The Union Jackal
November 2024

2,493 words

Starmer’s (Third) World Tour

Sir Keir Starmer must have had mixed emotions when looking at his recent approval ratings in the opinion of the Great British public. On the one hand, he is polling at about the same level as Nicolae Ceauşescu was when the Romanian army took him and his wife out onto waste ground and shot them against a wall on Christmas Day, 1989, at the climax of the Romanian Revolution. On the other hand, it justifies Sir Keir embarking on a world tour featuring more dates than the Rolling Stones.

A government petition was started by a pub owner asking for a second General Election. Theoretically, such a petition may be debated by Parliament if it reaches 100,000 signatories, although this never happens with items of any actual importance that do achieve this mark. After two days, and at the time of writing, the number of signatories was well over two million, breaking previous records. My voting number was 2, 630, 283. Starmer is an automaton who will not be affected in terms of his ego, or the app which operates his ego, but he may wish to get out of town for a wee while and hope things blow over. And so it proved.

It’s all very reminiscent of what was at one time my main source text for English history, the legendary BBC comedy show Blackadder. The Prince Regent, played by Hugh Laurie, is assuring his servant Blackadder, as famously portrayed by free-speech champion Rowan Atkinson, that he is a popular Regent much loved by the populace. “Why, just the other day”, he brays, “I heard people in the street sing as I passed. ‘We hail Prince George!’, they cried. ‘We hail Prince George!’” Blackadder gently corrects the Regent. “We hate Prince George, sir, we hate Prince George”. “Is it?” “I fear so, sir”.

Starmer seems to have the same mute incomprehension that he could be so hated so soon.

But even more than this welcome show of healthy animosity by the good yeomanry of the British Isles, one detail of one of Starmer’s distractive excursions sums up much of what is rotten in the state of Westminster. Sir “two-tier” Keir recently attended something called COP29, yet another of the endless. time- and resource-wasting climate change jamborees that fritter so much of the public weal. When an Englishman talks to you about the weather, you know you have been accepted into the tribe. When a politician talks to you about the weather, you know you are about to be financially fleeced. This junket was conveniently held in Azerbaijan, which is probably short on freebies and gratuities at the level to which Starmer has become accustomed, but at least nobody will shout, “We hate Prince George!” at him in the streets of the capital, Baku.

The world’s two biggest polluters, China and America, didn’t show, so Starmer got to rub shoulders with climate bigwigs from Burundi and Belgium, Venezuela and Vietnam. Knowing what he undoubtedly does about the destruction of his own country, something with which he has been tasked by those that run things, Starmer must secretly wonder how much longer the conference-goers will refer to the UK as a “first-world” country. He probably hopes they don’t demote him at dinner to an inferior table, wedged between delegates from Iceland and Indonesia.

I got to thinking about who might accompany Starmer on this leg of his world tour. If he didn’t take the oafish token black man David Lammy, inexplicably still holding the office of Foreign Secretary, he might be trying out a replacement for that surely doomed diversity hire. More likely, he would take Ed Miliband, his climate secretary, who at one time led the Labour Party, and always comes across as a passably intelligent man doing an excellent impression of someone who is ESN, or educationally sub-normal. And I actually thought, you know what? Knowing the modern governmental love of waste – Labour has no Ramaswamy and Musk – I wouldn’t put it past Starmer to take a dozen aides with him. Even two dozen! Why not? All those interns on a tax-sponsored jolly.

A dozen. Two dozen. Sometimes my own naivety in the face of modern political practice is an embarrassment to me. Gentle reader, Sir Keir Starmer did indeed take staff with him to the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan. They numbered 470 souls. It’s a round-trip of 5,000 air-miles, but I’m not doing the mathematics, currently suffering a bit of a headache every time I look at the figure “470”. In the words of the great English comic writer, P. G. Wodehouse, one simply shakes one’s head and passes on.

