IF Mark Steyn is to be remembered for one quote, it will be the aphoristic ‘In Britain, everything is policed except crime’. Today’s politically-correct Plod constantly cause Steyn to dust down his dictum, and Mark’s maxim made an early reappearance during the latest video edition of Mark’s Mailbox.
Scolded by Steyn for symbolising the ‘utterly useless British constabulary . . . one of the most contemptible institutions in the Western world’ is Julie Cooke, Deputy Chief Constable of Cheshire and the National Police Chiefs’ Lead for LGBT+. Last week TCW reported how DCC Cooke had used International Pronouns Day – which she emphasised is ‘particularly important to those who are transgender and gender nonconforming’ – to tweet: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing. It can also be used as a form of abuse for somebody and that just isn’t right.’
Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday pic.twitter.com/pe9x9GWTJj
— Julie Cooke (@DCCJulieCooke) October 16, 2019
DCC Cooke’s vacuous virtue-signalling attracted attention across the Atlantic, from where Mark Steyn offers the scornful slant: ‘If you happen to be the number two police officer in the county of Cheshire, where violent crime is up 50 per cent year-on-year and you’ve got over 3,000 violent crimes a month, I can well understand why you’d just rather make stupid promotional videos about your pronouns.’
Noting the ‘implied threat’ in Cooke’s message, Steyn is scathing: ‘I can’t stand the woke constabulary . . . I preferred the old-school bent coppers to the woke coppers. Now they’re bent and woke. There’s something unpleasantly coercive about the entirely useless British constabulary now threatening to add one more useless, fake, invented crime that they pursue far more zealously than anything that matters.’
Moving from pronouns to pigmentation, Mark Steyn salutes ‘the world’s wokest Mammy singer’. Canada’s Prime Minister Jolson – sorry, Justin – Trudeau recently was revealed to have blackened, more often than he can remember, his face, hands, arms, legs and goodness knows what else. Mark muses on how the ‘Prime Minstrel’ might celebrate this week’s re-election: ‘I can’t wait to hear him do the Banana Boat Song – Day-O! – at the next Liberal Party conference and for him to invite all the ladies present to tally his banana. It’d be a lovely scene.’
More seriously, Ol’ Black Face remains in office despite losing both his parliamentary majority and the popular vote. Mark mourns how Canada’s general election was ‘almost a parodic version’ of voters in a Western democracy again being given the choice of ‘a candidate who’s Left of centre and a candidate who’s ever so slightly Right of Left of centre’. The window of discourse has of course been shrunk by ‘globalists [who] are not happy with people seeking wider choices: the narrower the turf that elections are fought on, the more it suits them’.
Which is why Brexit, Trump and other maverick movements have so alarmed and annoyed Leftist loathers of the nation state. As Steyn says: ‘If you happen to think that Britain should not be a member of the European Union, you must be a racist, you must be a hater . . . Likewise, if you think the United States ought to have a southern border, you must also be a racist, you must be a white supremacist . . . these labels save the guys on the Left from having to debate you on these issues.’
One of Mark’s correspondents, recently returned from East Asia, poses an interesting hypothesis: could Western countries, in which so much infrastructure and economic activity – policing, security, criminal justice, social work, and so on – is dependent upon wrongdoing and societal breakdown, actually survive becoming more orderly and having much less crime, like Japan?
‘The big difference between Japan and other developed nations is that Japan has minimal immigration. It takes its borders seriously. It takes its citizenship seriously: it just doesn’t give it away to anyone who can get there. If you have a [national] border and that border is seriously enforced, there’s less and less to do inside the border.’
Envious of ‘the guy who’s got the bollard concession’ for North America and Europe, Mark Steyn sardonically ascribes ‘bollards around everything that matters in the Western world’ to ‘vehicular jihad’: ‘You can have a lot of SUVs that are perfectly moderate. Then the SUV starts going to a radical mosque and becomes radicalised. Next thing you know, that voice telling you to put on your seatbelt is instead saying “Allahu Akbar” and the radicalised Jeep Cherokee has ridden up on to the sidewalk and is mowing people down.’
Steyn’s solution: ‘Instead of erecting our borders [inside the country] it would simpler to do what the Japanese do. But somehow, that’s never addressed . . . and so we have bollards as a growth industry in our economy, and it’s bonkers.’
Indeed, but to argue against the interests of ‘Big Bollard’ is to question what Mark Steyn earlier had deplored as ‘the multicultural orthodoxy of the post-World War II Western world’.
Enjoy his latest half-hour of heresy.
