The Union Jackal, July 2022

England’s lily-white Lionesses women’s football team.

2,293 words

Rampant lionesses tamed by BBC

Women’s football — soccer to my American readers — is often scorned but is actually enjoyable to watch, provided you actually like the game and not just the tribal and commercial nonsense that nowadays comes with it. The female game is slower and more mistakes are made, but the passes are pleasant to watch, like park football, and there are other pleasing features of the ladies’ game.

For example, players who are fouled tend to fall down and get straight up again rather than rolling over seven or eight times as though they had just been pitched from a motorcycle after having been hit by sniper fire. When the referee awards a penalty, she or he gets a couple of catty looks from the defenders, but is not surrounded like some violent mob scene from a film about the French Revolution. When the players score, they hug and smile in enjoyment rather than sprinting 50 yards trailing their overpaid egos behind them like scarves. Also, concerning cosmetics, the female players don’t seem to feel that a neck tattoo is a rite of passage in the professional game.

But don’t let all that fool you into thinking that a certain type of female soccer player is not guilty of the gravest of sins: playing — and winning — while white.

The European women’s championship is currently underway, and England’s “Lionesses” are in the semi-finals, one triumph being an 8-0 victory over the Valkyries of Norway. And if you think 8-0 is an impressive scoreline, pity the poor Latvian women’s team, who came out just on the wrong end of a 0-20 result against England in 2021. And you say it’s a low-scoring game. The only person not on the score sheet — seriously — was the goalkeeper. That’s almost a goal every four minutes. So, England’s Lionesses are roaring but, as football managers tend to say about a player not fulfilling potential, there is something missing in their game.

A BBC reporter at the Norway-England game giving (and apparently having) a post-match breakdown acknowledged the dominance of the England team, but pointed out their fatal flaw: The entire on-field team was white. (The squad from which the team was picked, incidentally, had 23 players, of whom three were black, leaving blacks demographically overrepresented in the squad if not the starting line-up).

This leaves doubts, she added, about the team’s commitment to diversity and inclusion. Yes, and it probably leaves doubts in the Norwegian goalkeeper’s mind as to whether she ever wants to face a rampant bunch of English chicks ever again. But that’s not the point. Nor is it the point that a concomitant lack of ethnic diversity in the Nigerian or Pakistani women’s teams would go unremarked.

If we get into the whole meritocracy versus quotas argument again I will despair. We have already had that argument. The best person, not the blackest one, should get the gig. England is playing Sweden in the semi-finals as I write, and there won’t be too many whites on display, I fear. The other semi is Germany vs. France. How delicious to beat either in the final.

At the risk of riling my Scotch correspondent here who upbraids me when I criticize things Caledonian, the reporter was Scottish and was commenting on the English team. But I know when not to kick a hornets’ nest, and so I will say no more about it. I will just update you on the current scoreline: White Supremacy 1, Woke Broadcasting 0.

To the Tower!

One — or even the Royal “we,” in the case of Her Majesty — could easily be forgiven for thinking that the driving motive of the British establishment is to make Queen Elizabeth II’s last years as cheerless and uncomfortable as they can manage.

She was forced to sit alone in church at her husband’s funeral due to Covid regulations her own government waived for themselves. She is a monarch cursed with one son, who apparently has friends in low places, and a grandson who will never wear the crown but would suit one of those rubber problem-kid helmets. There is also the grave possibility that when or if Rishi Sunak pops over to Buck House (which is what Londoners call Buckingham Palace) to ask permission to form a new government, the Queen might be taller than him.

Now, Her Majesty is having her art collection rifled by woke courtiers. They are looking for evidence in the paintings of colonialism and imperialism — which one would assume would not be difficult for an art history sleuth to sniff out in the Queen’s collection — but also, and rather bizarrely, disability. Changes must be made.

I think my favorite edict by these aesthetic commissars (today’s band name, if you are thinking of forming one) is that a painting by Domenico Zampieri originally entitled Epileptic Boy now be more sensitively retitled Boy with Epilepsy. Now, those who know me well would never call me an art critic. Plenty of other choice language, yes, but never an aesthete. But may I suggest we change Franz Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier to Cavalier Having a Laugh, and perhaps Delacroix’s The Execution of Lady Jane Grey to, I don’t know, Lady Jane Grey Getting Executed?

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

This is, as we must wearily concur, nothing to do with any kind of direct moral probity or post-colonial audit, but an attempt to belittle the monarch before she dies and, by extension, the colonial past that the far Left have decided she represents.

The British media have a tendency to call this type of behavior “madness” or “crazy” or lacking in “common sense.” Oh, dear. There is nothing unhinged about this. The Left have completed their long march through the institutions and have finally arrived at Britain’s version of The Winter Palace. And they want to get inside and destroy things, even if those are only history and tradition.

And, as she nears the final Royal Appointment, the one with her maker, Her Majesty is the perfect target for the Left. They despise the monarchy because the Queen represents whiteness, power, and wealth. Now, the Left at present don’t know what to do with the first except hate it, don’t know what to do with the second except waste it, and wouldn’t know what to do with the third if it spat in their face. Queen Elizabeth II, in bold contrast, has been a sterling example of each one.

How Her Majesty must secretly long for the glory days of monarchy, when you just had a footman fetch the keys to The Tower of London off the hook, or told the executioner to sharpen his axe and look forward to some overtime at the weekend.

Robinson redux

Tommy Robinson has emerged from his lair with a new video which seeks, as always, to trouble the waters. The maverick, divisive Robinson has a new target, the organization Hope Not Hate (HNH), who are roughly the British equivalent of American governmental advisers the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL). I have rattled their cage before now.