On Guy Fawkes Night, Don’t Be White

To the now-seasoned observer of the decline and fall of the British Empire, it isn’t all toppled statues, historical revisionism, the decolonization of university curricula and the casting of blacks in historically white roles in TV dramas. It’s also about the little things, those tiny, attention-to-detail touches intended by government to denigrate whites and make us aware of our place in the new, socially engineered great chain of being.

Consider this UK Government document, if ye doubt me still. The night of the American election was also Guy Fawkes Night in Britain, a night of bonfires and fireworks. Guido Fawkes – also now the name of a famous independent news website focusing on, and much feared by, the Westminster bubble – is often mentioned in jest as the last man to enter parliament with honest intentions, those being to blow up parliament, V for Vendetta style. But, as the Smiths so rightly pointed out, that joke isn’t funny anymore. Guido Fawkes, wert thou living at this hour.

On Guy Fawkes Night, or Fireworks Night, or even Bonfire Night for those of my generation, displays of the famously noisy pyrotechnics have to be over by midnight, as required by law, which seems reasonable. Should these firework displays be in celebration of Chinese New Year, however, or the Hindu festival of Duwali, an extra hour is added, and fireworks are legal until 1am.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Western Civilization Bites Back here.

You see what they’ve done, I take it. This is a time-tax on white people. It is one of many daily humiliations white folk will have to face under Starmer’s junta. The difference between our response to this tiresome and petty infringement of our rights is that we will not whine about it, like our colored bredren. We will simply note it in passing, and wait until our time of revenge comes, as it surely must.

Franz Kafka’s It’s A Wonderful World

Many literary quotes, phrases, and allusions are used and abused. Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Frankenstein was not a monster, Frankenstein’s monster was the monster. Hamlet never said “neither a borrower or a lender be”. It was Polonius advising his son, Laertes, and he said, “neither a borrower or a lender, boy”. And so it goes, a good party game.

But one term which is regularly misused is “Kafkaesque”. Some bimbo journalist doesn’t understand a situation, and all of a sudden that situation becomes “Kafkaesque”. These are the same stringers who write about “deconstructing” things when they mean “understanding”. “Deconstruction” doubtless makes them believe that they are doing valuable, practical, real-world, shirt-sleeve work rather than sitting around, talentless and cattle-stupid, with their fat arses in a bucket of cream, which adequately describes British journalism.

One English journalist, however, has every right to use the adjective the Czech patent clerk Kafka bequeathed to the world after her experience with the British police. Allison Pearson has been a columnist for The Daily Telegraph for many years, and is a reasonable writer, something of a rarity in the British press, whose house style is so anodyne it makes a motor -car manual seem a belletristic conceit by comparison. Anyway, Ms. Pearson has recently taken to appearing on GB News, Britain’s supposed answer to Fox News in the States, and a counter-weight to blatantly Left-wing echo-chambers such as the BBC and Channel 4, and it may be this association with a channel which displeases the British deep state that marked Ms. Pearson’s card and led to her own personal re-run of Kafka’s most famous work, The Trial.

The journalist answered a knock at her door on Remembrance Sunday morning, and the timing is the first sure sign of state coercion and government-backed scare tactics of a type which will surely become more common as this calamitous regime struggles on, and those reporters who still have journalistic integrity start to notice, and to say so. Noticing is being promoted to the level of criminality in the UK, and this extends to the accredited journalistic class just as much as it does to amateur YouTubers and Facebook users.

The police will have been certain that a conservative journalist living in Essex was likely to be attending one or other Remembrance Sunday services, making it perfect timing for intimidation at 9.40am. Ms. Pearson was informed that the police wished to interview her about a year-old Tweet which had led to a complaint. When she asked what the Tweet had said, she was told that the officers were “not permitted” to tell her, which is where it all starts to get a bit Josef K.

She then asked who the complainant was, and was told again that the police were not allowed to tell her, but that they could let her know that the person in question should not be referred to as the “complainant” but thenceforth as the “victim”, victimhood being the new trump card in the grievance pack. The Jews developed the prototype, blacks copied it as best they could, and Muslims have more or less perfected the art of victimhood. But what was this cataclysmic Tweet that wreaked such havoc in the mind of the poor victim? Given that Ms. Pearson is a conservative journalist, we can rely on The Guardian to do the spadework for us. A lengthy quote, but it contains every paradox and irregularity currently the practice of the British media:

But The Guardian believes it has found the post at the centre of the row.

