Chapter 6: uSquidge
“It’s not fair they want to send you back to Pakistan Tariq. It’s not fair because I love curry ‘n all.”
Emma Rydal as Stella Moorhouse, East is East (1999)
Shortly after South Africa’s impressive victory over England in November 2019 at the Rugby World Cup in Japan, exhilarated Springbok fans began sharing a YouTube video that explained how the Springboks had triumphed. The video’s producer was called Squidge, who owned the YouTube account “Squidge Rugby”. Judging by the flattering tone of his commentary, it was apparent he loved the Springboks, so, all good.
In the UK general feeling about Squidge - outside of rugby - is that he’s lost in time. He’s scruffy and has the kind of English teeth that don’t appear to be sailors escaping a ship on fire as much as they are jostling to the front of the line. He supports Labour, and, judging by the comments he makes as it relates to class structures, he’s only a few decades away from joining Jeremy Corbyn’s cell of professional protestors.
His commentary uploads average roughly between 60,000 and 70,000 views on YouTube. His commentary on the Springbok final, however, went to 971,000, many of those shared by South Africans flattered with the review - which was positive, warm and interesting - especially his analysis of a particular set move that would later feature in (the South African television network) Supersport’s “Chasing the Sun” where the Springboks’ magnificent coach Johan “Rassie” Erasmus would describe the move as “the move” (Squidge himself made an appearance in the documentary).
On the 23rd of December 2019, less than two months after the World Cup final, a man called Courtney Lawes composed a tweet. “TRIGGER WARNING,” the tweet started, “Britain is not a racist country. Just thought I’d clear that up.” The tweet ended with the thumbs-up emoji. Lawes was a member of England’s team that lost.
Unfortunately for Lawes, this wasn’t good enough for two Irish social justice identities (is there a worse kind?) called Gav and Patricia who run the “Ruck n Roll” podcast. They retweeted Lawes’ statement, and included with it some obscure information they didn’t reference - the kind of squealing that momentarily relieves the permanent suffering of Michel Foucault as he rots in hell for sodomizing those young boys in a graveyard - “BAME” people this, “BAME” people that - “there is just NO hope for BAME people”.
Perhaps buoyed by his favorable spike in popularity, and possibly Patreon subscriptions, Squidge decided to jump in and replied to Lawes himself: “Courtney Lawes’ dad earns over £600k a year as head of a successful company. I’ll give him that it’s certainly a less racist country if you’re super rich.” Now, when you’ve made an allegation like this - when you’ve essentially accused a country’s sporting ambassador of being an aloof elitist - you’ve surely got your facts right? Surely. You can back this up with evidence - Companies House documentation, social media photographs of the elitist in question on an exclusive heli-ski trip with similarly well-heeled friends, making silly LA gangster-esque hand signs, or confirmed reports that the individual swore at a Bangladeshi slave at a prohibitively expensive Maldives resort when the stupid bastard put ice in his champagne. So, well done Squidge - for bodying a product of inherited privilege, for taking class and race wars to rugby. Right….?
But there was a problem with Squidge’s claims: they were rubbish. Worse, Courtney - in our newly, classification-heavy society - qualifies as black, despite having a white mother.
He was born in the London Borough of Hackney, which is now - as it was then - one of its poorest. His father is a Jamaican who bounced nightclubs; his mother, a prison nurse who frequently returned from shifts sporting bruises. He never attended private school or enjoyed a network that would have afforded opportunities. The only thing he had, according to those who’ve watched his rise, was phenomenal talent, modesty, enthusiasm and an enviable work ethic.
Oopsy Squidge. How you going to get out of this one? From where did you get your information? Was it someone else? Surely you’re not implying that all non-white people look the s….oopsy Squidge…how the hell are you going to get out of this one?
