A FEW MONTHS ago, Michelle Obama and the assorted concerned of the world berated Boko Haram with a hashtag campaign #bringbackourgirls. Boko Haram, you may have forgotten, are an extreme Islamist group in northern Nigeria who have an addiction to mass slaughter and destruction. Their particular crime this time was the kidnapping of two hundred girls from a school.
The boys of Boko Haram don’t like decadent western things, such as education, and decided it would be a great wheeze to snatch the girls, convert them to Islam (because they were mostly Christian — a fact the western media were keen not to emphasise) and sell them into sex slavery in the surrounding countries. As an ideology it makes good old-fashioned patriarchal capitalism, that perennial scapegoat of the feminist left, look like a party on the beach.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like the image of the sad-faced FLOTUS has worked any magic on the Boko boys. Nobody knows where these girls are. In fact, so unmoved were the bad lads that they went on to abduct another bunch. As well as slaughter lots of people. But pouty Michelle has better things to worry about now, such as running her childhood anti-obesity campaign, which is proving unpopular not just with those evil Republicans but also with schoolkids themselves, so she’s not selfied any more hashtags.
Mind you, if I were Michelle, I’d be more miffed that Joan Rivers had quipped in public that I was transgender and my husband gay. I suspect once she and Princess Barry have departed the White House, part of this story will feature more prominently in peoples’ recollections of them than any political campaigns they’ve been involved in.
AND TALKING ABOUT the patriarchy, here in Blighty Suzanne Moore, who writes for the Guardian, has suggested starting a feminist political party to counter the awfulness of having men run everything. This was in response to a whinge by Harriet Harman MP, who claimed that when Labour were in power Gordon Brown had not made her Deputy Prime Minister because he is sexist. It can’t have occurred to Harman that he turned her down because she wasn’t up to the job.
Still, I think a feminist party is a good idea. That way a few more votes would be drained from the Labour Party. It would also provide great fun watching the sisters fight among themselves about which group were the biggest victims and who should check their privilege before speaking. And having all-women shortlists for party candidates would be a great move as well, namely because it wouldn’t change a thing in real terms but might keep the whingers quiet for a while. The women in politics are as bad as the men; stupid, vain, ignorant, arrogant and incompetent. It goes with the territory. Genitals are irrelevant when the brains are all mush.
Talking of mush brings me to another item. We have just learned that those of us who are indigenous British are racist. I’ll pretend for the sake of form that this judgment surprises me. A think tank called the Social Integration Commission released their first report entitled How Integrated Is Modern Britain? I think you can tell without even seeing a copy of the report where this is coming from and which direction it is going in. Who are the Social Integration Commission? There’s nothing royal or official about them, despite the “commission” bit. They’re a group of worthies, including Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA and former advisor to Tony Blair; and Trevor Phillips, erstwhile chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, and a permanent denizen of quango-land.
The Commission has been set up by a sock puppet charity, The Challenge, whose aim is to “bring together local people across all generations, ethnic groups and incomes to build a stronger society.” The latest set of their accounts reveals that the bulk of their funding comes from the government, which makes them a de facto agency of the state, yet another reason to drop their scribblings in the bin.
They’re rather worried by the fact that those aged 17 and under are not integrating properly, that is, not having enough “meaningful interactions” with others of different ethnicities. If they’d done a basic bit of arithmetic they’d have noticed that the 17 year-olds were born in 1997, the year New Labour came to power. Since then the country has experienced the largest influx of immigrants in its existence, with no support given to the social infrastructure to cope with it. London, according to this report, is the least well-integrated part of the country. That could be to do with the fact that 40% of its population is now foreign-born.
Such facts elude the quangocrats and the worthies. Hence they can talk about integration but not assimilation, and assume that it’s the duty of the host population to integrate with immigrants, not the other way round. Nobody takes any notice of these people. They should do, though, because while they’re lecturing us on how to live they’re paying themselves from our taxes. Maybe it’s time for a couple of new hashtag campaigns of our own: #getoffourbacks and #handsoffourtaxes. I can think of pithier ones but they’re not printable in this esteemed journal.
