedroom flat in one of London’s more down-market boroughs, such as Bexley, until that is you consider that the average wage in Cornwall is £28.8K1, which is pretty piss poor compared to the national UK average salary, which is alleged to be £38.6K (2020).
But what if you are not interested in renting a property in Penzance but want to join the UK’s masses in declaring your home your castle?
Most people in the UK want to buy a property these days because even with a barely supportable 25-year mortgage and all the entrapment and misery it brings, for a while at least you can enjoy the illusion of owning your own home even if in reality it is actually owned by the bank. It is well to remember, however, that UK castles are not impervious to debt collectors, county court judgements and bailiffs, hence the small print in your mortgage contract telling you that ‘your home can be repossessed if you fail to keep up repayments on your mortgage or on a secured loan’. For those perspicacious readers, and I know that you all are, the emotive use of the word ‘home’ instead of property will not have escaped your attention.
Buying property in Penzance
To assist me in finding an Englishman’s castle, I turned again to the superior property portal that I had consulted earlier, what’s it called? Wrongun, where I found instead a flat, the main features of which were listed as a double bedroom, open-plan living room/kitchen, shower room/wc, gas-fired central heating, glazing and no onward chain.
Before we go any further just a word to the wise: When considering any house purchase or rent, learn how to translate estate-agent speak. For example, what we have here is a ‘double bedroom’ (a room into which a double bed will fit ~ usually just), an ‘open-plan living room/kitchen’ (living room and kitchen lumped together without dividing wall), ‘shower room/wc’ (a room with a toilet not big enough to get a bath into), ‘gas-fired central heating’ (good point), glazing (does that mean double-glazing or that the windows have panes of glass in them?). The last feature, ‘no onward chain’, is an important one and also a good selling/buying point.
“A property with no onward chain is one which is ready to be sold straight away. The seller will not need the funds (or proceeds of sale) from an existing sale to purchase the next property or move on. For buyers, it’s an advantageous position to be in as, by and large, it simplifies the sales process.”2
The price tag on this double-bedroomed flat in Penzance with glass in the windows and ‘no onward chain’ is a mere £100,000, and I jest not when I affirm that in this day and age this is a good price in the current UK market.
However, before you break your piggy bank, take note that the tenure of this property is ‘Leasehold’, not ‘Freehold’. What does that mean exactly? It means that if purchased you will own the property but not the building or the land on which it sits. This will be owned by a ‘freeholder’ to whom you will be expected to pay ‘ground rent’. Conversely, should you purchase a ‘freehold’ property you own both the building and the land, which is really what you want if you want to call your home a castle.
Moving on, but not necessarily swiftly, I looked next for a house as opposed to a flat in Penzance and found one which was described as being “located in an exceptional position … ” which, knowing Penzance as I do, I can assure you from the description of it, it most certainly is.
Although this house with its ‘captivating outlook’ is offered as a two-bedroomed property, the description of it suggests that it has the flexibility to be three-bedroomed, which means, I assume, that with a bit of imagination and some DIY skills alterations could be made. With this house you get great views across the bay, gardens to the front and a carport at the rear. How much? £395,000.
At first you may think that the price tag on this property owes a lot to its location in Penzance and the rejoiceful views that it offers, but a quick skim through various property portals reveal that for a two-bedroom house in Penzance £360,000 is about the average minimum price that you can expect to pay, and as most of the ads for properties in Penzance are not cast-in-stone prices but ‘offers over’, ‘offers in excess of’ or ‘guide prices’, you can expect to pay much more. Now what was the average wage in Penzance again?
We conclude, therefore, that properties in Penzance though not half as expensive as in London are, in terms of like for like, still way beyond most people’s pockets. However, if you are not most people but a well-healed high-roller, houses and flats in Penzance make good second-home investments, and high-flying executive types forced to accept distance working because of coronavirus charades could find that working and living in Penzance, with its captivating view over the bay to St Michael’s Mount, infinitely more agreeable than watching statue-molesting thugs at work somewhere in downtown London.
Council Tax in Penzance
But we have yet to mention that second mortgage, the UK’s dreaded council tax, the devious nature of which I adumbrated in my previous post. Council tax bands in Penzance compare unfavourably on an income-to-expenditure ratio to what you would pay if you lived in London. But, hey, there has to be some compensation for living in one of the world’s most rip-off capitals!
The lowest council tax you will have to pay if you live in Penzance is £1361.31, the highest £4,083.90 per year3.
As for the cost of living in Penzance, whilst nowhere in the UK is the cost of living higher than it is in London, equally nowhere in the UK is the cost of living low. Penzance located in one of England’s most desirable holiday destinations is bound to mug your wallet and having a big one to enjoy what is arguably the best coastlines, best sea views, best historical venues and best of dramatic landscapes is not a surprising contingent.
Crime in Penzance
What is surprising is that on the flip side of beauty lies dread: “Penzance is among the top 5 most dangerous small towns in Cornwall and is among the top 10 most dangerous overall out of Cornwall’s 218 towns, villages, and cities. The overall crime rate in Penzance in 2020 was 73 crimes per 1,000 people. This compares poorly to Cornwall’s overall crime rate, coming in 41% higher than the Cornwall rate of 43 per 1,000 residents. For England, Wales, and Northern Ireland as a whole, Penzance is the 177th most dangerous small town, and the 1,300th most dangerous location out of all towns, cities, and villages … The most common crimes in Penzance are violence and sexual offences4.” So Crimerate.co.uk tells us. But the good news is, from the same source, that “Penzance’s least common crime is bicycle theft”. So, even if you are raped, beaten to a pulp or murdered, at least you can be fairly sure that your bicycle will be safe, but I wouldn’t count on it.
As I said in my previous article, and if I forgot to, then I should have said it, the UK’s famous North-South divide is nowhere more conspicuously reflected than in the price you have to pay to put a roof over your head.
