A much-discussed pair of posts on X/Twitter – first up, journalist Charlotte Gill:
Back to the UK tomorrow.
I’ve never had such dread about Britain.
Coming back to London and knowing how unpleasant it’ll be.
The demographic changes and feeling that 🇬🇧 is most against Brits.
The lack of functional media.
The feeling something big has to happen to restore order.
Then, commentary in support from right-wing populist academic and pollster Matt Goodwin:
London is turning into an unaffordable shit-hole with the “enjoyable” parts closed off to an elite minority. Everybody who lives there can see it even if liberal progressives will never accept it bc to do so would shatter their worldview. Charlotte is just saying out loud what we can all see.
Goodwin has since deleted the post, although he hasn’t explained why.
It’s possible to read too much significance into one off-the-cuff comment on social media in relation to someone’s overall worldview – indeed, I criticised Goodwin for doing just that in my previous post, although his “gotcha” was an obviously malicious misinterpretion of a joke whereas the above was published in earnest. Without overdoing it, it seems to me that his post is worth noting as representative of a trend within a political movement.
The profane expression “shithole” (fussily hyphenated by Goodwin) can reasonably be seen as signalling alignment with Trumpian rhetoric and attack lines; in May, Donald Trump Jnr expressed the view that the Democrats had “succeeded in their years long attempt to turn America into a third-world shithole”, and Trump himself was famously said to have described African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes” in 2018. It seems to me that the collocation is so strong that the outdated term “third-world” can be inferred as the implied context whenever the word is used. The term “shithole” in relation to London is also a favourite usage of Laurence Fox, and it featured heavily during a tired and emotional phone-call to his fiancée that he filmed and put online after a car he was a passenger in crashed into a London bus on his way back from last month’s Tommy Robinson rally.
The phrase “third-world shithole” in turn evokes another anti-immigration mantra: “Import the Third World, become the Third World”. Reform MP Lee Anderson recently used a variant of this (“Import a third world culture then you get third world behaviour”) in relation to the disturbances in Leeds, after party leader Nigel Farage falsely attributed what happened to “the politics of the subcontinent” (background on Zelo Street).
Perhaps Goodwin deleted because he felt that he had strayed too far into “red meat” territory, both as regards the word and his endorsement of other elements of Gill’s Tweet. He also faced criticism; as expressed by Matthew Sweet:
If you don’t like “demographic changes” maybe you just don’t like cities. I’ve never heard a serious argument that uses the word “shithole”.
We might also ask what Goodwin means by an “elite minority”. Goodwin frequently bemoans the supposed influence of a “new elite” who hold harmful progressive views at odds with the common-sense instincts of ordinary people such as himself. However, “closed off” areas would refer to the gated communities of the super-rich – an actual elite who would much rather we focus our critical scrutiny elsewhere.
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What is a Somalian? In a sense aren’t we ALL Somalians?. This kind of incestuous socialist gibberish where statements are dissected and reformed to portray critics as extremists was invented by Marxists, Maoists etc., to cloud the issue and inject doubt. You should not be using it Richard.
There are parts of our country which ARE shit-holes. They have been created by absent politicians who spend their time in the higher eschelons of intellectual masturbation instead of actually looking around them to see what is happening. They would prefer to talk about Globalisation and dance on the international scene than deal with people sleeping in shop doorways, and aged widows freezing to death in their hovels as a sacrifice to idiotic scientific ideologies which futilely control Nature, as the country’s infrastructure crumbles beneath them.
Half our indigenous population are living in a deprived Dickensian world which torments the old and disenfranches the young. Half of the immigrant population has learned to play the ‘racist’ game to get precedence over funding which has enabled them to mpose alien social and religious structures into depressed town centres which they seem to favour.
They are able to do things with impunity in Britain that they would be severly beaten for, thrown into stinking rotting jails for unspecified years and forgotten about, or even shot dead on the spot for, in many Middle Eastern countries. The young activists amongst them do not consider this beneficent tolerance, they consider it a weakness and despise us for it, taking more than we can afford to give and largely offering little in return. This is absolutely clear to members of the indigenous culture who have to live in proximity to and work amongst these Moslem ghettoes, for although other immigrants have tested the foolishness of the UK in various areas, set up mafias for a black economy, organised drug and people trafficking and money laundering operations which again, they would be executed for in their home countries, the Moslem community is by far the most radical, most organised and persistent in imposing itself upon us. They have consciously and consistently pushed the boundaries and taken power to themselves, from the Fatwa on Rushdie to the hiding of the Batley school-teacher for ‘insulting’ Mohamed, to bringing city centres to a halt over the Palestine Question; from illegal immigrants who took our coin and then subsequently despised us so much that they felt we deserved bombing and killing 70 of us and injuring 200 in the 7/7 bombings, to the radicalised 2nd generation immigrants who killed 22 people and injured over 1000 young people at the Ariane Grande Concert in Manchester. It has been a constant strain of applied terror to accomplish one thing; the subjugation not only of the indigenous British people, but particularly the institutions of State, the police, the law and our political process, in favour of what the Moslem activists want, which is a theocracy running Britain.
Only an ideological fool could fail to see this and only a fool would persist in trying to demonise the messengers trying to warn about it.
The real question is not whether shit-holes are happening but whether it is too late to actually stop the march of Islam and the machinations of the Moslem Brotherhood. If they can achieve all this with only 3 million people, what will they be doing in 30 years when that figure will have doubled?
These complaints have nothing whatsover to do with ‘nominal Moslems’ , who do not ascribe to Wahabist radicalism and who are tolerant and who wish to live in harmony. However, these ‘nominal Moslems’ are well aware of the power of Moslem Clerics from the trouble they have caused in their various homelands whihc most of them are in Britain to escape, yet as we have clearly seen over the past three decades, this section of the Moslem commuity is largely silent and unwilling to put themselves in the firing line by calling out Wahabi radicals.
Who then is left to call a shit-hole a shit-hole? Why the remaining indigenous people who are affected by it and who stare it in the face daily.
Stifle them at your peril.
Arnold F