Delingpole: Three Murdered in an English Park. So Where Are the Street Protests?

WOKINGHAM, ENGLAND - JUNE 22: A painted portrait is seen among the flowers as students pay
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James Delingpole

Three people have been stabbed to death and a number of others seriously injured while sitting in a park in Reading, England. OK – so when do the protests start?

When does outraged Britain take to the streets with its shouty placards and its angry chants to send a signal to the UK government that enough is enough and that something needs to change fast so that this kind of outrage never happens again?

My guess is somewhere between ‘ain’t gonna happen’ and ‘never’.

Am I the only one who finds this puzzling?

Here’s what puzzles me: George Floyd, the fine gentleman killed by police in Minneapolis no doubt had many excellent qualities and certainly did not deserve to die.

But was his terrible murder really any less disgusting, outrageous or unjust than say, those of the three thirtysomething men slashed about the throat while drinking beer in a park one tranquil Sunday evening?

My suggestion would be: probably not. But the left-liberal Establishment which currently sets the political and social agenda in Britain (and beyond) would appear to disagree.

Here is a classic example of these double standards, courtesy of Labour MP Yvette Cooper:

Do they think we don’t notice? Well clearly they must do, or they wouldn’t be quite so brazen about it.

For Cooper — and for Cooper see also: every other member of the Woke political and media class — the wrongful killing of a man 4,000 miles away in America is a sign that we must immediately institute radical change in our culture.

But, for these same politicians, the killing of three blameless individuals by an alleged murderer — a Libyan asylum seeker from a suspected Islamist background, known to the security services, with convictions for violent crime —  is something we should just accept as what London Mayor Sadiq Khan called ‘part and parcel’ of living in the big city.

I don’t understand it. Or rather I do, all too well. Western civilisation has been almost completely subverted by the Marxist notion that the world divides into oppressors and the oppressed. According to this analysis, the killing of a black man by a white policeman is far more blameworthy and shocking than the killing of three white men by an alleged Islamic terrorist.

In the realm of classroom theory, this distinction may pass the time of day and keep a few otherwise unemployable professors in work. Translated into the real world, though, it’s a recipe for the surefire destruction of our entire civilisation.

How, for example, can any nation-state worth the name be prepared to turn itself upside down in order to alleviate some largely confected upset about police brutality in a jurisdiction 4,000 miles away on the other side of the ocean — but at the same time do virtually zilch, save turn the other cheek, whenever predatory jihadist killers decide to take out a few more of its citizens?

It quite literally makes no sense.

There is nothing anyone in Britain can do to prevent incidents in America like the killing of George Floyd.

There is lots and lots more that could be done in Britain to prevent murders like the ones in Reading.

Britain could, for example, get much, much tougher on the repatriation of foreign-born criminals — even ones claiming (and who can blame them when it gets them so easily off the hook?) that if returned to their native countries their lives might be in danger.

Britain could beef up not just its counterintelligence services but also its police, placing a much greater emphasis on tackling real crime, and savagely reducing the number of police hours wasted on dancing at Gay Pride parades or chasing after pretend crimes like hurty words exchanged on the internet.

Britain could also do much more to combat the self-hating narrative — so frequently promulgated by the left — that it’s a land of ‘systemic racism’ and rampant Islamophobia where no one who is not white ever gets a decent break. This narrative has become so ubiquitous that even Conservative ministers — from the Prime Minister downwards — now routinely apologise for it and agree that there is much more to be done. Well how about, for a change, they try saying: “No, actually Britain is about as fair and non-racist and unbigoted a country as you’re ever going to find. And if you don’t like it then don’t stay here.”

None of these things would be easy to achieve but they’re all perfectly doable. It would simply require our schools, our universities, our police, our politicians, our civil servants, our lawyers, our big businesses and our media completely to abandon the neo-Marxist doctrines of political correctness and identity politics — and start asking basic questions like: “If we must have a government to which we must pay large chunks of our hard-earned cash, what do we have a right to expect in return?”

One of our most basic expectations, I would argue, should be this: next time we cross a bridge in London or go for a picnic in Reading or take our daughters to a pop concert in Manchester, we should be able to do so confident in the knowledge that we’re not about to be run down, slashed across the throat, or blown to smithereens by some jihadist thug ‘known to the security services’.

And if the government’s response to this is to pretend its not happening and carry on as before — just like, by the way, they are very much not doing in the response to these ridiculous Black Lives Matter protests — then we should take to the streets and demand that it pulls its finger out. We are, after all, the decent, sensible, law-abiding, tax-paying majority and it’s about time we got treated with respect.

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