California Uber Alles - The USA may be an ocean away but prepare for Trump like chaos in the UK.

Following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, I wrote the following commentary on the manner in which the UK was copying the USA in its newly confident racist approach towards Black people, all as part of a lurch towards something resembling a fascist state. For every Steve Bannon that the USA has, the UK has a Farage or Yaxley Lennon (Tommy Robinson) whose sole purpose seems to be to whip up xenophobic fury amongst the more mentally challenged in this country.

Those of you watching your screens as fascists invade the Capitol Building in DC might do well to suspend your disbelief and consider that it could quite conceivably happen over here too.

We have a Prime Minister whose causal use of racist language has emboldened the UK variant of the likes of the MAGA morons in the US to feel that they can once more express racism freely, and violently confront anyone who opposes their ugly diatribes. They now have a cult figure to get behind as racist Americans had with Trump, and the Etonian Mess is ably assisted by his Home Secretary Priti Patel, who, in a speech that might well have made Goebbels blush boasted of making deportation flights to Jamaica a 'regular drumbeat', a potentially racist trope for which she seemingly has gone unchallenged by the mainstream media. A quote purported to have been said by former member of the House of Commons, Edmund Burke, but likely wasn't, is one the media might well remind themselves of; "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

June 2020

I DECIDE WHEN BLACK LIVES MATTER

Priti Patel’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement puts her firmly in the House.

The savage murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis reverberated around the world and acted as an alarm call for the kind of large-scale Black activism that has been largely absent for a quarter of a century. That does not mean institutionalised racism had gone anywhere in the intervening years, more the case that the ‘mark’ was not radically overstepped. When it was, as it was with the murders of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, the U.S. had Barack Obama to smooth things over.

However, when George Floyd was killed, in Trump they had a cracker in charge and on May 25th 2020 his stormtroopers changed the world. Not since the Rodney King affair has the level of righteous indignation and visceral anger been so high. The vicious beating meted out to King by (let’s not forget their names) LAPD officers Laurence Powell, Stacey Koon, Timothy Wind, Rolando Solano and Theodore Briseno was captured fortuitously by George Holliday on video camera. Conversely modern technology meant that George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao and J.A. Kueng was caught from every conceivable angle thanks to the advent of the mobile phone camera. Access to social media that was not around during King’s brutal assault meant that what began as a whisper in Minneapolis soon became a throat lacerating scream in Manchester, Marseille, and Madrid.

As a result, we have seen the already quite formidable Black Lives Matter organisation flower into a truly global movement and in France especially it has given second wind to Assa Traore’s four-year pursuit of justice for her brother Adama who was murdered by Parisian police in 2016. Incidentally, one of the striking things about the Adama Traore murder and the George Floyd murder was the similarity in the initial response from the authorities. In both cases they blamed the victim by casting aspersions upon their character, in France to the extent that they tried to coerce the Muslim Adama’s family to forego an autopsy in keeping with Islamic 24-hour death rites. Had they done so they would not have discovered that contrary to what the police were suggesting, toxicology reports for marijuana and alcohol were negative.

Whether it is a media engendered moral panic or not; since the murder of George Floyd we have seen further cases of police brutality in the US culminating such as the murder of Rayshard Brookes, questioned for the crime of falling asleep in his car, and shot in the back after having pleaded with police to just let him walk home.

The thing to take from these horror videos is that these are just the cases caught on film, which in turn begs the question of just how many of these types of extra judicial police force murders must be taking place all over the United States? You begin to sense there is still something racially rotten deep in the heart of America. Given who ran the country between 2017 and 2021 it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the highest office in the land enabled it to fester, which is a suitable segue with which to begin examining the response in the United Kingdom.

Britons Never, Never, Never Shall Be Slaves.

The UK Government that is currently orchestrating a world beating response of incompetence in reaction to a global pandemic, has an unpleasant whiff of Empire mentality about it - with attached inherent racism - and so was never going to comment on George Floyd willingly. Johnson couldn’t be seen to be criticising his brother in harm over the pond because without the USA his beloved No Deal Brexit would be shot out of the water. This therefore meant the people of the UK would have to take it upon themselves to demonstrate their disgust at the snuff movie murder of George Floyd and the U.S. President’s heavy-handed response to it.

