Britain is in decline. This much is true. Nobody would dare suggest otherwise – unless, of course, they wish to attest to pure ignorance or twisted glee.
Given this, we are very much in need of sweeping reform. Yet reform is not the product of drawn-out pontification. Ultimately, it is the sum of action: action moulded by proposition.
As such, dear reader, allow me to do just that. May I present to you: A Sensible Proposal.
Shrink the cabinet to its 5 or 6 most capable members, empower ministers to fire civil servants at will, and slash the civil service by at least 75% – it’s not technically Moldbuggian RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), but it’s of the same spirit.
Take the Civil Service Code and throw it on the regulatory bonfire, along with every obstructive procurement rule preventing us from becoming the AI capital of Europe.
Implement mandatory IQ tests for all new civil service hires and scrap the counter-intuitive stakeholder model of policy-making; ensuring government bureaucrats literally, not figuratively, live in The Real World.
Double the length of every sentence, especially for crimes which make civilised society impossible (murder, rape, theft, schmonking weed, etc.). Freedom, if nothing else, should mean the ability to go from A to B without being mugged, molested, or murdered.
Repeat offenders should receive at least one of the following: an extended sentence, a life sentence, chemical castration, or the death penalty. Tough on Crime, Tough on The Causes of Crime.
Abolish the Communication Act and its statutory predecessors to make speech free again. The less time the plod can spend harassing you for tweeting facts and logic, the more time they’ll dedicate to brutalising groomers of our nation’s children, vandals of our nation’s heritage, and abusers of animals.
Furthermore, abolish the Supreme Court and bring back the Law Lords – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, eat your precious ‘modernising’ hearts out!
Speaking of which, if we can hand out titles to cronies, half-wits, and dodgy sorts, I’m sure we can take them away – put some actual aristocrats in Parliament; of spirit in the Commons and of blood in the Lords.
Abolish the TV licence fee and replace it with nothing. That or broadcast stuff worth watching – like reruns of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series or Spy x Family.
This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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Rishi Sunak Was a Worse Chancellor Than Gordon Brown
2020 was awful and most people would agree that they never want to experience that year’s events ever again. For Rishi Sunak, though, it was the highlight of his career as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
He was smooth and slick during those COVID press conferences and he just presided over the furlough scheme that ensured people could live off government money comfortably whilst the nation was locked down. Sunak quickly became regarded as future leadership material and those must have been the glory days of his career. 2020 was a nightmare for ‘ordinary’ people, but for Sunak, it was the start of a promising future.
But a week is a long time in politics. Things have quickly changed for this Tory hopeful; he stabbed Boris in the back recently and put himself forward to replace his former boss as Prime Minister. In fact, it is somewhat laughable that Sunak claims he would ‘govern like Thatcher.’ But that is because many of us who remember his time as Chancellor were not so fooled by the way the media portrayed his handling of the Government’s response to COVID. The price of lockdown is becoming all too clear now, and Sunak should be remembered as a Chancellor who was worse than Gordon Brown.
This comparison may not seem fair to some readers. Brown was Chancellor during an economic boom, and he occupied the role for ten years. Yet Brown also made terrible decisions that failed to prepare us for 2008’s events like selling our gold, failing to build enough homes, and ruining the UK’s pension system. As Tejvan Pettinger explained for Economics Help, the last Labour government made the mistake of running a budget deficit of 3 per cent towards the end of the 1997-2007 boom under Blair. If Labour had reduced public debt further, this would have given them more room for manoeuvre during the 2008-12 financial crisis.
In the Conservative Party, many Tory members and MPs make the mistake of thinking the 2008 recession was caused by Labour’s ‘reckless borrowing.’ Though it was an argument I supported during my early days of political activism, Brown did nothing in hindsight to cause the global housing collapse; that was caused by the irresponsible housing policy of the Clinton administration, and the consequences of subprime borrowing spread throughout the rest of the world as the global economy is hugely interconnected.
