As I always say, Britain is the land where everything is policed except crime. So, naturally, this week the useless plods are busying themselves with "National Hate Crime Awareness Week". I would imagine that if you're, say, a Jewish restaurateur in Golders Green, you're quite aware enough already, thank you.
But that's not what HM Constabulary have in mind, apparently. So they've commissioned an expensive graphics team (see top right) to alert Britons to the rising problem of peg-legged Barbary Coast pirates who've had their parrots stolen.
Oh, wait, my mistake. Per our friend Laura Rosen Cohen, it's a disabled Muslima of colour (possibly also trans - see the "man hands"). Laurence Fox, who advertises himself as a trans lesbian of colour, really needs to up his game if he wants the Metropolitan Police to cease barging in and dragging him off to gaol.
A great nation that built the modern world is dying as a joke. Can we get a Global Laughingstock Awareness Week?
~Some good news for a change - and with a relevance far beyond its ostensible topic. I congratulate my friend Alexandra Marshall and her colleagues at the Aussie Spectator on seeing off the "Voice" referendum. This was a proposed "change" to the Australian constitution that would, in fact, have nullified it - by giving an approved identity group, "indigenous peoples", privileged power over the legislative and executive branches (as Alexandra has spoken about on our show). The Speccie's James Allan can take a particular victory lap here. In the teeth of overwhelming support from Australia's politico-media-judicial-cultural class, Mr Allan was the first to declare that the Voice vote would fail - and five days before the referendum he doubled-down:
The No side will win the national vote comfortably and we will also (I risk being overcome by hubris here I know) win in every state, even Tasmania.
He was quite right. The Voice was voted down 70-30 in Queensland, 65-35 in South Australia, but even the limp noodles of Victoria rejected it 55-45. The metropolitan elites took it as well as their Commonwealth cousins in London took the Brexit vote. But the margin of loss makes it emblematic of the starker divide around the west today - the widening gulf between the masses and their betters.
A sober ruling class might wish to reflect on that. But they probably won't - and, as a result, will continue on their merry way until something, somewhere gives, and very badly.
~Speaking of which:
I spent yesterday in the District of Columbia Superior Court with my American bête noire, global warm-monger Michael E Mann. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, my British bête noire, the UK state censor Ofcom, was running into a spot of bother:
EXCLUSIVE: Ofcom Suspends Director of Online Safety Over Anti-Israel Views https://t.co/yRHIeYaawh pic.twitter.com/XALn77AGOj
— Media Guido (@MediaGuido) October 16, 2023
As you know, the grisly unconservative Conservative Government has just endowed, in their "Online Safety" bill, the commisars of Ofcom with total jurisdiction over the Internet. Their powers include, supposedly, the right to have uncooperative Rumble executives arrested if they chance to land at Heathrow. But hey, relax - in the end, they're just another bland and boring British bureaucracy, right? So what's to worry about?
Well, Ofcom's now suspended Director of Online Safety, Fadzai Madzingira, describes herself as "a Zimbabwean, a Black Feminist, a student of decolonization". Setting aside the fact that she turns out also to be a rancid old Jew-hater, why would such an obvious hyper-partisan be selected by Lord Grade and Dame Melanie Dawes to be their chief of police for the Internet? What kind of impartial justice did they expect their Director of Online Safety to deliver?
Well, they didn't. They suspended poor Ms Madzingira only because the truth of who she is got out to the wider world. But the greater sin is theirs for appointing her in the first place. Michael Grade is Jewish himself, a scion of one of Britain's great Jewish showbiz families; son of Leslie Grade, bigtime theatrical agent (Bob Hope, Danny Kaye) and founder of the television station ATV; and nephew of Lew Grade, distributor/producer of Thunderbirds, The Muppet Show and The Persuaders, and of Bernard Delfont, the impresario who brought Sinatra and Judy Garland to the Talk of the Town and produced hit shows such as Stop The World - I Want to Get Off and hit films such as The Deer Hunter.
Michael was never in their league, but, even so, Lords Grade and Delfont would surely be astonished to find their idiot nephew ending his days promoting the kind of poisonous ideology that caused his grandparents to flee the Ukraine. From refugees to members of the House of Lords to total woke wanker in just three generations. Pitiful.
As you know, I'm suing Ofcom in the King's Bench Division of the English High Court for their unlawful rulings against me and Naomi Wolf over our coverage of the Covid vaccines. I'm the first UK presenter (TV or radio) to push back against Ofcom in a decade-and-a-half. Which is, if not unexpected, kind of disheartening. I wish more of my former colleagues would butch up, because, by meekly accepting Ofcom's decisions (as Angelos Softcockoulos and GB News management did) they collude in the lie that Ofcom is some sort of normal British bureaucracy - tedious, bit of a pain, but in the end respectable and not unreasonable.
Michael Grade's choice of Fadzai Madzingira nails that lie. Which is why Bill Cash, one of the last old-school Tory temperaments remaining in the House of Commons, is now calling for the Attorney-General to investigate Ofcom.
Grade and Dame Melanie's hiring policies are the death of English liberty. Unless UK presenters wish to be mere court eunuchs to the Wazirs of Woke, they need to get real about this disgusting organisation.
~I've been enormously touched by how many readers, listeners and viewers want to support my free-speech lawsuit against the ever more overbearing censors of Ofcom. Well, there are several ways to lend a hand, including:
a) signing up a friend for a Steyn Club Gift Membership;b) buying a chum a SteynOnline gift certificate; or
c) ordering a copy of my latest book The Prisoner of Windsor. You won't regret it.
With the first two methods, one hundred per cent of the proceeds and, in the last, a significant chunk thereof go to a grand cause - and you or your loved one gets something, too.
~Finally, let me thank all the newcomers to our ranks in recent days, from Roanoke to Rushcutters Bay, Nottingham to Nine Miles Falls. We hope to welcome many more of you in the years ahead. For more information on The Mark Steyn Club, see here.