For Russians Moving to UK Towns not London: Durham
In the second part of this article, I decided to go to Durham. Why? Two reasons. First, I have always wanted to know what it was about Durham that made the singer/songwriter Roger Whittaker want to leave it so much; and second, and more to the point, it is cited on many property prices and cost-of-living websites as being the most inexpensive UK city in which to purchase property.
Durham is a cathedral city, which means that is a town that has city status because it has a cathedral. Durham is the county town of County Durham in northeast England, noted for its Romanesque cathedral, Norman castle, low-cost property and Roger Whittaker’s insistent desire to leave it, leave it, leave it … (I know he said that leaving was ‘bringing him down’ but he did not sound at all convincing!)
Apart from its university, tourism and Roger Whittaker’s song, I know very little about Durham’s employment market. They no longer mine coal thereabouts and flat caps and racing pigeons are possibly not as chic as they used to be, but I have it on good authority (our cat told me) that one of its major industries has earnt Durham the title of the ‘City of Medicine’, named such for the 300 medical and health-related organisations that thrive there. Thus, I think we can say without fear of rebuttal, not the best place to be if you live in fear of compulsory vaccination but a tremendous city to live in should you want to get out on the streets to protest against the iniquity of vaccination totalitarianism.
But first you will need to live somewhere. According to the property and estate agents sites that I visited, the average house price in Durham is £174,841 as of August 2021. Flats sold for an average of £157,792 and terraced houses for significantly less, at an average of £135,425. But let us take a closer look.
Renting property in Durham
For some reason, the rental market in Durham is not particularly cheap. Our old friend Arightbigportal reveals that two-bedroom apartments (which means flats) are priced at £700 per calendar month. The one that I looked at online was, admittedly, ultra-modern and fully furnished to boot.
However, perhaps a better deal is the three-bedroom semi-detached house that I discovered on the same site. It is a modern gaff with a rental price of £575 per calendar month. Now, that’s more like it!
Well, it would be, until you consider these gloomy statistics provided by Payscale.com5. The average salary in Durham UK is £26K. Not as much as Bill Gates earns in his lunchbreak? But wait, there is more: “Trends in wages decreased by -100.0 percent in Q2 2021. The cost of living in Durham, England: Durham is 100 percent higher than the national average.” Gulp!
Buying property in Durham
Buying a castle in Durham, even a one-bedroom castle, does not bode well for those who have to subsist on the average Durham salary, but at least in Durham one can cut one’s coat according to one’s cloth. In other words, property type and prices vary and those variations are quite broad. An internet search revealed that one-bedroomed flats can be purchased between £65,000 and £85,000 and that there was a smattering of two-bedroom flats from £80,000 to £115,000.
Two-bedroom mid-terrace houses have an asking price of £140,000~£150,000, with the magic qualifier ‘offers in the region of’ (so, hows about £140,000.01?), rising to £250,000 depending on property type, ie Victorian, and area.
Things are better in the semi-detached bracket provided you have no objections to a modern housing estate. Here, you can pick something up ~ I mean a property ~ for less than £120,000.
Council Tax in Durham
You might be tempted to believe that given Durham’s ‘up North’ location that the one prime advantage of living there would be a relatively low council tax. Thing again, sucker!
Durham’s Band A council tax, the lowest band, is £1360.91 and its Band H, the highest (‘H’ for high, you see they are clever are British councils), is £4082.747, which means if you move from Penzance to Durham, travelling, for example, on your unstolen bicycle, you could end up saving yourself 40 pence at the lower band and £1.16 at the higher. ‘That’s it!’ I hear you cry, ‘Durham here we come!’
The price differential between any property type in Durham compared to similar property in London is as striking as the difference between respect and social cohesion in 1930s’ England and what there isn’t today, but this ‘advantage’ has to be weighed against Durham’s abysmal wage packets and what about its quality of life?
Crime in Durham
Apart from the insecurity of living there if you are not on better wages than the ones they pay in Durham, how does Durham shape up in the national crime stats? Allegedly, when compared to the national crime rate, Durham county’s crime rate comes in at a depressing 115%6.
And there’s more: “Most crimes, 39.5k crimes were violent crimes which is 33.3% of all crimes committed in the area. Violent crime rate is at 142% of national crime rate. Public order crime was the fastest growing crime and it increased by 12.5% over the last twelve months6.”
Little wonder then that the healthcare and medicines industry is a thriving concern in Durham.
Conclusion
In compiling this article, I obviously appreciate that the number of Russians hungry to live in Penzance and/or Durham might not be incredibly high. London with all its intrinsic peril and high-octane Woke has a great deal more to offer in every capacity than small regional towns and small cathedral cities and that ‘more’, most essentially, also includes job diversification and higher earnings opportunities, not to mention a ‘vibrant’ culture, albeit a rather dangerous one, and the kind of teaming nightlife that you’ll never be able to ever afford because of the cost of your rent or mortgage.
For those of you who are mega-wealthy or have a secure and reliable well-paid job, preferably working from home, the likes of Penzance or Durham may be a marriage made in Heaven ~ or somewhere. Otherwise, it’s sea fishing and amusement arcade operatives in UK coastal towns or in Durham, for example, NHS workers or prison officers.
At least we now know why Roger Whittaker left. He most likely left Penzance as well? And on the evidence of his most excellent intuition would most certainly have thought about leaving London before he ever went there.
Where do you want to leave? In considering life in the UK, you’ll never run out of places to choose from.
Now, I hate football with a vengeance and always have. I have hated it for as long as I can remember and from my earliest childhood, especially at secondary school level. There was something so odiously, if not inclusively, masculine about having to interrupt your academic day by running up and down a muddy field in your silly little short shorts booting a ball about, accompanied by a gaggle of inane whoops and shouts under the kindly ministrations of a retarded bully-boy games master.
In those days wearing rainbow colours in support of all kinds of deviant practices was unheard of and, besides, had it otherwise been the case it would hardly have been encouraged. You only had to say, “I don’t like football”, to be immediately on the receiving end of ‘poof!’, ‘queer!’, ‘homo!’.
Football was a masculine game; it was all about manly men, both on and off the pitch; it was a case par excellence of male camaraderie, of muddy and sweaty male bonding but strictly of the non-rainbow kind.
