Programming note: Tonight Steyn will be here with the penultimate episode of his current Tale for Our Time - Bulldog Drummond, an evocation of a lost England which has proved very popular with listeners. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Mark will be hosting our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~It is just a week since the famously Welsh boyo Axel Rudakubana used what English law calls a "bladed article" to kill three little girls - aged nine, seven and six - and attempt to kill another ten. My old Telegraph colleague Allison Pearson writes:
The failure to discuss the terror suffered by Elsie, Alice and Bebe, three little girls knifed to death by a devil, and the pain of five other critically ill children and their dance teacher is deafening.
— Allison Pearson (@AllisonPearson) August 4, 2024
Families must be shocked, raging and grief stricken, but they are not...
When my own children were born, I suddenly found myself - as a hitherto hard-hearted chap - unable to handle movies or TV shows in which infants were menaced with violence. Just the usual Hollywood rubbish - all very antiseptic and generic - but I would grow almost instantly moist-eyed and avert my gaze from the screen. Nothing in those formulaic confections was as horrible as what citizens of Britain and Europe are being asked to accept as a permanent feature of life - that, every once in a while, at a kindergarten in Dublin or a children's park in Annecy, a man will show up with a "bladed article" and randomly plunge it into your kid. And sometimes they will survive, albeit bearing the scars until the day they die. And sometimes, as at that dance class in Southport, they will not - and the final moments of their foreshortened lives will be, as Miss Pearson says, of bewildered, uncomprehending, slashing "terror".
Nevertheless, it will not be presented as such in our public discourse. As with the Eloi, when one of their number is seized at dusk by the Morlocks, it is "considered bad form" (in the words of H G Wells's narrator) to make too much of it, and, if you do, like the Time-Traveller seeking the Eloi's assistance in breaching the Morlocks' sanctum, they will recoil as if you had used "a grossly improper gesture to a delicate-minded woman". Instead, the politico-media class will "manage" the horror into the soft anaesthetising language of "tragedy" - like a tsunami, or a car crash, rather than an entirely foreseeable consequence of public policy.
Last week's "management" was, however, especially brazen - even if it means, to underline Allison Pearson's point, that all the old Fleet Street rules about beating a path to the doors of the grieving have to be abandoned: as I noted last week, the one parent to express his views on LinkedIn has not been sought out by the sob-sisters.
So instead, every night since, British cities have burned. Two in particular caught my eye - Rotherham and Belfast. In the former, a Holiday Inn full of "migrants" was set alight:
ROTHERHAM - illegals inside the hotel. Some masked up. Some in the background can be seen holding weapons.
It's reported in the MSM that they were terrified. They don't look scared to me. pic.twitter.com/d5sUPnz8mn
— SL (@Steve_Laws_) August 5, 2024
Rotherham is the town where "the authorities" - police, politicians, social workers - turned a blind eye for years on end to the industrial-scale gang-rape and sex-slavery of white English girls by Pakistani Muslim predators. A decade ago, after one of their most courageous victims Sammy Woodhouse had been invited up to Downing Street to watch David Cameron furrow his brows and look concerned, I went to see Sammy and her friends in Rotherham and was told that, notwithstanding Dave's furrowed brow, it was all still going on. And they gave me the name of the shopping centre and I swung by and, after twenty minutes, saw it for myself - as Sammy and I have discussed regularly on The Mark Steyn Show over the years.
Back then there were officially estimated to be 1,400 victims of "grooming gangs". It must be many more now. And yet the authorities are so indifferent to the fate of these girls that they breezily assign thousands of "migrants" - almost all young Muslim men - to Rotherham! The "white slags" (as the coppers call them) were doubly violated - first by their rapists, then by the connivance of officialdom. But that's no reason not to set them up for a third time, is it? Maybe then you'll get the message: lie back and think of diversity.
As for Belfast, the mobs are said to have targeted a Syrian convenience store and the local Islamic Centre. But this is the line that caught my eye - from the Beeb, no less:
Those protesting against migrants held Irish tricolours and Union flags side by side.
Holy Mother of Jesus! They finally came up with an answer to the Irish Question!
In the scheme of things, as I pointed out to Simon Schama at that Munk Debate, the differences between Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists are minimal, but they have proved bedevilling over the centuries. So the good folk of Belfast are better placed than most to grasp that adding Afghans and Somalis to the mix is not something one should undertake lightly.
Also relevant is that Ulstermen understand that the perception that the state was on the side of one community over another set off thirty years of bloody violence. In Britain, the "far right" - ie, people who object to children being stabbed - are out on the streets, but so are gangs of Muslims, many with "bladed articles"...
Stay out of Birmingham right now! These people are serious weapons.
