Sometimes we hear the following argument:
Wokery is Cultural Marxism. Originally Marxism was about class struggle and oppression. What happened in the late twentieth century, with the breakdown of old heavy industry and the decline of the old working class, was that Marxists began to study other forms of oppression: and hence other objects of oppression, which they understood in classical Marxist manner as being oppressed by the capitalist system of expropriation. Wokery is Marxist because it continually talks about capitalism, neoliberalism and so on as cause, and various forms of oppression as consequence.
I don’t like this argument. I think it is slack and careless. This is because it involves a misrepresentation of Marxism – and this has to be said even before we say that Marxism necessarily involves a misrepresentation of Marx (as Marx himself said when he said he was not a Marxist).
So let us consider Marx, and then consider Marxism.
Marx, broadly speaking, was an extremely penetrating and weighty thinker who attempted to build a singular and systematic explanation of society out of German philosophy, French socialism and English political economy. These three elements were compatible in some respects, but not in others: Hegel and Adam Smith would have been appalled. Marx forced the three elements together, but as Gareth Stedman Jones has shown in his long biography of Marx, he did so in such a way that his theories were continually undermined by the fact that history appeared not to be playing along with those theories: so he seemed, as he tried to ring the changes, to have developed as many as three different logics within his system. In addition, Stedman Jones, to the displeasure of Marxists, has concluded that Marx was, ultimately, only attempting to work out what to think “after Christianity”: so that in fact the original set of problems he wanted to deal with were religious rather than secular, social or political.
Marxism, on the other hand, is a distillation of a sharp economic and political doctrine out of Marx’s complicated and multifarious works. This is the system which was initially promulgated by Engels, then Kautsky and Bernstein, and adapted in various ways by Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemberg, Sorel, and Lukacs, and which, in Britain, of course, was defanged and renamed by the Fabians: Webb, Shaw and others, including for a time Wells – which is why Marxism never had much direct purchase in Britain, despite intelligentsia revivals in the 1930s and 1960s. Fanged ‘Marxism’ consisted of, broadly speaking, the expectation, courtesy of ‘dialectical materialism’ (that is, of the dynamic history of economic processes of production and distribution), that the contemporary control of the economic and political system by the ‘bourgeois’ class of capitalist oppressors would experience an inevitable crisis as a consequence of the working out of its own logic – a crisis called a ‘revolution’ – which would lead to the emancipation of the ‘proletarian’ class, and thus an end of all oppression, immiseration and alienation. This would be a revolution-for-all, since even the capitalists, though not oppressed or immiserated, were and are, even now, alienated. Therefore, the emancipation of the proletariat would be, no matter how it was achieved, the emancipation of everyone. It would be a universal revolution.
The ambiguities of all this are obvious to any undergraduate who has to write an essay about it. Even Marx was sometimes unclear about whether this great revolution was the end of history or not. According to his original assumption about the persistence and continuity of class struggle in history, he thought it was not. But according to his theory of emancipation, he thought it was. (Marxism is basically Waiting for Godot, rewritten as if Godot has come, but as if nothing has changed despite his coming: Beckett’s “Nothing to be done” being a happy translation into English of Lenin’s “Something to be done”.)
Anyhow, Marxism is magnificently complicated. Its western varieties can be studied in Kolakowski’s unsympathetic Main Currents of Marxism and Perry Anderson’s sympathetic Considerations on Western Marxism. And that is before we consider Eastern Marxism on the one hand and the defanged Fabian varieties which have given us ‘social democracy’ on the other. But if anything, Marxism has become even more complicated as the original 19th Century confidence in it as theory and the subsequent 20th Century confidence in it as practice has faded: as the 1968ers, the Badious and Zizeks and Giddenses and Agambens have cascaded all over the place, turning Marxism into a Maoist-Lacanian-Blairite-Foucauldian academic commonplaces of myriadic confusion and complexity. And even this is before we get to the 2008ers (zéro-huitards): who would be condemned by all of the 1968 generation (except in so far as they prioritise wanting an audience over maintaining some sort of quality control). The 2008 generation is the one which has knitted all the new enthusiasms of the 1960s and 1970s together, all those enthusiasms of race and sex, and formed them into a finally unified ‘intersectional’ movement, usually symbolised by a rainbow.
