Imagine precisely equivalent tweets from a white British activist:
“I’m a racist, I don’t like black people, so piss off”.
“I consider killing any Muslims, and especially Palestinians, heroic, we need to kill more of them.”
“U need more fear, random shootings of black men should convince them that crime costs lives.”
“I seriously, seriously, seriously hate black people, especially those of Nigerian, Somali or Congolese descent.”
“i must confess i want a drone of me own, promise to only use it to shoot Eid celebrations.”
“Now all I can think of is joining the KKK and killing a few Negroes.”
“Living in South Africa in general has convinced me that violence is acceptable and that the extermination of blacks is a desirable thing.”
How do you suppose the authorities under Sir Keir Starmer would have responded? We all know the answer. The author of those posts would be on trial faster than you could say “Lucy Connolly”.
But when the targets are white rather than black, Zionists rather than Muslims, the author is fêted by the government. These sentiments, mutatis mutandis, were all posted online by Aala Abd El-Fattah, whom Sir Keir Starmer rejoices in bringing here from an Egyptian prison.
Sir Keir says he had no idea about the tweets – though they were the subject of a column in the Wall Street Journal when far-left MEPs nominated Abd El-Fattah for a human rights award in 2014. Indeed, Starmer explicitly raised Abd El-Fattah’s social media posts when demanding his release in 2022.
But if we are seeing a wider state failure, a failure of the government machine, then so much the more serious. If our officials are searching with hair-trigger sensitivity for the merest incorrect tweet by Graham Linehan, yet know nothing of statements from an Egyptian political activist which, by any definition, come closer to incitement, then the problem goes deeper than Starmer.
Why that asymmetry? Presumably because our officials want to find the one, and not the other. Our civil service is shot through with the woke assumptions that other Leftists moved on from after the demented BLM summer of 2020.
That problem will not be solved by changing politicians. We need regime change: an alteration of our entire system of government.
I am a conservative. I do not lightly advocate revolution. But the British state has crashed so utterly that reconstructing it is the more conservative option. Our current legal and political machinery lands the mother of a 13-year-old daughter in prison for over a year over some nasty words online yet pours its energies to rescuing a man who detests Britain, lobbying for his release and piling on the pressure until he is sent here – to a country where he was not born, where he has not lived, and whose people he calls “dogs and monkeys”.
If that is the system working as planned, I hope we can all agree that the system is wrong. Labour, seeking to spread the blame, says that Abd El-Fattah was granted citizenship “by the Conservatives”, but it is inconceivable that the decision crossed a minister’s desk. He got his citizenship because we have for decades divorced citizenship from loyalty, and because an ECHR ruling meant that Britain could no longer make the right to live here conditional on good character.
This is not to exculpate MPs, including a handful of Tories, who lobbied for him to come here (as opposed to being released from prison, which is fair enough; even bad men deserve justice, and Abd El-Fattah did not get it in Egypt). If Kemi Badnoch wants to keep the pressure on Labour, she should suspend the whip from one or two Tory MPs who allowed their activist virtue-signalling to distract them from their main jobs.
Still, the wider point stands: the entire machinery of state is malfunctioning to the point where it cannot be patched together with cannibalised spare parts. It needs to be dismantled and replaced.
Britain’s singular misfortune is to be led right now by someone who, more than any other MP, embodies the system. “There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer,” Starmer told his biographer, Tom Baldwin.
It is sometimes said that Sir Keir has no convictions, but one belief has motivated him at every stage in his life, whether as the editor of a Trotskyite newspaper, as Director of Public Prosecutions, as a Corbyn yes-man or as a hapless prime minister, namely his belief that, while national loyalties are arbitrary and transient, human rights are universal and absolute.
“It would be to this country’s shame if we lost the clear and basic statements of our citizens’ human rights provided by the Human Rights Act on the basis of a fundamentally flawed analysis of their origin and relevance to our society,” he declared in 2009. “The idea that these human rights should somehow stop in the English Channel is odd and, frankly, impossible to defend.”
Championing Abd El-Fattah flows naturally from that world-view. Never mind that the Egyptian was not born here, has never lived here and has only now decided that we “dogs and monkeys” might be useful to him. His rights come before anything else.
No country can survive such leadership, and sacking Starmer is a given. But that is only the beginning. We need a political and legal transformation, a systematic reconstruction of the entire post-Blair juridical state, a tilt back from unelected functionaries to elected representatives, a democratisation and decentralisation of power. Now, please, before it is too late.