But did the ‘Conservative’ Party’s economic policies help cushion the blow of the Great Recession? Pettinger’s piece explains how borrowing levels actually got worse once the Tories gained power in 2010 onwards. That hardly sounds fiscally conservative, does it? View Pettinger’s article here if you do not believe me.
However, Sunak’s record no doubt makes Brown blush. Government borrowing during the 2020/21 fiscal year was predicted to hit around 400 billion pounds, the equivalent of between 17-20 per cent GDP, well above its 10 per cent peak at the height of the global financial crisis (which was when Brown was Prime Minister).
Of course, Sunak would argue his decisions were necessary to finance Britain’s lockdown during a global pandemic. Nonetheless, John Hopkins University found that global lockdowns failed to prevent the spread of COVID and recommended that they should not be used as an instrument to tackle pandemics in the future. Even The Daily Telegraph was reporting in August 2020 that lockdown itself killed more people than COVID. With stories now surfacing of children who failed to receive support from social services during lockdown, and people having missed cancer appointments in 2020-21, it is apparent that locking down the country, and the world, was a deadly, self-inflicted mistake.
Sweden and Florida are two useful case studies for parts of the world that did not lock themselves down and still tackled the spread of COVID. Sweden’s COVID death rate currently stands at 19,144, and though its population is smaller than the UK’s, which locked down hard, they were praised for not locking down by mainstream outlets like Germany’s DW, despite being a nation that is 88 per cent urbanised, but then again Britain’s urbanisation numbers are very similar. Sweden’s leading epidemiologist, Anders Tagnell, argued his country’s approach to the coronavirus should be based on evidence, and there was none to prove that lockdowns were working. That we will come to later.
Florida’s infection levels, meanwhile, were no different to California’s, which locked down hard, and now the state has been ranked as one of the best when it came to handling the pandemic, according to The Committee To Unleash Prosperity. In fact, Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, recently said his state’s economy is experiencing a record surplus. This shows Sunak and Boris did not have to fund an economically catastrophic lockdown to tackle the coronavirus; they chose to go down this path.
In Brown’s defence, he had no control over America’s subprime housing bubble exploding, which wrecked the former Labour Chancellor’s budget plans, though he should have been more financially prudent in anticipation of a crash. That is his only mistake.
And now, Britain is literally paying the price for Sunak’s record borrowing. Sure, the unemployment rate currently stands at 3.8 per cent, one of the lowest rates since 1974, but that does not help those on low incomes in the face of surging inflation and high interest rates.
Interest rates were at a record low during the height of the pandemic in 2020, and as Norton Finance explains, when interest rates decrease, there’s an increase in borrowing. The Bank of England has a 2 per cent inflation target (a rule set by Gordon Brown, funnily enough), yet it has now exceeded 9.1 per cent. This means interest rates will have to rise to levels not seen since the 1980s to bring inflationary levels back down, which affects small businesses with large loans and provides consumers with less discretionary income, both of which will harm the economy in the short-term at least. Inflation itself has a huge impact on consumer spending levels, many of which are already being felt with surging prices in shops, etc.
Under New Labour, inflation hit 1.9 per cent in 2005, just below Brown’s target, and this was the highest level it got to before the crash. As expected during a recession, inflation climbed to 3.99 per cent in Britain during the 2008 crisis, but that is still far lower than it is now.
It pains me as a former Conservative Party member to write that a Tory Chancellor did a worse job at handling the economy in two years than a former Labour Chancellor who was in office for ten years did. However, as the Conservatives look to the future, they need to regain their reputation for economic prudence. That has been destroyed by Sunak’s financing of Boris’s overreaction to COVID. Sunak should not only be remembered as a worse Chancellor than Brown, but he should be regarded as the worst Chancellor in history in years to come.
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The National Scandal That Never Was
In undoubtedly one of the most important and disturbing watches this year, the GB News documentary Grooming Gangs: Britain’s Shame is perhaps the best examination of this ongoing (and sadly ever-widening) scourge on Britain as a nation. The amount of detail and research Charlie Peters goes into is commendable, simultaneously making the matter horrifying and frustrating, given how little was done to tackle it up until the last decade.
