An Informed Choice

It was a miracle that this week’s Any Questions? was repeated. Not only did Lindsey German mention the fact that Boris Johnson had blocked a peace deal in Ukraine in the spring of 2022, although she did not fit in that he done so for his own monetary gain, but she also referred to the Undercover Policing Inquiry, and that as illustrative of the fact that there were plenty more rape gangs, including the Police. But then, Jess Phillips herself had already told Parliament, not only the same thing, but that she had known it all along. What makes her unsackable by Keir Starmer? She is certainly not unsackable by her constituents.

The Workers Party candidate who came within 693 votes of unseating Phillips last year was the wonderful investigative journalist Jody McIntyre. Like his party, he has called from the first for a statutory inquiry into the rape gangs. And yes, he is a Muslim. The late Marcus Fakana was imprisoned in Dubai because the age of consent in the United Arab Emirates was 18, in that that was the minimum age for marriage, and all sex outside marriage was a criminal offence. Prince Andrew might think again before he fled to his palace in Abu Dhabi.

“I would stab Jeremy Corbyn in the front,” said the woman who is now “Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls”. She has accused British Pakistanis of importing wives for their disabled sons. She claims to have been rude and abusive towards Diane Abbott, although it is possible that she has built her reputation on lying about having used gutter language towards a woman who was old enough to be her mother. Phillips laughs at male suicides, at male cancers, at other men’s health issues, at violence against men, at problems in boys’ educational attainment, and at fathers denied access to their children. And she said on Question Time that attacks of the kind that were seen in Cologne on the New Year’s Eve of 2015-16, “happen every week in Birmingham.”

Phillips personifies the most abiding legacy of Thatcherism, that publicly funded caste of middle-class women who made life miserable for the working classes in general, for men in general, and especially for working-class men, “the Enemy Within”. Those women’s underage daughters are not at large at all hours in the company of grown men, and if they were, then those men’s feet would not touch the ground on the way to prison. That is as it should be. But those same women, who are themselves mostly White British, take a very different view of the subjects of their Raj, to the point of branding them “prostitutes” at the age of 12. Heaven help anyone who so described a 12-year-old, probably white daughter of the statal or parastatal bourgeoisie.

Another of that class’s archetypes was Home Secretary when the Police were instructed that those victims had, “made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour.” Rejected by the electorate in 2010, she was last year raised to the peerage so that she could take up Ministerial office in the Department for Education, under a Prime Minister who was the Director of Public Prosecutions when the Police were so instructed. The likes of Phillips and Jacqui Smith are Starmer’s organisational and electoral base. As the Permanent State, their 40-year rule has created a rape gang problem that does not exist in the vast Pakistani diaspora in the Gulf, or in the considerable one in the United States. The great majority of child sexual abusers in Britain are white, and they routinely operate in gangs. This is not an imported practice.

The punishment for raping a child in Pakistan is death. All sex outside marriage is illegal there, and the minimum age for marriage is 18 for boys and 16 for girls, rising to 18 in the highly populous provinces of Sindh and Punjab. This problem has arisen in the country where the recommendations of Professor Alexis Jay could be completely ignored by the then Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, who now leads the party that draws most heavily on the public schools while usually controlling local government in the deep countryside of endemic incest. Like everything else in these Islands, this is about class.