The Judge RANTS!
Date: 09/05/04
Who Are The Real Barbarians?
Hell hath no fury like a publicity-seeker forced out of the
limelight.
Robert Kilroy-Silk, the man who once said he would be Prime
Minister, who helped launch the drive to rid the Labour party of
troublesome people like...well, socialists; who then immediately went
off to a highly lucrative future as a media tart, and lost that cushy
little number when he started spouting vicious tosh against Arab
civilisation in his newspaper column for the deeply regrettable Sunday
Express; well, he's back.
He has just been appointed as a candidate in the forthcoming
European Parliament elections on behalf of the self-styled UK
Independence Party in the East Midlands of England - an area with which
he has no obvious connections. This in itself is interesting, as one of
UKIP's basic yells is all to do with "unaccountable politicians
from far away who know nothing about us making basic decisions about
our everyday lives". Then why pick an outsider as their candidate?
Oh, the originally-selected candidate was 'persuaded to stand aside';
and one suspects that democracy never entered into the equation at all.
Mr. Killjoy-Sick is, of course, perfectly matched with his new
ideological soulmates. After all, the offending article I referred to
stated that Arab culture and civilisation has nothing to teach us -
never has had; and he categorised all Arabs (Mr. Killwog-Slick is an
Equal Opportunities Bigot) as "suicide bombers, limb amputators and
women repressors".
UKIP's leaflets in their campaign in the East Midlands could
have
been written with such a candidate in mind: indeed, they could have
been written by him. Here a just a few quotes:
"The EU is nothing more than a devilish conspiracy to deliver
a quasi-communist-socialist-federal dream state."
"[I]t is inspired by envy, greed and self-serving ambition
that dictates if they can't beat us they will drag us down to their level
because they can't bear to see a free and democratic country like the
UK doing better than they are".
"predators are at the gate"
"no one and nothing is safe from the barbarians in our midst"
Now, I did A-level History (albeit very badly), and I can see
certain historic precedents in this kind of screaming diatribe.
Unfortunately, English libel law being what it is, it is safer for me
to refrain from drawing even the most obvious parallels. Suffice it to
say that I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see Westminster set on
fire and the blame being placed on, say, an Albanian or a Kurd.
Let's examine some of their claims, shall we boys and girls?
The idea that the EU has anything remotely to do with Communism
should give some indication of the level of reality inhabited by those
making the claim. Twenty five states, each of them avowedly capitalist
in one way or another, and where Communist or similar parties play only
the most minor rôle (if any) in national political life. Most of
those governments (the UK, Italy and many of the eastern states in
particular) put the desires and demands of 'the business community'
(and if you want an image of what such a 'community' might look like,
try imagining sharks swimming in their own shit) before the needs of
the people. And these are the governments which are handing over their
precious sovereignty to a 'socialist federal superstate'! I find it
difficult to imagine that the French, for example, with all their hauteur
and memories of gloire (thanks, Mr. Earnshaw, some parts of
your lectures did take root) would cede a single unnecessary morceau
of their political, economic or cultural identity even in the name of
peace and co-operation.
And 'they' want to drag 'us' down to 'their'
level? And what level is that, I wonder? Is it the level where 'they'
have a far higher average income than 'us'? Where they have
better pensions and welfare provisions than we do in this combination
of Disneyland, Ruritania and a bad Ealing comedy? Or is it the level
where 'they' have far fairer and more equal societies and economies
than those of us who have the undying good fortune to live in this
latterday wirtschaftswunder, where the gap between the rich and
the rest widens with every passing day, and the tax burden has been
progressively transferred from the incomes of the wealthy to the
necessary expenditure of the poor?
Or do they mean that we are being dragged down to the level
where
the night-time streets are not full of ultra-aggressive drunks (of both
genders) and where you can actually walk down the streets in daylight
hours without the good old British privilege of being casually effed at
by a passing ten-year-old? Good heavens! Raise the drawbridge, Effie!
Here they come, the uncivilised heathen wretches!