So, it is not without some curiosity that we arrive in the 21st century to find that under the guise and guile of racism traditional notions of masculinity are as much under attack on and off the football pitch as they are in almost every other UK walk of life.
I take as my lead on this treatise a recent article, ‘On racism and football, it’s England vs. their fans’, published online by Politico, a media resource described by AllSides media-bias rater as ‘Left Leaning’. Don’t take a spirit level to it, you will only tax your bubble.
The article in question is one of a plethora launched amidst the media-hyped hysteria about the so-called racist behaviour of a section of the England fans during the Euro 2020 final, which took place at Wembley Stadium in London recently (I haven’t a clue when exactly, as I don’t follow football?). But let’s leave that article for the moment and cut to the chase.
Keep Woke out of Football
The politically correct storm in a liberal-left teacup is all about ‘taking a knee’ (No, not in the groin. Don’t be silly. You all know what ‘taking a knee’ means. It’s so everywhere that it wouldn’t surprise me if Brits are not soon wearing builders’ knee pads to go with their facemask fashion accessory ~ isn’t the 21st century fun!!). Apparently, when the English team took a knee, some of the fans took to booing. At the end of the game, when England lost, allegedly certain members of the English team were subjected to racial abuse.
When Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, denounced the ‘vile racist abuse’, (I believe she was referring to the verbal offence not the act of booing) she was accused by black player Tyrone Mings of hypocrisy. Because Priti Patel had once described ‘taking a knee’ as ‘gesture politics’, and when asked if she would criticise fans who booed England players taking the knee, she had replied that it was their choice, Mings felt justified in saying “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.”
Whatever you might say about Mings’ game, joining the dots obviously isn’t it. He should stick to football, and possibly hone his skills, and Priti Patel should conduct herself in a manner befitting that of a home secretary, which is exactly what she is doing.
The problem with ‘taking a knee’ is that whilst some postulate that it as an anti-racism message, others see it as the political salute of an organisation described by The Telegraph as ‘a radical neo-Marxist political movement’. I refer, of course, to Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Patently, it is not within the remit of the British Home Secretary to endorse controversial brands.
The Politico article also alludes to Priti Patel’s refusal to endorse ‘taking a knee’ but at least has the decency to acknowledge that the reason one takes the knee is “in support of Black Lives Matter protesters”, which does not entirely dovetail with Mings’ vocalising of it as an “anti-racism message”.
The same article also offers an alternative, acceptable reason as to why some of the England supporters felt the need to boo, which is to “keep politics out of football”.
Booing for all the right reasons is not such a bad thing.
If only more people would boo for keeping politics out of wherever it is they do not belong, life might inch up a notch. We could certainly do with people standing outside our schools and booing and, if not exactly booing, demanding that we keep politics out of the UK education system, where it operates at every level subversively and with grievous intent to indoctrinate.
I booed, latently, when in the opening paragraphs of that article ‘On racism and football, it’s England vs. their fans’, I learnt for the first time that football, the game that I loved to hate, was, or was expected to be, as mixed up, convoluted and Woke-obsessed as British society itself. Why was the author of this piece rambling on about the virtuous things that some of the players did, were doing or had done when they were not booting a ball around and getting paid too much for it? It was not until I got to the bit about Jordan Henderson embracing LGBTQ+ laces and armband that the article raised a smile, a sigh of relief and a sense of where this was going. I checked the article’s attribution: aahh, ‘activist and editor at the New Socialist’ ~ mystery solved.
It would be naïve of me to suggest that LGBTQ has nothing to do with football and everything to do with people’s personal sexual proclivities, because some would Woke me up with, no it is all to do with inclusivity, others that is a gender equality message and still others a case of ‘gesture politics’, but, be this as it may, football, I would argue, is two teams of 11 men, 10 of them running around a field in pursuit of a plastic ball and the eleventh stood there like a dummy surrounded by three metal poles.
The Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries defines football as “a game played by two teams of 11 players, using a round ball which players kick up and down the playing field. Teams try to kick the ball into the other team’s goal”. There is nothing in this definition about sexual deviations, taking knees, knees up mother brown, or mother white, or one or other of the players giving sixpence a week from his not insubstantial salary to the local home for stray migrants ~ please send all donations to The Ritz …
Then comes the dogma and bigotry, the ironclad implication that if you do not wish to align yourself with a neo-Marxist group and believe that politics should be kept out of football then as sure as night follows day you must be far rightist. In fact, anyone who refuses to join in with the Riverdance foot-stamping and tantrum-inclined politics of the left, whether it manifests itself on the football pitch or anywhere else, can only be motivated by far-right sympathies. Like the game of football itself, you are either with us or against us, there is no middle way.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that the Politico article, as with many other on the left, links the ‘mindless violence of hooliganism with far-right sympathies’ ~ no mention here then of weeks of street rampaging, public disorder and the mindless vandalism against civic statues and Britain’s heritage that characterised the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots of BLM. You disagree? Go home and take the liberal tablet and whilst you are at it, take a knee.
WOKE WATCH UK!
Now spitting tar and feathers the Politico article navigates safely into familiar territory. Having satisfied itself that the disinclined knee-takers and stadium booers are far-right extremists, it full steams ahead up Shit Creek postulating on the way that “the far right have always preyed upon … forgotten working-class communities”. So, who are the football fans who dare go ‘boo’, warriors of the mythical far right or working-class victims that the far right have duped? Two considerations arise from the victim statement: one, that the majority of football fans are from working-class communities, which they are; and two, yes, they have been forgotten ~ forgotten systematically over the years by the very people who egregiously pretend that they are the champions of the working-class, call them the left, call them socialists, call them new socialists, call them what you want, this putty vocalist clan have almost always one thing in common, which is that the majority of their kind are bourgeois-emulating lush-living liberals who talk the talk but do not walk the walk.