Courtney fired back at Squidge: “Lol maybe get your facts straight before you start chatting utter shit, my mum and dad combined wouldn’t earn that in 10years. Standard lefties trying to discredit someone who doesn’t fit the narrative. Pathetic.” When there was nowhere left to turn, the standard apology bordering-on-not-an-actual-apology appeared - here’s Squidge’s response: “Fair enough. I’d either misread something or read something that was clearly false. That’s on me, and I apologise. I’m not trying to discredit you, but by your own admission, you don’t fit the ‘narrative’. You can’t dismiss the issue because it isn’t your experience.” He accompanied the non-apology apology with two screenshots. The first, an article by - yes - the scumtard Guardian entitled, “Hate crimes double in England in 5 years”. The second was a graph, produced by Britain’s captured civil service, indicating the rise in “hate crimes” (an aside: “hate crimes” and “non-crime hate incidents”, are exactly the reason policing in the UK finds itself in a state of suspended animation. The obsession with policing these things is partially due to political interference, and partially due to laziness - it is a lot easier for the police to investigate an alleged case of transphobia than a burglary. Also, the Royal College of Policing has since enhanced prioritising these pursuits - so when you go looking for something, and you apply considerable resources - chances are you’ll find it, or some of it).
Courtney, being a decent man, accepted Squidge’s not-really-an apology, cautious perhaps that since the World Cup, the latter’s following had expanded impressively. But the question must be asked: why did Squidge jump in with such conviction? Of course, people often err on Twitter, but there are degrees of such, and race isn’t an area into which you leap feet first. Fine, he’s sorry (supposedly), but what compelled him to what ostensibly appears to have been an attempt, instigated initially by weirdo duo Gav and Patricia, to dogpile a decent, respected man entitled to an opinion?
To answer this question you could present Tony Blair’s Human Rights Act of 1998, and the ambiguous language employed to draft it - how it has emboldened generations of interpretation, and worse, sought to apply consensus to those interpretations.
But the following year, Courtney would find himself isolated and Squidge would be in the right place at the right time. That was because of one man: uGeorge Floyd.
Even today merely speculating about the curious speed at which this incident unfolded is grounds for cancellation and dismissal. The majority of corporations occupying the American media industrial complex immediately crafted the narrative: uGeorge had died as a result of a police officer’s knee on his neck. He had been suffocated. Murder. Any talk of contributing factors - fentanyl in his system - was immediately terminated. An initial autopsy revealing this was dismissed and replaced with one confirming the popularised version. Had - just had - to be.
What followed was grotesque: the media repurposed its objectives and hyped protests that resulted in other, unnecessary deaths. A CNN reporter stood straight-faced in front of a burning object - at the back of a crowd responsible for the arson - and stated words to the effect of “these are fiery but mostly peaceful.” Small business owners across America, many of them owned by minorities, were targeted; in New York, two young lawyers - one of them of Pakistani heritage - threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car. In her defence, Urooj Rahman pleaded for leniency: she had, according to a letter to the judge, participated in “conflict resolution” initiatives across the Middle East and Northern Ireland. “Participated”, apparently - not “learned from”. In November 2022 and January 2023, Rahman and her co-accused Colinford Mattis were sentenced to 15 months and 12 months in prison respectively. The Judge declared that “Mattis was privileged” - and obviously today’s liberal logic was there in the courtroom to gasp at the temerity of a white Judge to make such a privileged statement.
At a stretch, you could examine the geography and conclude that, although these riots were unlawful and possibly choreographed, the fact that the incident occurred in America indicates that a response would occur in America - and there was no basis for a global response. That is as reasonable as the benefit of doubt you’ve already surrendered - if you accept the results of the second, revised autopsy indicating that George was murdered. But the one thing that you wouldn’t expect is for the marches to spread to other countries.
They did.
