Parallel Lines

All Saint Helenians are descended from all three of West African slaves, South Asian indentured labourers, and their masters, with others in the mix. So, and I must emphasise that I am talking about a small and mostly ageing minority but they do exist, I have always known people who both looked and sounded like Shabana Mahmood and Kemi Badenoch, Zia Yusuf and Ben Habib, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman.

There is no reasoning with them. They truly believe that none of it would apply to them. Some of them even sincerely imagine that they pass for Anglo-Saxons. They tick White British on forms, to the confusion of well-meaning employers. I am not making this up. If you come from somewhere that is still a British Overseas Territory in 2025, then you are not an immigrant. But if you are brown, you are brown.

Not that race is the primary indicator in an industrial or postindustrial country such as Britain. Or Denmark. Britain is to copy Denmark's "parallel societies", until 2021 officially called "ghettos", and Denmark will return the compliment once we had expanded the scheme. The first criterion for a "parallel society" is that more than 50 per cent of the inhabitants originated or "descended" from "non-Western countries", defined as everywhere apart from "all 27 EU countries, the United Kingdom, Andorra, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, San Marino, Switzerland, Vatican City, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand". But the other four are socioeconomic.

Once it had met the racist first one, then a community has to meet only two of those four to have all of its children from the age of one upwards required to undergo 25 hours per week of instruction in "Danish culture", and to be declared liable to mass eviction and demolition in the manner of Sharpeville, District Six, or the West Bank. After a few years, Britain would drop the whitelist and just ghettoise everywhere with two or more of unemployment at 40 per cent or above, criminal convictions more than three times the national average (as if the criminal justice system were class-neutral), 50 per cent or more of over-30s without tertiary qualifications, and an average gross income below 55 per cent of the national average. Adjusting for different education systems, Denmark and elsewhere would follow suit.

Not that the change would be that enormous. It was Durham County Council, then the jewel in the right-wing Labour crown, that imposed Category D status. Even if not in detail, everyone in these parts has always known about Medomsley Detention Centre; we are shocked but not surprised. Parallel societies are nothing new to us. The British State inflicts sexual violence on working-class, predominantly white males as the American State inflicts sexual violence on African-American and Hispanic males, and as the Israeli State inflicts sexual violence on Palestinian males. That, and false allegations of sexual violence.