Delingpole: White Lives Do Matter, Actually

TOPSHOT - A police officers lays flowers, given by a member of the public, at an entrance
Getty Images
James Delingpole

My hero of the week is Jake Hepple, the football fan who had a plane pulling a banner saying ‘White Lives Matter Burnley!’ flown over a football stadium on Monday in response to the murder of three innocent people in an English park at the weekend.

He’s a hero first because his gesture succeeded in annoying all the right people — all the smug, spoilt, virtue-signalling celebrities (aka the Wankerati) who have chosen to take violent offence for reasons they can’t quite explain because that would mean admitting they think white lives don’t matter.

He’s an even bigger hero because, despite a massive, orchestrated bullying campaign from the woke Establishment — police investigating him for a ‘racially aggravated public order offence’, his football club Burnley withdrawing his membership, girlfriend sacked from her job, his employer pressured into giving him the sack — he has so far resolutely refused to apologise.

Here’s what he has said on his Facebook page:

‘I’d like to take this time to apologise… to absolutely f***ing nobody!

‘It’s now apparently racist to say White Lives Matter, the day after three white people got murdered in a park in Reading, but all we’ve seen on the TV is Black Lives Matter after George Floyd got murdered. What a mad world we live in.’

Since the incident, the mainstream media — in accordance with its new role as the left-liberal Establishment’s fully compliant harlot — has been on a mission to destroy Hepple. The Daily Mail, for example, has found some racist messages he posted online — but Hepple has responded ‘I’ve got lots of Black and Asian friends’ and says that he sometimes gets ‘a bit drunk and coked up and uses offensive language.’ In other words, Hepple is not a paragon: just a fairly typical white working-class Northern football fan of the kind that our relentlessly woke MSM would prefer to airbrush from history.

Has there ever been such a gulf between where our political and media Establishment are and the people they supposedly serve and represent are? I doubt it.

This bemused tweet sums up the bizarreness of the current situation rather well, I think.

Yes. Exactly. What kind of lunatic world do we live in where you’re supposed to get really, really, really upset about an apparently offensive message pulled behind an aeroplane but where the stabbing of three gay men in a park by a refugee from Libya on the intelligence services’ watchlist is something best taken on the chin and memory-holed as soon as possible?

It makes no sense whatsoever. And most people in this country can see it makes no sense – which is why I’m sensing trouble ahead.

As an example of the rampant double standards at play right now, consider this now-deleted tweet from a Cambridge professor.

Unlike Jake Hepple – sacked by his employers, an engineering firm called Paradigm Precision — Gopal certainly won’t lose her job at Cambridge University, in fact she’s just been promoted. But I personally don’t think she should, because I think it’s very helpful when Cambridge professors put out tweets like this: it reminds us that a once-great university has fallen to the forces of wokist ignorance and that you’d really be better off trying to study for your degree elsewhere.

Nonetheless, I think it’s hardly a recipe for civil order when ordinary people look out at the world and see such entrenched injustice.

Why should a white working-class lad be forced out of his job for stating something fairly innocuous and obviously true — white lives matter: well they do, don’t they, every bit as much as black lives matter? — when at the same time a Cambridge academic from a posh and privileged professional background can state something much more calculatedly offensive and racist, and enhance her career prospects more than she is damaging them.

It’s wrong. And more and more people can see that it’s wrong.

What they’re particularly likely to notice is wrong is the way that the Establishment seems to be siding with the minority against the majority.

I’ve argued before that most people in Britain — and elsewhere — have no sympathy with Black Lives Matter. This isn’t because they’re racist — very few people are in these multicultural times — but because they recognise that BLM is a divisive, aggressive, hard-left activist group whose ultimate goal is not to bring about peace but to foment chaos and Marxist revolution.

Ordinary people see this, yes, because it’s blindingly obvious: peaceful groups don’t go marching menacingly on cities, fire rockets at police horses, and daub graffiti over statues of Winston Churchill.

Yet bizarrely, the entirety of the Establishment — from Prime Minister Boris Johnson downwards — and the bodies representing every cultural institution from the Church of England to the Football Association, have been grovelling and fawning and kowtowing to BLM as if its name were to be taken at face value.

At the same time, the moment someone whips out a banner saying exactly the same thing as ‘Black Lives Matter’ — only with the word ‘White’ where ‘Black’ would be — this same entire Establishment, plus all the cultural institutions, plus every two-bit celebrity you could name and lots more you’ve never heard of, piles in as if it were the most evil and divisive thing anyone had said in history.

Well, I’ve got news for you, o cultural and political elite: out here in the real world people think you’ve lost the plot completely. And they’re increasingly unwilling to let it lie.

Most of us, being peaceful, law-abiding, slightly nervous types, will respond to this blatant injustice by merely chuntering to one another with increased irritation about how incredibly unfair it is.

But I worry as time goes on, the more angry and less restrained or timid among us, are going to start taking matters into their own hands.

I really don’t want there to be violence, still less do I want anything approaching civil war. (I’m currently reading a book about Britain’s worst civil war — the War of the Roses, part inspiration for Game of Thrones — and it was a horrible, barbaric period which would surely have been most unpleasant to live through).

What I cannot see though, is how there can be a happy ending to the current state of affairs, in which a narrow ruling elite takes the side not of the decent, law-abiding and fundamentally majority but of a needling, cry-bulling, destructive minority bent on destroying everything the majority believe in.

Under those circumstances, what exactly does the narrow ruling elite think the abused, put-upon and ill-considered majority are going to do? Carry on, lying down and taking it? Or moving on to demonstrations of anger a touch more forthright than merely pulling banners behind aeroplanes?

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.