Programming note: Join me tonight for the latest episode of our brand new Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a piece of speculative fiction from 1907 on the world of the early twenty-first century.
~Mark Carney is a former Governor of the Bank of England, a former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the principal architect of the anti-Brexit panic-porn "Project Fear". It is somewhat surprising to me that he can still find gainful employment anywhere on earth. However, he is Klaus ("Vee penetrate zuh cabinets") Schwab's handpicked choice for next Prime Minister of Canada, so I am making an effort to take him seriously.
On Saturday, the United States imposed twenty-five per cent tariffs on imports from Canada. So what was Carney tweeting about? Go on, take a wild guess...
Let's take a new approach to fighting climate change.https://t.co/KRLQbGjigL pic.twitter.com/wFcUETlH6E
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) February 1, 2025
So Brexit necessitates Project Fear. But punitive twenty-five per cent tariffs means Project Nothing to Fear Here, and we can go blathering on about the same old drivel secure in the knowledge that half the country will always vote for virtue-signalling bollocks even as it slides off the cliff...
~Speaking of tariffs, from our "Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive" files, Exhibit A - Chuck Schumer:
Chuck Schumer claims that President Trump's tariffs will raise the price of beer because "most of it comes from Mexico" while holding a can of corona.
This might be the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen a politician do lmfao. pic.twitter.com/z4Z0W22gUe
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 3, 2025
~Had I been in the UK on Saturday, I would certainly have attended the Tommy Robinson "Stop the Isolation" rally in London, at which many old friends were present - Kathy Gyngell, Sammy Woodhouse, Norman Fenton... Mr Robinson is being held in solitary confinement for eighteen months - and the evil Starmer regime is now denying him any visitors whatsoever. For purposes of comparison, just in case Sir Keir the celebrated "human rights" lawyer has forgotten, Nelson Mandela on Robben Island was put in solitary only for short periods when they found him in possession of smuggled newspaper clippings and was permitted one visitor every six months.
Officially, Tommy Robinson has been gaoled on a civil contempt charge. Over at The Conservative Woman, Kathy Gyngell provides further context:
It's salutary that the last time that any journalist was imprisoned for contempt of court in England was 1963. Sentences of three months' and six months' imprisonment, for a Mr. Reginald Foster and Mr. Brendan Mulholland respectively, were condemned at the time by MPs as being totally out of proportion to their offence. How out of proportion, then, is 18 months' solitary, when the breach was admitted some 60 years later? Why ever not a suspended sentence, since the prison estate couldn't guarantee his safety without condemning him to solitary confinement?
When the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror were found guilty for breaching contempt of court laws in their coverage of the conviction of Levi Bellfield for the murder and abduction of Milly Dowler, they were fined; their editors did not get a prison sentence.
It is hard not to see that contempt of court has been weaponized to silence him, the sentencing to get him out of the way.
In the last five years, citizens of western nations seem to have accepted that advanced societies are entitled to a certain number of political prisoners - the J6ers in America, the truckers in Canada, and in England people who think little girls shouldn't be stabbed by ricin-manufacturing scions of families who should never have been in the country in the first place. But I think Kathy is missing the point somewhat when she references a prison administration that "couldn't guarantee his safety without condemning him to solitary confinement". The fact that prison is unsafe for Tommy Robinson is the point.
Starmer, like so much of Britain's depraved political class, is a cold, unfeeling bastard. Do you think he lost a minute's sleep over his responsibility for the death of Peter Lynch? Mr Lynch engaged in non-violent protest over the Southport girls and Two-Tier Keir and his biddable judge decided to upgrade it to a capital offence. "They Want You Dead", as our headline put it.
The Prisoner of Windsor, my whimsical inversion of Anthony Hope from a couple of years back, includes a scene in which a psychotic Home Secretary muses on one of her prisoners, gaoled for contempt:
'There was an Australian blogger,' she wheezed. 'Mouthing off about "Londonistan" and "Eurabia". We were shutting down a free-speech demo in Luton, and he got lippy with a copper. Then in court he started swearing at the judge. Very Oz. Got thirty days for contempt in HMP Tea-Cosy. Someone in the department thought it might be a big up-yours to these "citizen-journalists" if we transferred him somewhere harder. I sort of knew where they were going with this, but I signed off on it anyway. Third night he was there, six of the jihad boys jumped him. He's a vegetable now, so no more blogging...
'I thought I'd feel bad about it... So I was surprised, after a day or two, that I felt fine. Made it easier to do it again ...and again.'
Last Wednesday in Sweden, Salwan Momika, a supposedly "controversial" anti-Islam Assyrian partial to Koran burning, was livestreaming on Tik-Tok to thousands of viewers when a handful of men bust into his flat and killed him.
