Put Up Or Shut Up

On this third anniversary of the fire at Grenfell Tower, the suggestion that Black Lives Matter is an imported American concern is as offensive as the suggestion that the participants did not know anything about the figures against whose monuments they were demonstrating. On the contrary, they are the only people who do know anything much about them. And no, they certainly did not learn it in school.

Those who imagine their own list of pub quiz answers, learnt by rote at public school, to be the last or even the first word on anything have been bellowing for decades against every actual or potential Prime Minster who dared not to be either Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson. And they have now decided that they do not rate Johnson, either. Well, the votes are up for grabs. The votes of the public urinators who give the Nazi salute while defending a statue of Winston Churchill against no one, and who cannot spell "Britain" correctly.

When I was on Telegraph Blogs during the Brown Premiership, or it might have very late in Blair's, then there were at least two dozen people writing for it, and quite possibly three dozen. Most of them put out the same post several times per week, pitched at the people who were throwing bottles at the Police yesterday: "The political parties are all rubbish, but at least the Tories might do anything for us." Until very recently, several of them were still publishing that same piece regularly elsewhere. But now, it is just, "The political parties are all rubbish."

When I was on Telegraph Blogs during the Brown Premiership, or it might have very late in Blair's, then there were at least two dozen people writing for it, and quite possibly three dozen. I am open to correction, but I am practically certain that other than those who were already Members of Parliament at the time, not a single one has ever been a parliamentary candidate. Apart from me. 

Well, Toby Young. Well, James Delingpole. Well, everyone else on the Ranting Right that hates the lockdown and which loves the statues of long-dead slavers whom you cannot name. It is time for you to use the incomes and the platforms that I have always been denied, not least by you. It is time for you to put up or shut up.

If you are truly the voices of the voiceless, if millions truly agree with you, then you ought to have no difficulty finding somewhere where the combination of that status with those incomes and with those platforms would make you the First Past the Post. Or you need to shut up and go away.