Monday 20 July 2020

TIME TO END RITUALISTIC POSTURING.

After several weeks of seeing assorted kneeling and exhibiting a 'Black Power Salute', I think we've got the message. Far from accommodating Lewis Hamilton's call for more action after what he's termed an embarrassing ceremony before the start of the Hungarian Grand Prix yesterday, it is surely time to call a halt to the recently adopted ritual.

Of course 'Black Lives Matter' but so do white ones and yellow ones, brown ones and any other colour anyone cares to mention. The way in which a man was treated in the USA was disgusting and other reports of people being treated in similar manner are equally so, but these remain very isolated incidents and have probably been vastly outnumbered by the morally unjustifiable actions of police towards people of all colours, in many countries and for many, many years. The moral panic now being visited on our nation is nothing but a measure of how far from reality we have drifted in recent times.

Sportsmen are being pressured to comply with the 'new', and apparently only, acceptable form of demonstration, with Hamilton having previously complained that not all of his fellow drivers would do so. I say "more power to their collective elbows"; why on earth should they be forced to comply with some specific, if dubious, form of representation ?

As with all such protest movements, the original objective has already been lost. Assorted 'rent-a-mobs' have taken to the streets, statues have been torn down or defaced, places have had their names changed and a memorial to a dog has had its name removed. Some companies have decided that they must, again, set targets for ethnic minority representation on their boards or within their senior management, seemingly irrespective of the suitability of candidates. Police forces are, again, reviewing their procedures to ensure fairness in their dealings with all their 'customers'.

None of this has anything to do with the murder of George Floyd in the USA. It is an opportunity seized upon by Marxists, anarchists and others who despise our society, its culture and its history, and wish it nothing but harm. Some have fallen victim to the seemingly laudable aims of the protesters, while others have been pressured into complying with the voices of the 'woke'. That this is not quite the  principled movement it is presented as being is surely proved by the manner in which those who defy the 'woke' have been hounded and pressured. What footballer would conceivably be brave enough to take his own stand when confronted by the pressure of his coloured colleagues (or should that mimic the latest idiot phrase and be 'colleagues of colour') ?  Thankfully, at least a few of the Formula One drivers have been strong enough to defy the mob, although not without garnering some severe criticism for their failure to toe the line.

Rather than continuing to divide our society up into smaller and smaller special interest groups on the basis of colour, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexuality and the rest, we should be bringing our people together as Britons and citizens of the United Kingdom, people who have equal opportunity in life but who also must play their part in the wider everyday cultural activities of the nation. We must all ensure that we abide by the law and those who do not should be punished; if that means that some groups suffer more arrests and punishments than others, it's for those groups to look at themselves, not for the rest of us to be made to feel guilty for pursuing them. 

It is time to end the nonsense, time to stop removing words form our language because they might offend someone and time to stop making excuses. The police must use profiling as a means of identifying likely criminals and to suggest that 'racial profiling' is some form of NAZI activity is simply wrong. However, it's also wrong for the police to rely too greatly on such methodologies. At the end of the day, we need good, old fashioned common sense and decency far more than 'woke' protest movements.

No comments:

Post a Comment