UK News Report #3
PLUS: bonus podcast episode with Louise Perry
Good morning, and welcome to the UK NEWS REPORT, my round-up of demoralising stories from around the country, specifically aimed at crushing the last remaining grains of optimism you may possess. This edition also features my recent podcast appearance on Louise Perry’s Maiden Mother Matriarch, for paid subscribers only below the paywall, where we talk about the recent by-election and its implications for the future of British politics.
It’s War
A remarkable opening sentence from former Foreign Office official Ameer Kotecha.
Nearly five years ago, on the day Kabul fell to the Taliban, I was among several thousand officials invited to mark World Afro Day (for those unaware: “a global day of celebration and liberation of Afro hair”) with a panel discussion featuring a director charged with matters of national security.
This week, with war raging in the Middle East and the RAF base in Cyprus under attack, the main news on the Foreign Office internal intranet was about the “New FCDO Capability Framework and self-assessment”, with all staff urged to “Take charge of your development”.
It’s a mystery as to why Britain has become such a laughing stock on the global stage, a sense reinforced by recent events. While France sent anti-drone systems to Cyprus to protect the island from Hezbollah attacks, HMS Dragon won’t arrive in the region for a week.
The response to the plight of the British in Dubai has been interesting. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said that British ‘tax exiles’ in the United Arab Emirates should have to pay for their rescue: ‘As we protect them, it’s only right for tax exiles to start paying taxes to fund our Armed Forces just like the rest of us do’.
It’s notable that they didn’t complain when we evacuated people from Sudan with far less claim to the British taxpayer’s largesse. As a locked account on Twitter put it, the Lib Dems are the most ‘populist’ party in Britain, possessing no real ideology or vision, only gimmicks that play well to their base - people who listen to The Rest is Politics and feel class antagonism against the crabs who have escaped the bucket.
He wasn’t the only one who felt unsympathetic to Deano; one left-wing journalist even used the line ‘No representation without taxation’, an idea once put forward by Alan B’Stard in an episode of The New Statesman. So you’re saying that the state should only help people who are taxpaying members of society? Interesting idea.
Incidentally, I’m off to Dubai next month, inshallah. Get in touch if you’re a subscriber and want to meet for a coffee. After that, I’ll be in Singapore, so likewise.
Hey, whatcha readin’ for?
It was World Book Day on Thursday, one of the less harmful made-up modern calendar events, even if Tony Blair had a hand in its creation. To mark the event YouGov put out yet another depressing poll about reading habits, showing that in the last year 40 per cent of Britons hadn’t read a single book. This is for the entire population - young people read far less than the average, so that book-reading is now considered genuinely eccentric among some teenagers. I’ve become very pessimistic about this subject since I started reading James Marriott’s views, and await his upcoming book with great interest. I used to observe my fellow Tube passengers’ ‘reading’ habits with mild sadness, but now I’m turning into Kevin Spacey’s character from Seven, filled with genuine disgust at all the people watching reels on their slop dispensers.
I know that some schools already do this, but perhaps they should all have compulsory reading time where everyone sits in silence and reads a book. Now that we’ve got the tech, we could use cameras to monitor their eyes to check they’re actually reading, and if the sensors detect that they’ve drifted off they could get a detention or, I don’t know, mild electric shocks. It would really install a love of reading in young people, but I imagine that the Woke Left would object.
Disproportionately cruel
In their 2024 manifesto, Labour pledged to counter the ‘disproportionate’ sectioning of black men detained under the Mental Health Act, a proposal based on the belief that any inequality of outcome must be proof of racism.
Rates of psychosis vary hugely by race in Britain, and this tragic condition is far more common among black men, although to what extent this is environmental depends; there may be underlying genetic factors, but we know that minority status can be a trigger for mental health problems, because many people find it alienating. Whatever the cause of this disparity, to deliberately not section the mentally ill for the sake of equity is incredibly irresponsible and cruel. Anti-racism has real world consequences.
