In the Brave New World of 2024 Britain, the Stasi meet the Keystone Cops in a kind of Carry On Kafka, says Toby in his latest Spectator column. But does the comic dimension of the authoritarianism detract from the moral outrage? The Allison Pearson debacle is an obvious example of the absurdism; another is the ‘trial’ of a 17 year-old girl by the Football Association. Here’s an excerpt.
The free speech advocacy group I run has taken on the girl’s case and is helping her appeal the ban, but I sometimes worry that the comical aspect of episodes like this – that the young man on the ‘ladies’ team had a beard! – means people are less morally outraged than they should be. It’s hard to laugh and be angry at the same time. George Orwell said the reason the British Army would never adopt the goose-step was because people in the street would take the mickey out of them, imagining that our keen sense of the absurd would be a bulwark against totalitarianism. But our woke overlords have found a way around this by coming up with a uniquely British version of despotism, simultaneously comic and creepy, as exemplified by the Scottish Government’s employment of the Hate Monster – a cartoon creature that looked like a hairy pepperoni – to promote the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. The Scottish writer Ewan Morrison referred to this as “cute authoritarianism” – and the fact that our Brave New World is so laughable means people sometimes don’t notice quite how sinister it is.
But Carry On Kafka also has its upsides. For instance, the Free Speech Union has won several big lawsuits because of the sheer incompetence of people on the other side. The diversitycrats who run HR departments are such zealous enforcers of progressive dogma, they often ignore their companies’ policies and procedures, which the employment tribunal takes a dim view of. And they frequently misunderstand the Equality Act, believing it empowers them to persecute anyone who dissents from progressive orthodoxy when, in fact, it protects gender critical feminists among other heretics.
This points to a broader benefit: if we have to live in a British version of North Korea, better it should be run by David Lammy, Bridget Phillipson and Ed Miliband than, say, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. Not because the assault on our freedoms is leavened by the comic relief of watching Starmer’s buffoons running amok in Whitehall, but because they’re too stupid to work out which levers to pull and buttons to push to implement their oppressive policies in full. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of Britain’s future, imagine a clown shoe stamping on a human face – for ever.
Worth reading in full.
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Not sure ESG will “fall” in my lifetime
As an SME we’re expected to have a CSR policy by our big clients
I had no idea until recently, the full extent of the Pakistani grooming/rape gang atrocity. It is a horror story that unfolded over decades. Every one of those bastards who colluded to cover this up, should be strung up from a lamp post. I am especially disgusted with the police.
(Stranger) rape is an in-group/out-group phenomenon, so it is inevitable that an influx of migrants will lead to an increase in sexual assault.
I’m in the antipodes, and I heard about this scandal due to one man: Tommy Robinson. Doesn’t get a mention here.
It’s not only UK. I read a report from Paris. A girl between 12 and 16 years old was raped by 24 men. One brit, one Italian and 22 Pakistanis