Life Moves Pretty Fast?

Hadley Freeman is being given a richly deserved reception for her pastiche. The Guardian made this fashion writer a political commentator as part of its campaign to take down the man who had called its bluff on higher taxes for public services and who had scared it out of its wits by taking 40 per cent of the vote on that platform. Taxes have gone up far more than he ever suggested, so ha ha ha to that. But I do not know what UnHerd’s excuse is. Freeman is the herd.

The “Labour anti-Semitism” hoax was what delegitimised the use of the State to bring about greater economic equality, so it could never be let go, no matter how bored even UnHerd readers became of it. Freeman is peddling the line that “everyone accused of rape should be convicted”, and the kind of lurid allegations that used to be made by those of that mind against white working-class men in Britain during the panic about Satanic ritual abuse. The same tendency has copied and pasted that old file in the expectation that respectable persons would believe such things against Darkie as they were once expected to believe them against Pleb. That tendency has been a major driver of this century’s wars of choice, always on essentially the same grounds. This is who you would be lining up with if you accepted the accounts of 7th October such as apparently featured in a video that we commoners were not allowed to see. We commoners see perfectly clearly.

The most basic of checks would have confirmed that the mural, and the wreath, and the “not understanding English irony”, and the “friends from Hamas and Hezbollah”, and all the rest of those, were complete dross, as everyone who did bother to check did find out. The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases in its entire report, neither of them involved Jeremy Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of the Labour Party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.”

Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed. But it does now. Labour has expelled more Jews under Keir Starmer than under all its previous Leaders put together, most or all of them for what has been found to be the protected characteristic of anti-Zionism; there would not be enough time left in this Parliament to change the law on that. It is no wonder that Andrew Feinstein is standing against the Leader who has turned Labour into an anti-Semitic party.

Every week, listen to Starmer and Rishi Sunak “clashing” under parliamentary privilege over whether or not Starmer had tried to put an anti-Semite into Downing Street, and whether or not he had changed the Labour Party from one in which anti-Semitism had been “rife”. Pure fiction, but what else would they have to “clash” over? If they have any point of political disagreement, then it is that Sunak has not handed over the health portfolio to someone who was still a paid lobbyist for the privatisation of the NHS, but had appointed a Foreign Secretary who was at least occasionally willing to criticise Israel.

Freeman expects us to defer to David Baddiel, who wrote last year that J. Robert Oppenheimer should have been played by a Jew. The derision was as predictable as it was correct. At the same time, David Harewood’s otherwise excellent documentary on blackface ended with the fading away, since it was never cancelled, of The Black and White Minstrel Show. But Little Britain started on television seven years after the end of Fantasy Football League. Baddiel had single-handedly brought back blackface, which had not been seen on British television in a good 10 years.

Until then, blackface had not been acceptable in the 1990s, even among the white people by whom I was almost entirely surrounded while growing up. Or if it was, then it must have been a class thing. Certainly, the reaction of Fantasy Football League’s studio audience to Baddiel’s first impersonation of Jason Lee included an audible element of heavy shock. If blacking up was mainstream entertainment, then who else was doing it? Baddiel gave it an extra decade of life.

Baddiel has been in two comedy partnerships, and in both cases the other bloke has been the funny one. For many years, he hardly appeared except as a guest on one of Frank Skinner’s shows. In his late fifties, he wants to reinvent himself as a public intellectual by taking up a cause that placed him beyond criticism. He has therefore had to go through the motions of apologising in person to Lee. Even then, though, he still managed to present himself as somehow the victim.

But the world moves on, and even Baddiel’s old mates from football are having none of it. So now he accuses them of “trolling” him due to “white guilt”. He calls them, “That enemy. They’re white, heterosexual men, desperately trying to show solidarity, as they see it, with black people.” He knows that it is over. We are within sight of getting rid of this public nuisance once and for all.

As well as Freeman and Baddiel, see also those likewise elevated to heavyweight public intellectual status by this almost admirable grift. Although her character would be due for release from prison around about next year, Tracy-Ann Oberman was in EastEnders 20 years ago, and that is about it beyond having lost a libel action for having accused an academic specialist in the field of maintaining “a Jew blocklist”.

Rachel Riley is the glamorous assistant on a gameshow, when she is not purveying the complete lie that, “We now know that there was a pregnant woman who had her belly cut open. The baby was removed from her stomach and beheaded in front of her.” We know no such thing, yet Riley continues to be booked, while Sangita Myska has been replaced with Vanessa Feltz of The Big Breakfast and of What Are These Strawberries Doing on My Nipples? I Need Them for the Fruit Salad. That would not be the mark of a serious news operation even if Feltz had not just left a station that had been forced to go online-only. Nor is it a mark of seriousness to publish Hadley Freeman.