Michael Deacon 
Britain is obsessed with policing Islamophobia – why not ‘Anglophobia’?

If progressives can criminalise anti-Muslim hate, surely promoting child marriage in a Western country should be against the law

As his many followers on social media will be well aware, John Cleese has become a rather outspoken figure these days, on any number of contentious subjects. I certainly can’t say I agree with everything he posts. But I was very much intrigued by a little thought that he put forward on Tuesday morning.

“I’d like to suggest,” he wrote, “that promoting child marriage, stoning, halal animal torture, wife beating, sharia courts, and other behaviour contrary to British values, should now be referred to as Anglophobia.”

What an interesting idea. I wonder whether Labour MPs will take Cleese up on it. After all, they were extremely keen to draw up an official definition of Islamophobia. So why not do the same for “Anglophobia”?

Admittedly, I suppose there’s a risk that some Labour MPs might think Cleese’s definition of “Anglophobia” constitutes Islamophobia – which would, of course, make it completely unacceptable to them. Especially if they think the latter of those two phobias is a far graver sin than the former.

Anyway, regardless of what our beloved Government might think, I for one rather like the thought of a crackdown on “Anglophobia”. Personally, though, I would expand on the definition proposed above. Because I think “Anglophobia” should be used to refer to anyone, of any background, engaging in the tedious Left-wing habit of performatively bashing Britain or the British, purely because they think it makes them look good.

Take, for example, the recent case of Jameela Jamil. The former BBC presenter, who was born in London but moved to Los Angeles in 2016, declared on a podcast last month that “British people are truly the most evil people in history”.

I was fascinated by this comment. Not least because if I were asked to name “the most evil people in history”, the first thought that would spring to my mind would be the Nazis. Does Jamil think the British are more evil than the Nazis? And, if so, does she think it would have been better if, in the Second World War, the Nazis had defeated the British, rather than the other way round?

On the whole, I’m fairly confident that she doesn’t think any such thing. I suspect she only called the British “the most evil people in history” because she thought it would make her sound both daringly transgressive and fabulously right-on. Whatever her motives, though, I would say her comment easily comes under my proposed definition of “Anglophobia”. So I thank her for so helpfully illustrating my point.

To what other uses might we apply this exciting new term? Well, we could use it to describe anyone who claims the British national flag is somehow upsetting, intimidating or “divisive”. Or anyone who demands that ordinary British people be forced to pay financial reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, as if they were to blame for events that took place centuries before they were even born. Or anyone who calls for British schools, universities, museums and other institutions to be “decolonised” (I’m never quite sure what is meant by this, although, in practice, it seems to mean “ruined”).

To be clear, it’s not that these examples of “Anglophobic” views offend me. It’s that I find them unbearably boring. Which is why I think it would be quite fun to play progressives at their own game, by formally ruling that all their endless whining about Britain and the British is actually racist, and potentially against the law. See how they like it if, every time they tweet a link to a Guardian opinion column complaining that the British countryside is insufficiently diverse, the police turn up on their doorstep and bark: “Excuse me, sir, but we’ve had reports that you’ve been engaging in Anglophobia.”

And if they don’t like it, here’s an alternative idea. Instead of formalising yet another type of “hate crime”, let’s bring back an old-fashioned notion known as free speech. That, I can’t help thinking, would benefit everyone. It would mean that progressives could bore on interminably about the unparalleled evils of the British Empire without fear of being arrested for “Anglophobia”.

At the same time, it would mean other people could express their concerns about, say, “child marriage, stoning, halal animal torture, wife-beating and sharia courts” without fear of being arrested for Islamophobia. Which would be reassuring, after Tuesday’s reports that two protesters in London were arrested for holding signs that read “f--- Islam”.

The British people have a proud history of both defending and exercising their right to free speech. To deny them it is deeply “Anglophobic”.

Trump declares Palestine Action a global terror group

Organisation faces same sanctions as Hamas and Islamic State in move that sees supporters banned from US

 

Palestine Action has been declared a global terrorist organisation by the US.

The protest group has been added to a list that includes Hamas, al-Qaeda and Islamic State, meaning supporters face a lifetime ban from entering the US.

US officials said that by promoting its “acts of terrorism” on social media, Palestine Action encouraged others to copy its tactics overseas, including in America. It is the first known case of a British Left-wing activist group being subjected to US counter-terrorism sanctions.

Under the new measures, Palestine Action’s assets in the US, including bank accounts and property, are being frozen, and Americans are banned from doing business with the group.