It’s not simply the individual accounts of grooming victims that make it such an uncomfortable watch, nor the vast scale of the scandal that Peters exposes. Rather, it’s the clear institutional failings that occurred, as well as the Soviet-level attempted cover-up by the authorities, including intimidation campaigns against those trying to tell the truth.
It ends with an overall call to action for the government to take this matter more seriously and have more of those involved in the cover-up to be held to account.
Peters’ excellent work is one of several noticeable examples of mainstream culture attempting to shed some more light on the scandal, with others including the equally harrowing BAFTA-winning BBC drama Three Girls and an episode of the Denise Walsh true crime series Survivors where prominent victim Sammy Woodhouse gave an extensive interview on her own tragic story.
However, such contributions are noticeable in how few and far between they actually are. This, in turn, highlights a sinister truth about the scandal as a whole: despite how much of a major problem it was, and continues to be, it never quite gained the status of ‘national scandal’ it truly deserved.
The fact it hasn’t had such an impact is very troubling and should highlight how legitimately broken our current system is, politically and institutionally.
But before that, it’s worth examining a brief history of this scandal.
For several decades now, tens of thousands of young, mostly white girls, have been targeted in numerous towns and cities across the UK by gangs (generally of British Pakistani origin) for grooming, sex and rape.
Such girls would be coerced by various means – offers of drugs and alcohol, psychological manipulation, fake affection – by these gangs, and would later be abused.
Sometimes, those in positions of authority were also accused of engaging in such behaviour themselves, including Labour peer Lord Nazir Ahmed, who was (ironically enough) lauded for a speech condemning it.
To make matters much worse, such crimes were often ignored for decades by the authorities, from the local councils, to the police to the social services. It was later discovered that fears of being called ‘racist’ and ‘politically incorrect’ and ‘undermining community cohesion’ were given as justifications for to the ‘see no evil’ attitude of those in charge, because of the race dynamics of those involved (not least of which the victims themselves, often berated for being white by the preparators).
In a post-MacPherson Inquiry Britain (of which had questionably accused the Metropolitan Police of being ‘institutionally racist’ following their bungled investigation of Stephen Lawrence’s murder), fears around that sort of accusation lingered among many police forces – leading to the direct racist abuse of many white, Sikh and Hindu girls in the process.
Later on, Dan Hodges described those failed in Rotherham as those failed because of crying ‘racism’, as “[Rotherham Council] were standing back because the victims were white and the rapists were not.”
The scandal would remain an open secret for many years, whether it be the working-class mumbling in hushed tones about it or less-than-palatable political alternatives captalising on the problem to gain local support.
This would change in 2012 when Times journalist Andrew Norfolk blew the whistle, following extensive research and corroboration with the likes of Woodhouse. This, alongside further exposure in other areas of the country, brave individuals like Maggie Oliver openly highlighted the matter, further helping it into the mainstream.
How extensive this was and how far back this goes will probably never be known. In terms of time alone, there is much circumstantial evidence. The Sunday Mirror found that the Telford abuse goes back as far as the late 1970s and early 1980s. A Rotherham Advertiser article documented such abuse as far back as 1975. A memoir titled Call The Midwife dates the scandal even further back to 1950s London. During a 2021 Parliamentary debate on grooming, Rotherham’s Labour MP Sarah Champion noted that she had met victims who were 70 years old.
To make matters even bleaker, it seems that there are further revelations still to unfold – as one of the lawyers who helped to prosecute the Telford gangs stated, such matters in the town were simply the ‘tip of the iceberg’ for what was to come.
So if all of this is true, then why is it a scandal that has (once again) gone under the radar, kept on the down-low and sidelined to ‘dissident right’ Telegram chats?
There are several reasons for this, and none of them are good, shockingly enough.
Firstly, the ‘racism’ and ‘far-right’ stings and smears that made many turn away initially are still prevalent when discussing this stuff. Norfolk himself was worried about investigating the story initially when first hearing of it, stating in 2015 that his ‘liberal angst’ about the issue being a ‘dream story for the far-right’ made him nervous about tackling it.
