The South Africanisation of the United Kingdom
"South Africa's future will not be civil war but slow decay" - Rian Malan, Spectator, 2006
Here are a few slow-decay headlines from just the past week:
(ITV News)
(Jewish News Syndicate)
(Order-Order / Guido Fawkes)
(The Times)
Let’s dive into an explainer or two for each of these:
1) Last week, a woman and her two small children had alkali thrown in their faces in Clapham, south London. The suspect is a twice-failed asylum seeker - a convicted sex offender from Afghanistan - who, despite sustaining what appears to be a serious injury to his own face, has managed to thus far evade police;
2) Dawn Queva, 55, employed by BBC 3 as a scheduler, made anti-Semitic remarks and other statements against white people on Facebook that constitute hate speech to the letter;
3) Caroline Nokes, a “conservative” MP, appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight in which she sought to conflate the Clapham acid attack with garden-variety misogyny;
4) Mary Harper, the BBC’s Africa editor, was paid by immigration lawyers to provide supporting evidence preventing the deportation of 15 Somali criminals, some of who had been accused of serious crimes, such as rape.
All that you knew of the United Kingdom - that which made it work, or at the very least resemble sense and order - is being slowly suffocated.
What has happened to the police here is what happened to the police in South Africa in the late 90s, when Thabo Mbeki deliberately weakened the entire security apparatus to diminish the threat of a coup. The British police, once seen as stern but approachable friends to the public, have been hollowed out, underfunded, poorly guided - and now exist as some kind of peripheral, effete feature no more effective or capable than a volunteer marshal on a weekend fun-run in Lonehill.
What has happened to the BBC is what happened to the SABC - nuanced to the extent that instead of capturing the institution in the interests of a political party, the BBC has been captured in the interests of perpetuating an unfamiliar, hostile culture. Colleagues of Ms. Queva were aware of her positions on issues. They kept silent not because they feared retribution…but because they agreed with her.
Ms. Nokes was one of the “Cameron cuties” - a description of the group of women that accompanied David Cameron into Downing Street in 2010. As a mother she claimed to be staunchly old-fashioned, family values, etc - then illustrated just how serious she was here by diving into an affair with a hunk of an aide 10 years her junior. In September last year, also on BBC Newsnight, Ms. Nokes was asked to remark on the controversy involving GB News’ Laurence Fox, the leader of the Reclaim party, who had expressed some lively sentiments in response to a female commentator poo-pooing the rate of male suicide. An indignant Ms. Nokes suggested that the channel be stripped of its license - this, despite her having made nine appearances there. According to Ms. Nokes, the acid-throwing, sex-offender Afghan’s case isn’t actually about an acid-throwing, sex-offending Afghan: it’s about “micro-aggressions”. South Africa is well versed in this kind of thing: as one of many examples, then Small Business Minister Lindiwe Zulu, sporting orange dye in her hair in Parliament, was asked how she was going to extract herself from the wreckage she had inflicted upon her department. “I don’t appreciate being called Comrade Ginger,” she snapped defiantly before walking off. Other examples like Ms. Nokes include Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Faith Muthambi, Qedani Mahlangu and Phumzile van Damme.
To paraphrase: hell hath no fury like a spinster with a grudge. It’s unlikely you’re aware that much of the African content you’ve listened to on the BBC World Service was produced by a woman with a handsome supplementary gig. Selling Malawian knitting on Etsy? Performing improv in community theatres alongside a diverse cast of Zambian slam poets and Ugandan drummers? No, Ms. Harper has been hawking witness evidence to shyster lawyers gaming a broken system to prevent foreign criminals from being deported. Now, does the name Liz Gunner mean anything to you? Julius Malema hate speech trial? Testifying in his defence, the squirrel-ish Ms. Gunner who, obviously, taught at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), claimed that a song about killing people was actually not a song about killing people, but a call to open dialogue. Then there’s Justine Limpitlaw, another niche academic never far from the worst take possible.
Form is being steadily stripped here, and just like SA, the strippers are the people once elected to protect it, or those who promoted themselves to vague moral authority status. Case in point - Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, who, despite losing his seat in 2017, failed upwards enough to become a lord:
It's tragic and alarming to see what's happening to the UK and the West in general. But it seems the citizens are too apathetic to stop this rot or paralysed by indecision.