These are they who have an awful lot to say about racism and about equality in our working-class communities whilst advancing and enforcing ideological doctrines, such as globalism and mass immigration, that are tailor-made to undermine cultural identity and social stability. Globalism, mass immigration, open borders, political correctness and Wokism serve nothing but an elitist liberal club and as such are no friends of England’s working-class communities.
But take heart! All is not lost! The article goes on to suggest that the naughty element tarnishing the otherwise good behaviouralist fans appear to be suffering from that strange malady that most people tend to contract after the age of 14, anachronism: they belong to “another era” and “struggle to find a way to adapt to the modern world”.
Oh, brave new world that has such creatures innit!
What ‘modern world’ is it to which we must adapt to earn ourselves our browny points? Presumably the world of Woke, where all and everything has to be subsumed into the importance of rainbow colours and the virtue-signalling of ‘taking a knee’.
“Most of the team’s supporters have spent the last few years going through an attitude change that they should be given credit for.”
This is like saying, ‘I’ve kicked your arse, now I’ll pat your head, you good sheep you”. Such delusive nonsense might make the writer sleep better at night, but in reality, it will take a lot more condescension than that to rub out the fact that the majority of legacy Brits will never cave in, not to accepting politics in football and in any other part of their lives where politics should not be. If the English majority had wanted Wokism, they would never have voted for Brexit and the Labour party would not have collapsed in the last general election.
Oh, and if you are left wondering, so to speak, of course Brexit has been blamed for the malodorous actions of those ‘far-right’ fans! Cue a nursery full of bawlin’ babies: “We want a people’s vote!”
True to liberal or ‘new socialist’ form the tone of this article then becomes more rabid and froth foamy as it implodes towards conclusion. Brexit, as I have said, has already joined the ranks of the ‘usual suspects’, but there are a lot of other liberal-lefty hobbyhorses that are still unaccounted for. And then, just when you are asking yourself why you have not been mugged by the usual neuroticisms and enrichment blandishments, your faith in liberal bias is restored. In profusion, as if the writer is worried that he (she/it?) forgot to include them ~ and inclusivity is a very serious matter ~ comes ‘right-wing’, ‘populism’, ‘borders’, ‘immigration’, and ‘gender fluidity’ (I don’t much care for the liquid sound of that last one, do you?).
And so, we end up with what the writer no doubt believes is much of a ‘tan-ta-rar’ but is really little more than a sorry descent into cliché, that “right-wing populist politicians, including those in the government, continue to sow the seeds of division and stoke the fires of hatred”. Rather than admit that it is our socially engineered society with all its isms, virtue-signalling and Wokeness that is sowing the seeds and stoking the fires.
But now, of course, it is all going terribly wrong. The architects have the divisions for which they have been working but are perplexed and frustrated that they have gone no deeper than the thin end of the wedge and what is more disturbing for them is that as society grows more ‘populist’ the more exposed their handy work becomes.
As with all fanatical idealogues they have overestimated their own capabilities and underestimated the strength of the resistance. The days when legacy Brits could be cowed into submission by accusations of racism and other PC nonsense never really happened, at least not beyond the sold-on delusion, and as it never happened in the hey days of Tony Blair when liberals were living the dream, they might as well accept that it is never going to happen, no matter how many toys they toss from the three-wheeled liberal pram.
Time was once that football was a man’s game. The players all wore shorts that were far too long for them, had skinny legs and nobly knees. The football was a big brown lump of leather inflated by a blow-up pig’s bladder, a vegetarian’s nightmare. The players were rewarded with three and thruppence a match, and nobody fell over and cradled their leg unless they really had to. In the days of manly football the stands were full of working-class white men in long brown macs and flat caps. They did boo, even though politics was nowhere to be seen, but the only people taking a knee were players who got one accidently in the centre forwards. But still they played the game. “Come on now, play the white man!”, would come the roar from the crowds, and no one criticised because no one cared, back in those bad old real days.
Football! It has about as much appeal to me as keeping racing pigeons whilst ferreting during opening hours.
I think real socialists, the old kind, possibly loved it, but not so it would seem new socialists, as the writer of the Politico article decries football, “as a sport that has always lent itself well to toxic masculinity, a staunch ally of right-wing populism”.
What to do! What to do! Presumably the only way to deal with this ‘toxic masculinity’ is to shirt-lift it out of existence and, whilst you’re at it, for pity’s sake don’t forget to take that knee!
London Woke Up to Khan ~ one day it might just wake up!
Woke Watch PC UK! {Case 2}
Published: 11 May 2021
On 8 May 2021, London Woke up to a new dawn of nothing new ~ another 3 years of Sadiq Khan as mayor. Another 3 years for the usual suspects to contextualise his re-election as a great day for inclusivity ~ never mind the downside!
As predicted, London, which the last national census of 2011 revealed is 55.1% non-white British (one can only imagine what it is now!) chose to ignore Khan’s abysmal record of mayoralty and instead, following their woke instinct, ticked the box next to the man under whose mayoral tenure the capital city of England has earnt itself the dubious accolade of being Stab Fest City of the World.
During Khan’s 5-year reign, serious crime in London has spiralled out of control: deaths by stabbing are at an all-time high; rape prosecutions have dwindled: nobody feels safe upon the streets anymore.
Political activists such as Laurence Fox, himself a candidate for the London mayor’s office, called upon the Metropolitan Police to ‘free up officers to police streets not tweets’, a reference to the disproportional importance that the Metropolitan Police under Khan’s stewardship seems to put on their politically correct credentials at the expense of combatting crime in the real world.
An insight into the extent of Khan’s wokeyness can be gleaned from a Spectator article headlined, ‘Revealed: the cost of Sadiq Khan’s woke army’:
“The number of staff at City Hall has swelled by 45 per cent in just four years, rising from 817 in May 2016 to 1,190 in April 2020. Among these include no less than nine staff tasked with responsibilities for inclusion, diversity and fairness – a ratio of one per 132 total employees.
“Posts include a Programme Director for Economic Fairness who earns between £70,241 and £76,029”
And if that does not convince you, The Spectator article goes on to mention Khan’s planned ‘commission for diversity in the public realm’, an exercise in pure woke that is expected to cost the taxpayer more than £1 million.
