By Guy Birchall | RT | June 17, 2020
“Far right”, “Nazis” and “racists” are epithets used by the liberal elite as an excuse to demonise patriotic Brits who offend their metropolitan sensibilities. This is class hatred, plain and simple.
Bigotry is alive and well in the UK. One form, in particular, is actively encouraged, lauded and laughed about. The victims of it are demonised in the press and for entertainment. These people don’t matter, their opinions don’t matter, their tastes are low-grade, the things they enjoy are looked upon with scorn, and whenever they kick off about all this, they’re vilified or ignored. They are, of course, the white working class.
The difference in the tone of coverage of last weekend’s protests compared with the ones the weekend before won’t have passed you by. When Black Lives Matter descended on Westminster to have a riot because a man had been killed 4,000 miles away, the media could not have been more sympathetic.
These weren’t just people who were wound up and bored after the Government had locked them all inside for a quarter of the year. They weren’t troublemakers – they were protesters. They weren’t “far-left thugs” – they were “anti-racism activists”. Their pulling down of statues, defacing national monuments or attempting to set fire to the Union Flag was just being done to “raise awareness” of “systemic racism” in Britain today.
The weekend of civil unrest was reported by the BBC to be “largely peaceful”, despite 27 police officers being injured in one day, some requiring serious hospital treatment. But, of course, they were a “diverse” group of ethnic minorities and middle-class Marxist poseurs fighting for a cause endorsed by every corporation going, from Ben & Jerry’s to the Premier League.
They were good people who’d been wound up. Even those who dared to criticise them did so only with the heavy caveat that they “understood their grievances”.
However, it was all very different for another group of people who got pissed off by what they saw, with war memorials being desecrated and monuments to national heroes being covered in graffiti. They were incensed by police inaction and what they felt was an assault on their national identity and history, so decided to go out and protect these monuments.
And what did the government and media call them? “Far right”, “racists” and “Nazis”, because, obviously, Hitler supporters would want to defend a statue of Winston Churchill. For a demonstration that was a tenth of the size at best as the one the previous weekend, the area was flooded with police.
The Mayor of London told them their “hate wasn’t welcome” in the city. The BBC described the “more than 100 arrests, after violent clashes with the police” (though just six cops were injured, in comparison with the previous event’s 27). It was a stark contrast to the coverage of the “mostly peaceful protests” that had taken place the weekend before. These new protesters weren’t legitimately concerned about the actions of communist and anarchist agitators – they were just racists. That was the only possible reason they’d assembled.
And what evidence did the media provide for them being racist? It boiled down to ‘Well, just look at them.’ Shaven-headed, pasty-faced, tattooed men covering themselves in the Cross of St George. Every front-page headline on every paper might as well have read, “Look at them – aren’t they ghastly?”. People wilfully misconstrued images to say they were performing Sieg Heil salutes, when they were clearly raising their hands and chanting “England” in a fashion anyone who has ever seen a football match can clearly recognise.
The hero of the hour was a black protester who was photographed carrying an injured white counter protester away from the fray – an undoubtedly noble act on his behalf. But when the Daily Mail covered this, they described a “far-right statue defender” as having been rescued by a BLM activist.
It had no way of knowing this man’s politics. It didn’t even bother to find out his name before labelling him an extremist. And what about those “mostly peaceful” protesters he had to be rescued from? Were they about to lovingly kick his head in for thinking that Churchill was basically a good bloke? Did they shove him to the ground to educate him about the wonders of diversity?
The double standard is appalling. The photos taken before that counter protestor was hauled to safety in an admirable act of humanity show a baying masked mob of mostly black men around him. Can you imagine the outrage if a picture emerged with those dynamics reversed? There would be hell to pay.
The disparity is obvious yet again in the coverage accorded to the man pictured urinating near the memorial for policeman Keith Palmer, who was murdered by a terrorist outside Parliament in 2017. The photo was circulated by MPs and media outlets alike, all of them accusing a man who was clearly out of his head drunk as engaging in some sort of dirty protest against the memory of a fallen officer.
Within a day, he’d handed himself into police custody and was up before the magistrates on Monday. He told the court he’d been out in London the night before, where he’d necked at least 16 pints, not gone to bed, then decided to join fellow football supporters to “protect the statues” – but he didn’t know which statues. He said he was ashamed of himself and admitted guilt and, within 15 minutes, he was sentenced to 14 days in prison. The usual punishment for this offence is an £80 fine and results in no criminal record.
Remind me again how long the gang of thugs that tore down a statue, rolled it through the streets of Bristol and dumped it in the harbour got? I seem to recall that entire incident being filmed as well, but none of the perpetrators have even been arrested, let alone had the contrition and decency to hand themselves in to the authorities.
While we’re on the topic of Bristol’s “racist” statues, let’s consider the latest public art installation that has arrived in that city. Next to the plinth where the statue of Edward Colston once stood there’s now another sculpture.
This one depicts a morbidly obese skinhead wearing a string vest and standing in a wheelie bin. His enormous belly spills over its lip as he looks at a phone with “England for the English” as a background in one hand while holding a globe in the other. On the bin are the words “Spoiler alert: St George was Turkish”. Can you imagine the outcry if a statue exaggerating the stereotypes of any other group were to be put up? It would be smashed before lunchtime.
The statue is a material manifestation of the attitude the elite has towards this section of society, which is simply: “You don’t matter”. The Labour Party was formed to represent working-class people, but stood idly by as their jobs went abroad and their communities were completely transformed by immigration.
“You’re just racist,” they told them, or as Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, once famously got caught out admitting in 2010 while unknowingly still mic’ed up, “You’re just bigoted” – in other words, you don’t deserve to matter.
They ignored these people after they voted for Brexit in 2016, prompting them to plump for the Conservatives for the first time in decades in 2019. But the Tories won’t listen to them, either: they also regard these white people as toxic, and the party doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.
So, we end up with the appalling scenario of our police standing by as white girls across England were raped by gangs of predatory Muslim men. Because these white girls don’t matter.
The white working class’s love of cheap EasyJet flights to Spain and Greece have to go because they’re killing the planet – while we ignore China and India belching out millions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. But we can end all that because they don’t matter.
Even football is being taken away from them, as the price of Premier League tickets go up and up and the grounds are ever more gentrified to appeal to the middle classes who derided the game for so long, but like it now that it’s fashionable and lucrative. The old lot would just fight anyway, so they don’t matter.
I don’t believe the vast majority of these people are far right – those who make that accusation don’t even know what that means. They just, rightly, feel ignored. There will be racists in their midst, but you can’t dismiss millions of people on the basis of a few extremists. Black Lives Matter and the Labour Party should both be dismissed, if that were the case.
They are, for the most part, patriots who feel abandoned by the country they love. They deserve to be heard. And they deserve to know that they do matter.
Guy Birchall, British journalist covering current affairs, politics and free speech issues. Recently published in The Sun and Spiked Online. Follow him on Twitter @guybirchall