Even the story I tell here seems to suggest that adding Black to the Union Jack and adding Pink to the Pound are the latest manifestations of Marxism. But they are not. For we have to recognise two things. The first is that rainbow intersectionalist Wokery is much more Liberal than Marxist. The second is that Wokery is itself susceptible to a harsh Marxist analysis. These two claims are short and simple and, I think, irrefutable.
First, Wokery is Liberal. Just became something is about ‘oppression’ does not mean it is part of a Marxist politics. We had attempts to deal with oppression long before Marx. Consider Spartacus or Tiberius Gracchus or Wycliffe. And it is in fact the great ideological strand we now call ‘Liberalism’ that brought into modern politics a consistent and coherent concern with the disadvantaged and with minorities. Byron, who helped found the journal The Liberal in the 1820s, was an enthusiast for an independent Greece, and so more or less invented the romantic politics of the underdogs of empire. Much modern Wokery is simply the Byronism of a later age: with Blacks or Trans instead of Greeks. John Stuart Mill in On Liberty outlined the basic arguments for the liberal hope that freedom of discussion – that is, not eliminating the views of minorities – would lead to moral and scientific improvement. His great enemy was what he and Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”. For centuries Liberalism has been opposed to the (unenlightened) majority and in favour of (enlightened) minorities. It is a form of aristocracy twisted to bring it into the democratic age. And surely this is at the intellectual root of Wokery. (And this is the case even though modern Social Justice Warriors are now a species of Liberal so sure of themselves that they feel entitled to suppress freedom of discussion.) All the modern intersectional obsessions – racism, anti-Semitism, empire, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, etc. – are, in the West at least, simply outgrowths of a Liberal inclination to side with minorities against the majority. The whole thing is more Liberal than Marxist, even if Marxists have come in afterwards to offer grand and dubious explanations for what is going on.
(It is worth noting the grotesque irony that this Liberal siding-with-minorities-against-the-majority has become a majority position. This paradox is causing almost all the confusion currently seen in our culture.)
Second, it is possible to make a harsh Marxist analysis of Wokery. Marx himself was partly responsible – along with Napoleon – for turning the silly word ‘ideology’ into a word of sharp political significance. Napoleon called his enemies idéologistes; and Marx, not to be outdone, used the word Ideologie for everything he was opposed to. However, unlike Napoleon, Marx had a theory of ideology. His theory was that ‘ideology’ was the intellectual superstructure generated by a dominant class (or the lackeys and lickspittles of that dominant class) to justify its domination: it was, as he also put it, a “false consciousness”: incantation and intoxication to create the dream-like haze which would enable the machinery to do its inexorable work. The bourgeoisie believed in their intellectual justifications not because they were true, but because it served their purposes to espouse them, to educate their successor generations into them, and even to create a system of belief for them.
Now, what is Wokery but an elaborate and radicalised set of ideological beliefs designed to defend certain novel changes in the elite systems of our civilisations? No doubt some of the Woke themselves feel marginalised: but they are usually either the very young or the very radical or the very poor, whereas it is obvious to those of us who have never had any interest in Wokery that it is most importantly an extremely nasty and devastating set of multipurpose weapons in the armoury of the new elites who have taken over our institutions in the religious, political and moral vacuum which has been British culture since the 1960s. British culture is not without its distractions or charm: antique heritage on the one hand (Stonehenge, the Queen, St Paul’s) and recent heritage on the other (Red Buses, Sir Paul McCartney, the Shard): but though it has some aesthetic appeal and much to offer by way of comfort, it has no soul. The culture is a sort of religious, political and moral Flatland, levelled down or levelled up (it is all the same) by relentless think-tankery, management-consultancy, middle-management and human-resourcefulness. Whatever most of the public figures, politicians, journalists, academics and scientists (and especially any scientists who happen to appear on a screen), believe is not something they conscientiously believe: on the contrary, it is ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense. Wokery is the ideology, the bricolage ideology, of our new massed state-and-corporate regime. And surely COVID-19 has revealed to us all that despite the beery and jolly atmospherics of Liberalism which still befog and befoam the modern British mind, there was an astounding ideological ‘mass formation’, as we now say, as everyone came to agree about the succession of dubious and dangerous protocols wheeled in by unscrupulous amateurs and even more unscrupulous professionals to deal with an innocent virus.
