Pissed-off Toff takes a closer look at Harry ’n’ Meghan’s pronouncements about alleged ‘structural racism’ in modern Britain, and asks what lies behind claims which are both false and inflammatory.
As our country embraces the extinction of all personal freedom, and as we witness the birth of a totalitarian state, the Black Lives Matter phenomenon – sinister enough in its own right – is little more than a sideshow in the kafkaesque circus of the world we now inhabit.
A sideshow it might be. But let us take a closer look at it, and let us focus, in particular, on the role of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex as crusaders in the struggle against what they like to call ‘structural racism’ in modern Britain. Let us also explore the motives behind their pious pronouncements; motives which, I suggest, have little to do with any genuine concern about racial inequality, and quite a lot to do with wounded pride and a desire for revenge.
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It starts with an interview via Zoom which the California-based prince and his mixed-race spouse gave to The Evening Standard earlier this autumn, and which accompanies an article signed by the two of them (ES, 1 October 2020).
Let’s take the interview first. “You know,” says Harry, “when you go into a shop with your children and you only see white dolls, do you even think: ‘That’s weird. There’s not a black doll there’?”
Yes, that’s pretty much the level of it. And since Harry mentions it, if I walk into a toy shop near Kensington Palace, I don’t expect to see black dolls. Why? Because there is little demand for them in the overwhelmingly non-black Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. If I wished to purchase a black doll, I’d go to Brixton, and I might there find whole shopfuls of them, with not a white doll in sight. Which, I suppose, would be a ‘racist’ retail experience.
In a statement of almost hilarious banality, Harry now opines that “it’s a really exciting time in British culture and British history and in world culture.” More contentiously, how about this, again from the princely mouth? “The world we know has been created by white people for white people,” he claims.
I’m sorry, Harry, but this is just bunkum. The early civilisations on the Tigris and Euphrates were not ‘white’ civilisations, were they? Nor was the early Chinese empire ‘white’. Nor were the pharaohs of Egypt ‘white’. In other words, “the world we know” was created by lots of people of lots of colours, each of them no doubt with their own tribal or racial advantage in mind. And since we’re at it, if any race looks set to dominate the world, the colour of its skin is not white, but yellow. The West is finished.
Anyhow, this royal nonsense is just an amuse-gueule for the absurdities which follow. Thus: although London is “celebrated as one of the most diverse cities in the world,” says the world’s dimmest duke, “if you actually get out onto the streets and talk to people, it doesn’t feel as diverse as it actually is.” Geddit? No: nor me neither.
I’m bored with this already, so let’s move on to the article carrying the by-line of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Here, we once more hear about the existence in Britain of what Harry has learned to call ‘structural racism’ … this being his new war-cry. However, if we are to accept the expression at all, this so-called ‘structural racism’ was to be found in South Africa under apartheid; or in the United States in the 1950s; in other words, in countries where there was a legal separation of the races. But not here. No ‘structural’ barrier prevents black people in the United Kingdom from going as far as their abilities will take them.
We then read a moan about “young people of colour who do not start their lives with the same equality of opportunity as their white peers.” Again, it’s rubbish. Firstly, as Our Saviour remarked, the poor will always be with us. And secondly, the most disadvantaged group in our country is arguably not young blacks, but the youths of the white underclass.
And how about this? “If you are white and British, the world you see often looks just like you – on TV, in the media, in the role models celebrated across our nation.” This isn’t just a little contentious, Harry. It’s pure tripe. Not only is the world I see, here in London, teeming with black people, generally a great deal more cheerful than us miserable whites, but in the media and on TV they are over-represented by a factor of about ten, in terms of the proportion of the population that they make up. In other words, in this very largely white country, the black minority is celebrated and promoted non-stop, one might even say ad nauseam. So much so that whenever I sit through the ads on TV, I wonder whether I am in Nairobi.
Let’s wind up this brief analysis of Harry ’n’ Meghan’s thousand-odd words with a purely stylistic consideration. “As we look at our past, acknowledging the good and bad of how we find ourselves where we are today … [etc. etc.]” Yes, it’s that bad.
