Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I'll be here for 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.
~The latest stabbing of an English girl - eleven years old - is being reported mostly because the heroic figure on hand who stepped in to disarm the "knifeman" (a recent coinage but now routine in Fleet Street) was a plucky Muslim fellow called Abdullah.
Good for him - even if the not-so-subtle sub-text of the reports was: You get it yet, you lousy Islamophobes? We need immigrants to come here to do the jobs Britons won't do - like saving the little girl from being stabbed by some of the other immigrants we let in. You'd better hope there's a civic-minded Abdullah on hand the next time you're ordering a decaf macchiato and a stabbing breaks out, because there's certainly nothing recognisable as a Londoner among the baristas and sales clerks of the West End.
The perp, it transpires, is one "Ioan Pintaru" of no fixed abode. With that name, his abode would at one time have been fixed in Romania or thereabouts. But that's the great thing about all this vibrant "diversity": the natives get reduced to the bit parts. Mohammedan hero, Balkan baddie: no Anglo-Celts need be involved in this story from the New Naked City - well, accept for the victim, of course.
Come to think of it, even that cannot be said with certainty: the poor kid could be Tajik or Bhutanese. London has reached the exquisitely rarefied heights of diversity where it has everything except Londoners. Somewhere in The Prisoner of Windsor I quote Metternich's famous line that the Balkans begin in the Landstraße. In Sadiq Khan's Great World City both the Balkans and the dar al-Islam begin in Leicester Square. That seems a smart move.
Yet what was more striking to me than the have-a-go hero was that little girls and their mums can now be stabbed in broad daylight in the heart of tourist London. That's not the same as coming home late at night on a darkened street in a sketchy part of town. Leicester Square is one of the most famous addresses in the world. It's in the songs:
Goodbye, Piccadilly!
Farewell, Leicester Square!
It's a long long way to Tipperary...
Actually, not as long as it used to be. County Tipperary now boasts several mosques and Islamic cultural centres. So the contrast drawn in the song between the great metropolis and the small town of the author's grandparents is no longer applicable: you've got to go a much longer way from Leicester Square to be free of "diversity".
On GB News Matt Goodwin said that the UK's native whites would become a minority of the population by 2070:
Watch the full interview with @StevenEdginton: https://t.co/c2ksQeSUJX
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 9, 2024
I will be long gone by then, but I would bet that that Rubicon is surrendered well before 2070. You would have to be extremely optimistic to bet that a British Britain has another forty-six years left.
Just saying the quiet part out loud: "The white British population has decreased by 600k, while the minority population has increased by 1.2 million. So yes, lads, we're winning." pic.twitter.com/rJlTFDCepb
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 12, 2024
This ought to be news - the voluntary self-liquidation of the nations that built the modern world. As I said to Steve Paikin on Canadian telly over a decade-and-a-half ago, this is the biggest story of our time: if you're a writer, why would you not want to write about it? I used to get asked to fluff up the cobwebbed scripts of revived musical comedies, which I rather enjoyed, certainly when compared to writing about stabbed schoolgirls. But there aren't going to be any musicals in tomorrow's West End, nor Noël Coward, classic rock, or a zillion other things. Because the new Londoners don't dig 'em. Because when you lose your future you also lose your past. So you might as well write about the biggest story - the one that will determine what others we get to write.
Yet, sixteen years after my observation to Mr Paikin, the authorities would still rather "the biggest story of our time" remain untold. A week ago, I wrote:
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.
And so, just a week later, it has proved. Brendan O'Neill:
I'm worried that justice is turning into something like vengeance. That this isn't just law and order but also a kind of centrist revenge against the lower orders. Am I wrong?
He cites a few examples:
Stacey Vint from Middlesbrough who has been jailed for 20 months for pushing a wheelie bin at a line of riot police before falling flat on her face. She's an idiot, clearly. She might also be a bad person, I don't know. But nearly two years in the slammer for a failed bin attack on heavily armed police? Admit it, it's a bit much.
Or what about the gay couple, in Hartlepool, whose chief crime, as far as I can tell, was 'dancing and gesticulating at a line of police officers'. They also struggled as they were arrested. They have both been jailed for 26 months. Let's not relitigate the 'two-tier policing' debate, of which we've all had a gutful, but it's worth reminding ourselves that the knifeman who terrorised staff at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green in January, demanding to know their views on 'Israel and Palestine', was given a suspended sentence.
The United Kingdom, as I always say, is the land where everything is policed except crime. Under Scotland Yard and Britain's other woeful constabularies, convictions for reported rape and robberies are at all but statistically undetectable levels. But thoughtcrime the Starmtroopers can hunt down with ruthless efficiency. The gay couple in Hartlepool are an instructive example in the emerging hierarchy of identity groups. They were strolling back from the bingo, possibly a little over-lubricated, when they stumbled on a "far-right" "riot":
At that point he saw a 'red mist' and stepped in to defend Mailen. He was captured on video waving a finger at police officers and shouting at them: 'I pay your wages.'
He also refused to step back and a police dog was deployed which latched itself onto his buttock, almost dragging off his shorts, which [Crown prosecutor] Ms Masters said 'had the effect of dispersing the crowd'.
And don't think you need to dance in your shorts and commit the crime of yelling "I pay your wages". Just being a lethargic bystander is more than enough. From Belfast:
You will be refused bail even if you only watched riots from the sidelines, judge warns
They're teaching you a lesson: go gentle into that good Eurabian night - or else.
And in doing so they are ensuring that there will be many more stabbed schoolgirls on Britain's funeral pyre.
On this issue, politicians and policemen and judges have failed the people. If peaceful protest ("watching riots from the sidelines") is not to be permitted, there's only the other kind left.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly months - and especially 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.