They came to the country that had lost members of its navy attempting to abolish slavery - where it is illegal to discriminate against race - where racism is a criminal offence. From Shetland in the North Sea to the Channel islands of Jersey and Guernsey, people gathered, accompanied by flags and banners “no justice, no peace” and “the British police are NOT innocent.” They erupted in Bristol, where - mainly white - students toppled the statue of Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour. They came to London and goaded two uniformed Metropolitan policemen, scared out of their wits, to kneel in front of the baying picket line (more about this a little later).
The circumstances plea for examination, and, being charitable, we should afford them that. These protests were attended by people who had been locked down since March - the start of the many, many bad political responses to the pandemic. They were agitated by the lack of human interaction, and eager to find meaning in their artificially narrowed lives. But of all the wrong to lean upon this, the crutches of climate and race are always - by far - the worst. Yet the protests were encouraged, not least by the never, ever acceptable Piers Morgan, who, between mouthfuls of pork pie on morning television agreed that, said that although he’d been one of lockdown’s most prominent enthusiasts, ordering people to stay the hell away from each other, describing those caught in parks or taking a walk as subversive, an enormous gathering of angry people getting together was now a splendid idea. “I’m proud my son is attending,” he boasted.
So courtesy of Piers and the major UK television networks, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) grift found a safe landing in the UK. Today, thanks to a mess of networks, chapters and incompetence, it is still not clear how much money was raised by the group, but the actions of one of its founders, Patrice Cullors, leaves little doubt that there’s been extraordinary malfeasance in the organisation that was initially established to address the relationship between young African American men and America’s law enforcement. In contrast to the early UCT “Rhodes Must Fall” and other related “decolonise the cirriculum” campaigns, the arrival of BLM in the UK was as icy and precise as the currency markets’ response to Jacob Zuma’s decision to sack Nhlanhla Nene in 2015.
It was an incident that occurred at the time of the riots in London - that stands alongside Squidge’s self-righteousness - that perfectly captures the madness. BLM protestors, and once again for those losing attention - mainly white, middle class people - had defaced the Earl Haig Memorial in Whitehall. Located nearby the memorial are the Household Cavalry barracks, so on a morning shortly after the demonstrations, a group of young, mostly white squaddies, the majority in all likelihood from underprivileged, working-class backgrounds, came out to clear the streets of litter. They brought buckets and soap and trash bags - there were no council services that day, and the place looked revolting.
They got to the statue and started attempting to wash off the incendiary remarks in red spray paint on the stone: all cops are bastards (“ACAB”). Then a group of young women approached them. One asked menacingly: “What do you think you’re doing?” Then, equally menacingly, a young blonde girl, with a posh London accent, went further: “Why are you doing this? I don’t understand?” The group proceeded to abuse the group of squaddies before leaving.
“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand”. If you see the video, taken that day, you’ll note her failure to “understand” was genuine: she couldn’t understand why people would want to restore broken things, she couldn’t understand that it was the right and decent thing to do: all she saw impeded a projected social justice idea she’d read, or was told about by an echo chamber. It was not consistent with the actions of those squaddies, and she was confused, then angry.
It wasn’t a new phenomenon, but it updated perceptions: these things are designed to break, to divide. It happened again on the 13th of October in 2022, when two young women threw a can of tomato soup on the fourth version of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” on display at the National Gallery. One of the girls had pink hair; she was called Phoebe Plummer and her Twitter handle was “Ziggystardyke”. The stunt was in aid of Just Stop Oil, the latest iteration of civil disobedience designed to halt the UK government from issuing any new oil or gas licences. It would turn out that the group had, in part, been funded by an heiress of the Getty oil dynasty.
It would also turn out that Phoebe wasn’t suffering breathing problems born of a diesel exhaust fitted into her bedroom. She wasn’t a working-class child whose prospects were identifiably diminished by the damage inflicted by the fossil fuel industry - a subsistence fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico during BP’s spill of 2012 for example. If she was concerned about marine life - she would have done well to approach the mega funding complex building wind-farms in the oceans, who then scratch their heads when whales beach themselves nearby. But Phoebe wasn’t poor, or underprivileged - in fact, she was the complete opposite.
