BY SEAN WALSH
The government’s response to the invasion of frustrated young men from sexually regressive and misogynistic cultures—men who are acculturated to casual violence and the cheapening of human life—is to insist that the incoming violence must be distributed “fairly” across the whole country.
That is not quite true. The instinctive response is not policy-related at all, but rather to gather some words—fair, share, reassure, etc.—which its hapless ministerial representatives can then throw around liberally on that morning’s news round, hoping that they will “take.”
Spells, in other words.
The people who run things have given up on persuasion and are opting instead for mass hypnosis. If Derren Brown can pretend to play Russian roulette on live TV, then this government can persuade us—or so it thinks—that its replacement strategy is not genuine national suicide. All illusions are possible when you oversee the stage settings.
Which brings us to the very specific case of Piddington, where the government is expected to, well, dump thousands of illegal migrants armed with Home Office pamphlets asking them not to sexually assault people, and high-visibility jackets to keep them safe when they wander about on the winding and formerly picturesque Cotswold lanes.
There are suspicions that the women of Piddington voted for Liberal Democrat candidates in both local and national elections and therefore endorse this insanity in theory, if not in practice. But we must keep in mind that nobody has been convicted of this offence, and that these are at most allegations. Even if all of them are guilty, it does not follow that they deserve all this to be inflicted on them. Women should be able to walk around at night in complete safety, no matter how provocative their previous voting records.
It could very well be true, on the other hand, that the residents of Piddington are guilty of the most frightful hypocrisy, and that the rest of us are entitled to a cheeky shot of schadenfreude as a result. But in a way I can’t help admiring the very British, eccentric, and creative pushback.
To declare independence from the rest of the country, to go for secession as an instrument of protest, is very much in keeping with the new culture of unnecessary devolution. It’s hard to see that the strategy will acquire the necessary constitutional escape velocity, but you have to admire the chutzpah of the attempt.
The philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser was once attacked by the police during a college campus riot. When asked for his reaction, he said that the assault was fair but nevertheless unjust. It was unjust because it was unprovoked, but fair because everyone else was attacked as well.
Morgenbesser had a genius for the aphoristic quip. And his point applies here as well. If something is intrinsically unjust, it doesn’t get any better just by being universally, or “fairly,” applied. And even if the government can get away with saying that distributing the invasion so that everyone is affected by it makes it fair, it can’t get away with the claim that it is therefore just.
An evil system isn’t made good because the evil is dispensed according to some algorithm of indiscrimination. A swindler who rips off rich and poor alike doesn’t ipso facto qualify as a decent sort deep down. There are many theories and interesting speculations around the identity and motivations of Jack the Ripper, but I’m yet to hear a convincing case that what he was doing in targeting working-class prostitutes in a poor part of London would have been fairer if he’d got himself over to Hampstead or Tunbridge Wells from time to time.
It probably seems as if my problem with what this government is doing has more to do with its presentation of policy as much as with the policy itself. And at the risk of sounding like one of those politicians who likes to ask a question then answer it himself, I’ll admit that there’s some—sorry, fairness—in that criticism.
But the English language hasn’t done anything to deserve being treated the way it’s being treated by government ministers who, frankly, struggle to speak it. She is as much a victim in all this as anyone else.
As for the policy itself, all that really needs to be said is that globalism is the ascendant ideology, that its architects hate the idea of a nation state, and therefore wish to kill off that idea in its current instantiations, and that there isn’t much the rest of us can do about that—unless we rescue the English language from its philistine captors.
It’s hard to overstate just how misogynistic this government is turning out to be. And it isn’t even the gentle misogyny of the Lea Dawson mother-in-law gag or the understandable frustration that comes with being stuck behind an old lady at a cash point machine. The Piddington tragicomedy is the government telling all women in this country that the very specific vulnerabilities they experience really don’t matter when set against the need to propitiate the gods of process.
In service of a disputable and historically recent fetish for human rights universalism, it is quite prepared to overlook how that will work out in practice.
This is Leftism all over, though, isn’t it? A love of the abstract principle conjoined to complete indifference to the consequences of its real-life application. Mrs. Jellyby moral reasoning.
And, once again, an insistence that social justice is all about causing misery and declaring this is fair provided everyone is as miserable as everyone else.