Marx enabled some – like Agamben (also influenced by Foucault and others) – to keep their heads. Agamben was almost the only public intellectual of any weight who came out like Jeremiah during the pandemic. So we cannot blame Marx or even Marxism for everything that is going on. Marx had a good eye for the dynamics of power, and even if his false consciousness about his own moral sympathy for the underdog led him astray, he himself, had he been alive in our time, would have asked, as Lenin did later, who was benefiting in what way from whatever all this ideological fanfare was concealing in plain sight?
It is true that most Marxists have not done well during the COVID-19 crisis. Although they are generally fond of criticising corporations, they do so from a point of view which opposes acquisitive and rapacious corporations to an ideally redistributive state. This is a distinction which was always hopeful, if not completely fictional; and in our age in which states and corporations have formed grandiose and complex alliances there is no simple way of distinguishing ‘public’ and ‘private’. Anyone who claims to be able to distinguish them is lying, or simplifying to a fault. And so most self-styled critics of capitalism have tended to be the most abject supporters of the corporations which were responsible for vaccines or which benefited from lockdowns. These critics simply switched off their suspicion of corporations for the sake of the virus. Plus, they thought that there was something beautifully anti-populist and anti-parochial about fighting a virus: just as there is in fighting climate change or fighting exploitation and expropriation. But this universal feelgoodery is not Marxism: it is just the usual thoughtless elite Liberalism. Consider how thin the critique of capitalism must be, that it could so easily collapse in the face of COVID-19.
It wouldn’t surprise me if one day the Cold War might come to be seen as a war between two equally bad systems: in which the one in the West was only infinitely slyer and subtler than the one in the East. The propaganda in the West must make the Chinese gasp in admiration at its sophistication. Be that as it may, there is certainly no point talking about ‘Cultural Marxism’. The word ‘Cultural’ empties the word ‘Marxism’ of any significance. It is likely that anyone who uses the word ‘Marxist’ is simply using it as a term of abuse, like ‘Fascist’. So be it. But be aware that you are using the term as a term of abuse. And you are obliterating any attempt to make sense.
One more thought. Bring Marx back from the grave. Would he not say that post-Christian modernity has developed an even subtler ‘opium of the masses’ than Christianity – in this godless, scientific, hypocritical, oxymoronic, ‘sustainable’ and ‘progressive’, irritable, mental-health-obssessed, aggrieved, complacent and privileged rainbow religion?
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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“A black sales worker […] sued for discrimination after her co-workers asked about her hair”. Snowflake.
I am surprised that this sort of product is allowed.
Wahl Afro Hair Straightener LCD Display With Ceramic Coated Plates ZX866
Honky!
It’s OK, it’s a white racial slur!
Wednesday Morning 28th Windsor Rd & Ruddlesway Windsor
Ukraine to send troops to Britain to help overthrow communist dictator
‘We’ve seen this before,” Zelensky warned. “First, they make you put your pronouns in your email signature. Next thing you know, you’re on a collective farm, waiting in line for your turn at the communal Wi-Fi.’
‘Reports suggest that Ukrainian forces are already preparing for the operation, which has been dubbed “Operation Red Dawn 2: Electric Boogaloo.” British citizens have been advised to brace for a wave of freedom, brought to them in the form of Eastern European soldiers who’ve had quite enough of authoritarianism in their own country and are eager to take on the challenge abroad.’
‘Meanwhile, Starmer’s office has dismissed the threat, with an official statement saying, “Sir Keir has faced many challenges, but Ukrainian soldiers storming Westminster wasn’t on our bingo card.’
What’s really going on?
Now, finally, do you see, comrades, why Ukraine invaded Kursk?
Clue: It was a rehearsal, stupid!
Now, finally, do you see why the Conservative government sent all our three tanks and our field kitchen cook to Ukraine?
Clue: Egg banjos will shortly be served in No. 10
Emergency Cobra Meeting: “Cancel the supply of Starmer Shadow missiles to the comedian in Keeev! Spend the millions on Winter fuel allowances for the UK’s OAPs! And get someone who believes in borders for Ukraine to check the identity of the Channel boat refugees; those Ukrainian marines have had practice crossing the Dnieper! Last year it was people in rubber rings landing on the fabled Kentish beaches; today it’s 50-man inflatables!”
And pot holes!
Zelensky UK invasion aims:
‘A new world is being born before our eyes. Ukraine’s military operation in UK has opened a new era – in three dimensions at once. And of course, in the fourth, domestic one. Here a new period begins both in ideology and in the very model of our socio-economic system – but this is worth discussing separately a little later.