Yes, there are barbarians in our midst - most of them were born
here. And the predators (remember my shark image of a moment ago?) are
heading in from Houston, New York and Seattle, not from Hamburg,
Nürnberg or Sevilla. And it's also true that no-one is safe from
them. That's how our utilities and many of the other public enterprises
sold off in the Margaret Thatcher Everything-Must-Go Fire Sale of the
eighties ended up in the hands of Americans (and even some Europeans,
God Save The Mark!).
I had sometimes wondered what had happened to the Flat Earth
Society; you know, that bunch of people who, even when faced with all
the scientific evidence and pin-down-able facts that they were wrong,
insisted that no, they were still absolutely correct and that such
evidence was 'bad science' or devilishly-devised propaganda conjured up
by the Freemasons, the Vatican and Sir Alec Douglas-Home simply in
order to discredit them.
(This sort of delusion can strike in unlikely places: I once
heard
of a very distinguished practitioner of one of the hard sciences who,
nonetheless, was president of a society dedicated to the idea that the
Ark Of The Covenant was buried under the Hill Of Tara).
For some time, I thought they were now running the oil industry,
or
possibly the recording biz - two areas of the 'business community'
where denial of reality has always traditionally brought high rewards.
But now it becomes clear; they are in politics and they are indeed "in
our midst".
So what motivates UKIP? Bog-standard ignorance and intolerance,
of
course; but also an inability to countenance the notion that the world
does actually turn and, in doing so, changes. That and a wilful
misinterpretation of history; one in which Brave Britain nobly stood
alone against tyranny (something which certainly won't wash with Iraqis
now any more than it was likely to be a view shared by Indians,
Africans, Palestinians or even Americans in the past); one in which, as
we know to certainty from the films, darling Johnny Mills and dear
Dickie Attenborough beat the living daylights out of The Hun.
They are greatly assisted by the media in the Great Obfuscation,
of
course. This is at its apogee in the press, where the papers owned by
once-and-future North Americans have a vested interest in protecting
their proprietors against the actions for abuse of position which any
half-sane free society would have brought against them long ago. The "plug-ugly,
sub-animal yells" (© John Cooper Clarke) of these rags against
those seeking refuge or simply a better opportunity here is a part of
the weaponry of brute ignorance, and one which they use like Howitzers
against the generally benign instincts of the public, softening them up
so that they can be safely assumed to have no further resistance to
whatever brutality may be initiated in the name of 'The Country' or
'National Security'. But it is to be found elsewhere, too; it is
difficult to keep count of the hours of World War II films shown on
terrestrial TV here (they seem to fill Saturday afternoons on BBC2, for
example). More worryingly when, back on May 1, the ceremonies were
taking place to mark the entry of ten new members of the EU, virtually
every other member state's national TV services carried the events
live. Here, ITV couldn't be bothered at all; and the BBC shuffled the
whole thing off on to one of its little-watched digital channels. A
symptom and a symbol. Is it any wonder that the population at large is
so badly informed?
But what motivates the members of UKIP is far more sinister. It
is
sheer ranting intolerance, which manifests itself in the screaming
quotes I've included in this piece. The world they inhabit is one of
'Us' and 'Them', where the 'Us' are the upstanding, white Anglos like
the nieces of bishops courageously defending their maidenly virtue
against a mob of swarthy foreigners ('Them') seeking to sell them into
prostitution in Rio de Janeiro or Port Said. It is the world of Bulldog
Drummond and other suchlike fantasies created by those who believed
that their 'race' (whatever it may be) was innately superior to others.
Oh, foreigners might be quite charming in their way, of course, but
ultimately were not to be trusted.
UKIP is the last refuge of those for whom the Conservative Party
is
full of pinkos (and is now even led by a Jew, albeit a lapsed one), and
the BNP comprises people who are not quite our class, darling.
And it is into this mad milieu that Mr Robert Ballbag-Suck,
ex-MP,
ex-chat-show host and extremist, has now so willingly inserted himself.
The man himself has been unavailable for comment this weekend.
This
redoubtable defender of the God-givem superiority of everything British
is staying in his holiday home.
In Spain.