She attended one school that costs £45,000 a year, and has educated members of the Royal Family. She then attended another school - in Kensington, possibly on account of access to her former classmates - that cost £30,000 a year. And there she was, in the National Gallery, defacing an artwork painted by an impoverished man, shunned from his neighbourhood on account of his deteriorating mind - so that other, underprivileged children may not see it. The idea that these underprivileged children would look into this scenario and then invest their interest in Phoebe’s Just Stop Oil agenda is certifiably mental.
This is the landscape within which Squidge exists, where belief in theories and deliberately hyped and falsified information permits the individual to act regardless of the truth. He made that comment against Lawes because he could, because in Sutenbastud’s way, it is right and just.
But it was Lawes - not Squidge - 6 months after the false claim who was isolated. On the 2nd of June 2020, nearly every single young, white, middle-class Instagram user in the English-speaking world positioned a black square on their accounts in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. In the English rugby squad, 28 of the 33 players with Instagram profiles did this. When everyone alongside him was losing their heads to a fake crisis, Courtney was posting pictures of his young children sitting on a park bench and smiling back at the camera.
Why did they do this? There is a lot of detail and the explanations, just like recollections, vary. For some, it was to highlight the supposedly disproportionate number of deaths of African Americans in police custody. For some, like the UK documentary maker Adam Curtis, it was belief in the movement - that it would lead to real, systemic change - for the better. And for others, it was: “everybody else was doing it, so….”
Each of these explanations warrants frisking. There was no concrete evidence to support the claim that more African Americans die in police custody. When this was articulated by ideologically crippled profiles in US media industrial complex, by people like MSNBC’s Joy Reid, or CNN’s Don Lemon it was clear that the information had been cherry-picked then groomed for the occasion. White and Asian people have been killed by the police too; despite the presence of Instagram back in 2016, there was no such solidarity for an unarmed white Texan man named Anthony Timpa killed by police - just as little solidarity in fact as there was for the white Zimbabwean farmer Martin Olds, slaughtered by drunk “war veterans” in 2000.
The idea that BLM was to prompt societal and policing reform, or indeed enhanced social justice, was flawed from the start - in both the US and the UK. In the UK, the demands instructed by belligerent forces were just not going to happen. In 2011, riots erupted over the shooting of a drug dealer called Mark Duggan (this is when Robert Mugabe told David Cameron to resign). From the smouldering ashes it was declared that change was afoot: there must be better prospects for young black people in the UK, there must be alterations to the structural foundations of society. And so there were all these plans, all this commentary and reflection - and nothing happened. For all the talk and promises, it appears people had coaxed themselves out of a dream that made no sense - because there was - and is - nothing standing in the way of upward mobility. Ask Courtney Lawes.
Then peer pressure. As if the professional rugby player pile-on wasn’t bad enough, club rugby started doing something crazy. On match days, they began the Haitian voodoo ritual of kneeling. Those who didn’t kneel were eviscerated: one particularly loud white South African social justice identity in London squealed in disgust of the sight of his countrymen, playing in England, refusing to kneel: “I don’t understand, why don’t they just fuckin’ kneel??!!” This put Lawes into an awkward position: his principles were sensible - family, rights and respect - but it wasn’t good enough. Squidge was now fully in command of the argument he had thumbed in Lawes’ face the previous December. And he wasn’t done.
On August 2nd 2020, two months after the infamous black square, rugby league clubs St. Helens and Catalans Dragons played against each other at a bare stadium in Headingly, West Yorkshire. Playing for Catalans was the Australian of Tongan descent, Israel Folau, who had previously represented Australia at fullback in the union code - and whose skills were considered mercurial. Until 2018.