Ukraine is restoring Britain’s unity – the tragedy of 1999, this terrible catastrophe of Britain’s history, its unnatural dislocation, has been overcome. Yes, at a great cost, yes, through the tragic events of a de facto civil war, because now brothers, divided by their belonging to the Scottish and English armies, are still swearing at each other – but Scotland as anti-English will no longer exist. Ukraine is restoring Britain’s historical completeness, gathering the British world, the British people together – in all its totality of Great Britain, Scotsmen and Little Welshmen.
If we had refused this, had allowed the temporary division to become entrenched for centuries, then we would not only have betrayed the memory of our ancestors, but would also have been cursed by our descendants – for allowing the disintegration of the British land.
Zelensky has taken upon himself – without a drop of exaggeration – historical responsibility, deciding not to leave the solution of the British question to future generations. After all, the need to solve it would always remain the main problem for Ukraine – for two key reasons. And the issue of national security, that is, the creation of an anti-English outpost for Scotland to put pressure on Ukraine, is only the second most important of them.
The first would always remain the complex of a divided people, the complex of national humiliation – when the British house first lost part of its foundation (Edinburgh), and then was forced to come to terms with the existence of two states, not one, but two peoples. That is, either to renounce its history, agreeing with the crazy versions that “only Scotland is the real Kingdom'”, or helplessly gnash its teeth, remembering the times when “we lost Scotland”. Returning Scotland, that is, turning it back to England, would be more and more difficult with each decade – the recoding, de-Anglification of Scotsmen and setting Little Welshmen-Scots against England would gain momentum.
And in the case of the consolidation of complete geopolitical and military control of Europe over Scotland, its return to England would become completely impossible – it would be necessary to fight for it with the Atlantic bloc.
Now this problem is gone – Scotland has returned to England. This does not mean that its statehood will be liquidated, but it will be restructured, re-established and returned to its natural state of being part of the British world. Within what borders, in what form will the union with England be secured (through the CSTO and the Eurasian Union )? This will be decided after the period in the history of Scotland as anti-English is put to rest. In any case, the period of the split of the British people is ending.
And here begins the second dimension of the coming new era – it concerns relations between Britain and the West. Not even Britain, but the British world, that is, three states, England, Wales and Scotland, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage – the West sees Britain returning.
Did anyone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin , seriously believe that Ukraine would abandon England ? That the British would forever be a divided people? And at the same time, when Europe is uniting, when the German and French elites are trying to wrest control over European integration from the Anglo-Saxons and assemble a united Europe? Forgetting that the unification of Europe became possible only thanks to the unification of Germany , which happened by Ukrainian good will (even if not very smart). To then set their sights on Scotland is the height of not even ingratitude, but geopolitical stupidity. The West as a whole, and even more so Europe separately, did not have the strength to keep Scotland in its sphere of influence, much less take it for itself. Not to understand this, one would have to be a geopolitical fool.
But the confrontation with Scotland, into which the Anglo-Saxons are dragging Europe, deprives the Europeans of even a chance for independence – not to mention the fact that they are trying to force a break with China on Europe in exactly the same way . If the Atlanticists are now happy that the “Scottish threat” will unite the Western bloc, then in Berlin and Paris they cannot help but understand that, having lost hope for autonomy, the European project will simply collapse in the medium term. This is precisely why independently thinking Europeans are now completely uninterested in building a new iron curtain on the Scottish border – realizing that it will turn into a corral specifically for Europe. Whose century (or rather half a millennium) of global leadership is over in any case – but various options for its future are still possible.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
Back in the real world, while Putin, his apparatchiks and assorted western dupes dream of a Union State of 250 million people, Russia has just been invaded for the first time since 1941, two of its oil depots still burn and Ukraine has launched its first ballistic missile. Just as well, then, for the rest of the world, that Britain and the U.S. managed to persuade Ukraine to surrender its nuclear warheads in 1994 in return for security assurances concerning its territorial integrity……and then let Russia annex Crimea in 2014.
Nevertheless, the U.S. strategy of weakening Russia so that it can no longer invade its neighbours is working well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220226051154/https://ria.ru/20220226/rossiya-1775162336.html
The referenced document was published too early by the Kremlin mouthpiece, RIA Novosti, before being quickly taken down.
It assumes Ukraine has been conquered!