London Woke Up to Khan
Among the tasks that Khan’s commission has been charged to oversee is a review of London’s statues and street names in capitulation to the Black Lives Matter riots last year (2020). Now that really is money well spent! Apart from “Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square”, how on earth will London’s cabbies cope with all those foreign ooboogoogoo street names and disposed heritage landmarks? And what chance do we have of selling Churchill’s statue to the yanks for as much as it costs to fund a diversity manager, now that Biden has been string-pulled into office?
At least this proposed scheme goes some way to explain why the black gentleman, Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, failed to cut the mustard, that and the £1.5 million Khan disposed of on a New Year’s Eve firework display in which he chose to illuminate London’s skyline with the paramilitary BLM emblem of the raised, clenched fist. I think the word is ‘pandering’ or is it just ‘sick’? Perhaps, when you stop to consider that this act alone provides a clue as to why violent crime in London goes unchecked, a better word would be ‘sickening’. One million quid spent on renaming streets and replacing statues is a lot to shell out to blackmailers. The money would be better spent on training and equipping a viable London riot squad or used for funding a long overdue addition to the UK’s national curriculum called Respect for the Host Country.
The BBC (which the Mail Online informs us backed Khan’s inappropriate but self-revealing firework display [Tories slam Sadiq Khan’s £1.5million New Year’s Eve light show | Daily Mail Online) tells us that “the mayor [of London] officially acts as the police and crime commissioner for London, which means the mayor has a role in setting out how London is policed and staffed.” Oh dear!
“The mayor appoints the Metropolitan Police commissioner, who is in charge of the day-to-day running of the police and holds them to account.” Oh dear! Oh dear!
“Finally, the mayor also works with different agencies and government departments to make sure London is prepared for … terror attacks.” Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!!! [London elections 2021: What can the mayor of London do? ~ BBC (accessed 9 May 2021)]
The Metropolitan Police commissioner whom Khan ‘holds to account’ is one Cressida Dick ~ she must have had a hard time of it when she was at school, but then she became a police officer.
So, London has an Asian mayor and a female Metropolitan Police commissioner called Cressida Dick ~ and you and I wonder why mean tweeters are more at risk of being brought to book than serious street crims. Although, in case you need to know, the Stay Out of Jail Free card for mean tweeters is liberal affiliation and espousing liberal causes. No matter what you say or how you say it, you are guaranteed immunity.
When you read that the role of London mayor has the largest personal mandate of any politician in the UK and that Khan is the recipient, that is scary stuff indeed. But, before we write the UK off completely, let us not forget that London is a state within a state, a woke liberal enclave surrounded by a far greater real British population than the one that has yet to evacuate London, and that this same majority living in the provinces excommunicated London many decades ago. I suppose the day will finally come when we can leave multicultural London to its renamed streets and statues of a different hue and simply move the seat of government somewhere else ~ like Scunthorpe, for example ~ then campaign for LEXIT, set up a hard border and encircle it with a moat.
Whatever our opinion is of Mr Khan and his mayoral iniquities, we must concede that his re-election is merely grist to the woke mill. Laurence Fox, actor, political activist, victim of wokism and a mayoral candidate, never believed he would oust Khan in the London election for mayor, but by standing against Khan in the knowledge that he never represented a serious threat to Khan’s fifedom let alone pull his mayoral chain and flush him away, he effectively proved his point, that London is unequivocally the UK’s ‘Cathedral of Woke’. And there, as they say, you have it.
The beauty of living in a democracy (the UK’s kind of democracy) is that whilst you hardly ever get what you want, you often get what you deserve. So, let that be a lesson to you, London! Pass the vest and let’s all hold hands …
A T-shirt featuring the mayor and police commissioner hugging, with the emblematic BLM fist superimposed on the back, can be purchased from The Commission for Diverting Your Attention in the Public Realm, Blackhall, West Monrassa SW1A (turn hard and extreme left at Churchill’s empty statue plinth). Also on sale, 2021 mayoralty stab vests and candle-lit vigil kits, plus the Handbook on Mean Tweets ~ how to be liberal and avoid conviction.
This series of posts is devoted to identifying, tracking and reporting on instances of politically correct oppression in the UK, which have become so prevalent and stultifying in recent years that they have morphed into an erosive sub-culture, ironically characterised by self-righteous victimhood and a postured drive for equality. This is the culture of ‘Woke’.
Stymieing free speech and closing down discussion, liberal elements exploit the false altruism implanted in this credo for the prosecution and inverted moral enforcement of a neo-Marxist creed.
Assisted not a little by an ideological media sympathetic to their agenda, the hyper-reaction and sheer volume of publicity devoted to issues of race, gender and other liberal hobby horses has discredited the perpetrators and exposed their agenda. It has also caught them in a trap of their own making, the term ‘Woke’ ~ their term ~ presented originally as a victim’s cry for social and racial justice now widely used to identify over-zealous practitioners and self-proclaimed arbitrators of ‘correct thought’ as defined by neoliberal PC elites.
There is a limit to which even the most tolerant people of the most tolerant country (reference Sewell report) can remain tolerant to daily intolerance and at last legacy Britons appear to have reached that point:
Stay aWoke to the Wokes folks!
If, in a wild and distorted dream or a state of unpardonable and gross inebriation you have even vaguely considered that the ‘liberal way’ could be progressively good for your country ~ or, for that matter, remotely good ~ let these posts serve as a moral reminder: Be careful what you wish for!
In my introductory post to this series, Woke Watch PC UK, I referred briefly to that recent sorry state of affairs at Pimlico Academy London, where children, jumping on the protest bandwagon, were allowed and encouraged to lambast their headteacher and dictate school policy.