Folau’s father is a pastor. He grew up Mormon, but became an enthusiastic member of the Assemblies of God Christian denomination at the age of 11. It is clear he has always taken his beliefs seriously, and in 2017, the first glimpses of the seriousness emerged when he declined to support, via a postal survey, gay marriage in Australia. The following year he answered a question on Instagram: “What do you think God’s plan is for homosexuals?” Folau answered: “Hell…unless they repent of their sins and turn to God.”
Less than a year before he took the field in Headingly, Folau and Rugby Australia settled out of court. For the manner of expression in his beliefs, Folau’s contract had been terminated by the woman in charge there - a formidable unit by the name of Raelene Castle, whose head resembled a dark-ish brown brick. In what could have been a premonition for 2022’s Canadian anti-vaccination / lockdown mandate truckers, Folau’s attempts to challenge his dismissal were hamstrung by the demonic crowdfunder, gofundme, who claimed his position violated its terms of service.
There was no uncertainty when Israel Folau took to the field: kneeling is pagan - and he is a committed Christian. Admittedly his response to the plan question wasn’t the sort of thing you or I would say, fine, but it’s not as if he plans to join the Almighty in the exercise. If he did, then Britain’s Conservative party would have been the first to demand protection from some butch black policeman (“Help us Lohanthony, there’s a demented Tongan gay burner stalking the streets of Pimlico”).
When all the other players got down on one knee before the match, Folau stood upright - and The Independent, arguably the most useless of Sutenbastud’s information effluent outlets - went straight for the jugular: “Controversial Israel Folau to refuse to take knee before rugby game.” And that’s where Squidge emerged, retweeting the Independent’s hysteria with his own feelings: “This headline is not only proof that Israel Folau remains an utter cunt, but proof that virtually nobody on either code of rugby is on his side.” But that was not proof: the majority of the correspondents to the Independent actually approved of Folau’s position - “good for him” and “keep politics out of rugby”.
Here Squidge, like so many of his generation on the issue of race, has the appearance of possession. A class warrior is one thing: a young white man scolding black people - calling them “cunts” for not adhering to his own version of racial symmetries, is something else - that inhabits the brains of young privileged English white girls and boys and breeds something akin to a Marburg virus of perspective inside them.
BLM’s presence in the UK, what is made people do and think, how it was fostered then disseminated, has created a fake problem for a country that heavily invested in the eradication of the real one - when it mattered. So it is with irony that the Squidge perspective on race relations has graduated into calls for reparations, oblivious to the fact that the distant relatives of white sailors killed in the battle to end slavery, who would theoretically be the first recipients were such a preposterous notion to be realised, are not doing the same.
The hysteria also saw the rise to prominence of a young, black single mother, who had previously campaigned for the Rhodes Must Fall movement in the UK. Unlike BLM it was scattered and clumsy, its architects incapable of articulating the campaign’s goals without breaking into insults and losing their tempers. But Sasha Johnson was one of its finest graduates; not only did she ride the BLM grift, she went onto join the Taking the Initiative Party, which was centred around race and in Sasha’s case, the explicit violence of traditional black power movements. In August 2020, Sasha led the Million March through central London, an anti-demonstration that she claimed would strike fear into the hearts of oppressors. Roughly 400 people attended.
On the 23rd of May 2021, Sasha attended a house party in Peckham, southeast London. In the early hours of the morning, the house was invaded by four balaclava-wearing assailants, one of whom shot her in the head.
She survived the shooting, but her brain injuries left her in a permanent vegetative state. Half her skull had to be removed; today she cannot speak, walk or eat. It’s unlikely her young children will know much more of their mother than their early memories.
The police reports indicate that the majority of this kind of violence in London’s southeast is perpetuated by young black men, usually involved in gang or postcode warfare. As it happens, the police commander, a black woman named Commander Alison Heydari, addressed the media: “At around 3am, a group of black men wearing balaclavas entered the property. We have no reason to suspect that she was specifically targeted. Our inquiries are pursuing the line that Sasha Johnson was unintentionally targeted”. But the country was still under BLM’s spell, so immediately attention turned to motive, taking her position as something of an icon for the local movement, alongside claims she had received threats to her life on account of inflammatory statements she had made about white people. This despite the policewoman’s statement, formed by witnesses - “a group of black men” and “unintentionally targeted”.
