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“Black students at the University of Oxford who feel traumatised by the killing of George Floyd will be able to apply for a reduction in workload and special consideration in their exams.” That line came from a a report in the “iPaper” from June 15th 2020, six years ago today. The report continued:
The extra support was outlined in an open letter sent to students by the university on Monday.
Signed by the vice chancellor Louise Richardson and the heads of Oxford’s colleges, it was apparently sent in response to concerns raised about the welfare of black students, following the police killing of Mr Floyd in the US last month.
Click on the link to read the “Open letter to Oxford students from the Vice-Chancellor and Heads of House”. Besides devaluing the degrees of all black Oxford students who took their finals in 2020 whether the students wanted “special consideration” or not, the letter said much else of interest. For instance:
“While much is being done by many committed people, we acknowledge that we are rightly reproached for our collective failure to address the issue of systemic racism properly, and that we have work to do.”
At any one time there are several hundred Americans studying at Oxford. The terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11th 2001 killed 2,977 people. Oxford University did not offer its American students special consideration in their exams for the trauma of seeing their nation attacked and thousands of their compatriots murdered. Oxford did not declare itself “rightly reproached” for its collective failure to address the issue of anti-Americanism properly, though a much clearer line could be drawn from the output of certain Oxford academics to the 9/11 attacks than could be drawn from Oxford to George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department.
In the quarter century since then, scores of other countries have had their citizens murdered en masse by Islamist terrorists. I would hope and assume that students whose family members were murdered in the name of Islam were offered special consideration in their exams, but if the leadership of the university publicly offered it to all students from Indonesia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, India, Pakistan, France, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Canada, Australia, Yemen, Syria, Denmark, Tunisia, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Turkey, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Somalia, Niger, Lebanon, the Philippines, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Uruguay, Ivory Coast, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Iran, Finland, the Netherlands, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Austria, and, above all, Israel when their respective countries were attacked, I never heard about it.
I listed many nations above, but when the University said “We’re determined to support our Black students in every way we can” after some of them said they had been traumatised by George Floyd’s death, the support was offered to those students on grounds of race, not nation. Did it offer white students, or brown students – or black students, come to that – similar support when people of the same race as them were murdered in large numbers by Islamists to the support it offered black students when one man was killed by the American police? Did the leadership of the university issue a public invitation to Jewish students of all nationalities to claim extra time in their exams for the trauma of having to read about, hear about, or see on video the copious and horrible evidence of the thousand-plus murders of Jews on October 7th 2023? When Henry Nowak died just as George Floyd had, pleading “I can’t breathe” to the police officers restraining him, did Oxford “reach out” to its white students to “stand with them during these difficult moments”?
Many dismiss the type of arguments I have made above as “Whataboutery” or “whataboutism”. “Whataboutery” is the older term, having originated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The idea behind it was that when every attempt to get people to agree that some particular terrorist act was wrong was immediately countered by the cry of “What about [insert similar atrocity by the other side here]?”, it became impossible to de-escalate the conflict. Perhaps it did make sense to disparage the practice of endlessly citing old injustices in the Northern Irish context, but I think that to cite a current or historical parallel and ask “Why are these two similar situations not treated the same way?” is more often right than wrong. People of all races should be treated equally. That is the only form of “racial justice” that is actually just. Individual justice is also the only form of racial justice that is stable. Every deviation from the simple yet profound principle of equal treatment, however well-intentioned, is like stretching an elastic band. Either the elastic snaps back, which might cause injuries from the speed of the contraction but at least restores balance, or the elastic breaks – in which case society goes to the other stable pattern, that of considering those outside the tribe to have no rights at all.
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Related post: The main reason so many people fear Islam
Remember that photo of Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement? Leaving aside the question of whether George Floyd’s death was murder – the late Niall Kilmartin thought it was not – it was inevitable that people would eventually ask why, if the then Leader of the Opposition and now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was obliged to get down on his knees and beg forgiveness because the police in a foreign country had killed one man, should not Muslim leaders and opinion-formers make some similar acknowledgement that all these thousands upon thousands of murders preceded by a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” had something to do with Islam? Why can’t there be – why is there not – a “Kafir Lives Matter” movement?
Sir Keir Starmer is set to announce sweeping reforms tomorrow banning under-16s from 10 major social media platforms, including X, but not the Left-wing platform Bluesky.
– Toby Young
But let us take the question seriously, because it deserves to be. What does it actually mean, to be fit to govern?
It is not, I think, what the managerial mind supposes. It is not a glossy CV, nor a safe pair of hands, nor a tidy communications grid. Strip away the cant and ask the question the common Englishman (and our Scots, our Welsh, our Ulstermen will forgive me the shorthand, for the inheritance is theirs every bit as much as ours) has always put, plainly, to anyone who would rule him: what is government actually for?
The answer is older than any party in this room, older than this Union itself, this Union, our great Union. It is this. Defend the realm. Keep the peace. Hold the law level over the head of the richest man and the poorest alike. And then, having done those few hard things well, leave us our liberty and our property, and get out of the way. That is the whole of it. That is the inheritance of the common law, the law that stood here before Parliament and will stand here after it, the law that William Blackstone, Oxford’s own, took down out of the air and set in order so that every man and woman in these islands might know their rights. Measured against that standard, fitness to govern is not a question of experience. It is a question of spine.