The fallout from this will be interesting. HNH have powerful backers, while Robinson is shunned even by many on the Right. I wrote recently to the usually excellent New Culture Forum (NCF) to give them my thoughts on their running a lengthy discussion piece on the Muslim grooming gang scandal in Telford without once mentioning Robinson’s video on the subject. Telford, incidentally, is only just surfacing as a topic of discussion on the Dissident Right, while here at Counter-Currents we were ahead of the curve and I covered it here — via Robinson’s video — in February.

In 25 or so minutes, the NCF panel mentioned only “Tommy Robinson types” and “Right-wing nutters,” and that was the extent of the analysis. Shoddy journalism, and I suspect some of it to be a vestigial class reaction by the staunchly middle-class NCF towards the oik they perceive Robinson to be.

In Robinson’s new “exposé,” HNH and its capo Nick Lowles are accused by Robinson not of political bias — I think we already got that — but much higher-octane crimes, including intimidation, blackmail, harassment, sexual assault, doxing, and consorting with a known Pakistani heroin gang. I don’t think Robinson actually accuses Lowles of burning down an orphanage, but it’s probably on the outtakes reel.

With provocation like this we wait and watch to see what the lawyers do. Robinson often picks ill-advised fights, as when he recently lost an expensive libel case against a Syrian refugee. Here, he had better be sure that his research team got their facts right. There are a lot of people from HNH to The Muslim Council of Great Britain to the media in general who would love to see Robinson out of the game for good.

HNH get a lot of column inches out of Robinson, and I have written here about how they manipulate his public image and past misdemeanors to help gin up a largely non-existent “British far Right.” If Robinson is on the money this time, however — and he needs to be, as HNH constantly crow over his bankruptcy — then Lowles and his sidekick Robert Mulhall have got a summer of damage control to look forward to, not that the mainstream media will touch this.

Robinson’s hubris is his hot-headedness. He thinks he is some avenging spitfire, but sometimes comes across as the pub nutter. He attaches himself to Lowles in the street and starts asking him questions, but it quickly degenerates into a Robinson rant, and Lowles doesn’t need to command the situation; he just lets it coalesce around him as Robinson gabbles on. You have to leave space either for your target to answer or make it clear that he either cannot or will not, and you have to be a very good “doorstepper” to do that. Robinson is not one.

But if there is no legal action against Robinson forthcoming, this is tacit admission that his accusations are true. Robinson says in the video, “I’m a flawed man” — not an admission you hear too often from activists. His supporters will he hoping that there is a difference between flaw and hubris.

The fires of Albion

The British notoriously complain about the cold. Then there is a heatwave, and within a couple of days they are moaning about the heat. Now, of course, any evidence of heat is evidence of the “existential threat” of global warming. (“Existential,” outside of its appropriate philosophical environment, is a word that needs retiring.)

So it was with a series of apparently spontaneous fires that broke out during Britain’s recent exposure to some serious sunlight. Now, fires have always been important to Britain. At one time, in the olden days before the Internet, beacons would be lit sequentially across the British coast, perhaps to warn of impending invasion or to tell Anglo-Saxons we’ve just beaten Norway Ladies 8-0 — affairs of import. Now, Albion’s fires have a different message: climate change.

A series of apparently spontaneous fires across Blighty during the recent spell of hot weather put all the green chuckleheads on full alert. Apart from the fact that the authorities reacted to the hot weather in general as though it was the end of days, they managed to find more signs and wonders in these tiny conflagrations.

So, the science is settled. Global warming not only threatens your children and means the end of the planet, it is also trying to burn down all the grassland in what is still a very green country — green as in grass and crops, not the warped ideology. If you have ever flown over Britain and looked down, you will have seen a green quilt. Britain is still 85% fields or similar. But back to the scorching flames of global heat death, if that’s alright with you.

One small problem for the Al Gore types. The fire brigade said that 40 degrees of heat is not sufficient to start a dry-brush fire. Oh, yes. Almost forgot:  The police said the fires looked like arson.

Jackal financial desk

Fortunately for the British exchequer, some of us are keeping a weather eye on the nation’s finances, and we don’t forget. Recently, I wrote here about the government’s abortive attempt to send asylum-seekers to the African country of Rwanda in order to be processed. Part of the deal was an upfront payment of £120 million to Rwanda, and I wondered out loud what would happen to this money, given that the chartered (another £500,000) jet chartered to take these arrivistes to the heart of darkness went from having a manifest containing 130 names to not needing a manifest at all. Surely this plucky and dusky nation will play the white man and give the money right back, no? No.

Two additional factors make the humiliation of Britain complete in this fiasco. Rwanda have apparently declared that they are only equipped to take 200 immigrants. Item, Civil Service, calculator, batteries for. More immigrants than that, many more, pitch up every day on the coasts of Kent.

Immigration puts me in mind of stress testing.

Different materials split, fracture, or crack with differing degrees of pressure and torque, but always at a reasonably consistent level of application. Wood splits, steel fractures, china cracks. Those materials, different as they are, are still broken and, as of that point, unfit for purpose (that favorite motto of governmental jargon).

The question is not whether the immigration services or the United Kingdom’s Home Office is fit for purpose, and whether they might be split, fractured or cracked. The answer to that is as clear as an unmuddied lake (which movie/book did I steal that phrase from?).

The question is how long will the British temper remain in check.

Here’s to the monarchy.

The Union Jackal.

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