The COVID-19 lockdown meant that the initial protests attracted a lot of people who, post Dominic Cummings eyesight check, just wanted to test their own, and so some of the silliness that prevailed was down to an opportunistic fringe. Had they behaved that way in the USA they might well have lost their sight given the US police force’s apparently orchestrated aiming for eyes with rubber bullets (a tactic possibly imported from Israel and France). But then, on the 7th June the movement in the UK gained a real focus. By now the leader of the opposition had embarrassed the Prime Minister into expressing mealy-mouthed regret at the murder of George Floyd, but there was still a steadfast refusal from this most racist of U.K. Prime Minister’s (the evidence is there; “flag waving picaninnies”, “watermelon smiles”, “Aids ridden choristers” and his view that the problem with Africa is that Britain is still not in charge) to pass this ‘regret’ on to the President of the United States. If the Prime Minister was not going to deliver the message, then the people would. In Bristol, the statue of Edward Colston had long been something to be ashamed of due to his high-profile role in the horrors of the slave trade. Where petitions failed, the people of Bristol prevailed and they tore the statue down and symbolically; given the millions of dead Africans that share a watery grave in the Middle Passage, dumped it into the Bristol Channel. Johnson and his acolytes, the likes of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson, roundly condemned the actions and helped orchestrate a myth that Churchill’s statue was to be attacked by the Black Lives Matters marchers the following weekend. Now whatever you think of Churchill (personally I consider him to be a racist, misogynist drunkard), there is a sizeable, generally right wing, chunk of the population that look up to the former Prime Minister, and so the fascist triumvirate knew exactly what they were doing by whipping up a false storm on racial lines. Only it didn’t quite go to plan. They were utterly outflanked by the Black Lives Matter group who called off the march, which meant two arms of British fascism; right wing thugs and the police, had to play it out with each other.

The New Racial Caste System

Those who know politics know how ‘political’ minds work. When the zeitgeist is captured by an event, these thuggish narcissists think nothing more than “What’s in it for us?”. As 9/11 was a “good day to bury bad news” so you just knew the likes of Cummings, Gove and Johnson, when he could be bothered attending or paying attention, would have been thinking how to make the most of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protest. Johnson’s attitude towards race has already been covered and is founded upon an ill-founded sense of superiority and a lack of intelligence. Cummings and Gove however exhibit signs of being imbued with the Dunning Kruger effect and as such are perhaps more dangerously racist than Johnson, just slightly cleverer not to express it publicly. Cummings’s theories about genetics have been criticised by experts as being “unethical and amount(ing) to eugenics” whilst Michael Gove’s bookshelf, as well as containing some shuddering works of right wing thought, also includes works by Holocaust denier David Irving and more relevant to us, Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, a discredited ‘study’ on the connection between race and IQ. So how might these freaky eugenics fanboys use the Black Lives Matter protest to their own ends? Well, this week we have seen it rolled out, and the time had finally arrived for Priti Patel to be used for the only conceivable reason she holds high office; to bat away accusations of the government being racist, whilst she at the same time unfolded a new racial caste system for the UK.

The Conservative Government has people of colour in their cabinet but only of an acceptably and tolerably mild hue to their supporters. Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel are the most prominent members, both of Asian background, an ethnicity the racist Tories can do business with, literally and metaphorically.

Patel’s triumphant moment of grandstanding arrived on 8th June. On this day she asserted her view that this Asian daughter of the owners of a chain of shops and product of Watford Grammar School for Girls shared the same racial experience as the likes of Black MP Florence Eshalomi MP, daughter of a single parent and student at local south London comprehensives whilst also caring for her mother who had sickle cell anaemia and kidney failure. Patel, with all the panache of a Sixth Form student playing a female lead role in a school play paused for studied, dramatic effect before relating a story about her being called a “Paki” in the playground thereby attempting to make George Floyd's murder all about her whilst making a bid to equivocate her own experience of racism with Floyd's. All racial abuse is abhorrent, but Patel’s experience must have been soothed somewhat by her privileged background compared to Eshalomi’s experiences. The same woman who months earlier introduced laws that would have prevented her own parents from entering the country of her birth, sat back down having delivered her rehearsed missive, smug in the knowledge that this performance would be played out on the evening’s news bulletins.

For Patel then, racism is racism and being called a “Paki” is the same as having your neck knelt on for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

What she quite shockingly failed to account for or understand is that State institutionalised racism, a form of racism she has almost certainly never suffered from, has always been directed predominantly against the Afro-Caribbean population. Her experience of racism cannot be some sort of bench-mark equivalent to every other person who has suffered from racial prejudice because it is, quite simply, never going to be the same experience.