And that is precisely where the parties opposite fail, and Reform does not. For fitness, properly understood, is the willingness to say what you want and to mean it, and to bring with you a team ready to put its shoulder to the national wheel and push.
– Gawain Towler giving an absolutely stonking speech.
“Labour’s spyware plan for phones is straight out of North Korea”, writes Silkie Carlo in the Telegraph.
Quote:
The technological reality of Sir Keir Starmer’s demand is extraordinary: that every smartphone in Britain must be child-locked. That means two enormous changes for every one of us: first, our phones will restrict our internet access to child-friendly content only, and second, government-mandated AI software will constantly monitor our messages, video calls and photo albums for verboten activity.
The only way to escape Starmer’s Great British Firewall and get regular internet access is to undergo a digital ID check on the device to register yourself as an adult user.
Convenient, perhaps, for a Prime Minister who has failed to get a digital ID system through the front door.
This is a total reshaping of modern civil liberty – a remodelling of internet access, a strangulation of freedom of information, and a death sentence for online anonymity and privacy. That such extreme, illiberal measures could be more appealing to our politicians than the more natural and effective solution of parental responsibility reveals a deeper malaise in British culture.
The uncomfortable truth is that many parents no longer want the burden of supervising their children in the digital playground. Too many, stretched by work and time pressures, would rather outsource that responsibility – first to big tech as both the playmate and the nanny, and ultimately to the state to act as Big Brother.
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But the price that the rest of the country will pay for the slide towards infantilising control of the internet is significant. In every other democracy, smartphones are portals to the largest library in human history. In Starmer’s Britain, those same devices are being devalued to become, in effect, state-controlled spyware in our pockets.
Our leaders usually condemn the disorder and violence that follows, but will refuse to discuss the triggers in any depth. Anyone who asks what can be done about horrors like that inflicted on Stephen Ogilvie will be accused of stoking division, exploiting a tragedy and courting the far right.
But something can and must be done. It is simply no longer sustainable to force working-class communities to endure such levels of terror, to bear the brunt of the elites’ open-door experiment – to pay the ‘blood price’, as Brendan O’Neill describes it, of the establishment’s virtue-signalling. Practically every day brings new horrors that ordinary folk are simply expected to put up with. On the very same day as the Sudanese suspect was charged with attempted murder, four Afghan nationals appeared in court, all charged with the alleged rape of a Bristol schoolgirl. From gang rapes in Brighton and grooming gangs in Norwich to child rape in Warwickshire, countless British citizens continue to suffer at the hands of men who shouldn’t be here. Yet this barely seems to trouble our cloistered political class.
– Fraser Myers
Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.
– Signal official statement
“Labour deputy says Farage is a threat to democracy and calls for misinformation clampdown”, the Guardian reports.
Reform UK is destabilising British democracy by spreading divisive material that is being amplified by bots and troll farms, Labour’s deputy leader has said.
Lucy Powell called for tighter laws on social media giants to tackle misinformation, arguing the online space was “open to wealthy individuals, and bad state actors”.
It’s open to everybody, even bad state actors like the UK.
She also highlighted the multimillion-pound donations that have bolstered Reform’s election war chest and “fund their powerful online campaigns”.
Reform UK should put that acknowledgement that they are running a powerful online campaign in their next ad.
Arguing Nigel Farage and his party posed a threat to democracy, she said the law should be strengthened to “tackle the scourge of dis- and misinformation which is ripping communities apart and undermining us all”.
She said Reform’s “exploitation of online algorithms on social media sites is well documented”, as was the way the party had benefited from “bots and troll farms to amplify support”.
A Reform spokesperson said Powell’s claims that its messages were spread by bots and troll farms was “completely untrue” and called her a “conspiracy theorist desperately trying to distract from a failing Labour government”.
“Rather than smearing voters and demanding more state censorship, Labour should be focused on fixing the messes they’ve created,” the spokesperson said.
Some note-worthy observations and comparisons in no particular order:
– Sikh leaders have come out to condemn the behaviour of the offender and his family and to show their support for the victim. This contrasts noticeably with Muslim leaders after a Muslim atrocity, where the emphasis is on disowning the perpetrator and pretending he wasn’t really one of them
– The murder does not appear to religiously inspired. This was a murder by someone who happens to be Sikh. There is no suggestion that he thought his actions were justified by his religion.
– That Sikhs have cover for going about armed is largely irrelevant to most knife crime. Removing daggers from law-abiding Sikhs is not going to stop murderers from carrying knives.
– The lack of concern by the police for the victim is palpable. Derek Chauvin, however, had already called for the ambulance before he and his team had to restrain George Floyd. They continued to beg for the ambulance to arrive all the way through the incident.
– The resulting angry crowds are not burning down shops and looting. Sikh temples are not being attacked: their anger is directed – correctly – at the police.