The Swedish state's response to this murder has been pitiful, but somehow the British state's managed to be even worse. A social-media type in Manchester decided, in memory of the late Mr Momika, to livestream a Koran-burning of his own. At which point the Assistant Chief Wanker of the Brit wanker coppers, Stephanie Parker, swung into action and made what she boasted was a "swift arrest":
'The Homeless Hacker' @DigitalVagrant, who live-streamed the burning Koran in Manchester today, has been arrested by the super-efficient British Police for the heinous crime of Islamophobia.
The 47-year-old remains in custody after the incident next to the memorial - which... pic.twitter.com/Y00rIxjofv
— Imtiaz Mahmood (@ImtiazMadmood) February 1, 2025
Greater Manchester Police is, even by the standards of the English constabulary, revoltingly corrupt. One notes, for example, that Assistant Chief Constable Parker and her colleagues are incapable of making any "swift arrests" when her community's twelve-year-old girls are being gang-raped by Muslim paedophiles. But, even so, Stephanie Parker is taking it to the next level. Keir's two tiers:
*On the one hand, if you douse a naked schoolgirl in petrol and dance around her with lit matches, GMP is positively insouciant.
*On the other hand, if you dance around an inanimate object such as a book with lit matches, Assistant Chief Constable Parker can't kick your door down fast enough.
Greater Manchester Police, like many institutions of the British state, has crossed over to the other side. They want you to know that:
This is the moment @DigitalVagrant was arrested by Greater Manchester Police for the crime of burning the Quran.
Do you think they chose these officers intentionally?
[Footage by @TheCynicalBrit_ ] pic.twitter.com/rpG0RSjO00
— Basil the Great (@Basil_TGMD) February 2, 2025
A masked mutaween enforcing Islamic apostasy laws on the streets of Manchester.
By contrast, as I observed on UK telly three years ago, in Oldham (which is part of Stephanie Parker's jurisdiction) the rape gangs procure their victims in the very lobby of the police station:
🚨 ICYMI...
'Inquiries do not succeed in changing the culture in those towns'
Mark Steyn gives his opinion of grooming gangs in Oldham.
📺 Freeview 236, Sky 515, Virgin 626
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 4, 2022
💻 GB News on YouTube https://t.co/KHMl3BS8eC pic.twitter.com/DTnqRqKAkg
For the benefit of non-Brits, I should explain that an ASBO in an "Anti-Social Behaviour Order", a Blairite innovation used by Stephanie Parker and her evil constabulary to pseudo-criminalise, among others, Samantha and her mother. So in Oldham the police station is the one-stop cop shop for all your paedo needs ...and the gang-rape victim is harassed as the real criminal.
Will the Koran-burner also die in prison and add another notch to Sir Keir's glorious escutcheon?
I am not sure England, "land of hope and glory, mother of the free", can be saved at this point.
~In the old days in Fleet Street, it was well understood by every hack that you needed three to make a trend. On Wednesday dozens died in Washington in a midair collision at Reagan National that should never have happened. On Friday more died in an air ambulance that nose-dived into a row of houses thirty seconds after takeoff in Philadelphia.
A third? On Sunday a Houston-New York United flight had to be evacuated after one of the wings burst into flames as it began taxi-ing to the runway.
Or maybe Chicago's O'Hare, where a flight from Kalamazoo landed and hit a tug vehicle, sending the driver to hospital with life-threatening injuries.
Critical air safety system NOTAM goes down nationwide
From the consumer's perspective, air travel in the United States has been, since 9/11, lousy, unpleasant and incompetent. But passengers tend to assume that's a front-of-house thing and that, behind the scenes, everyone knows what they're doing. Are we entirely sure about that?
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with my column on the DC air disaster, with a Saturday follow-up on Philadelphia. My weekly music show was a cavalcade of song from Al Jolson to Luther Vandross, and Rick McGinnis's movie date offered Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Dorothy Malone and Gig Young in Young at Heart. Our Sunday Song of the Week started in New Jersey and took off for the stars. And our marquee presentation was our current Tale for Our Time - Robert Hugh Benson's extraordinarily prescient Lord of the World: Click for Part Fifteen, Part Sixteen and Part Seventeen. Part Eighteen airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy this weekend asking the fentanyl cartel next door if they knew how to score some avocado, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We're thrilled by all those across the globe - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Surrey to the Solomon Islands - who've signed up to be a part of it. We have quite a bit of fun in The Mark Steyn Club, with audio adventures, video poems, planet-wide Q&As, and much more (heart attacks permitting). We appreciate the Club is not to everyone's taste, but, if you're minded to give it a go, either for a full year or a three-month experimental period, we'd love to have you. You can find more details on The Mark Steyn Club here - and, if you've a loved one who'd like something a little different for his or her birthday, don't forget our special Gift Membership.
