The Union Jackal
January 2024

Harmonie London

2,006 words

Delivery for Airstrip One!

America and Great Britain were trading together long before Sir Winston Churchill minted the phrase “special relationship” to describe the transatlantic accord. (It wasn’t Reagan or Thatcher who came up with that one, as is commonly supposed; they just pulled the term out of mothballs). Some American imports were and still are loved in Britain: pre-woke Hollywood, jazz, the great American novel, actually preparing food rather than just killing it and eating it with mushy vegetables. The list is extensive.

Then, of course, there is the debit side of the tally. Thanks very much, USA, for McDonald’s, Madonna, and Meghan Markle — and that is just the M section of the Rolodex. But now the United States has more than made up for it, and the former British colony is sending a gift to the United Kingdom to atone for those cultural faux pas. A big, shiny package from Uncle Sam is about to arrive on Albion’s shores and, although it’s a little late for Christmas, that is probably Jeff Bezos’ fault.

This gift is one which could keep on giving right up until there are no recipients left alive. The US military is about to station “nukes” (as children and the lowbrow mainstream media term them) in the beautiful English town of Lakenheath. We are gleefully told by a rabidly pro-war media-political complex that each of the three warheads in transit is three times as powerful as the bomb that spoiled the afternoon for the locals in Hiroshima. So that’s nine Hiroshimas, nine Little Boys, coming right up. Might as well round it up to ten, like that coffee deal where you drink nine lattes and you get the next one free.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

As noted, in the British media (also known as the megaphone of the political class), the drums of war have been increasing in both tempo and volume. The British Defense Secretary is a man called Grant Shapps, one of those names that reads like a baffling crossword anagram, and he recently had to talk down one of his generals for suggesting that Britain may have to raise a standing army at some stage in order to fight Putin, or Xi, or Thanos, or whoever that month’s bad guy is. So, essentially, this would mean the cream of British youth being conscripted for the first time since 1960. Sounds like a military plan, but so did The Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, in which British cavalry infamously rode in the wrong direction with catastrophic results.  Alfred Lord Tennyson has the details.

Those of us who have actually met young people from Britain almost spat out our free tenth latte when we read the news of a possible call-up. There won’t be many of this generation joining the British Army, let alone the brave 600 riding into Tennyson’s Valley of Death. And the young men won’t even to be able to get out of serving King and country by putting on a dress and pretending to be a woman. They would be doubly welcome in today’s army. What kind of a crew would be marching out onto the square on day one of the Big Push? To call British youth feckless would be doing a grave disservice to feckless people. What would they be like in a war-zone? Is it possible to get post-traumatic stress disorder from witnessing someone being misgendered? Army medics and psychiatrists may be about to find out.

Also, if Britain is to fight in World War III, and the generals turn to their Ukraine-depleted arsenal, they may find the cupboard is bare. It used to be the case that every church in Britain had at least one yew tree growing in the graveyard (my little church certainly had one). This is because yew is the best wood for making the feared longbow, as featured at Agincourt. Grant Shapps might want to dust off a copy of the Domesday Booke and find out where his local church is, if it isn’t now a mosque. Speaking of matters concerning Medieval weaponry, it seems the crossbow has made a comeback. Queen Elizabeth would be happy, were she still alive. The first one, not the lately departed and much-missed monarch.

Gospel truth

Church grounds lead us to the latest piece of mischief emanating from Britain’s police forces. Harmonie London sounds a musical affirmative action project from London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office. In fact, the young lady in question is a 20-year-old black gospel singer, a trade I am pleased to see still exists. Well, at the time of writing.

Ms. London was outside her church giving of her best on the old ecclesiastical favorite, “Amazing Grace,” but her gift to her community didn’t please everyone. It says much about London to read of a black gospel singer confronted by a trainee police officer called Maya Hadzhipetkova and claiming she “was not allowed to sing church songs outside a church.” Given Britain’s current cultural climate, the attempted intimidation of this inoffensive but plucky girl (who gave as good as she got to the impertinent cop) would be because she is a Christian, and what is still laughably referred to as the national religion is under ever-stronger cultural siege. That said, this is not simply the targeting of Christian expression. It is also the sheer and spiteful exercise of petty power which a certain personality type should not be allowed to have, let alone inflict on the public.

As the British police have been adopting increasingly lowered requirement standards, and the idea of serving their community belongs to another age, many officers are becoming pushy and arrogant. Unfortunately for them, they can’t get away with flexing their muscles as much in the age of the citizen journalist with a smartphone. This officer was not even a full constable, but a Police Community Support Officer, or PCSO. Rather unfairly termed “plastic police” in some quarters, the idea is actually not a bad one. The PCSOs accompany qualified officers out in the field, and a type of apprenticeship is served. But they are either useless — such as the pair of white officers I saw years ago in London reduced to tears by a baying pack of black schoolgirls — or they are jumped-up twerps such as Ms. Hadzhipetkova, who charmingly stuck out her tongue at the person filming the incident.

