I am not a member of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall because I am a liberal or rather, the classic version: not a race communist, the position much of the contemporary Liberal Democrats occupy – 40 of whom are members there.
Nonetheless I accepted an invitation to a discussion on crime, so I popped along. In the library there’s a framed tribute to Harry Willcock, a liberal activist central to identity-card resistance in the UK. This is repeating itself some 75 years later, courtesy of an illiberal former Prime Minister.
The presentation was tortuous, insufferable. Like listening to an Africa Check webinar. “Whilst there is crime, we can’t actually know if it’s targeted…or not”. “London has seen a sharp rise in theft, but the good news is that National Health Service reports indicate a drop in the number of assaults by sharp objects”. “We object to demographic crime statistics ̶ it affects us all”. Then something fantastic happened.
Bored, I happened upon a post entitled “This is how South Africa deals with car thieves”. The video featured four men in an unknown location. One of the men wore a cap and had an earring; another a beanie. They were in pairs, embracing. These four men were allegedly bandits, or tsotsis, and they’d tried to steal a car or cars belonging to a bigger group of men. They were caught bang to rights, but instead of alerting authorities, or dishing out some early 2000s Mapogo e Matamaga discipline, the bigger group had ordered the men to start French-kissing each other.
The alleged tsotsis were not happy in their compromising postures, although one couple looked more comfortable than the other. The uncomfortable pair were jeered for their lousy little birdy kisses: “manji manji manji” came the instructions from the bigger group, which included whistling and some taunting. ‘Get into it, show some initiative, you’re well past the stage of offering your date a whiskey and Fanta pine’.
I watched the video twice before I had the idea to show it to two men, neatly dressed, whom I’d sat next to during the presentation. I explained the circumstances as described. They were intrigued at first, before one stood back: “But that’s not consensual, is it?” Er, no, I replied ̶ which was exactly the point. We used to call this sort of thing “punishment”.
I was thrilled with the men who staged that event. Proud. They clearly knew that it was pointless calling the filth, or some social worker to come and perform a stolen land ceremony, or a tsotsi-themed yoga class. Nobody was assaulted (“sharp object”), nobody was waterboarded, or hung up in a warehouse naked for ladies wearing burkas to laugh at.
Genius, right there
It was genius, right there, and I made a note to find out who those men are, and buy them a ghetto blaster, so the next time it happens they can play a Chris de Burgh number or something.
The video became even more relevant in respect of an event that unfolded two weekends ago.
It involved the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the response by the incoming President of the Oxford Union, a young man called George Abaraonye. Abaraonye shouldn’t even be at Oxford, let alone be the prospective head of the world’s most prestigious debating society, but thanks to the ANC-ification of all UK public life, he finds himself in both.
Some days after Kirk was murdered, Abaraonye went on something of a victory lap, celebrating the death of a man he’d met and shaken hands with. This prompted a furious response from former and life members of the Union, who demanded Abaraonye ‘s resignation.
Abaraonye‘s response to this was to call a vote of no confidence in himself, believing that, such were the forces since 2020 particularly in the media and academia, he’d romp to victory, and would be freer to pursue ideas he’d previously expressed about burning institutions he didn’t like to the ground, or subjecting them to extreme violence. Predictably the vote was a disaster for him, and on the day of the count, Abaraonye‘s reps started intimidating the returning officer responsible for tabulating the numbers. This is the moment where John Cleese feeds an already vomiting Mr Creosote one more mint in The Meaning of Life.
Abaraonye may be gone, but the thuggery of his reps and their kind will endure – because it invites submission. That’s all we know how to do. Bow. Kneel. Navel gaze. Occasionally nod. Forty years of sociologists and criminologists pursuing ideas associated with “restorative justice”, “prison rehabilitation” and the logical progression into no-cash bail and defunding the police in the United States have emboldened our rotters and scoundrels, from Minneapolis to Soshanguve to Oxford. I wouldn’t force George’s reps to French-kiss each other because they’d probably like that – see it as reward maybe – which means we’d probably have to go back to the stuff they get up to in the Middle East or CIA black sites if examples needed to be set. And they do.
Ingenious countrymen
Even worse is the denial. The Englishmen to whom I showed the video of my ingenious countrymen were genuinely repelled; they couldn’t put themselves in the shoes of the vigilantes, they couldn’t empathize with what it must be like to have nothing and almost lose that. Later, one of them reported me to the host, prompting a message (of course it was a message, not a call or meeting) in which I was passively-aggressively rapped for first: contravening the no-phone policy, then second: producing contentious material.
For the last two years I’ve been trying to warn the good people at The Critic, now the UK’s premier conservative magazine for which I occasionally write, that bad things are on their way. This week a street sweeper, a cheerful individual associated with the best of this country’s identity, was murdered by an Afghani migrant. In the 1990s, an episode of the satirical series Brass Eye featured a sketch about a paedophile being sent into space, but moments before takeoff a young boy managed to wander into the craft. He would be stuck with the paedo orbiting earth forever; “officials said it was the last thing they wanted to happen”.
As life imitates art, last week, UK prison services accidentally released a convicted pa̶̶edophile, due for deportation to Eritrea, onto the streets of London. Two nights ago, he was given £500 cash in hand from officials as he boarded a plane. Awesome.
[Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/statue-of-lady-justice-with-scales-30483129/]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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