Cap doffed to Brendan O'Neill....
Imagine getting angrier over a word than a grape. This will go down in history as the week when there was more digital fury over one man’s criticism of mass immigration than there was over the dire impact those untrammelled flows of people are having on Britain’s women and girls.
The conviction of an Afghan illegal migrant for the grape of a 12-year-old girl in Nuneaton barely seemed to trouble the conscience of the virtuous of our chattering classes. But Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s lamenting of our broken borders? Worse, his use of the word ‘colonisation’ in relation to migrants? That pricked their hollow souls. That got them tweeting. From Whitehall to White City, the wail went up: ‘Something must be done about this awful man.’
The horror in Nuneaton involved 23-year-old small-boat criminal Ahmad Mulakhil taking a girl into a cul-de-sac last July and carrying out ‘extremely horrific sexual offences’. His conviction this week confirmed what working-class women up and down the country have been saying for more than a year now: that Britain’s porous borders pose a grave threat to women and girls, especially in the poorer parts of the UK where these men from afar tend to be placed, at taxpayers’ expense.
Yet within a poxy 48 hours the debate had shifted from dangerous men to supposedly dangerous words. From the real-world atrocities that spring from government ineptitude to the outrage of a rich bloke criticising that government ineptitude. The opinion-forming set was back in its comfort zone: ignoring the plight of working-class women and instead wagging a collective finger at a blunt billionaire.
Sir Jim’s offence was to say the word ‘colonised’. Britain has been ‘colonised by immigrants, said the petrochemicals boss and Man Utd co-owner in an interview with Sky News. Cue much clutching of pearls. From Keir Starmer down, they raged against his speechcrime. They charged him with using language that echoes the far right.
BBC News started a rolling live news feed, as if Sir Jim’s remarks were akin to a natural disaster or a war. Rachel Reeves said his comments were ‘disgusting’ and ‘unacceptable’. Sir Keir even demanded that Sir Jim recant and apologise for his sinful utterance. I’m sorry, what century is this? In what more moral universe is it acceptable for a PM to so publicly rebuke a British citizen simply for saying something he disapproves of?
Sir Jim eventually bowed to the bourgeois mob. He says he is ‘sorry my choice of language has offended some people’. No. 10 is gloating. ‘The Prime Minister asked for an apology, and one’s been issued’, said a spokesman with spectacular haughtiness.
Am I going mad or is No. 10’s brutish extraction of an apology from a supposedly misspeaking Briton by far the most shocking part of this story? Would I use the word ‘colonisation’ about immigration? No. But so what? Britons are either free to express themselves as they see fit or they are not. And the Starmer-led shaming of Sir Jim, the government’s heavy-handed demand that a man publicly retract his deeply-held beliefs, suggests we are not.
The taming of Sir Jim is as pure an act of cancel culture as we have seen in some time. Only in this instance it wasn’t wild-eyed, blue-haired students hollering for a public figure to withdraw his words that so wounded their brittle self-esteem. It was the government, aided and abetted by the public broadcaster, and of course by every tweeting tosspot who loves nothing more than the cheap thrill of being part of a dissident-gagging mob.
For that’s what this was: a savage clampdown on dissenting speech. The government and the digital enforcers of its censorious writ can doll it up as ‘opposing hate speech’ as much as they like. But we’re not fools. We know they went for Sir Jim to make an example of him. To let the rest of us know that the use of fruity or impudent language in relation to immigration will be severely punished. If even one of the richest Brits can be made to genuflect to correct-think by No. 10 and its media minions, imagine what could be done to you, pleb — that’s the speech-chilling undertone of the public dunking of Ratcliffe.
The fact is, millions of decent Brits are worried about our broken borders. And some might express themselves in an un-PC way. They might say ‘swarm’, ‘invasion’, even ‘colonisation’. And guess what? That’s their implacable right in a free society. How about listening to their concerns rather than having a fit of the vapours over the words with which they express them?
The gall of the government is extraordinary. It fails to protect the nation’s borders and then punishes those who point this out. It endangers women and girls and then has the nerve to say ‘Watch your language’ to anyone who speaks too colourfully about this increasingly lethal situation. Now that, Rachel Reeves, is disgusting and unacceptable."