The sanctions also prohibit people from giving funds, goods or services to Palestine Action, effectively cutting it off from the global financial system.

Diane Abbott should pay reparations

If she thinks that people alive today should pay compensation for the historic suffering of others, I’ve got some bad news for her

Diane Abbott, who has recently been reinstated as a Labour MP, is once again demanding that Britain pay compensation for its role in the transatlantic slave trade. “The campaign for reparations,” she defiantly declared at the weekend, “is not going away.”

No doubt many voters will be a touch irked by this. But not me. In fact, I’ve decided to launch a reparations campaign of my own.

Mine, however, has nothing to do with the slave trade. Instead, it’s to do with an even greater source of human suffering.

Socialism.

Throughout the 20th century, socialism caused untold poverty, starvation, misery and death. And even those countries that have since freed themselves from its shackles are still blighted by its horrifying legacy.

Therefore, I believe there’s only one way to atone for this historic injustice. All of today’s socialists – such as, for example, the sainted Diane – should be made to pay trillions of pounds in reparations to the descendants of those who suffered under socialist regimes.

Of course, today’s socialists will doubtless say: “Come off it. That’s ridiculously unfair. We didn’t personally cause any of that suffering. It happened thousands of miles away, long before we were even born. So why on earth should we be made to pay?”

To which I’ll reply: “Gosh, yes, that is a good point, isn’t it?”

Even then, though, it’s possible that the penny won’t drop, and dear Diane and friends will continue to issue their demands. So here’s an alternative idea. Hold a referendum on slavery reparations – and let the British people decide.

I genuinely think we should do it. If only because I’d love to watch pro-reparations canvassers going door to door, trying to win voters’ support.

“Good morning, sir. We’re here to explain why, at a time when Britain is sliding ever closer to ruin, your taxes should be spent on lavish freebies for people in countries far away from here. Of course, those people themselves are not slaves, just as you yourself are not a slave-owner. But we want to give them your money anyway, in order to punish you for crimes you didn’t commit. Can we rely on your vote?”

As we saw 10 years ago, pundits are not always good at predicting the results of referendums. All the same, I’m fairly confident that I could predict the result of this one.

Admittedly, holding a referendum would be extremely expensive. But don’t worry, I’ve thought of that. Because the losing side would be required to refund both the taxpayer, and the winning side, in full.

We could call it “reparations”.
How to save our cigars from Labour

There’s something odd about this planned crackdown on cigars. Labour ministers are considering proposals to ban them from sale unless, like cigarettes, they come in plain packaging covered in graphic health warnings. But what’s the point? Do ministers seriously believe that, in the year 2026, the British public remains unaware that smoking is bad for you? Does the Health Secretary imagine that there are innocent young people thinking, “I’m in training for the London Marathon. So, to boost my stamina, enhance my lung capacity and ensure that I’m in tip-top physical condition, I’m going to smoke a box of massive cigars every day for the next eight months”?

The contingency seems somewhat remote. But then, I have a feeling that this is actually nothing to do with protecting the public’s health. Instead, I bet Labour politicians just want to crack down on cigars because they hate the kind of people who smoke them. Or at least, the kind of people they think smoke them.

In their minds, I suspect, they primarily associate cigars with rich white Tory businessmen. They probably also picture JK Rowling (remember the famous photo of her puffing on a cigar to celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of the word “woman”). And I bet they also think of the man viewed by today’s progressives as the most hateful racist of the 1940s, Winston Churchill.

You may say: “But hang on. Lots of famous Lefties used to be associated with cigars too, such as Castro and Che Guevara.” Very true. In 2020s Britain, however, cigars seem to be seen as the exclusive preserve of the Left’s ideological enemies. Which might explain why Labour wants to put cigar-sellers out of business. Nothing gives Labour greater pleasure than stamping out the pleasures of its foes.

Luckily, though, I’ve got a solution. Tobacconists can transform the cigar’s image in modern Labour circles – by giving free cigars to all the Left’s favourite people. Once there are photos everywhere of cigars being smoked by trans activists, diversity officers, climate protesters, asylum seekers, benefits claimants, Gary Lineker, Kneecap and Hamas, the crackdown will be ditched.

t would be quite funny if it weren’t so appalling: successive governments have let so many men from backward cultures into Britain that they are printing leaflets with cute illustrations reminding them that child abuse, rape, female genital mutilation are not traditional in our country.

What a way to keep the public safe. Talk about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Occasionally, you see posters warning us to beware of pickpockets, but you rarely see information campaigns telling thieves not to steal. Yet here we are, begging sex predators, child abusers and rapists to control themselves.

