Pissed-off Toff compares the vigorous policing of the all-white anti-lockdown rally in London on Saturday 26 September with the acquiescent police presence at the far bigger Black Lives Matter rally, a few months before … and concludes that the blacks are now the most privileged group in the country.
From around midday, a helicopter had been hovering overhead, shredding the nerves of hundreds of thousands of Londoners below. The presence of the chopper, plus the fact that today was a Saturday, could mean one thing only: there was yet another demonstration going on.
Reflecting for the upmteenth time on the fact that putting these maddening machines in the air, at considerable expense to the taxpayer, has nothing to do with observing demonstrations (this could easily be done with a cheap drone), and everything to do with providing entertainment for the police (choppers for coppers?); aware that countless readers worldwide now depend on me for reliable news of life in Covid-struck London; and aware, furthermore, that I had hardly stepped out of the flat for days except to stock up on gin … with these thoughts in my mind, I sallied forth, digital camera in hand, and Moleskine notebook and solid 18-carat gold Parker pencil in pocket.
As my readers might remember, this pencil is hallmarked with a lower-case h for 1963. Not only does the H remind me of the name of a girl I have loved; but the colour of it occasionally reminds me of her hair. This object is a thing of beauty, of a deep rich buttery gold colour with a hint of green that becomes especially apparent in the dull flat light of an overcast Norfolk afternoon … the tinge of green meaning that there’s some silver in the alloy.
Some friends have suggested that I might perhaps have a slight obsession with solid gold writing instruments. Better that, however, than murdering grannies … or than shooting down police helicopters with illegally acquired ground-to-air missiles launched from the balcony of one’s London residence; though I admit that this fantasy is seldom far from my mind, nowadays.
* * * * *
In Parliament Square, under the statue of Winston Churchill, two men were holding up a banner bearing the legend ‘God Bless Donald Trump’. One day we will realise that although he occasionally lacks diplomatic finesse, Donald is right about most things. He’s right to mistrust the Chinese, who, as anyone who has been to China knows, despise us and view us as inferior beings; enemies, even. And he’s right to see the ‘man-made global warming’ scare for the baloney that it is. One suspects, too, that he has little time for ‘trans’ activists, and little time, either, for the Black Lives Matter circus.
Walking along Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square, I came across another legend with which I was entirely in sympathy, written in indelible ink on the plastic bench of a bus shelter. ‘NHS sucks’, it read.
Dead right, I thought. They need to dismantle the whole rotten institution and start from fresh. I know this because I once did a temporary job in a large NHS hospital where the waste and inefficiency beggared belief. After only a few days, I realised that the NHS exists not to provide health care for the nation, but to provide cushy and entirely useless jobs for a vast army of incompetent bureaucrats.
* * * * *
I have no idea how many people there were in and around Trafalgar Square. But although not densely packed, the place was full of demonstrators protesting against the ‘lockdown’ in general, and the ‘mandatory’ wearing of masks in particular. No-one, therefore, was wearing a mask and there was no ‘social distancing’.
Everywhere, slogans were in evidence, on banners, placards and T-shirts. Here, beneath Nelson’s Column, is a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Covid-1984’ – a wordplay on Covid 19 and the title of George Orwell’s prophetic novel set in a totalitarian world in the near future.
‘We do not consent’, read a banner unfurled beneath Nelson’s Column.
‘When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty’, read another banner (see photo at top of this article). And here are two more banners: ‘No to mandatory vaccines’, reads one. ‘Stop stealing our civil liberties under the guise of emergency measures,’ reads another – inarticulate, but comprehensible nevertheless.
This being a gathering of more than six people, it was illegal; and it is a measure of quite how far we have gone down the road to serfdom that I write that last sentence with barely a shrug of the shoulders. There was, however, nothing the guardians of the law could do about it, since they could hardly arrest several thousand peaceful demonstrators … although perhaps in order to be seen to be doing something, a phalanx of masked policemen in front of the National Gallery was executing a crowd-control maneouvre, the point of which eluded me.
From time to time a chant arose, spontaneously, from the crowd. “Free-dom! Free-dom!! Free-dom!!!” it went. As always at these rallies, the smell of hash hung in the air. And as always, there were a few loons dressed in New Age gear, attracted by the chance to protest against ‘them’.