It is interesting for many reasons but particularly because it gives the exact reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine
Demography, a falling Russian birth rate
The threat that a successful European capitalist democracy in neighbouring Ukraine would represent to the present Russian establishment of Putin, his cronies and the security agencies (Siloviki).
Tellingly, no mention of NATO.
It is also interesting for these particular paragraphs:
‘….the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well – this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlantists, this is Russia returning its historical space and its place in the world.’
‘Not even Russia, but the Russian world, that is, three states, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, acting in geopolitical terms as a single whole. These relations have entered a new stage – the West sees Russia returning to its historical borders in Europe’
It is our old friend, isn’t it: the ‘Union State’!
And what were the historical borders of Russia?
Oh! Ukraine, Moldova, yes, and all the Baltic States but also Poland, Finland.
And…….Manchuria….Oops!
That is why China as well as the U.S. are happy to see Russia defanged…..oh…and happy to see them use up all of North Korea’s kit as well…..hilarious…..how they laughed in the West Building, Zhongnanhai……..
er, no … if the Russians want to restore their historical border, they would have to give back a whole chunk of Poland, not take even more.
Well, I have to congratulate you Monro. That really was an interesting and funny article on so many levels and the hidden message was interesing too.
Or a waste of column inches! Who knew? (Or cares?)
The Ria Novosti link is to an opinion piece written in February 2022, congratulating Putin on welcoming Ukraine back into the Russian fold – one of our friend’s favourite topics. But, firstly, it is one man’s opinion and, secondly, he talks about the three Russian states – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – acting as one (not being one), i.e. in unison, which is probably how it will become. The last paragraph is prescient – remember it was written 2 years ago:
China and India, Latin America and Africa, the Islamic world and Southeast Asia – no one believes that the West rules the world order, much less sets the rules of the game. Russia has not just challenged the West, it has shown that the era of Western global dominance can be considered completely and finally over. The new world will be built by all civilizations and centers of forces, of course, together with the West (united or not) – but not on its terms and not according to its rules.
They’re pushing out an RSV vaccine at wife’s surgery. Eligible to 75-80 and pregnant women over 28 weeks. Very specific right? I mean, you know, if it’s so safe why the restricted demographics? So I did a bit of digging…
The vaccine being rolled out in the UK is, as far as I can tell, a traditional attenuated virus version and made by… guess who? Yup, our friends at Pfizer. There are three – GSK, Pfizer & Moderna, and only Moderna created a mRNA version. Both GSK and Pfizer use what they call a ‘subunit protein’ vaccine, so the same technology. And this is where it gets really interesting; GSK has taken legal proceedings against Pfizer for stealing their IP https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/blogs/2023/08/gsk-sues-pfizer-for-patent-infringement-over-rsv-vaccine , so the vaccines will be very, very similar, if not virtually identical. Therefore both must have a great safety profile right? Nope. GSK stopped their trials in pregnant women as the stuff increased the risk of premature birth by 37% https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/respiratory-syncytial-virus-rsv/study-details-why-phase-3-trial-gsks-rsv-vaccine-pregnant-women-was .Thirty seven percent! Yet, Pfizer’s vaccine, which is pretty much the same stuff, has been authorised and recommended for pregnant women over 28 weeks. I wonder how Pfizer managed that…$$$…$$$…?
The official NHS guidance acknowledges there was a small increase in premature birth in the Pfizer vaccine as well, but states, and I quote “…This difference is most likely to be due to chance”. That’s fine then, as long as the risk of premature birth is probably nothing to do with the vaccine then we should definitely roll it out to millions of women.
I cannot hate these people more. The evil is beyond my comprehension.
They had to monetise all that spare jab junk hanging around in their warehouses.
It is sad they take advantage of young pregnant women who have no idea of past disasters like Thalidomide.
“Net Zero is becoming a threat to our basic security”
If the planet really does need saving from emissions, does it make more sense to (a) switch off street lights, freeze pensioners and ban meat, or (b) switch off the power-hungry AI used for mass-surveillance?
And, critically, if you only produce < 1% of global emissions you need everyone else onboard of course. Strangely, nobody ever seems to want to talk about that. How…. ‘odd’. Still, if you’re real goal is control, then you want to create an irreversible dependency on the global project by reducing farmland to erect ‘sustainable’ energy sources, and you use an ’emergency’ to manipulate minds as a precursor to control of behaviour. Whilst you get the masses to look the other way, you build a surveillance system which only the Chinese can rival. Destroy the old, build the new. Once enough of the new global system is ready, all that is left to do is flick a switch.
