The Union Jackal, February 2022

Beloved British cartoon character Peppa Pig has been unmasked as a horrible racist after being shown doing such unconscionable things as buying fiddles and attending an Irish dancing festival during a trip to Ireland.

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Late to the party

There seems to be a political axiom whereby it is clear that a party or its leaders are in trouble when they start doing things, or at least start talking about doing things, which the majority of people actually want done. Thus, we see Angela Rayner, the blowsy Deputy Shadow Prime Minister, “talking tough” (translated from politico, that means horse-shitting) on crime. Ms. Rayner recently called Tories “scum” on social media. I don’t know where she thinks these mythical Tories are, but they certainly aren’t in the Conservative Party.

For their part, the government have decided to launch a “war on woke,”  and will doubtless say they are listening to the people, even though some of us have been scribbling about this on the asylum walls for years. But the media won’t stop banging on about illicit government parties and birthday cake, and so they must be distracted like kittens when someone flickers a flashlight beam across the carpet. If we can’t have a war on Russia — this week — then a war on woke will do.

The great unwashed must have the truth, and the Conservatives are not afraid to stand up and tell the good people just what they think of this impertinent “cancel culture” of which we hear so much. It’s just they haven’t dared to say so in the United Kingdom yet, instead dispatching Minister without Portfolio (a sort of freelance idiot) Oliver Dowden for a Stateside vacation, as well as to say as much in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. Perhaps it would have been better to speechify in a country unprotected by a First Amendment. Like your own.

Boris Johnson also threw the rabble a few bones to chew in the shape of dropping COVID restrictions on the principle that “we have to learn to live with the virus.” Well, as the young people say so amusingly, duh! It was only ever a bad ‘flu, not an alien invasion or Putin’s Mensheviks or the Black Death. What Johnson is trying to do, however, is what all world leaders are trying to do, which is keep the disaster-thon going. His comment, again in translation, means “you have to learn to live with our increasingly hard soft totalitarianism.” Or, as another blonde poseur (poseuse?) once almost said, don’t let them eat cake.

Dick out

A bad month for saucy sub-editors saw the defenestration of The Chief of London’s Metropolitan Police Force, Cressida Dick. A lesbian steeped in cultural Marxism, Ms. Dick was wholly inappropriate for the job, which made her perfect for the requirements of the anarcho-tyrannists who wish London’s streets to be violent and threatening. After five years of rising street crime, an obsession with online policing, a worship of gay pride and transgenderism, and generally a talent for covering everything in woke tinsel, Ms. Dick was finally ousted under pressure from the equally odious Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. There seemed to be crossed wires, however. Ms. Dick, having announced a day previously that she had no intention of quitting, was clearing her desk next day.

Cressida Dick was a wholly useless head of the Met. And that was the idea. Everyone knew from the start that she was an affirmative action (gender/sexual preference division) hire. The job is, or was, almost unbelievably important, dictating as it does the style of policing a major capital which at the moment is less West End and more Wild West. A good, tough, male, grizzled old cop is what is needed to grab London by the scruff of the neck and shake it but, of course, if it’s anarcho-tyranny you are wanting, the last thing you need is the type of efficient policing a good cop would bring.

Pink supremacy

Peppa Pig is a jolly little cartoon character much loved by British children. She is also a racist. Her most recent escapade, Peppa Goes to Ireland, sees Peppa and her family visit the Emerald Isle, which is when things start to go wrong for porcine-Irish relations:

Outraged Irish parents have criticized a book in which Peppa Pig journeys to Ireland — insisting it is ‘offensive’ and ‘horrendous’ . . . [as] it features no Irish characters and [features] stereotypes such as Peppa’s family purchasing fiddles and attending an Irish-dancing festival.

Peppa’s really done it now. The Irish will forgive Cromwell first. No Irish characters? Get used to it, that will be parts of Dublin soon if your country continues its attempts to turn the Fair City into the Third World with Guinness. As for the buying of fiddles and the dancing of festivals, faith and begob, if that isn’t racial stereotyping, then yer man doesn’t know what is.

You could never trust Peppa. She comes from a nuclear family, for a start, what with Mummy and Daddy Pig and her little brother, George. The publishing company’s assiduous but worried sub-editors are now looking for any potential trouble with their next publication, Peppa Goes to Mecca.

Don’t let trash in!