On June 13, 2023, a severely mentally ill man named Valdo Calocane fatally stabbed three people in a rampage in Nottingham, two of his victims being teenagers.
Recently, the Times reported that:
The Nottingham triple killer carried out an earlier violent attack after being released by mental health professionals who had considered the “over-representation” of young black men in custody, a public inquiry has been told.
Valdo Calocane was in the grip of psychosis when he tried to batter down a neighbour’s front door, frightening her so much that she jumped out of a first-floor window and badly injured her back.
Mental health professionals had been “leaning towards” sectioning Calocane, who had been arrested for criminal damage earlier that day for attacking another neighbour’s door. However, he was released after “the team of professionals considered the research evidence that shows over-representation of young black males in detention”, the inquiry was told.
It also emerged that an officer claimed that the police could not ‘link two prior violent incidents, which occurred on the same day, investigated by the same force, because of the suspect’s “data protection” rights.’
I previously wrote about the Nottingham murders, and how the aftermath was co-ordinated by the authorities to give a sense of spontaneous unity; that sort of smoke and mirror routine just doesn’t work anymore, as the subsequent Southport tragedy showed.
In brief
A new report has found that racism and ‘poor’ staff relationships are factors in maternity care failings. And what is the proof of that racism?
Muslim families described feeling discriminated against on the basis of their religion and feeling unable to raise concerns due to fear that discriminatory attitudes may result in poor treatment for their baby. For example, a parent listening to Qur’anic recitation was told by a nurse to “turn it down; I don’t want to hear it”.
LGBTQ+ families reported a lack of inclusivity, with some reporting that services focus narrowly on “mothers” and “fathers” and fail to reflect diverse family structures.
There are 45 groups of pro-Iran extremists operating in universities across the UK.
‘Whereas the graduate premium has increased in most rich countries, it has plummeted in Britain since 1997.’
An immensely sinister TikTok from the Yookay terrorism police. Incidentally, in the USSR domestic enemies were prosecuted under the guise of countering ‘disinformation’.
An interesting report from Horden, County Durham,
In the past three years, a group of Nigerian families has moved into the area. Most are employed as engineers or health and social care workers, and many have sent their children to Cotsford Primary - of its 182 pupils, as many as 30 are now Nigerian. But they’ve become embroiled in the country’s immigration debate.
Historically most immigration has been to dynamic large cities which already experienced a great deal of churn. The key difference with the Boriswave is that migration has accelerated in poor regional towns, driven in part by the fact that these areas are heavily reliant on public sector organisations which are keen to recruit cheaper staff from overseas. This in part explains the sudden shift in public mood.
Since 2002, stripping out the effects of inflation, the number of households getting over £40,000 a year in benefits has grown from 45,000 to 192,000.
More prisoners have been recalled to jail than have been released early since Labour took office, according to a Tory Party analysis. Reoffending is a big problem in every country, which is why prison works.
The Free Speech Union ‘has won a landmark High Court victory against the Police Federation for unlawfully suspending police officers Richard Cooke and Rick Prior after they questioned whether the police were “institutionally racist”.’ The British police are, in fact, institutionally anti-racist.
The BBC has really surpassed itself, filming a 44-minute documentary, in Gaelic, about a ‘“black trans woman activist” who has left “her career as a drag performer” in Glasgow in order to carry out research for a university on how indigenous people in South America have “fought against ignorance”. Can someone explain the BBC’s obsession with drag queens? They seem to have a whole department purely devoted towards drag-related news.
And in yet another case of ‘worth the licence fee alone’, there was also this first person soft focus story. As I’ve said before, the BBC needs to stop producing this sort of slop; these hard-luck stories are uninteresting morality tales designed to promote the beliefs of the regime, and frequently misleading.
Thanks for subscribing, and below the paywall my beloved paid subscribers can access the podcast.
