On The Face

Having already angered everyone with the abolition of trial by jury, the Government has now decided to anger everyone again with facial recognition. Those two should pull anyone back from support for digital ID. Like the assisted suicide that we now know was always planned to be pursued as a Private Member's Bill that was really a Government Bill, like puberty blockers, like the Chagos sellout, unlike protection from unfair dismissal on day one of employment, and unlike a cap on ground rents, those measures were in no one's manifesto.

If they cancel your local elections, then do not pay your council tax. They are doing this to soften us up for the "postponement" of the next General Election "because we are at war". We saw another step towards manufacturing consent for that today. The Socialist Workers Party is full of spooks, and look what it has done to Your Party. On the day of a demonstration against digital ID, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is to hold a carol concert. Yes, really. Again, how spooky.

The suspension of the whip from Markus Campbell-Savours is a warning to Labour MPs in general not to oppose the Government's present and future obscenities. Next up, the fruits of an "independent review" that simply presupposed the "overdiagnosis" of mental health conditions. Yet the Financial Conduct Authority had announced that it will not even investigate Rachel Reeves. She had already broken the law by renting out her house without a licence, the simplest of matters. But would her latest transgression be sufficiently complicated to have to be tried by a judge sitting alone, since the plebs were too thick to understand it? What do judges know about high finance, either?

Talk of facial recognition is already causing the usual suspects to crow about women in niqabs, but the more important point is that this would drive those women out of public places. It has also come on the same day as Nigel Farage's invocation of 1970s blackface. Well, it did not stop there. Last year, 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. It was the centrist darling and sage David Baddiel who 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. Look at him now. As Far Right terrorist suspects are arrested in liberal Brighton, remember that centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war, while Fascism is inherent in both of them, and it never arises except by their joint enterprise.