It is an alleged retweet by Pearson of a photograph posted several months ago amid heightened tensions over the policing of Gaza protests. It shows a group of people of colour posing with a flag on a British street, flanked by three police officers.

The photograph angered Pearson, who allegedly wrote a tweet condemning the Metropolitan police: “How dare they. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.”

In fact, the picture is from Manchester, sources confirm, and thus the officers pictured are from Greater Manchester police and not the London force.

The implication that the Muslims pictured are antisemitic and supporting Hamas is undermined by the green and maroon flag they are holding. The flag is used by supporters of the Pakistani political party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). It also, rather clearly, has the word “Pakistan” written on it.

Where do you even start with this dog’s dinner of a criminal proceeding? Do you begin with the demonstrable fact that “heightened tensions” were solely due to the uncontrollable trash who so volubly and destructively promote “Palestine”? Do you kick off with the journo’s rather glib equation of the showing of a Paki political party’s flag with “anti-Semitism”? Or do you begin with possibly the most illiberal legal development in Britain since lockdown, the ominously named “Non-Crime Hate Incident” (NCHI)?

American readers are used to the comfort blanket of their First Amendment, and so they should be, given that they can see what is happening to the mother country, which lacks such a copper-plate guarantor of free speech.  But I would be interested to know if European readers have anything similar in their countries to a NCHI. Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act of 2022, NCHIs are “recorded” (a very sinister word for those who understand authoritarianism) by the police to collect information on so-called “hate incidents.”

They are intended for nothing of the sort, obviously. This is part of a Chinese-style credit-score system, whereby non-conforming citizens are punished for their thought crime. They enter your employment record, and if you are intending to attend a job interview, and your potential employer has in front of her a record of a “racist” NCHI alongside or other achievements, you won’t get the job, and you can tattoo that on your arm. Racism is the mark of Cain in modern Britain.

I am not sure that those of you who do not reside in the laughably named Great Britain fully understand exactly what is happening in the old country. If I post a contentious tweet – impossible, as I have a lifetime ban from the platform even Musk’s people won’t overturn – from here in Central America, I can say what I like about who I like, because my freedom of expression is protected by the Constitution of Costa Rica. Articles 28 and 29, from memory. Isn’t it rich to be a journalist freer to write in Central America than I would be in the supposed cradle of democracy?

Car-crash Advertising

There was a time when British car manufacturing ruled the world. Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Rover, Aston Martin (as famously driven by James Bond), Daimler, Jaguar; These were the imperial marques. If a film director needed brash and flash for a freeway tear-up, then a Chevy or a Pontiac fitted the bill. But to show class, they’d use a Roller. Those days have gone, and not just because we sold the entire shebang to the Krauts and the Frogs, of all bloody people. In the yard sale Britain has become, I notice that the UK is selling off its manufacturing crown jewels to our natural and historical enemies.

Now, webzines such as Counter-Currents put hyperlinks in articles for information, confirmation, or as a legal safeguard. Of course, not every reader follows the links all the time, (unless you are one of the British police officers I know to a certainty are tasked with reading this august journal to see what I am up to, as they follow me everywhere I have committed virtual ink to online paper. Hi officer, by the way. Are you happy in your work? Is this what you wanted to join the police force to do?) but I’m afraid that you are going to have to watch this one, if you haven’t already viewed it in disbelief and horror. It is the new Jaguar advertisement. Make sure you are wearing a seatbelt, although there aren’t any actual cars in the ad.

A brand once implicitly linked with British masculinity has now gone woke. Now, what does that tell you about Britain? It tells me that the good ship Britannia is sinking, and perhaps we should just salute and go down with it.

Pray, pray, pray for the UK!

Yours, as ever,

The Union Jackal.