Burning effigies exposes our screwed-up priorities
Finally, the Prime Minister takes a stand. She declares on Twitter that a video showing an effigy of Grenfell Tower being burnt, while Guy Fawkes revellers laughed and joked, was “utterly unacceptable”. I may have missed it, but did you hear Theresa May make a similar statement yesterday after the fifth young man in a week was stabbed to death in London? That’s six days, five new murder investigations. At least no black youths were stopped and searched for knives. That really would have been unacceptable.
Meanwhile, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said that it could take up to 10 years to “make significant progress” in stemming the tide of knife crime. Seriously? At the present rate, that’s another thousand mutilated young corpses in the morgue. But don’t worry about that, folks. Look over here! See how quickly five men have surrendered and been arrested on suspicion of a public order offence for setting light to that Grenfell effigy.
Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Cundy, who is leading the investigation into the Grenfell tragedy (that’s the actual tower block, not the Guy Fawkes cardboard cut-out), said he was “frankly appalled by the callous nature of the video … To mock that disaster in such a crude way is vile.”
Yes, it is vile. And tasteless and creepy and the morally inert louts who did it would not be ideal suitors for your darling daughter, that’s for sure. They may very well be racist, too; the paper figures screaming from the windows of their home-made tower appear to be brown. Truly repugnant, we can all agree. But since when was Being A Really Unpleasant Person a crime? When did sick jokes made in a back garden constitute a “public order offence” or take up valuable police time while real flesh-and-blood victims are being scythed down in broad daylight on our streets?
If you apply the same standards of conduct, what are the police going to do about the people who threw Boris Johnson on their bonfire? A giant effigy of our former foreign secretary holding the severed head of Theresa May (don’t get any ideas, Marjorie), was paraded through towns in East Sussex. As it passed, people booed and yelled, “Burn him!” Will they be charged with a hate crime, do you suppose?
Come off it. If you wear a Barbour and vote Lib Dem then immolating a white Old Etonian Tory counts as a spot of harmless fun and a public service to boot. I mean, you could probably get a grant for it. There will be no backlash against the Boris burners. (Nor would Boris, a tolerant fellow, want one.) By contrast, the reaction to the Grenfell Tower effigy is chilling because it seeks to criminalise individuals for things they thought and said on their own private property. It is yet another example of displacement activity by our impotent leaders. Khan fiddles while London burns. Terrified of taking the zero-tolerance action needed to halt knife crime, because running the risk of being called racist is so much worse than another butchered teenager, politicians prefer to talk up trivial incidents, which shouldn’t even be dignified with a response.
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of all this synthetic outrage when there is so much that calls for the genuine kind. For example, how can it be that a Conservative government is now spending more on foreign aid than on policing? Pinch yourselves. We can’t even protect our own young people, yet we gave Pakistan £463 million in 2016. That is a hell of a lot of coppers. Extra police, that is, who, if deployed on the streets of Tulse Hill, could give strutting gangs a run for their drug money.
Oh, and by the way, that’s Pakistan with its own space programme. Where politicians in the National Assembly came to blows over the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian who narrowly avoided the death penalty for some non-offence. Pakistan whose hard-line Islamists have held protests calling for Asia’s death and whose government has agreed to impose a travel ban on her while her case is “reviewed” (allowing plenty of time for the poor woman to perish in mysterious circumstances).
This is the kind of behaviour a British prime minister should call “utterly unacceptable”? So much easier, though, for May to post a virtue-signalling tweet about some stupid home-grown bigots.
How many of us nodded along vigorously on Monday when Sgt Richard Cooke, chairman of the West Midlands Police Federation, complained in these pages that the Government has “a frankly perverse attitude to priorities”? Young people are slain almost daily in cold blood and our Prime Minister is busy trying to look righteous by giving the oxygen of publicity to the abhorrent behaviour of a few scumbags.
In future, instead of genuflecting before the fickle gods of Political Correctness, Mrs May should reserve her Twitter tirades for the burning issues of the day. Not pour petrol on some nasty Guy Fawkes prank.