The Pimlico Academy circus and the liberal media’s reaction to the Sewell report on racial disparity are perfect examples of the fostered permeation of a woke cult within the UK and the extent to which this virus is cultivated and used as a mind-altering, psychological weapon in our schools. From the government’s reluctance (some have referred to it as ‘moral cowardice’) to institute robust measures to combat the virulence, hope for an effective vaccine grows less and less credible as each day passes. Unchallenged, systemic wokeness is a source of global embarrassment to the UK in the disproportionate media and political space it occupies to the detriment of real issues, such as unsafe streets and spiralling crime, but is at the very least redeemable in its entertainment value.
My attention was first drawn to this farcical piece of nonsense, re Pimlico Academy, when I stumbled upon a report in that most august of intellectual online dispensaries, the Mirror.
Headlined, “Pimlico Academy: Angry pupils stage mass walk-out at school’s ‘racist’ uniform policy”, with the standfirst, “Students and staff are furious over a strict new uniform policy at Pimlico Academy in Westminster, central London, and changes to the secondary school’s history curriculum”, the article immediately set the sirens wailing: ‘Woke! Woke! Woke!’.
From the safety of my anti-PC bunker, not having been enriched for some time now, I read on, hardly able to contain my amusement. According to the report, some angry children were having a tantrum in the school playground (for those of you who are not from the UK, an ‘academy’ is a posh-sounding name for a school; a tantrum is a ‘peaceful demonstration’). ‘We want change’, they shouted. I could hear an echo bouncing back at them from somewhere in Britain’s glorious past, “Don’t we all!” it was saying.
The change that they wanted was not for the drinks machine. They were ~ shall we use a ‘peaceful demonstration’ word? ~ ‘outraged’.
Woke Attack in Pimlico UK!
It may defy belief if you come from a non-PC-crazed background, but in the wonky land of Woke, anybody and anything can be denounced as racist at any time, and somebody with a lot more time on their hands than most of us, but not a great deal of intelligence, had denounced Pimlico’s school uniform as racist. The school uniform was wacist (that’s a cross between woke and racist) because it discriminated against hijabs and hairstyles. The school pupils were also incensed that the school curriculum was not paying enough attention to the antics of Black Lives Matter and were demanding that more time be devoted to Black History Month, like, er, Black History Two Months or preferably 13 months of the year. Durrgh…
The Mirror published extracts from the children’s online post, which, incorporating such terms as ‘protect marginalised races [and] religions’, ‘discriminating against’ and ‘challenging identity’, shows that if they learn nothing else in today’s progressive liberal schools, children are at least well versed in the parrot language of Woke.
Some went on to excel themselves by taking up the cudgel for the gender disadvantaged. And you have to hand it to them, they had really done their homework on the PC prose of choice:
“We believe the idea of gendered uniform for all students is a ridiculous, backwards ideal. This ostracises non-binary and gender non-conforming students, or those who are struggling with their gender identity.”
I really, really do wish that I had been armed with this load of old cod’s wallop when I was at school. In those days, if you did not present in the full and prescribed uniform by the time you had chanted ‘we want change’, you could be guaranteed to have got it, initiated by a swift, stout kick up the arse. The change being a bruise where you did not have one before.
Woke Attack in Pimlico UK!
Whilst some of Pimlico’s school children were writing online statements, others, true to form, were defacing the school walls with graffiti. Some future university student daubed:
“Headmaster Smith should get the sack.”
And why on earth shouldn’t he, with a name like that!
The Mirror goes on to report that, “the Guardian reported that the school was facing mass staff resignations, a student protest and a vote of no confidence in its headteacher.”
It almost sounds like ‘Hooray’?
Mr Smith is a white headmaster and therefore it goes without saying that he should either resign or apologise, or preferably both! ~ be sent to Devil’s Island, somewhere in the Caribbean or Lambeth, and never again be permitted to hold office.
Apparently, the academy’s staff is in such a PC tizz about it all that many of the poor darlings are thinking of quitting their job.
Helpful school caretaker: “Allow me, I’ll open the door for you!”
And it is reported that the entire geography department handed in their notice, presumably because they failed to identify that the country where they live and work is Britain. Mind you, it is not that easy to tell these days, is it, not even for a geography teacher?
Now, I am not sure whether you will appreciate the woke irony inherent in this next quote from the Mirror, but take your time (clue, think of BLM and statues and political allegiances).
“Former Pimlico Academy pupil Liza Begum, Labour’s candidate for the upcoming Churchill ward councillor by-election, visited the protest.”
Well, she would, wouldn’t she!
According to the Mirror, she was proud of the students, adding, ‘it [the protest] was a peaceful event’.
As all such demonstrations, especially BLM demonstrations, are ~ children …
One mother complained that the pupils are not listened to and feel ‘frustrated and disempowered’ (Congratulations, now you know what most teachers feel every day of their lives.) And wanted to know what this would do for them [the kids] when they left school? The answer being, a great deal of good, I suppose, because in the real world, the world outside of school, getting your own way by staging a tantrum, even if the liberal media patronises it as ‘peaceful’, is not something that Bet Fred is likely to give you very good odds on.
Now, I have intentionally left the best for last, which is that after ticking all the essentials on the woke checklist, as ticked by the children at Pimlico Academy, having been primed to do so by their liberal masters …
Racism
Discrimination
Gender issues
Identity
Challenged self-esteem
White man headmaster
… the ultimate demand from the Pimlico children was that the school remove the Union Jack. And, yes, you have got it in one, of course the school capitulated.
“And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all The needle returns to the start of the song And we all sing along like before … “
The least you would expect is that the entire history department of Pimlico Academy would hand in their resignation, hop into the nearest TARDIS, shoot off back in time and warn Great Britain of what will become of it in the 21st century unless it takes a firmer grip. What a mess!
The ethnic composition of the child protestors which led to the peremptory and pitiful removal of the nation’s flag is not immediately apparent. A closer look at the photos and videos that covered the playground huff would be interesting from a sociological viewpoint if nothing else, as it would help to ascertain the ratio of children indoctrinated by liberal left mantras in relation to those exploiting them to further an agenda.
Incidentally, did you ever see that wonderful old black and white (cough) film Passport to Pimlico? It was all very different then, wasn’t it, although the title of that film could well have been a presentiment. All the same, should a remake be made today, the film would have to retain its original title since Pimlico is land-locked, so something along the lines of Small Boat to Pimlico would hardly be believable ~ but then again, what is?
