Okay, I’ll admit this isn’t as salacious an article as the heading might have implied. But I thought the statement “I wish I Wasn’t Right About Everything All the Time” could prove a bit of a turn-off.
But it’s true - I really do wish I could wake up some mornings and hear that Obama has turned round the American economy, or that the police are winning the battle against yobbery, or that black boys are doing really well in school.
Instead of which, all I get are stories confirming what I already knew, or what I had predicted. Barack Obama is a disaster. The police have handed over control of our streets to yobs. And black kids are posting appalling results in school.
First, Barry. The only genuine achievement of his first term in office so far is to make Jimmy Carter look good. As anyone not on the left could have predicted, his Big State policies are proving massively unpopular, his panicked helpers are stealing away from an unhappy White House in the dead of night, his party is due to be slaughtered in mid-term elections, his approval rating is at a record low, the US economy is flatlining, and every time he opens his gob and that rich, stern, sonorous Afro-American voice issues forth, he reveals himself to be seriously out of touch with the mood of his country.
I’ve never been a fan, but even I hadn’t realised just how loopily detached from reality he was until the head of NASA reported that, during his meeting with Barry, the Prez told him that the space agency should make reaching out to the Muslim world one of its priorities.
Presumably the most powerful man in the world believes our galaxy is littered with failed planets where women are regularly stoned to death for adultery, suicide bombers slaughter their fellow beings in order to spread God’s loving message, young females have acid thrown in their faces for wanting to go to school, high office is stolen by force or bribery, and professional Intergalactic Zargl players take bribes to fix matches.
Or maybe Obama wanted to ensure that the next time the US launches a rocket, it is manned by a non-American Muslim (in which case, as the reporter warned at the end of The Thing From Another World, “keep watching the skies!”).
My being right all along about Baz isn’t any consolation. Even the evident embarrassment of all those Bush-hating celebrity airheads who frothed themselves up into a pitch of shrieking, gushing hysteria over his election on both sides of the Atlantic doesn’t provide solace. At a time when Iran’s election-stealing tyranny is getting itself nuked up and when the world is desperate for a strong US economy, it would be nice if the planet’s most powerful human being didn’t see sucking up to Muslims as his number one priority.
I’m even more depressed to be proved right about the utter crapness of our police.
Complaints about the awesome scale of petty lawlessness in this country, and the bizarre unwillingness of the police to do anything about what is the major law and order issue for most of the poor blighters whose taxes pay for their inflated and undeserved wages, have for years been countered by a fog-bank of ludicrous, massaged statistics showing how well Plod is dealing with issues like “hate crime”, which the majority of us frankly couldn’t give a toss about.
We want to feel safe in our homes and in our streets. That’s all that matters! That should be what cops worry about when they get up in the morning and last thing before they go bye-byes. The main source of our anxiety is the lawless behaviour of the young thugs who, with impunity, decorate our urban landscape with obscenities, graffito, vomit, drugs, broken glass, urine, blood, and unwanted children.
I mean, a six-year old could grasp this point.
In fact, given the example their older siblings are setting them, I’m surprised nobody has invented a “Junior Yobbo” kit to give them as Christmas presents. It would include a toy knife and gun, a spray can, fake blood, a tattooing kit, ready-made bits of litter to drop, an assortment of mini alcopops cans, chocolate reefers, sweeties madeto look like popular street drugs, and a device which teaches them obscenities and, of course, their “rights”. It might also contain an Inaction Man toy, which pukes, pisses and bawls insults at the touch of a button (e.g. “Paedo!”, “Oi, what you staring at, wanker!”, “Yeah? What you gonna do about it? Call the police?”). Oh, and a photograph of a police officer, as most of the little dears won’t ever have seen one in the flesh.
Yesterday, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Dennis O’Connor reported that rowdy and abusive behaviour by yobs is a “disease” which has been allowed to “fester” in communities because the police have retreated from the streets during the past 20 years in order to concentrate on paperwork and chasing targets.
One is tempted to respond with, “No shit, Sherlock!”, but, as I’m opposed to public vulgarity, I’ll refrain. Instead, I’ll just point out that millions of us have been pointing this out relentlessly for twenty bleeding years!
45% of calls to the police in the past year were about antisocial behaviour. 3.5 million incidents were reported last year, and Sir Dennis reckons that’s about a quarter of the total.
Today, the country’s top cop, Sir Paul Stephenson, referring to the report, said, “This is more to do with the psychological contract between the citizen and the police. And occasionally (my italics) the citizen might be forgiven for thinking the psychological contract has been broken. They are on the streets and police are in buildings and vehicles, not doing other things. This is the critical issue.”
M’lud, may I refer the court to my previous scatological comment?
What is a “psychological contract”, precisely? We, the public, pay you, the police, a fortune every year to protect us from our fellow citizens. If there was an Olympic event for failing to do your duty, the British police would win gold – but as they’d have to leave the station to collect the medal, they probably wouldn’t bother.
We saw a gaggle of policemen enter a neighbour’s house a few weeks back. We assumed something serious had happened. Turns out a fox had killed the family’s pet rabbit. If their house had been daubed with graffiti, windows smashed and their 4x4 keyed and sprayed with acid, I doubt they’d have received a visit.
When police representatives warn that a cut in their numbers will result in a Christmas crime spree this year, we all laugh hollowly. First, we’re right in the middle of a crime spree right now. If things were any worse, we’d be in bloody Mexico! There couldn’t, physically, be less physical policing of the streets in our area than we currently enjoy. To achieve that, there would have to be constables composed of anti-matter on the beat.
Again, I can’t extract an ounce of pleasure from being right all along. I’d prefer a competent, effective police force, safe streets and a low-crime society.
Black boys do badly in our schools. In 2008, 27% of them achieved “good” GCSEs compared with 45% of white boys, over 60% of Indians and a stunning 70% of Chinese.
Obviously, our liberal rulers have spent decades explaining this away by blaming racist attitudes in the classroom and society as a whole. I’ve always assumed this knee-jerk excuse was rubbish. Now a former teacher, Tony Sewell, who happens to be black, has written an article for Prospectmagazine firmly rejecting institutional racism as the reason for underachievement:
“What we now see in schools is children undermined by poor parenting, peer-group pressure and an inability to be responsible for their own behaviour... They are not subjects of institutional racism. They have failed their GCSEs because they did not do the homework, did not pay attention and were disrespectful to their teachers.”
Mr. Sewell suggests (and this is a rough paraphrase) that the real problem is that the race relations industry has taught these boys to see themselves as victims, when , in fact, no one is victimising them. As for the general hoo-hah about presenting the kids with black male role models, this is dismissed as “desperate”. Mr. Sewell asks, reasonably, why black boys can’t draw inspiration from black teachers?
Again, I’m not in the least cheered to have what I’ve already known confirmed - that the poisonous cult of victimhood and the pack of absolute blisters who run the race relations industry are making things worse (who’d have thought it?).
Finally - and here the news is merely interesting, rather than depressing - I’ve long suspected that estimates of the number of people who would see themselves as homosexual have always been wildly exaggerated.
And I’ve spent long stretches of my life at Cambridge and the BBC, and living in Chiswick!
According to a report from the Office for National Statistics, I was right all along. Only one percent of the population (men and women) considers itself to be gay - about 480,000 in all. Former official estimates had suggested that nearly one in ten men were gay, which struck me as utterly ludicrous.
But, as Neil Midgeley point out in a Telegraph blog today, given that the gay dating site, Gaydar, has 1.5 million people signed up to it, maybe the latest ONS figures are a crock as well.
Still, who are we to mistrust official government figures?
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