Hey #TwoTeirKeir @Keir_Starmer Live on Sky they are in the street openly carry swords. What are you going to do about it ???? pic.twitter.com/b6WkaGOtqh
— leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ (@LeilaniDowding) August 5, 2024
Yet the Muslim gangs are all but unreported in the "mainstream" media, unless they stumble into the live-shot and start yelling F-words at the reporter:
Sky News is forced to end a live interview after a gang of "hard-right thugs" harass the correspondent and mimic pulling a trigger.
Oh wait... pic.twitter.com/SVCnjvFsJb
— Samantha Smith (@SamanthaTaghoy) August 5, 2024
Fortunately, the respectable old-school wankerman cuts away lest the audience be discombobulated by an unnecessary complication in the narrative.
Meanwhile, Two-Tier Keir has announced the creation of a "standing army of specialist officers" to "protect mosques" and the Muslim community:
Shouldn't you be concerned about attacks on *all* communities?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2024
Indeed. Sir Keir has taken sides, quite openly, and in so doing repudiated the founding principle of modern policing: two centuries ago, Sir Robert Peel did not want his peelers to be seen as the Paris gendarmerie was - as a military occupier. That's why he dressed them not in military red but in civilian blue - ie, they were explicitly not a "standing army". But now a government that chooses not to enforce its national borders will be erecting them internally:
PM actually announced proposals to restrict the movement of those within the country.
— Laura Perrins (@LPerrins) August 2, 2024
They cannot restrict the movement of thousands of people breaking into the UK ILLEGALLY but will restrict the movement of natives.
THEY ARE TROLLING YOU.
This would seem as good a time as any to revive the question put by Mr Alderman Sidney, the Member for Stafford, to the Home Secretary Sir George Grey, Bt in the House of Commons in 1863. As reported by Hansard:
He wanted to know upon what principle of the Constitution it was that we were to have, in addition, a vast standing army of policemen, who were to be concentrated under the authority and direction of the Home Secretary?
In fairness to Sir George, he did not explicitly advertise his body of men as a "standing army" - because almost everyone would have objected. As the then Lord Mayor of London put it:
Why, the House had been in the habit yearly of protecting the country, and the constitution of the country, from the evils of a standing army by passing the Mutiny Bill, and yet the Right Hon Gentleman proposed a measure to give him the control of a body of 10,000 armed and disciplined men—an army which, under his direction, would be at liberty to come and go as it liked, to carry on any system of espionage, under no other control whatever.
Hey, welcome to Starmworld! Sir Keir's "vast standing army", openly proclaimed as such, will be pan-jurisdictional, although presumably under the operational control of that same thin-skinned goon of a Met commissioner, Mark Rooney, who responded to an entirely reasonable question about "two-tier policing" by seizing part of the reporter's microphone and hurling it to the ground. Has the "far right" mob burned Scotland Yard to the ground yet? Would it make any statistically detectable difference to the capital's crime rate?
Everywhere is Rotherham now. And the communities transformed by mass migration, from Birmingham to even Belfast, are being set up by Two-Tier Keir and Mike-Grab Mark. Starmer is not, as has been suggested, simply "tone-deaf". He is seizing his opportunity, as Washington did on J6 and Justin did with the Canadian truckers. You know how that worked out for law-abiding grannies on their first trip to America's capital, or for prairie donors who'd dropped fifty bucks via credit card on the Ottawa convoy. And you know how muted public protest about anything has been in either country since. The full powers of Britain's "system of espionage" - the 24/7 panopticon state - are about to be brought down on the despised masses. Because J6 was about a dodgy election and the truckers were objecting to lockdowns and vaccine mandates, but a pushback against mass migration is a threat to the absolute inviolable core uniparty policy. Oh, sure, you didn't do anything other than mouth off on Facebook. But, even as the cities are aflame, they'll still find time for you:
🚨🇬🇧 "Am I going to be locked up for the night? Do I need to bring my medications?"
Welcome to 2024 Britain where The Police arrive at your home to arrest you for comments made on Facebook.
As Britain descends into lawless chaos - the Governments priority clearly isn't fixing... pic.twitter.com/YmxBj92aCl
— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) August 5, 2024
To go back to that Union Jack-tricolour kumbaya moment in Belfast: Those guys finally figured it out. In Dublin, the same government that just a couple of years ago was mandating masks in public is now banning masks in public - because protecting remorseless demographic transformation trumps all else, even the next variant. In Dublin as in Belfast as in Paris as in Brussels, they don't care whether you're Prod or Papist or just another post-Christian Euro-pudding: they're going to screw you either way. Because in Britain and Europe, in the EU or out, the ruling class is agreed: you're the problem.
~We thank you for all your kind comments this last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.