Woke Attack in Pimlico UK!
At the end of a wrong day, whether your verdict is woke tsunami or merely a storm in a piss pot, that the Pimlico spat was set against the backdrop of the frenzied reception to the Sewell report on racial disparity speaks volumes about the wider malaise in the land of the Woke and Wonderless.
This ‘landmark adjudication’, the Sewell report, is, of course, covered extensively by the liberal press. The Guardian, for example, asks in one of their earlier articles, before the tone becomes predictably rabid, ‘Did the government’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests measure up? A panel of writers responds’. And the answer, from the liberal perspective is, as we know, of course it didn’t. Whilst some people could be forgiven for equating inadequate response with lack of robust policing, I am not saying anything about this article. Find it, read the names of the contributors, see their panels and photographs, read what they have to say and judge for yourselves.
I cannot quite make up my mind, from a purely woke position, whether the liberal faction so seemingly incensed by the Sewell report’s conclusion that the UK is one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world, would have been infinitely more disappointed had the report returned what they presumed it must do following what they conceived to be an intimidation victory by the BLM riots, namely that the UK is racist to its core and that penance by those responsible can never be paid in full, as there is not enough guilt in Woke land for reparation to replace agenda.
Such Woke expressions of virtue-signalled anger are surely just for the record ~ the broken record. Without doubt, the Sewell report has handed to those who have nothing better to do than to delude themselves into believing that making banners and running amok in the streets will change anything, a golden opportunity: summer is on the way, time to get those hoodies on and crank up the ‘peaceful protesting’! And if it all gets sordid and nasty, then not only is there the old excuse to fall back on, that the police response was ‘neither appropriate nor proportionate’ (from the rehearsed script of Mr Mayor Khan) there is the Sewell report as well. “Ooooh, it made me so angry! I just had to make a banner and go and deface a statue. Er, how do you spell ‘discriminate’?”
Woke me up when it’s all over, yawn …
Here are some later headlines from the balanced liberal press on the Sewell report:
The Sewell report on racial disparity is an attempt to erase progress and sow division [Guardian]
Comment: This assumes that the path to progress must be defined as a never-ending cycle of recrimination, apology and appeasement
The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate [Guardian]
Comment: Tantrum time
Race report: Was controversy part of the plan? [BBC]
Comment: You should know. It’s what you do best … but not so well as you did, or everyone would still be paying their license fee
Let’s hope that these headlines were not run after the watershed viewing time for children ~ there’s bound to be tears before bedtime ..
Liberals are upset. The word ‘woke’, originally enlisted into the English language as a weapon to further their ideological aims and bulwark their arsenal of victimhood, has fallen into enemy hands. It seems that ‘white privileged males’, ‘populists’ and even a man who gets paid to be rabid on television, have wrested the weapon from the hand of the mugger. They, along with millions of legacy Britons like them, are turning it to their own advantage in an existential struggle to preserve country, culture, heritage, home and history.
In this series of posts, I will update you from time to time on the wokey pokery that, having been brought to the surface and accelerated by such a monumental political event as Brexit, threatens to undermine, destroy and eclipse what, less than a century ago, was one of the greatest nations on Earth but which now, regrettably, as a result of social engineering and state-sponsored sell out, is little more than Pandora’s Box in a carnival hall of mirrors.
If, in a wild and distorted dream or a state of unpardonable and gross inebriation you have even vaguely considered that the ‘liberal way’ could be progressively good for your country ~ or, for that matter, remotely good ~ let these posts serve as a moral reminder: Be careful what you wish for!
The Strange Woke Case of the White Privileged Male
The liberal left like nothing better than to label anyone who does not obsequiously and unquestionably conform to what Piers Morgan has described as their ‘PC-crazed world view’. Case in point:
For the first time in months coronavirus slips from its number one place in the British media slot and is immediately replaced by lamentable laments about race. It wasn’t April Fools Day when I read about the liberal media’s reaction to the Sewell report on racial disparity and caught sight of the shockless, but none the less discouraging, headline, “Pimlico Academy: Angry pupils stage mass walk-out at school’s ‘racist’ uniform policy”, but it ought to have been, at least then it might have all made sense … a little sense … some sense … no?
On the same day, 31st March, it was refreshing to see something infinitely less predictable than a load of liberals all crying collectively into the same obsessive snotrag. It was the actor, political activist and leader of the Reclaim Party, Laurence Fox, the High Priest of Anti-Woke, whizzing across London in a traditional, red, open-topped double-decker bus, launching, in an applaudably British way, his London mayoral election campaign against that really nice Asian man, the Woke’s mayor of choice, Mr Sadiq Khan BLM, EU, AGENDA.
Woke Watch PC UK!
Mr Fox, probably best known for his co-starring role in the TV detective series Lewis, entered the political arena after he fell foul of anti-freedom of speech liberals and the predominantly liberal-virulent Twitterati mob for responding to a mixed-race university lecturer during the BBC’s Question Time who accused him of being ‘a white privileged male’. Such an accusation, he said, was racism.
Following the broadcast, the actors’ union, Equity, which is not at all institutionally Woke, called on other actors to denounce him. As a ‘white privileged male’, he had obviously overstretched himself. Racism, as we know, is a one-way street ~ or so they would have us believe. My only regret is that I missed the headline: ‘White Privileged Male Blacklisted’.
I am sure you will agree that there is absolutely no excuse for being a ‘white privileged male’. If you have the misfortune of being one, let it be a lesson to you. You should have chosen the race of your parents more carefully and ensured that both were on the dole. You should also sue them for not consulting you on your gender preferences before they had the temerity to consider giving birth to you.
Woke Watch PC UK!