Otherwise, who were the people assembled there? To what socio-economic class did they belong? I saw not one single black, and perhaps just a couple of Asians. Everyone else was white. Middle class? Working class (if the term still means anything)? Trash? I’m not sure. However, of respectable professionals there was no sign. One reason for this, I speculate, is that they cannot be seen at these rallies for fear of losing their jobs. As a young accountant recently told me, a colleague of hers had been sacked after her employers spotted her, caught on social media, attending a rally of sorts. But no-one can sack me, so there I was.
* * * * *
At some stage a part of the crowd in Trafalgar Square peeled off and proceeded westwards down Pall Mall, towards Green Park. I went with them, unsure as to whether I was now a demonstrator or an observer. Suddenly, the style of policing changed to the offensive. I can’t say how, but it was clear that they were now the hunters, and we the hunted; and I sensed that I might at any moment be fined or arrested.
Look at them here, on this video clip that I took half-way between Trafalgar Square and St James’s Street.
Look at them, too, as they hide behind a corner near Clarence House, in military style.
All this, I repeat, for a peaceful demonstration during which I witnessed not one single incident of aggression on the part of the demonstrators, nor even the slightest suggestion of it.
* * * * *
Which leads me, finally, to speculate as to why some demonstrations are so heavily policed, and others not. The huge Black Lives Matter rally in London on Sunday 7 June was policed all but invisibly. I was there, and stood on Victoria Street for one and a half hours as the rally passed, from vanguard to camp followers. There must have been many hundreds of thousands of people marching. But of the police, hardly a sign; and when they did appear, at the tail-end of the rally, their presence was meek and acquiescent … not so much policing the event, as part of it. Whereas here, for an event smaller by a factor of at least twenty, there was a heavy police presence which, as I witnessed, soon turned threatening.
Why? It can only be because if you are black, you can demonstrate to your heart’s content and the police will leave you be. Whereas if you are white, you can’t and they won’t.
So much have we interiorised the idea of white guilt, so relentlessly has it been shoved down our throats, that what we now see in this country is indeed ‘endemic racism’. Not, however, of the sort about which the Markle harridan likes to lecture us from her fully-staffed Californian villa, or about which the opportunists of the Black Lives Matter movement complain so loudly. On the contrary, the ‘endemic racism’ we now see is one whereby the blacks enjoy protected status and are all but untouchable, with employers bending over backwards to offer them preferment and promotion in order to fulfil ‘diversity quotas’ … which are nothing other than structures of racism and discrimination, put in place in the name of fighting racism and discrimination.
When, recently, an attractive black girl in her early thirties bought me a glass or two of champagne in the smart London club that had eagerly fast-tracked her membership application, she told me that to be black and female in modern Britain is to have won in life’s lottery. You tick all the boxes. Every institution and every employer wants you on board. Whereas a headhunter friend of mine said that it is all but impossible, nowadays, to sack a black employee. Inevitably, you will be charged with ‘racism’; and the cost and bother involved hardly bear thinking about.
Why, then, do the BLM people make such a hue and cry? Because they have discovered that they can. They only have to pronounce the magical word ‘racist’, and – abracadabra – the world falls at their feet, quite literally ‘taking the bow’. And sensing cowardice and weakness on the part of the bien-pensant liberals who, overwhelmingly, run our national institutions, the BLM activists press their advantage.
Courted by politicians, deferred to by the police, favoured at work, fawned on by the media, and – by no means least – idolised by an advertising industry from which there is no escape … with all this, the blacks are now perhaps the most privileged group in the country.
Whereas if, like me, you are an upper-class white male, you are nowadays more or less a pariah, with broad swathes of the workplace entirely closed to you. I could, I suspect, no more get a job in the BBC, or in the Civil Service, or anywhere in the public sector, than I could fly to the moon. So that when, a few months ago, I witnessed the triumphant progress of the Black Lives Matter rally through the streets of the capital, it was as a dispossessed Aborigine observing the victory parade of the new masters of his world.
Black, it would seem, is the new white.