Judging by the ensuing response to her nauseating performance, and that is exactly what it was, others felt she had simply exhibited her own ignorance over what institutionalised racism constitutes.

What she also failed to understand, and still fails to understand despite that privileged education, is that in using race as a point scoring exercise against another M.P. from an ethnic minority , and even worse a woman, she had been played quite magnificently by the divide and conquer, all male, eugenics crew. Unwittingly, (one would hope because if it wasn’t then she is a racist) she drove a wedge between the Asian and Black populations by suggesting her promotion in the face of racism is a promotion for all ethnic minorities, that ‘all have finally been accepted by the Establishment so, yeah, stop whingeing about racism’. It may be the case for Priti, and it may have worked for many Asians (and maybe also a tiny minority of the Black population), but the intimated equivalence that her cosy middle class grammar school experience of racism was somehow the same as the institutionalised every day racism Black people in the UK face today is quite disgustingly dismissive of others’ experiences and plain wrong.

It was evil and it was shocking and, in a bid to accentuate her stupidity, when asked to reflect on her words by 30 MPs, she was dismissive.

Having launched their attack, Johnson and his fellow racists embedded their new racial caste system with the Prime Minister suggesting that those claiming to be victims of racism were playing up to a sense of “victimisation”. He then played his Joker, announcing the appointment of Munira Mirza (former communist now Conservative?!?) as the No 10 advisor to the new government commission on racial inequalities. Mirza has in the past cast doubts on the existence of institutionalised racism, which again brings us back to the racism Patel suffered. Neither Patel nor Mirza suffered from institutionalised racism for two reasons;

1) As mentioned before, the main target of institutionalised racism is the Black population and Mirza and Patel have not suffered from it because theirs is now a more palatable skin tone to racists, something it would seem their main employer evidences.

2) The racism of the current UK Government is not racist per se, it is anti-Black. Patel, Mirza, Javid, Sunak, and even Cummings supporter and Attorney General Suella Braveman cannot therefore claim equivocation with the Afro-Caribbean population because we can see the difference in action at the highest level.

'I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.' - James Baldwin

The subtitle to this article; Priti Patel’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement puts her firmly in the House, is in reference to a speech Malcolm X delivered in 1963 where he talked about two types of “negro”: -

So you have two types of Negro. The old type and the new type. Most of you know the old type. When you read about him in history during slavery he was called "Uncle Tom." He was the house Negro. And during slavery you had two Negroes. You had the house Negro and the field Negro.

The house Negro usually lived close to his master. He dressed like his master. He wore his master's second-hand clothes. He ate food that his master left on the table. And he lived in his master's house--probably in the basement or the attic…

So, whenever that house Negro identified himself, he always identified himself in the same sense that his master identified himself. When his master said, "We have good food," the house Negro would say, "We" have plenty of good food. When the master said that "we have a fine home here," the house Negro said, "Yes, we have a fine home here." When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he'd say, "What's the matter boss, we sick?" His master's pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself. When the house started burning down, that type of Negro would fight harder to put the master's house out than the master himself would.

But then you had another Negro out in the field. The house Negro was in the minority. The masses--the field Negroes were the masses. They were in the majority. When the master got sick, they prayed that he'd die. [Laughter] If his house caught on fire, they'd pray for a wind to come along and fan the breeze.

So now you have a twentieth-century-type of house Negro. A twentieth-century Uncle Tom. He's just as much an Uncle Tom today as Uncle Tom was 100 and 200 years ago. Only he's a modern Uncle Tom. That Uncle Tom wore a handkerchief around his head. This Uncle Tom wears a top hat. He's sharp. He dresses just like you do. He speaks the same phraseology, the same language. He tries to speak it better than you do. He speaks with the same accents, same diction. And when you say, "your army," he says, "our army." He hasn't got anybody to defend him, but anytime you say "we" he says "we." "Our president," "our government," "our Senate," "our congressmen," "our this and our that."

In Priti Patel, we now have an example of a twenty first century house Negro, and this one is sat on the front benches in the big House.

The article above was written six months ago.

Johnson has now been in chaotic power for two years. He is following a very similar path to that trodden by Donald Trump and victim blaming is at its core. If he somehow manages to cling to his post until the next election, then the likes of what we are seeing today in the capital of America could well be seen on the streets of London in 2024.