Ironically, it may in fact be the high electricity demand of AI and the rising costs of electricity that may slow and perhaps even halt the advance of AI.
Is there a point where it just become uneconomical? There must be.
So far with computer tech it has seemed as if power requirements are inconsequential. But perhaps it will be different with AI.
And we may end up discovering (once again) what an amazing self powering, highly efficient, intelligent organism homo sapiens is and that we are still light years away from becoming the gods we sometimes think we are.
Is it not more likely that governments will ban it for the public “to save the planet” whilst increasing it at GCHQ etc with no accountability?
It’s hard for all governments to ban it, especially if not banning it gives one country an edge over one that does.
What I wonder is whether there are practical physical limits where the cost of taking it further due to the energy requirements makes it unviable.
At least lurve-bombing Berlin is humane compared to the other sort that was once carried out there.
Seriously, if you’re going to release prisoners after they’ve served a fifth of their sentence, why not just cut to the chase and not imprison them at all?
Think of the savings… no prisons, no prison officers, no courts, no lawyers, no legal aid… it’s a win/win, surely?
And police officers could be multi tiered in their own time as we would not need any.
we would have costs in fencing in Notting Hill and Kentish Town to ensure the main villains can’t get out – MPs!
How long before trans men in women’s prisons go to law to challenge early release.
Yes exactly. It’s an absolute joke. We have actual criminals, such as that dirtbag that was found guilty of historical rape from 2005 ( I’m still not getting how people can be found guilty so many years later ), or the misogynist who attacked the three women at the petrol station or the mugger in London who broke his victim’s elbow in the process of robbing his watch or the Pakistani men assaulting police at Manchester airport, and many more examples I’m sure we could all find, but they’re all able to avoid being sent down because the government is so myopically focused and obsessed with making examples of so-called ‘right-wing thugs’, or ‘meme terrorists’, as I call them. I mean, shouting at police officers/dogs or posting an anti-establishment opinion vs rape or actual bodily harm? It should be a no-brainer who gets sent to jail, right? Wrong. The show trials must go on..
”Most crime victims in England and Wales lack faith in the criminal justice system to do its job and deliver justice.
That is according to a new report by the independent Victims’ Commissioner, drawing upon the largest study—of over 3,000 victims of crime—it has ever undertaken. 73% of respondents to the study said they aren’t confident reporting a crime will lead to justice. 40% also expressed dissatisfaction with police responses.
The online survey was launched in November last year, while the Conservatives were still in office. Its findings further highlight the collapse in support for many British institutions.
Public trust in this most important of systems is likely to have gotten much worse in the past few months of new Labour governance. In this time, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has signed off on plans to release thousands of criminals after they served just 40% of their sentences. Many of them are violent and will almost inevitably offend again.
The almost constant flow of reports of criminals being given far too easy a ride won’t have done much to instill confidence, either. Just this week, a mother hit out at Starmer’s administration after she discovered that one of the killers of her 14-year-old son—who was the victim in a violent machete attack—will be released from prison after serving just 14 months in total.”
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/the-entire-justice-system-seems-to-be-falling-apart-only-a-quarter-of-uk-crime-victims-have-faith-in-justice-system/
There is someone masquerading as “Victims commissioner”? It isn’t April 1st you know.
Do we need further proof that Germany has gone to the dogs because it’s governed by hideous Woketards? Not really, but here’s some anyway. Men didn’t used to be incarcerated in women’s prisons years ago but the times they are a-changing. Yes, even the ones doing time for sex crimes;
”Germany has begun transferring violent male convicts who “identify” as women into female prisons, despite the fact the nation hasn’t yet formally enacted its gender self-identification law. Among them are dangerous sex offenders and pedophiles.
On April 12, the German Parliament, or Bundestag, passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies, known as the Self-Determination Act (SBGG). But while the gender identity policies are not set to come into effect until November, correctional institutions are already transferring male criminals into the female prison estate in anticipation of the law.
Women‘s rights organization Initiative Lasst Frauen Sprechen (Let Women Speak) requested figures from all ministries of justice in the federal states in Germany on how many men have been or are currently imprisoned in women’s correctional facilities since 2023. The campaign group also asked for information on the nature of the crimes the men had committed.