At last, a heart-warming story of just how far the UK will go to make brown people feel at home. Between 2017 and 2019, Britain sent thousands of tons of waste to the cheery island of Sri Lanka, purveyor of the tea the British so enjoy. The containers were billed as containing “mattresses, carpets and rugs,” and Sri Lankan customs officials were told a tall tale in which a company had agreed to take the waste in order to recycle and sell the mattress springs and stuffing. Not exactly yelling out “invest in me!”, that business plan, but it got worse when the containers were inspected: “[I]n reality, [the containers] also contained bio-waste from hospitals, including body parts from mortuaries . . .”

A couple of considerations. Quite apart from all those self-assembly cadavers who have now made an unexpected trip in the afterlife to what used to be Ceylon, turning up mistakenly labelled as mattresses (anyone know if the Sri Lankan word for “mattress” is a bit the same as “corpse”?), “the containers were not chilled and some of them gave off a powerful stench.” I smell the new imperialism.

Sri Lanka, however, has put its elegant brown foot down. Cricket they liked, bits of dead British people not so much. The government is taking legal action to have the waste returned to the UK, presumably on the principle that Sri Lanka should not have to allow trash from far-off countries to travel across its borders. There is a lesson there somewhere.

Neurodiversity training

Britain’s Fourth Estate has long seen itself, in terms of governmental policy and its dissemination, as Mother’s little helper. It is natural, then, that a part of the provisional wing of our rulers called News UK has created something called The Disability and Journalism Forum. These good people have organized a symposium in which, they hope, “leading disabled journalists [will] come together to discuss a variety of topics.” This all sounds wholesome until the mission statement takes a dip into sci-fi, as these topics are said to range from “how to better attract and retain talent to how neurodiversity can benefit newsrooms.”

As we English tend to say in times of incredulity, come again? Neurodiversity? Sorry if I am behind the curve, but I couldn’t Google quickly enough:

Judy Singer, a sociologist who has autism, started using the term ‘neurodiversity’ in the late 1990s. It refers to the concept that certain developmental disorders are normal variations in the brain. And people who have these features also have certain strengths.

Uh-oh. Turns out “disability” is not that guy in accounts with the robot leg, it’s your line manager with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Including “neurodiversity” under “disability” means a big hello to psychological disorders, including Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). So, it seems the boss of your average newsroom can stop worrying about whether the wheelchair ramp reaches the water-cooler and reach for his copy of DSM V to see what he might expect at the next interview. Judy Singer sounds an unintentional note of warning by talking about “neurominorities.”

You can buy Mark Gullick’s Vanikin in the Underworld here.

This does no service to those who have lost limbs or have other physical disabilities. Put simply, psychological disorders are not physical disabilities, and the two ought to be kept separate. They present wholly differing sets of logistical problems, and will encourage sectarianism as the physically handicapped do not, generally, tend to whine about victim status or use their disability as an excuse. They are just not very good at victimhood. And they should not, therefore, be bracketed with those suffering from an ever-increasing range of psychologically dysfunctional conditions, all fully sanctioned (meaning encouraged at diagnostic level) by the pharmaceutical companies. Those with autism, I have noted, are often only too happy to let you know all about it, and I once heard a woman describing her daughter’s supposed Asperger’s Syndrome (which the little girl didn’t have, in my opinion, but was merely poorly parented and so badly behaved as a result) as though she were parading a new Prada clutch-bag.

Also, the condescending idea that physically disabled journalists need affirmative action to get a job is rather nauseating, given the focus and resolve many crippled people will have built up in response to injury, loss, or birth defect. But, government or one of its little elves has to do everything for what it sees as victims of some cosmic unfairness, and equity is the soup of the day at all participating restaurants, which is all of them.

Scots off color

Off now to the land of heather, haggis, and hatred of the English, Bonny Scotland. Apparently, our Caledonian cousins are having a bit of a recruitment problem in their civil service. Not only are just 2.5% of its staff black or Asian (in the British sense) when a full 5% of Jocks are of the dusky persuasion, but those few token gestures are more likely to “receive less favorable appraisal markings than their white colleagues.”

Now, we all know the drill. What about meritocracy, best person for the job, I thought we were supposed to be color-blind, and so on and so forth. None of that works anymore. It is the quota and only the quota that counts. Brown the workforce if you want to stay out of the papers. Can you imagine the pressure on whoever evaluates these rankings to boost the scores of ethnic minorities? And they still fall behind. But that just means you are racist for suggesting a viable alternative explanation.