Can they even understand the language (English) on the leaflets? There could be no starker admission of failure from the British state. After decades of an open-door policy towards the darkest corners of the world, we find ourselves in a position where Pakistani-heritage gangs have created the most depraved child sex network ever seen in this country, often with the complicity – complicity! – of the authorities.

Almost every week, we are hit with another outrage carried out by migrants, whether murder, rape or assault. The problem is only getting worse, and with more than 3,000 illegals arriving by boat each month, the Government is out of ideas (unless you count moving them to live in middle-class areas, at greater taxpayers’ expense).

Much of it beggars belief. Just this week, in a case that didn’t attract nearly as much attention as it should, a 33-year-old Eritrean man by the name of Bruke Desalagne was convicted by a court in Harrow for one of the most disturbing rapes I have ever seen reported.

Last year, at around midnight, Desalagne was skulking through the streets of London when he saw an elderly man sitting drunkenly on a bench outside St John’s Church in Harrow. Rather than helping the pensioner home, or even just walking past, he dragged him behind a hoarding and raped him.

Who does that? You can see the Whitehall reaction now. “Yes, Minister, we propose a leaflet telling migrants that raping drunken elderly men outside churches is not culturally appropriate. We could get the Department of Work and Pensions to share the bill.”

That’s it? That’s the plan? Leaflets? Give me strength. Since 2018, enough illegal migrants have arrived in this country to populate a city the size of York. We have handed them hotel rooms, mobile phones, food, benefits and healthcare, and looked the other way while they have joined the black economy, finding cash-in-hand work in car washes, nail bars or as delivery riders.

This – quite obviously – has created a powerful incentive for a bottomless number to try their luck, upon which the smugglers have built their lucrative business model. But while there’s no shortage of demand across the Middle East and Africa, it hasn’t occurred to our rulers to curb the supply.

A sane government would be locking illegals up in pop-up prisons on uninhabited Scottish islands, without mobile phones, benefits or access to the black economy, until the flow stopped. Instead, we have leaflets with cute illustrations. What are British women and girls – and elderly men, evidently – to make of that?

And this is only the illegal immigration (let’s stop calling them refugees; they are coming from nowhere more dangerous than France, where most of us go on holiday).

In recent decades, millions have arrived perfectly permissibly from places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Eritrea and Yemen. What did successive governments think was going to happen?

There were pretty obvious clues. In Somalia, for example, the prevalence of female genital mutilation is 98 per cent, according to government figures.

As a barometer of cultural backwardness, that is pretty revealing: it’s a fair bet that migrants from that country may not have the healthiest of attitudes towards consent, child sex and general social norms (indeed, our friend Desalagne was from a country where FGM was at 83 per cent).

Lo, today we find that among the 175,000-strong Somali community in Britain, economic inactivity is more than twice the national rate, while the number of people living in overcrowded accommodation is nearly eight times higher than the average.

Seventy-two per cent of Somalis are in social housing, compared to 17 per cent of the general population, with double the numbers of lone-parent households. Among those older than 30, 41 per cent had no qualifications at all. It is no surprise, then, that criminality, knife offences and gang membership are high, particularly in inner cities.

In one particularly appalling case, Abdul Hafidah, an 18-year-old member of a Libyan-Somali gang called the Rusholme Crips, was hunted through rush-hour Manchester and stabbed to death by members of the rival AO gang. The blood feud that claimed another teenager five years later. Why should this be taking place in Britain?

You get the picture. Now, here’s the question that gets to the heart of all this. Why did we do this to ourselves? Of course, among Somalians, Afghans and others there are many fine people. Some have fought bravely for our country. But the data show that they are outweighed by the problems.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, low-skilled migrants arriving in their twenties will be an economic drain across their lifetime, with the shortfall widening sharply after state pension age.

As we learnt this week, a record 1.3 million foreigners are on benefits in this country, 20,000 more than last year. In London, 63 per cent of Bangladeshi women and 61 per cent of those from Pakistan were not working, the highest rates recorded

So Britain has received little benefit, whether economic, cultural, social or spiritual, from mass immigration from impoverished, chaotic and authoritarian countries; yet we have saddled ourselves with great costs. Those of us gainfully employed are shouldering a snowballing tax burden to pay for it, while the threat to our people has become so great that the Government is bleating for mercy by way of leaflet.

Aside from the migrants themselves, the only people benefiting from all this are the virtue-signallers who brought this catastrophe upon us. Even now, they seem to be enjoying basking in a liberal glow while the country burns.