Piers Morgan, formerly of Good Morning Britain (yes, that’s him, nice, quiet man, never got a bad word to say about anybody), himself since hounded by the same crazed hypocrites as Laurence Fox, Tweeted on Twatter:
“Laurence Fox hounded off Twitter for daring to challenge the virtue-signalling mob. The repulsive abuse & threats these shameless ‘liberal’ (*illiberal) hypocrites spew out on here to anyone who refuses to sign up to their PC-crazed world view is disgraceful ~ [Feb 24, 2020]”
Piers Morgan ‘lost’ his job at Good Morning Britain “because I chose not to apologise for disbelieving Meghan Markle’s claims in her interview with Oprah Winfrey. I thus became the latest ‘victim’ of the cancel culture that is permeating our country, every minute, of every hour, of everyday. Though of course, I consider myself to be neither a victim, nor actually cancelled.” [https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/tv/piers-morgan-addresses-lost-job-20113944 [accessed 31 March 2021] ]
News on the grapevine has it that Mr Morgan, true to his beliefs, has not been ‘cancelled’. He is about to be reinstated (so he tells us), which is something that Laurence Fox has yet to experience.
You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!’
Published: 26 March 2021 ~ 25 Reasonable Excuses for Leaving the UK
You might not believe the BBC, and that is all to your credit, but, as sensible as it sounds, the UK government has indeed ruled as part of its battle against freedom, sorry, I meant to say coronavirus, that any Brit who attempts to flee the Blighted Kingdom could face a fine of £5000.
“This new measure has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with forcing Britons, and those who call themselves British, to holiday in appalling places like Hunstanton or Skegness, and is not affiliated in any way to the Have a Gay Holiday in Brighton scheme,” said William Butlins, Minister without portfolio but with a family ticket for the Costa del Sol, Wokesperson for the Kickstart Domestic Tourism Campaign.
The ban on people leaving the UK in search of sun, solace and sanity is what one man on a bicycle in Northamptonshire said was a ‘one way street’. He said a lot more, but we could not publish that for fear of the Free Speech Watchdog ~ who lives in the UK and barks in seven different languages, except English. What he meant by ‘one way street’ is that nobody is allowed out but people from everywhere else in the universe are allowed in, especially on small boats that come bobbing daily into Dover. Well, that’s alright then.
However, every cloud has a silver lining, except for the one called Biden’s Agenda, and that has a globalist golden one (incidentally, that is also a ‘one way street’). In the case of being forced to remain in the UK (which serves illegal immigrants right! Be careful what you wish for!) the proviso is that as long you have a ‘reasonable excuse’ you can be released on bail.
For those of you who have not downsized recently and therefore cannot afford, or do not qualify for government assistance, to pay for legal advice, here is a checklist of ‘reasonable excuses’ for leaving the UK.
25 Reasonable Excuses for Leaving the UK
1. Immigration
2. Coronavirus
3. Police State Coronavirus Restrictions
4. You don’t like Boris’s hairstyle
5. You like Matt Hancock’s hairstyle (what there is of it) but you don’t like Matt Hancock
6. You have no intention, now or ever, of paying your BBC protection racket license.
7. You want to go to a country where statues feel safe and heritage is valued
8. You really cannot prefix every statement you make with “I’m not racist, but …” anymore
9. The adverts on the telly do not reflect what it is really like to live in Britain (Thank Heavens!)
10. Political correctness
11. You want to go to a country where they are proud of the nation state
12. You want to go somewhere where you feel that your children are safe
13. You need to see a neck specialist as you cannot turn your head the other way and ignore anti-social behaviour any longer
14. You are frightened that if you write something on social media in the interests of your children’s future, you might be arrested for inciting the truth
15. Now that you have posted proudly “Yippee, I have had my vax,” and changed your Facebook avatar with some pretty rainbow colours, you feel such a prick that you are still locked down in your home
16. As a ‘first in and out of the queue’ early coronavirus panic buyer, you feel the need to travel abroad and stock up on more shite paper
17. You have run out of bog paper and feel embarrassed as the neighbours saw you fill the front room with rolls and instead of not paying your BBC license fee you’ve watched what they broadcast and used it all up as a result
18. I am an escapologist
19. You’ve experienced claustrophobia for the past 12 months, now you’d like to give agoraphobia a try (The UK establishment has given you plenty of aggrophobia!).
20. I want to go so you won’t let me back in
21. Just because you want to control me does not mean that I am going to make it easy for you
22. I am looking for the truth, and I know I won’t find it here
23. I was a liberal, but now I have learnt to see and think for myself
Someone did try using ‘I have grown allergic to the sound of sheep!’ but as a reasonable excuse, it was struck down for failing to register on the Fauci-controlled Baa-ometer.
On reading the 23 valid reasons for leaving the UK, one liberal remainer, who did not want to remain anonymous because he/she/it is an overpaid, untalented celeb with delusions of political grandeur, sneered venomously (well, they do, don’t they!) “It serves them right [It having nothing, of course, to do with gender]. Those who voted for Brexit wanted out of Europe so why should they be let back in!” And then she went straight back to her mum’s house to make a banner for this summer’s BLM riot ~ another reasonable excuse for wanting to leave the country.
So, 2021 promises to be not so much the summer of discontent as spending the summer in a clapped old tent, in your own back garden if you have one and in nobody else’s if they have one and you don’t, six feet apart from one another, wearing a mask, waiting for your 131st vaccination against alleged mutated strains of a similar number and counting your antibodies to see if you have enough to get you into the pub.
And the last two reasonable excuses for wanting to leave the UK are?
24. I want to send the UK establishment and it’s sheeples a postcard. “Hello Boris et al, I am having a lovely time in the real world. Sun, sand, sea good weather, wonderful bars and restaurants. You can take your lockdowns, masks, social distancing, never-ending vaccines, antibody tests, and pub vaccine passports and stick them up your a!*e! We would like to say, wish you were here, but we’re rather glad that you’re not! And, after all, without a ‘reasonable excuse’, you couldn’t be if you wanted to.
And finally, number 25, the most reasonable excuse that anybody could give for wanting to leave the UK:
Hello! Hello! Hello![/caption]
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UK Lockdown ~ a new board game to take your mind off lockdown[/caption]