– No-one in authority has taken the knee.
– The Pedant-General summarising the situation rather well.
To which I would add to anyone saying this horror should not be politicised: the incident is intrinsically political.
Why? Because the incident centres not just on the murder itself and murderer’s use of the word-of-power ‘racist‘, but also on the subsequent actions of the police, who responded to that word-of-power as the user intended them to.
So, this is all political because the police are the literal enforcers of the state’s will, responding as they have been trained to respond. This is a consequence of decades of establishment policy decisions by both Labour and ‘Conservative’ governments, a product of politically directed institutional police culture.
“When one your tribe is murdered, I call for calm and unity because that is according to your principles; when one of my tribe is murdered, I call for protests and riots because that is according to my principles.”
– Alice Smith on the stark difference between reactions to the deaths of Henry Novak and George Floyd. She’s paraphrasing Frank Herbert.
But tell me, there’s no “National White Police Association” in the UK, so why is there a “National Black Police Association” and a “National Association of Muslim Police” in the UK?
A poll showing Reform ahead of Labour among trade unionists is being treated as a bombshell. It should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Anyone, that is, except the union leadership.
[…]
Danny Kruger understood this before most. His public conversations with the leadership of the PCS and the National Education Union, in which he made perfectly plain to them that a Reform government would not be conducting its relationships with the civil service unions on the terms to which they had become accustomed. A Reform Government will not be bullied, and will apply the law. As we can now see he was directing his comments to people whose members, in significant numbers, might well vote for him. The officers sit there with their lanyards and their institutional memories and their absolute confidence that the working class would do as it was directed. The members, meanwhile, were doing something else entirely.
This is the structural problem that no amount of emergency press releases will solve. The union movement in Britain has, over the course of a generation, undergone a quiet transformation that its leadership has been careful not to notice. The headquarters of the major unions are populated, to a remarkable degree, by people who have spent their entire careers in the union movement. Many went straight from university to a union research department or political officer role and have not left. They are committed, intelligent, and hardworking. They are also, by inclination, temperament, and life experience, entirely disconnected from the people they purport to represent.
– Gawain Towler, who really has been blogging up a storm lately over on Fainting in Coils
Stop it, John Crace! I officially only read the Guardian to mock it. It’s confusing when I read a piece from the Guardian’s political sketch-writer mocking Nicola Sturgeon and find myself laughing out loud:
Nicola’s only crime was to love too much. And to not notice the Jaguar on the drive
You know how it is. You wake up and look out the bedroom window. You see a brand new Jaguar worth £81,000 parked in the driveway. You smile to yourself. That’s what you love about your husband. Always nipping out to the shops to buy himself treats. And where’s the harm in that? No one can say he isn’t worth it. And a new car is only a trifle compared with a motor home. That’s just Pete being Pete.
You get dressed and go downstairs. Your husband is already in the kitchen making you breakfast. “Fancy a coffee?” he asks. You nod. You’re busy not reading the SNP accounts. “Which machine would you like me to make it from?” he asks. “The basic Jura? The Jura Z8? Or the Miele? I always think the Z8 makes the best flat white. And what milk would you like?”
You open the back door and look at the Galloway and friesian cows he bought the previous week. Both are grazing on the lawn. You reckon you will try the Galloway today. You smile. You count yourself lucky that you are married to such an amazing man. Someone who can still surprise you after all these years you’ve lived together. Never change, darling man. Never change.
For those who ken not the tale of the Fall of the House of Sturgeon, Mr Crace explains in the next few paragraphs:
On Sunday morning, Nicola Sturgeon gave her first broadcast interview since her former husband, Peter Murrell, pleaded guilty to embezzling more than £400,000 from money donated to the SNP by supporters.
This was Nicola as a woman who had been badly wronged. Yet if you had looked behind the lights of the makeshift studio, you might just have been able to see the outline of a man in the shadows. That man was her lawyer, Aamer Anwar. Because who among us doesn’t need their brief on hand when doing a sit-down chat with Laura Kuenssberg? Probably just a precaution to make sure Laura didn’t nick one of the Montblanc fountain pens.
The interview basically consisted of just one question. How could you possibly not have known that your husband had been on the take? Your house was basically a multimillionaire’s remake of the Generation Game. A non-stop conveyor belt of high-value goodies. The garage alone was full of salt and pepper grinders worth more than £2,000 a shot. And even if it had never occurred to you Pete had basically stolen the lot, surely you must have thought his compulsive shopping habit had got badly out of hand?
Meanwhile, the writers at The National are making the best of things. One of yesterday’s headlines says, “‘Fundamental flaw’ in Sturgeon and Murrell having top SNP roles, says FM”. A Scottish friend gives rare praise to First Minister John Swinney and says, “He’s right. There was a fundamental flaw in Sturgeon and Murrell having top SNP roles. The flaw was that they were Sturgeon and Murrell.”
If you want to keep up with Scotland’s “ultimate power couple”, check out the brands listed in this article from the BBC: “Coffee machines, fountain pens and Grand Theft Auto: How Murrell spent the money”.
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