Although such worries were somewhat justified, his reporting was originally dismissed by Rotherham Council as lies of the ‘[Rupert] Murdoch press’. Needless to say, if such concerns could make the likes of Norfolk (a hero in this story by all counts) nervous to start with, then why would anyone else senior want that to be their hill that they died on?
In 2015, when Nigel Farage as UKIP leader travelled to Rotherham to speak on the issue, there was a significant protest – but it wasn’t the gangs they had in their crosshairs. Instead, much hatred was directed against Farage for in part spreading ‘racism’.
Champion herself when calling out these problems in her constituency area in a hard-hitting 2017 Sun article received similar attacks. Beyond the death threats and deselection attempts, she was also criticized for being racist by MP Naz Shah (infamous for retweeting a parody account stating that the grooming victims should ‘shut their mouths for the good of diversity’) and her local Labour Party.
Meanwhile, Peters’ doc itself was targeted on similar grounds with University College London professor Ella Cockbain sending a complaint to Ofcom on the matter, as it promoted ‘racist tropes’ about ‘Pakistani men’ (thankfully to widespread backlash online as a result).
In short, if far-left campaign groups, certain trade unions, much of the Labour Party and academics among many others with ‘privileged’ status are still willing to shut down this debate with racism smears, why would those with much to lose campaign against it?
This highlights the second major reason as to why this never became a national scandal: it didn’t serve the interests of the political establishment at large (not least of which those involved in the original cover up, alongside specific councillors who made horrid remarks on it).
Writer Derek Turner once described political correctness as a ‘clown with a knife’, highlighting its funny aspects of which conceal its sinister totalitarian aims. The grooming gang scandal, alongside the infrequent spats of Islamic terrorism, are the most obvious times of such an idea playing out in such a fashion.
When the political establishment has their eggs in the baskets of political correctness, multiculturalism and mass immigration – policies and ideas of which the proliferation of grooming gangs couldn’t have happened without – why would they seriously want to tackle such a subject matter head on and deal with it?
Instead, they focus on supposed scandals that confirm their prejudices. When the grooming gang scandal was taking off in the mid-2010s, a completely made-up non-scandal was entertaining the eyes and ears of Westminster – that of the VIP pedophile ring alleged by fantasist Carl Beech. Senior MPs gave it Parliamentary space, LBC host James O’Brien gave it copious amounts of attention and many at the Met Police felt that Beech (under his pseudonym ‘Nick’) was ‘credible’. It went as far as then-Prime Minister David Cameron getting involved, with Douglas Murray describing how it created a ‘witch-hunt’ atmosphere in Parliament. Beech was found out later to be a fraud – sadly not before some were made homeless because of his claims and others died before their vindication.
It is easy to see why much of the Westminster bubble was so eager to give it attention, but not the grooming gangs. The Beech affair targeted the old British establishment they despised for their part in a traditional Britain ‘out-of-sync’ with the secular one of the current year they love (and have benefited greatly from).
Persecuting World War 2 generals like Lord Bramall and former MI5 heads, alongside the Tory old guard of Edward Heath and Harvey Proctor was very easy under this mentality. When the crimes and suspects involved violate the principles of secular Britain that becomes much harder to do.
As such, it isn’t surprising that the grooming gang scandal isn’t much use for the establishment at large. This is something blatantly seen with the generally scant media coverage it receives in comparison to other tragedies.
In Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky highlight the various ways in which the media manipulate events and frame stories in a way to set an agenda. This includes the notion of ‘Worthy and Unworthy Victims’, whereby the media will ‘portray people abused in enemy states as worthy victims, whereas those treated with equal and greater severity by their own government… as unworthy.’
Such an idea can be recontextualised in regards to how the media at large covers certain bleak stories, whether in Britain or abroad. For instance, the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 was given much coverage in the half-decade since the disaster, and rightly so. One would hope this extended to the ramifications of such an event. It was, but not in the way one would think.