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Finally, don’t take my word for it that these sanctimonious pronouncements about ‘structural racism’ and all the rest of it are pure drivel. A certain Kemi Badenoch, who is the Equalities Minister (I didn’t know such a role existed) and also a ‘woman of colour’, as they say, has stated that Britain is one of the best countries in the world in which to be black. Not only. “I’d go further and say this is the best country [in which to be black],” she said. A view that is very similar to one expressed not long ago by Trevor Phillips, the universally respected former head of the Commission for Racial Equality.
Or, more anecdotally, here’s what a black girlfriend told me recently. When she approached a grand London club with a view to becoming a member, they waived the normal application process. No need, in her case, to be proposed and seconded and then wait for a couple of years, like the rest of us. No: she was in, straight away; and here we were in clubland, sipping champagne in a high-ceilinged room overlooking Pall Mall. As my hostess pointed out, to be a half-way capable young black female in modern Britain is to have a winning ticket in the lottery of life.
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Why, then, this denunciation of non-existent ‘structural racism’ by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in the pages of The Evening Standard? Thick as two planks, Harry could not have come up with this stuff by himself. And he admits as much. “I wasn’t aware of so many of the issues and so many of the problems,” he confessed to his interviewer; these unspecified ‘issues’ and ‘problems’ apparently existing “within the UK and also globally as well.” It seems, therefore, that we are now concerned about racism not just in Britain, but throughout the whole world!
No, this isn’t Harry’s work. Behind this conceited claptrap mouthed by one of the thickest boys ever to have emerged from Eton, we detect the manipulative hand of his rather more intelligent spouse. So what game is Meghan Markle playing?
Having beaten an inglorious retreat from her husband’s country, she first of all needs to salvage her wounded pride … monumental vanity being her defining characteristic, as witnessed at the recent Fortune Next Gen Summit, where we saw her emoting over how she is so very “concerned for the world that [her son Archie] is going to inherit” and wondering how she can do her bit “to make it a better place for him.”
Make the world a better place, eh? This is narcissism on a colossal scale. And Meghan the narcissist is angry, because in the kingdom where she was hoping to live out a fairy tale as a universally adored princess, it took only a few months for peasant and courtier alike to see that far from being a mixed-race Snow White, she is a pushy little egotist, a hard-nosed hustler. But how can she admit this, when all she wants to do is save the world? How much easier to blame her unpopularity on the newly-discovered ‘structural racism’ of the nasty imperialist British.
Nor, while we’re at it, would there seem to be much evidence that Meghan has ever suffered from racism. On the contrary, her mixed-race status has been a useful visiting-card throughout her career as a Hollywood starlet; and it did not prevent the British people from giving her a rapturous welcome, before the scales fell from their eyes. Where, then, is this ‘racism’? And why her professed concern with it? It’s all nonsense.
Anyhow, her pride salvaged, Meghan also wants to get revenge on the country which failed to take her at her own valuation. And what better way to achieve this than to arrange for her enslaved British prince to denounce the place, at her dictation? Not only denounce it, but stir up trouble as well. Because as the ‘equalities minister’ quoted above has pointed out, “the repetition of the victimhood narrative is really poisonous for young people, [who] hear it and believe it.”
Finally, in inducing Harry to denounce his own country and to cause real harm in doing so, Meghan gets him to burn his bridges with his very own hands. It has been clear for a while that she has no intention of stepping foot in this country again, except to fight her now-notorious court case against The Mail on Sunday. But can he come back to Britain after this?
What, then, is the result of the couple’s recent intervention in British life? With her toxic pronouncements about an imagined ‘racism’, the scrawny-arsed harpy has achieved various personal aims, most notably vengeance. And her poor dim husband is stuck, a poodle wandering aimlessly around their Californian villa with its seventeen loos. As the excellent Donald Trump said: Good luck to him, because he’s sure gonna need it.
