An ex-copper who blogs as Dominic Adler – not his real name – came up with a good phrase this week to describe where Britain is heading under this increasingly authoritarian regime: ‘Like North Korea, but run by David Brent.’ It echoed my own attempts to sum up the atmosphere in Keir Starmer’s Britain in a WhatsApp exchange with Allison Pearson. I described Essex Police, who recently dispatched two hapless officers to the journalist’s door to question her about a year-old tweet, as ‘a cross between the Keystone Cops and the Stasi – Carry On Kafka’.
The fact that our Brave New World is so laughable means people sometimes don’t notice quite how sinister it is
The tale of Allison’s persecution could have been written by Eugène Ionesco, but another good example of this burgeoning absurdism is the recent ‘trial’ of a 17-year-old girl by the Football Association. Her all-women team was about to play another club in a single-sex league when she noticed that one of the opposing players was a bearded man in his twenties. ‘Are you a man?’ she asked, genuinely puzzled that he should be warming up with the other team, particularly as he was wearing jewellery and wasn’t in a football kit. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m transgender.’
A better-drilled trans activist would have said ‘No, I’m a woman’, but the fact that he didn’t stick to the script gives the exchange a comic dimension. How can you be a transgender biological male who identifies as a man? But what followed was far from funny. The captain of his team complained to Kick It Out – originally set up to campaign against racism in football – and it in turn complained to the FA. The girl was charged with two counts of ‘improper conduct’ and, when she pleaded not guilty, was put on trial via Teams by a three-person tribunal. After an ordeal lasting several hours, both charges were upheld and she was given a six-game ban.
To underline what a grotesque miscarriage of justice this is, the girl suffers from autism. In their wisdom, the FA appears to believe that making an example of a neurodivergent teenager is a great way to advertise just how ‘inclusive’ it is. It’s a good illustration of the iron rule that the more an organisation professes to care about the suffering of beleaguered minorities, the more likely it is to inflict cruel and unusual punishments on them.
The free speech advocacy group I run has taken on the girl’s case and is helping her appeal the ban, but I sometimes worry that the comical aspect of episodes like this – that the young man on the ‘ladies’ team had a beard! – means people are less morally outraged than they should be. It’s hard to laugh and be angry at the same time. George Orwell said the reason the British Army would never adopt the goose-step was because people in the street would take the mickey out of them, imagining that our keen sense of the absurd would be a bulwark against totalitarianism. But our woke overlords have found a way around this by coming up with a uniquely British version of despotism, simultaneously comic and creepy, as exemplified by the Scottish government’s employment of the Hate Monster – a cartoon creature that looked like a hairy pepperoni – to promote the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. The Scottish writer Ewan Morrison referred to this as ‘cute authoritarianism’ – and the fact that our Brave New World is so laughable means people sometimes don’t notice quite how sinister it is.
But Carry On Kafka also has its upsides. For instance, the Free Speech Union has won several big lawsuits because of the sheer incompetence of people on the other side. The diversitycrats who run HR departments are such zealous enforcers of progressive dogma, they often ignore their companies’ policies and procedures, which the employment tribunal takes a dim view of. And they frequently misunderstand the Equality Act, believing it empowers them to persecute anyone who dissents from progressive orthodoxy when, in fact, it protects gender critical feminists among other heretics.
This points to a broader benefit: if we have to live in a British version of North Korea, better it should be run by David Lammy, Bridget Phillipson and Ed Miliband than, say, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists. Not because the assault on our freedoms is leavened by the comic relief of watching Starmer’s buffoons running amok in Whitehall, but because they’re too stupid to work out which levers to pull and buttons to push to implement their oppressive policies in full. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of Britain’s future, imagine a clown shoe stamping on a human face – for ever.
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