British scientist plotted to cover up Covid lab leak

Dr Peter Daszak is accused of trying to shut down the theory that coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology

A British zoologist involved in risky bat coronavirus experiments in Wuhan is accused of plotting with a senior US health official to shut down the theory that Covid-19 leaked from a lab.

Dr Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance, sent bottles of wine to David Morens, thanking him for his “behind the scenes shenanigans” and promising further gifts, such as dinners at Michelin-starred restaurants, US court documents state.

Morens, 78, a former employee at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and adviser to Dr Anthony Fauci, this week pleaded guilty to conspiring to evade public records laws and conceal government documents related to grant research funding and the Covid-19 pandemic.

He is facing five years in jail. No charges have been brought against Dr Daszak.

Prof Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, who has called for a lab leak scenario to be fully investigated, said: “Morens’s guilty pleas is an important first step in holding accountable the US officials who funded the reckless research in Wuhan.”

In a signed plea agreement, Morens admitted contacting Dr Daszak – named throughout as co-conspirator 1 – using his private Gmail account so that the messages could not be found through freedom of information requests.

Morens also promised to help Dr Daszak win back grant funding for his bat coronavirus experiments in China, which had been suspended in April 2020, over fears that the research may have caused the pandemic.
Covid-19 emerged just eight miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where Dr Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance had been working with scientists to collect and genetically tweak bat coronaviruses to see how they might mutate and jump into humans.

In June 2020, emails show that Morens agreed to write a “scientific commentary” outlining the importance of Dr Daszak’s work, while keeping the zoologist’s name out of the article, giving the impression it was wholly independent.

He told Dr Daszak via email: “Let’s win this anti-science battle, get you refunded... then settle the scores and kick some ass.”

A couple of weeks later, court documents show Dr Daszak sent two bottles of The Prisoner Red Napa Valley wine to Morens with the message: “This is the first of what I hope will be a continued series of expressions of gratitude for your advice, support and behind the scenes shenanigans in my battle against your bosses boss, his boss and the ultimate boss on the hill (referring to Donald Trump).”
 

The next month, Morens published an article titled The Origin of Covid-19 and why it matters, in which he argued that Covid-19 was a “natural” spillover from animals and called for work such as Dr Daszak’s to be funded to prevent another pandemic.

A press release from the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland said that Morens and his co-conspirators had pledged to help “counter the narrative that Covid-19 leaked from a lab”.
Last year, the US department of health and human services debarred Dr Daszak, and US-based EcoHealth Alliance, blocking both from receiving federal funds for five years.

It followed an eight-month investigation which concluded that taxpayer money had been used to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in China to make viruses more lethal.

Dr Daszak visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2021 as part of a team dispatched by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to investigate the source of the coronavirus pandemic.

It came amid criticism of China for being slow to respond to calls to identify where the SARS-CoV-2 emerged and how it spread.

The WHO report Dr Danszak helped author claimed a lab leak origin for Covid was a possibility, but unlikely. The report was widely condemned as a “whitewash”.

Dr Daszak later recused himself from Covid origin investigations for failing to declare that he worked closely with scientists at WIV.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, said: “The record shows that Peter Daszak boasted about channelling huge sums of money to dangerous gain-of-function experiments on Sars-like viruses in Wuhan, concealed the existence of a plan to add a crucial feature to such viruses in 2018 and then, when the pandemic broke out in Wuhan the next year, did his utmost to kill any investigation into the possibility that a laboratory accident killed millions of people.

“He instigated a misleading letter to the Lancet, plotted with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to shut down legitimate scientific queries, and schemed relentlessly to blacken the reputation of scientists. It is time he was held to account.”

US court documents outlining the case stated that the conspirators had “concealed their communications” so they could publish papers and articles without directly mentioning Dr Daszak, “to generate the appearance of disinterested scientific consensus”.

Morens told Dr Daszak that he was working “behind the scenes” to help him, adding: “My boxing gloves are on and laced up.”

Morens reached a deal with prosecutors and entered a guilty plea in the US District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Tuesday.

Paula Xinis, a US district judge, set sentencing for Nov 12. In addition to a five-year prison sentence, Morens could face a fine of up to $250,000.

At a recent Senate hearing, Dr Fauci, who led the US pandemic response, was questioned over his relationship with Morens, but chose to exercise his Fifth Amendment right to avoid implicating himself.

He has previously told a House committee that Morens’s actions were wrong and that he played no part in attempting to get the grant restored.

Dr Daszak, who now works for Nature Health Global, has been approached for comment.