Epic trolling

Aside from a few gentle explanations on facebook about why parping "All Lives Matter!" and then expecting a biscuit is idiotic*, I've largely kept quiet on the BLM issue. This is due to a number of reasons, but chief amongst these was I thought that the last thing the situation needed was the opinions of yet another middle aged white man.

I may well be wrong about this, and I've seen plenty of arguments that suggest that if you're not vocally pro, then you're tacitly accepting the status quo. This has some merit, but I still rather felt that getting blogging about it would be jumping on the bandwagon to an extent (I also though that it would make for a fairly short blog. Black Lives Matter. Tearing down statues of racists and slavers is fine. Don't @ me).

Official inquiries into racism though? Now that's bang up my alley. Particularly when we've just had two in the last two years. There's little I enjoy more than the sight of a spot of brazen politicking, and this one's right up there. A neck so brass you could sell it for scrap. Announcing an official inquiry is, as any fule kno, government speak for "kick into the longest fucking grass you can find", and if that didn't put protestor's backs up enough, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson then decided to stick Munira Mirza in charge. A woman on record as saying there's no such thing as institutional racism, and who opines that previous inquiries have led to a "culture of grievance."

As trolling goes, this is pretty epic. It's like getting the animatronic corpse of Jimmy Savile to head up a taskforce looking into safeguarding in hospitals. And it worked like a charm, as platoons of the infuriated  clambered out of the trenches and went on the offensive. The debate was no longer about racism, it was about Mirza (who, as a British Asian, has a pretty good come-back to that). Another front opened up in the culture war.

Those fulminating against the tone-deafness of her appointment were rather missing the point. She was appointed for a number of reasons (being close to the PM being one of them), one of them being piss off the oppo. It's been a defining characteristic of any campaign that's had Dominic Cummings fingerprints on it since he first started stirring his bony fingers in the pot of national governance, and sticking his big data eye of newt in. Lynton Crosbie, the Tories PR attack dog of recent vintage, used to talk about dead cats. You have one story, you want to distract from it, you throw a dead cat on the table. Suddenly everyone's talking about the cat. In the modern Conservative Party (and to an even greater degree the modern Republican party) this has been weaponised to a refined and unholy degree.

It's a dangerous game that Johnson's playing, but one that he and his team have calculated will win out for them in the long run. The central premise of BLM is impeccable. The facts bear it out. BAME people have died disproportionately from COVID-19. BAME people are over-represented in prisons and under-represent in public life. These are unassailable, demonstrable facts. Drag it into the wider culture war, though, and suddenly all's to play for. Hence absurd arguments about old TV shows and minor monuments. If you keep everybody angry then they can't pin you down on detail. It becomes a shouting match, debate is neutralised.

This has been the key to Trump's success. Repeated dog-whistling his base has effectively turned any issue on US politics into a binary one. If you're anti Trump you're anti America. If you're pro gun control you're anti America. If you're pro immigration rights you're anti America. As any actual human with lived experience knows, very few issues are binary. But that doesn't matter. What's important is to keep the atmosphere so febrile that, all of a sudden, norms we took for granted just two or three years ago can be violated and nobody bats an eyelid. Looked at dispassionately, Trump should have been gone any number of times. But for as long as he keeps "his" side passionate in their loathing of the opposition, he can carry on. A blind eye is turned to his monstrous incompetence and rapacity.

So it is with the Johnson / Cummings axis, who quickly drew BLM into the wider division which has ruled since the 2016 referendum. Opinions about statues broke fairly precisely down Brexit lines, and as Johnson can keep "us" hating "them" the longer his side will turn a blind eye to his many manifest failings. At least, that's the calculation. I'm unconvinced it will work long enough to secure him another term. Death is a fairly unforgiving metric.In Cummings' case it doesn't have to work that long, it's a war that he can use to hide his real targets: the civil service, the BBC, the Supreme Court. Dismantling the great machineries of State is the real name of the game here, it's why he was put in place and why he has to stay there come what may. It's why a disastrous, vulture capitalist No Deal will be hurtled through at breakneck speed while we're all yelling at each other about Churchill, and if a few black people or trans-rights activists get hurt in the process, so be it.

* Because nobody's saying they don't. And because honking "All Lives Matter!" is effectively shutting down debate. You don't yell at someone campaigning to save the Amazon that this means they want to burn Epping Forest to the ground. Wind your bloody neck in.