We then have the usual all-you-can-grift list of the dreadful things that have happened to colored people while serving Hibernian interests. One woman claims her boss asked her why it was that black people always played the race card. The union representing government employees claim bullying, discrimination, and racism are rife. One “victim” claims that “the culprits are still walking around.”

The likelihood, in the current Party (that’s Orwell’s Party, not the Scottish Nationalist one) atmosphere, of white civil servants doing any of these things and not expecting to unleash the whirlwind is remote, not to mention the fact that employees — particularly government employees — know that to game the system to their advantage, their best bet is to go race, every time. This is often to their financial advantage:

The findings come just weeks after The Independent [a British newspaper] revealed that a black civil servant had received a six-figure settlement over allegations of racial discrimination in Whitehall, raising uncomfortable questions over the civil service’s approach to ethnic diversity.

The approach is the same as every other white managerial body has to take: a mixture of abject fear for their continuing employment, and a coerced reverence for ethnicities the figures would suggest underperform. The uncomfortable question is why a six-figure sum is appropriate for some alleged nasty words.

Affirmative action, just as in America, jeopardizes the smooth running (such as it was) of every level of government, as appointments are made in terms of race and not as you would hope in terms of competence.

Star Trek, Boyo

With “sustainability” as one of the most sacred words of the new religion, you would expect it to affect the space race sooner or later. But who will become the world’s first sustainable nation to boldly go where only a few men and dogs and cats and monkeys and basically the animal population of your backyard have gone before? Will we see American exceptionalism striving per ardua ad astra (only now with recycling facilities), will Russia create a new Sputnik that runs on seaweed, will India’s space program convert the massive foreign aid Britain gives it every year and give us the first sacred cow in space? None of the above. Step forward the land of rugby, male-voice choirs, and Dame Shirley Bassey: Wales!

Yes, the tiny bit tacked onto Western England where they speak in a sing-song voice, eat leeks for apparent pleasure, and burn down English holiday homes is about to reach for the stars:

The Welsh government has unveiled ambitious plans to become the world’s first sustainable spacefaring nation by 2040, fueled by new initiatives including launching rockets at sea using cost-effective and environmentally systems [sic] and further investment at Spaceport Snowdonia.

Presumably the systems are environmentally friendly, but what about the social impact of a spaceship full of Taffs arriving on an alien planet? And how will sheep take to weightless conditions? We must be told!

Respecting Irish customs

And finally to Ireland (whatever is left of it after the Peppa Pig riots), or at least the bit of it which is still British. Brexit, of course, divided Ireland into a European Union country and a non-European Union country, and because the EU is what it is — a rapaciously bureaucratic leviathan designed to confound those who simply wish to trade and do their economies some good –, this has been turned into a problem.

There was never any intention — not by the British deep state, and certainly not by the EU — to let Brexit happen if it could possibly be sabotaged, and a truckload of spanners have been dropped into the works over the last five years.

The so-called Northern Ireland Protocol allows goods to pass across the borders between the two Irelands without the usual customs checks, which the EU want to see reinstated now that Northern Ireland is no longer under their ruinous auspices. This, however, means at least some presence at the border. However,

[t]he border is a sensitive issue because of the history of Northern Ireland and the agreements made to bring peace, which included the removal of visible signs of the border.

The fear is that if any infrastructure were to be installed, such as cameras or border posts, it could become a target and lead to political instability.

Sorry and everything, but the last century or so should have persuaded us that warnings against political instability in Ireland is like warning that a boxing match may lead to punches being thrown.

Now, you could be forgiven for concluding that all this political wrangling is taking place to stop Paddy having a tear-up, but this is a little unkind. Beneath it all there is the petty and spiteful revenge of the EU, who will never forgive Britain for leaving its rotting empire. If the government triggers the infamous Article 16 (go easy mentioning “triggers” in Belfast), then the border checks will cease and there will be nothing the EU can do about it — a situation they refuse to contemplate. Where Brexit is headed next is anybody’s guess. I’ll leave you with the old Irish gag about the man who was asked the way to Kildare Market and replied, “Well, if I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.”

Top of the morning to you.

The Union Jackal

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