Sutenbastud was on standby in the media, and within the agitation quarters of the labour party. At the announcement of Sasha’s shooting, Jeremy Corbyn’s old girlfriend Diane Abbott entered the discussion, tweeting: “Black activist Sasha Johnson in hospital in critical condition after sustaining a gunshot wound to the head. Nobody should have to potentially pay with their life because they stood up for racial justice.” But Dianne was unrepentant: on Sutenbastud’s LBC radio that evening and accused of stoking division, she replied that “we don’t know that it wasn’t a targeted attack”. Earlier in the day, however, one of Sasha’s own friends appeared on the same station - again: “Sasha was an unintended victim of a gangland hit”.
Which brings us to the central question of this chapter: what does the logic want? How does it see race relations? Is it reparations only, or is it legislated discrimination too, erm “affirmative action”? The answer to that question is easy to locate in the present. The UK (and Ireland) is trying to solve the problem of Eastern European and Middle Eastern “refugees” - ordinarily young men of fighting age - arriving on small boats to claim asylum and benefit from Britain’s generous benefits complex.
Here, the “right” is fed up, wants the endless stream of arrivals to end - and emphasizes this where permitted, mainly on GB News, but also in the Daily Express, The Sun and The Daily Mail. The “left” wins the argument here: it has more media support for more “refugees”, it has managed to influence the conservative government in the continual shift of the Overton window - and it gets out and marches. Under banners of “Stop racism”, the protestors howl at the police, demanding compassion and generosity. But what they say to the cameras is sometimes different.
In one recent march, a video maker approached a protestor. “So,” the interviewer asked, “would you be willing to house a refugee?” “Um…um…no because I don’t have the space.” Then another. “Erm…actually I can’t afford to, much as I’d like to.” Another: “No, it shouldn’t be up to me.” Finally, after ten identical responses, he finds a taker: “Yes I will, of course I will, I’d open my ho…” The protestor stopped and steadied himself: “Umm…actually I’ve just remembered…um please turn off the camera…um I can’t.” The interviewing has just created a focus group - 10% of a group of about 100 or just less - and the temperature reads zero. Despite believing so strongly that their own country is cruel enough for them to march, not a single member of this focus group agrees to the most instinctive response, which would be to lead by example where the government fails, and billet a “refugee”.
There is enough reason to suggest that this logic applies to black people too. Elevate them - but not at my expense. Create jobs for non-white candidates only - except for me. Give other people’s money away, not mine. What about restaurants and hotels? Yes, make some restaurants and sports stadiums for non-whites only…but not the ones I like. And you genuinely believe in this? Yes, yes. Black Lives Matter.
*
Thanks to Squidge and his fellow travelers - young white men following a path beaten by dead and old white men - there’s a wobbly future ahead. I’ll talk in hypotheticals, and we’ll need to revert to the intersectionality model.
We are not done with the whole Islamist thing. Far from it. Previously, when we thought we were, a murderous savage rocked up in Manchester and blew up several white pre-teen girls. Despite Theresa May’s insistence that we “don’t look back in anger”, and the fact nothing was done about this unspeakably tragic event, the Allah-u-Akbar lot are still - presumably - eager to deal with us.
So here’s the hypothetical. What happens if one of their extensions - a group out of Palestine or Lebanon or Pakistan - attack and the victims include a black female netball team, or persons present inside a synagogue? What happens when it is revealed that the girls and some of the Jews both supported BLM? Where does Squidge go from here? Don’t waste your time thinking too much. They’ve been cornered and cornered folk know only one course of action: to double down.
*Coming next, Chapter 7: The Lang Hancock Appreciation Society