Instead of talk surrounding corporate negligence and the neo-feudal implications of the inherent setup, the discussions surrounding Grenfell consisted of how the government had failed the seemingly benevolent ideas of multiculturalism and diversity due to the building’s high-foreign born population, all the while blaming the Tories’ austerity supposedly causing the matter to occur (a blame shared by more than just one political party, it turned out).
In all, brave firemen were more likely to be criticised for the incident than those who built it in such poor conditions, despite endless complaints from the residents about it. Grenfell could therefore be cynically pushed in a way that celebrated diversity and mass immigration, making its victims worthy ones. The grooming gang scandal meanwhile does the complete opposite, hence its victims are unworthy, for the reasons explained earlier. Hence why there was a Question Time episode set in Kensington for the Grenfell anniversary, but none for the grooming gang hotspots.
One can only then, in response, protest. Why can’t we all share in these tragedies together? Why does politicking and ideology have any part of such quandaries? Can we not move beyond politics, sacred cows and petty point scoring to grieve, share anger and unite in such times of darkness? Unfortunately it seems that no, we cannot.
It is for that reason, alongside not being recognised as a national scandal, that in some areas, the problem has only worsened since its exposure a decade ago – not least of which is the fact that Rotherham is still a hotspot for this very crime.
The liberal-left establishment have at best sought to further minimize and downplay it, and at worst once again outright deny it’s a problem. In a particularly blunt instance of anarcho-tyranny in late 2022, one victim (Samantha Smith) was investigated by West Mercia Police for discussing her abuse on GB News.
This vapid ignorance was no better displayed than the reaction by polite society to the 2020 whitewashed Home Office report into the matter. The vested interests wanting the story to go away treated it like gospel, including one Guardian writer who exclaimed that it ‘dispel[ed] myth of ‘Asian grooming gangs’ popularised by far right’.
The fact that some of its contributors were displeased at the report and it left out several key witnesses (like initial whistleblower former Labour MP Ann Cryer and the Quilliam Foundation) didn’t matter. Meanwhile, the recent exposure of the fakery of Eleanor Williams was certainly given far more coverage than something like Telford.
Such attitudes permeate other high places as well from so-called ‘comedians’ who try to make disgusting light of it as well as former respected journalists playing ‘whataboutism’ when confronted with the issue. Other institutions, like the BBC will conduct hit pieces against you if you highlight the matter further.
However, despite all this, there is reason to be hopeful.
Although not treated with the severity it deserves, the matter is at least public knowledge now, and can be dealt with accordingly. The 2017 arrests in Newcastle that were pre-emptive against such gangs (alongside many others in recent years) shows that the police in some areas are getting mildly better at catching the perpetrators of these despicable acts.
Meanwhile, the fact that some high-profile Tories, such as Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, have made political hay of it in recent campaign and conference speeches is a positive sign – at the very least, it shows how much of a concern it is to many of their voters and the British right in general, even if one may argue its all cynical electoral-politicking.
Similar political concern could be fully seen in the 2021 Parliamentary debate on the matter, where there was clear cross-party support and sympathy to the victims and their plight, indicating the determination of some of them to want to do something to stop this from occurring again. There is circumstantial good news also such as the Rochdale 3 being possibly deported.
Such steps may be in the right direction, but more needs to be done.
The government needs to apologise to all of the victims and whistleblowers it let down, akin to David Cameron’s apology for Bloody Sunday following the Saville Inquiry.
Then, some genuine action needs to take place from the ground up. As Peters’ noted during the documentary, the National Crime Agency needs to do a complete investigation into the matter, especially in highlighting particular areas uncovered as of yet. Genuine accountability against those involved is also required – the groomers themselves should be deported if foreign-born, and if the death penalty can be re-institutionalised, it should be used against those we can’t deport.
Those in local government that were complicit in the cover-up should be removed from their positions, either by the ballot box or other means for officials and some should be imprisoned for perverting the course of justice.