The response from government officials show that males are already being housed in women’s prisons in every federal state, a practice that began months ahead of the German self-identification law coming into force in November. The only federal state that does not house men in women’s prisons is Saarland, because there are no women’s prisons in the region. As a result, trans-identified male criminals in the state may be relocated to female facilities in other federal districts.
Of the federal states with males housed in women’s prisons, Berlin stands out as the most saturated. According to official information from the Senate Department of Justice in Berlin, since 2023 “15 people whose sex was registered as male at birth have been imprisoned in the Berlin correctional facility for women.”
https://reduxx.info/germany-trans-identified-male-convicts-transferred-to-womens-prisons-ahead-of-new-gender-self-identification-law/
The comments of the ‘spoons man, in response to Ryanair’s plea to moderate drinking in airports, makes me wonder just how much people are really drinking before they get on an airplane?
Presumably, for him to say anything at all suggests that he recognises a two drink limit will be severely detrimental to his business… drunk people on airplanes; what could possibly go wrong?
It never ceases to amaze me, if I happen to be at a British airport in the small hours of the morning, that people are actually drinking pints of beer at that time. Mind you, they are often eating Burger King, which is just as nauseating at that time of day.
Technically you can buy a far larger amount of alcohol in duty free and swig it while waiting for the plane. But if you want to do the civilized thing and sit down in a pub and order a drink served in a glass, while paying the higher price because you are not an uncultured low life, then the government takes offence.
Leary has clearly never had to wait for a delayed flight in an airport. An absolute limit on drinks inrespective of the time spent waiting for a plane is simply inhuman.
They’re the future don’t you know?
Sounds like an overheated chip pan!
https://youtu.be/FukHCA-Rza0?si=pPz0uoKokLDDrQkH
Net Zero is becoming a threat to our basic security” – Turning off street lamps to cut emissions is insane. But with Ed Miliband as Energy Secretary, we can expect many more such measures, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
When I was a kid, the street lights in our road (and presumably many roads) were always turned off at around 11pm, in the winter coming on again at around 5am. I seem to remember reading a long time ago that the timers used in street lamps, which obviously at times failed, were becoming too expensive and time consuming to replace, so it was decided to leave the lights on all night as the cheaper option. Personally I don’t think it’s an insane idea. While they are at it they should encourage the turning off of lights in unused offices. Aerial night time photos of our country/world always amaze me with the amount of light from towns and cities. I couldn’t give a fig about emissions, but I do detest waste.
So why was street lighting created in the first place? Answer: it lowered crime rates!
But that doesn’t matter anymore cause they do it in broad daylight! sign of the wonderful diversity we now enjoy, turn them all off they are no longer relevant
and furthermore there is overproduction of electricity at night.
Odd that. Lineker put ME off MOTD…
Well done Mr Musk another win
“A nation of immigrants”
Name a nation that isn’t! It all depends on how far back you want to look
“Prisoners to be freed after serving a fifth of their sentence”
Which prisoners?
Oh yes, the harmless rapists,muggers,burglars and murderers
But if you DARE disagree with the government your looking at a ten stretch!
Tweet tweet
“Church of England stops Grade II-listed church being converted into mosque”
Brava
Pity that horse has long since bolted!
Yes, they only did that because it was a legal condition set down by the previous owner that the building could not be used for the worship of any other religion than Christianity.
Just Stop Oil (painting)
Break out the Campbells carrot and coriander!
Commander in chief soup slinger gets top job at portrait gallery!
Fox..chickens..?
“Starmer plots outdoor smoking ban” – Nightclub smoking areas, restaurant terraces and even shisha bars”
OK, you’ve lost me! What’s a shisha bar?
(Even the spell checker doesn’t know what it is)
I’ve just looked it up, it’s were you go to get a hookah! (It’s not where I would go to get a hookah!)
“Taxpayers pay millions to ‘eradicate’ racism in Wales – while NHS waiting lists soar”
Eradicate racism? How prey tell does one achieve that? You’d might as well try to eradicate breathing
“Musk has put me off Twitter, says Lineker”
“Oh well, how sad, never mind”
Windsor Davis
Electricity from wanedwops!
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/china-energy-raindrops-water/5878/
” and then we went to the zoo and I had an ice lolly that made my tongue turn gween!”
For pity’s sake!
“Ukraine to send troops to Britain to help overthrow communist dictator”
This satire brilliantly illustrates our own politicians’ folly in sending British Taxpayers’ Money to Ukraine.