Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
There’s nothing quite like a brand-new British Labour government to set the teeth on edge. Tony Blair’s lot is no exception. In fact, as the posh buds of Blair pretensions unfold, it’s becoming obvious that this Labour government is going to be considerably worse than its predecessors.
Not that Labour ever lasts long in England. Abundant reasons for this include the uniquely British ability to thoroughly stuff things up every now and then. In other words, the British occasionally vote in Labour in order to be reassured that they should actually have stayed with the Conservatives.
Anyway, New Labour is a mismatch. The pistons which drove Old Labour mills are long impacted. All those hard-done-by working men of the Fifties and Sixties are today the jealous owners of 24-channel tripsonophonic surround-sound home cinema systems, mobile telephones, satellite dishes and the latest 32-bit CD-Rom Pamela Anderson Fuckalong computer games.
The British working man has become tired of dripping the sweat of his brow into a shop steward’s bucket. These days he keeps it for himself. The truly luminous endowment of the Thatcher years was that they turned the British working classes into crass materialist shitheads just like the rest of us.
More or less why they voted for Mr Blair and his glistening toadies. That week of New Labour snivelling which attended the death and disposal of Diana, Princess of Wales, was crucially tasteless. “Blair’s Falklands” they called it. (I can imagine how Tony Blair would have dealt with the Falklands. Emptied Elton John into some sort of military outfit, told him to get his wig cut and slapped him on the next Queen’s Flight to go and warble The Winds in My Underpants at the barbarians.)
My profound aversion to Elton John is leading me off the point. Back to Blairland and its latest horror-ride, the new British Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who recently suffered a severe attack of the socialist vapours and is threatening to introduce new legislation. This relates to the sentencing of offenders in criminal cases. Straw proposes that British judges be encouraged to increase punishment if the mischief they are penalising can be construed in any way as having “racialist elements”.
To qualify for one of these Wormwood Specials, offenders will, according to Straw’s edict, need to have “demonstrated racial hostility at or around the time of the basic offence”. Future British bank robbers will have to be very careful they choose racially compatible banks. If the bank is owned by someone called Cohen, the reckless British robber might find himself doing porridge for an extra year or two just because, a week before he robbed Harold Cohen’s bank, he got fearfully drunk and called his bookie, Dave Goldstein, a rapacious old yiddle.
I often wonder how such patent ninnies as Jack Straw prise themselves into positions of great power. The answer is simple: they get there because even more powerful ninnies, like Tony Blair, help them. In trying to impose his newest soggy demonism, Straw shows himself to be an exemplary left-wing goodie-brain. If racism in crime can be deemed an exacerbating factor, it can also be deemed the excuse. When he went out and shot black people, Barend Strydom was not acting in spite of his upbringing but because of it.
Awarding reverse privilege to any racial group is patronising and, in itself, gratuitously racist. For example: may a black man only be realised in his full human potential when he gets killed by a white man? If a fellow black man kills him, is culpability measured on a scale relating to the difference in skin tones? Conversely, do whites hurt more when blacks stab them?
Affirmative Justice, the next creak of the PC gibbet. Soon Jack Straw will be saying that Indians must be let off because their accusers are Arabs. I do hope someone calls him off before he makes an even bigger prick of himself. If someone doesn’t, his next judicial advance will probably be 10 years in prison for sexism because in a crackle of sudden affection you called the wife “my dear”?