Tag: Muslims in the UK

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If a week is a long time in politics, as British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have quipped to lobby journalists in 1964, then a month is an eternity. In mid-February, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party was riding high, topping electoral polls and threatening both main wings of the British uniparty, Labour and Conservative. (more…)

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Martin Frost holds an Israeli flag moments before burning a Koran

We made a swift arrest at the time and recognise the right people have for freedom of expression, but when this crosses into intimidation to cause harm or distress we will always look to take action when it is reported to us.
-Assistant Chief Constable Stephanie Parker, Manchester Police Constabulary, after the public burning of a copy of the Koran

You have the right to free speech
As long as you’re not dumb enough
To actually try it.
-The Clash, “Know Your Rights” (more…)

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Muslim thugs, responding to rumors of a “far-right riot” that never materialized, beat a white man outside a Birmingham pub on Monday.

Right when I think that people couldn’t lie any more audaciously than they do, that the gaslighting couldn’t possibly get more migraine-inducing, and that maybe things aren’t quite as bad as they seem, along come the English media and government to remind me that George Orwell was an Englishman.

First, let’s all take a deep breath and center ourselves. The riots that kicked off last week in England were rooted in the fact that a nonwhite male stabbed three white girls, all under age 10, to death. (more…)

The Albert Memorial in London. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

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A Tale of Two Cities

It’s always instructive to compare the respective fortunes of England and France, those old enemies. And what better way than to follow the lead of Charles Dickens, take the cultural temperature of both London and Paris, and so tell a tale of two cities? We’ll start with my hometown. (more…)

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Satire is a lesson. Parody is a game. — Vladimir Nabokov

The devil, the proude spirit, cannot endure to be mocked. — Thomas Moore

In 2005, a London production of Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play Tamburlaine the Great was subject to minor editing by its director. A part of one of the scenes needed to be cut, it was decided — not cut down, but cut out. The scene in question showed the burning of books, one of which was the Koran (which the BBC went through a phase of referring to as “the holy Koran”). (more…)

Sir Keir Starmer, the likely next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and also the author’s former schoolmate. (Photo courtesy of the World Economic Forum’s Flickr)

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It is the run-in to a British General Election in which the Labour Party is certain to replace a Conservative Party which has been in power for almost 15 years. The charismatic Labour leader is warning his party against what he calls “triumphalism,” although he knows almost to a certainty that in half a year’s time the keys to 10 Downing Street will be in his expensively-tailored pocket. (more…)

Katharine Birbalsingh (photo from the UK government website).

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The Jesuits famously pronounced, after Aristotle, “Give me the child and I will give you the man.” This maxim, or a version of it, reappears throughout the history of education, and by the time it reaches Vladimir Illyich Lenin, it has taken on a more sinister tone, as you might expect: “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” The modern Western state has accepted the baton, and effectively says the same thing.

I am not a parent, but I have to feel for those who are. (more…)

One of the Ramadan messages that appeared on the signboards at London’s King’s Cross railway station last week. Photo courtesy of @surplustakes on Twitter/X.

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That elusive last puzzle-piece

The jigsaw puzzle that is the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland has a piece missing. Of the puzzle’s four parts, as of this month the only non-white premier in Great Britain is Michelle O’Neill, a worryingly white-skinned blonde who obstinately stands in the way of an ethnic minority clean sweep of the UK’s top posts in government.

With the resignation of Welsh premier Mark Drakeford, a black man, Vaughan Gething, was duly elected in his place, and he wasted no time celebrating the fact that he is the first black premier in the European Union. There, you might be tempted to say, goes the neighborhood. (more…)

Keir Starmer, likely the next PM of the United Kingdom. (Official UK Parliament photo)

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You can’t appease everyone

When Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was paying attention at Reigate Grammar School in the 1970s and I wasn’t, he may have come across that old conundrum; What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? (It’s an illegitimate question, by the way, due to its inappropriate use of temporality, but that’s for another day.) If he was not previously aware of this intellectual teaser, he will be now. (more…)

Ramadan lights near Leicester Square in London, March 2023.

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Christ, you know it ain’t easy

So, the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland staggers through another year of our Lord, although that’s not a much-used phrase just at the moment. (more…)

Nigel Farage may have been able to get Britain out of the European Union, but now he can’t even maintain an account at the bank that Queen Elizabeth used to use.

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Farage against the machine

De-banking has arrived in Great Britain. Or rather, it has been going on for some time, but now it’s happened to someone with media leverage. Nigel Farage, the ex-financier who engineered Brexit, was contacted by his bank and told his account was being closed down. The bank in question is Coutts & Co., an exclusive concern who won’t even let you sit down if you haven’t got a million quid. The Queen used to bank there, although the current King seems the sort of personage who might give his money to that nice Nigerian chap who emailed him about his uncle also being a King and having made a will. (more…)

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Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. — George Orwell, 1984

American college students have said, ‘Like 1984, man’, when asked not to smoke pot in the classroom or advised gently to do a little reading. — Anthony Burgess, 1985

I made a half-hearted New Year’s resolution not to mention Orwell’s 1984 this year, not once. Like most of these Janus-faced pledges, however, it didn’t last long. But hasn’t the book been over-visited? (more…)

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Editor’s Note: Dominic Kennedy, who is Investigations Editor at The Times of London, spent well over a year trying to dox an obscure British nationalist YouTuber who goes by “The Ayatollah” (his recent appearance on Counter-Currents Radio is here). When he learned The Ayatollah’s identity, he sent him 63 questions, which he answers below.

Why do you run a racist YouTube channel? (more…)