This could all be done. The only thing stopping it is the cowardly Westminster consensus who instead of challenging such problems head-on would prefer to avoid, as Dominic Cummings stated, “awkward dinner party chats in London.”
It cannot be stressed enough that only the victims of this evil could deal with something that slight. Instead, they have their lives turned upside down, and in some cases ruined.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote about the Boer War that, “We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.” The sooner we appreciate that sentiment with the grooming gang problem and tackle it in a serious way, the better we’ll be as a nation.
In the leadup to the GB News documentary, writer Ed West wrote that “There should be a national conversation about it in the way there was after the Lawrence inquiry.”
The time for that ‘conversation’ is now. While the suffering of the victims can not be reversed, we can at least stop such horrors from continuing, not only showing that Britain truly listened to those people, but that it will leave future generations better off as a result.
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Removing Boris Johnson was never about morality
Boris Johnson has been effectively removed from office under the guise of moral outrage, but there is far more to this picture than righteousness.
Let’s not forget the primary reason Boris Johnson assumed office after Theresa May and was voted in with a landslide majority in the General Election that followed, was because he was considered the man who could ‘Get Brexit Done’. There was never any pretence about his morality, we knew what we were getting. A man who would make jokes seen as politically incorrect by some and casually racist by others; a man who is known for adultery and promiscuity, despite being married – several times; a man with an unconfirmed number of children by different mothers. By no standards is Boris Johnson a morally upright man.
The last time I saw Boris Johnson, he was joking in his apartment above No. 10 about not knowing how the Roman Catholic Church had even managed to marry him and Carrie, in consideration of his previous two marriages.
If the Conservative Party wanted moral leadership, they would have stuck with Theresa May. There are very few in politics with a stronger moral compass than Mrs May. The vicar’s daughter whose most rebellious act as a youngster was to run through fields of wheat. Compared to Boris Johnson and his time as a member of the Bullingdon Club – famous for burning wads of cash in front of homeless people – she was an outright angel. However, she didn’t have the strength of leadership to get Brexit over the line, and that was the national issue that mattered most at the time.
So, to hear parliamentarians arguing about Boris Johnson’s lack of moral fibre, as if to suggest they’ve only just been made aware of it, is laughable. Chris Pincher groped a couple of men in a gentlemen’s club in central London and it wasn’t dealt with appropriately, but that is not the reason Boris Johnson was dethroned. Nor was the fact that he ate some cake and received a fine for breaching COVID regulations. He has previously done far worse, and his colleagues have turned a blind eye.
What we have here is the culmination of multiple fronts of attack. The mainstream media has sustained a continuous attack against the Prime Minister for a number of months now. Sky and the BBC in particular have taken every opportunity to undermine the Prime Minister and paint him as a criminal – not for taking away peoples’ civil liberties, but for briefly attending the most boring party to ever grace the premises of Downing Street. Of course, their real agenda is probably more in line with the second group who has been attacking the PM incessantly, the Remainers and Rejoiners – or Remoaners for the sake of convenience. People who cannot get behind the democratic will of the British people to support one of the largest mandates in our nation’s history; people who, for their own selfish purposes, want to undermine and undo the EU referendum.
The third camp targetting the Prime Minister, is the most devious of all. The political genius Dominic Cummings. Cummings is arguable our country’s greatest campaign strategist, but is not exactly known for his empathy or compassion. Cummings was absolutely the right guy for the Vote Leave campaign, and the 2019 General Election, but he is a campaigner, not a governor. He should have been kept well away from the levers of power during the pandemic. Cummings held far too much influence for a man who was not democratically elected and therefore practically unaccountable. When Cummings was unceremoniously deposed, promised revenge on the Prime Minister and Cummings is a man who cashes in his cheques.
The Remoaners and Cummings are not natural allies, but together – perhaps uncoordinated – along with the mainstream media, they have succeeded in toppling the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and painting themselves as the good guys in the process.
None of this was about morality. The entire situation was both political and personal. A joint venture of vendettas that we may very well yet come to regret, depending on what happens next.