With British crime on a steady route-march up the graph, it might be suggested that police of whatever stripe turn their attention to the genuine article rather than harassing black gospel singers.

It wouldn’t have happened to Aretha Franklin.

Media studies

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

I think I am right in saying that I was the first English writer to cover GB News for the American dissident press. I thoroughly approved of this alternative to the BBC at the time, and said so. Now, they might be about to make me look a chump.

Firstly, they fired or forced out all the presenters who were a bit overzealous about certain ethnicities, religious persuasions, or sexual preferences, as well as vaccines. Canadian crooner Mark Steyn went first, jumping rather than pushed, followed by Calvin Robinson and Laurence Fox. (There is another presenter who has been off-air for a while, but his position seems unclear, so it’s best to leave him anonymous.)

It’s getting a bit dead-pool for some, with bets undoubtedly being placed among the tech staff as to who’s next. Big guns such as Nigel Farage are safe from any cull, but GB News presenters are increasingly trying to smile as much as possible and look busy because the boss just walked in. They have also noticeably backed off from anything too controversial, and any bite GB News had is being slowly defanged. Talking heads and pundits are starting to look and sound like the media they were supposedly set up to oppose, and GB News has more than the legacy media as its opposition, as the British Left are not too keen on any media outlet which does not resemble Pravda. GB News also refuse to address obvious targets such as the spiraling of knife crime, and the obvious herd of trumpeting elephants in the room indicating who is largely responsible, and have now begun a new tactic.

The semiotics of TV media presentation is always worth watching, and this is an appalling piece of journalism in which the knife murder of two young boys by a gang — ethnicity unstated — is spliced with another story concerning white men involved in soccer violence. It is just over four minutes, but the constant suggestion is that an increasingly lawless society can have an equivalence drawn between a savage double gang murder and some white men fighting at a football match. Everyone knows why crime is increasing in Britain, but no one dares discuss it out in the open. Just put, ooh, I don’t know, “London gang arrests” into your search engine.  This is what you will see, and the white faces glaring at you from the screen are mostly eastern European. The rest are, well, not white. Crime lacks diversity in the UK, in one sense.

So, whether GB News requires a reboot, or whether it is going to continue neutering its original mission statement as an alternative to the Leftist media hordes of the British mainstream media remains to be seen. It has another competitor from the Right-of-center in Talk News, but that is a little bit of a rant to watch for long. It is not enough to bring Peter Hitchens or Douglas Murray onto a show once a fortnight or so and think that will provide the intellectual substance news reporting requires. I would wish GB News luck after giving them my blessing when they began, but there are journalistic nettles to be grasped, and they are not showing too much pluck.

Playing the black notes

No report from the cultural pileup the UK is involved in would be complete without the obligatory privileged black person whining about something traditionally English. On this occasion, the young man in question’s privilege was at least earned. Sheku Kanneh-Mason is a principal cellist who played at the wedding of the Sussexes (that Markle woman again) and won the coveted BBC Young Musician Award in 2016. His love of music only goes so far, however, and he has complained about the song “Rule Britannia,” which is traditionally played on the Last Night of the Proms, the famous celebration of British music that seems to feature less of the stuff each year.

I can’t say the piece does much for me, sounding a bit bang-crash, music-hall for my tastes, but the way Noël Coward uses it cheekily in Mad Dogs and Englishmen Go Out in the Midday Sun does make me proud to be English. But when it comes to cultural invasion, the song is prime real estate, and it was only a matter of time before someone got round to trashing this most British of traditions.

Mr. Kanneh-Mason gravely warned the white British that they “don’t realize how uncomfortable a song like that can make a lot of people feel.” By “a lot of people,” he means a few from among Britain’s 4-5% black population and some of their liberal fellow-travelers. But, as always, numbers are not as significant as your unofficial social credit score. He goes on to say that this ethnic discomfort ought to be addressed by removing the song from the annual program “even if it makes the people singing it feel good.” That would be white people, who are as always having their simple pleasures gradually removed.

The line “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves” was, of course, bound to stir up mutterings, but it should, perhaps, be cut by virtue not of any offense it might cause, but because it doesn’t exactly fit the facts in the old country. If Britain was trying to produce a nation of slaves, it’s hard to see what different tune they might be singing.

Eyes right!

The Union Jackal.