Programming note: I'll be back this evening, Monday, with the latest episode of our eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time, Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome.
~Over the weekend we presented the first brand new video edition of The Mark Steyn Show since my third heart attack. It was on the scourge of the Islamic rape-gangs preying on English working-class girls. Even in today's United Kingdom the rape of children is somewhat frowned upon, but fortunately the institutions of the British state can be relied upon to (let us put it at its mildest) look the other way. In particular, HM Constabulary up and down England are enthusiastic enablers of the gang-rapists in their midst.
Before my health collapse, the tag line of the old Mark Steyn Show's Brit Wanker Copper of the Day feature was, if I do say so myself (and I do), brilliant:
News from the United Kingdom, the land where everything is policed except crime...
Which neatly distills the twin trends in the non-law enforcement that afflicts that benighted country: the less attention the coppers pay to anything that matters - smartphone snatching, vehicle theft, house burglary, glassing, grievous bodily harm, rape, murder - the more time it frees up for policing your tweets. In the latest indictment of the UK's execrable plods, Kent Police came round to one of their own - a retired septuagenarian special constable called Julian Foulkes [top right] - and pronounced that his bookshelf looked "very Brexity". As one of this weekend's show guests, Allison Pearson, noted:
Police have no business pointing to "very Brexity things" in a person's home.
— Allison Pearson (@AllisonPearson) May 10, 2025
In fact, legal action must be taken against them.
Policing of "behaviour" needs to STOP!
https://t.co/ufm4mbd07T
Allison is quite right. The "policemen" examining Julian Foulkes' "very Brexity" household goods then handcuffed him and put him in a cell for eight hours. In a sane society, it would be the arresting officers now languishing in gaol. And, upon release, they would never work in policing ever again.
By the way, sample tweets from Mr Foulkes:
The rot set in when they got rid of Mark Steyn. Brilliant presenter but they wanted to put him in a straitjacket and he, quite rightly, was having none of it. And so, the dilution continues and the left are winning.
— Julian Foulkes (@JulianPFoulkes) October 6, 2023
Ooh, how "very Brexity" can you get? One more from Mr Foulkes:
Ever wondered why investigative journalism has disappeared?
Mark Steyn Leaves GBNews After Company Demands Contract Indemnifying Them Against Lawsuits for Wrong Think and British Regulatory Speech Violations - The Last Refuge https://t.co/oQKQdYTZRy
— Julian Foulkes (@JulianPFoulkes) February 9, 2023
I see Lord Young of the Free Speech Union is now describing the UK police as "the paramilitary wing of the BBC". It was at the end of the last century that I first heard my friend John O'Sullivan call them "the paramilitary wing of The Guardian" - which was a rather better line, and delivered back when there was still time to change the trajectory.
By the way, in the British context, that formulation is principally redolent of the Irish "Troubles", when the IRA were routinely billed as "the paramilitary wing of Sinn Féin". It is worth observing, however, that the Royal Ulster Constabulary, whom London eventually chose to sacrifice because they could not command the trust of the "nationalist" community, did not bust into your house and decide that your bookshelf looked "very nationalist" or "very republican" or "very Catholic". The UK police as a whole have now lost the trust of the winning side in the Brexit referendum. Any chance they could also be abolished?
Seeing Mr Foulkes' tweets about our show made me a little sad, because its perspective was a little different. Here, for example, in a fairly typical segment, we report that the plods had sufficient "resources" to come round to Kellie Jay Keen's house to investigate complaints that she was being "untoward" towards paedophiles - and apparently, as I remarked, "Wiltshire Police would prefer it that you were 'toward' to paedophiles". And then our friend Parm Sandhu, former Chief Superintendent at Scotland Yard and no "far-right extremist", pointed out that police solving of actual, serious crimes is now down to statistically undetectable levels. The segment starts at 50 minutes in, although the warm-up with child-rape survivor Samantha Smith, vax victim Wayne Cunnington and others is well worth your time:
Our comments section on the weekend show found many American viewers bewildered as to why the UK police are on the side of child rapists. Hugo Miller responded:
The insanity all stems from the College of Policing, which mysteriously sprung up, I wouldn't mind betting during the Blair administration.
The College of Policing is an evil entity, which has ensured, under its "guidance for officers", the wholesale transformation of every county constabulary into "the paramilitary wing of The Guardian". Example of their "guidance": they advised all police to record in a national database "non-crime hate incidents" - in which, as they see it, no crime was committed but the non-criminal is perceived to have been motivated by an animus to someone based on racial, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, whateverphobic characteristics. Wondering why you didn't get that job you applied for last week? Check out East Mercia & Avon Valley Constabulary's Non-Crime Hate Incidents database from 2014.
Yet Hugo is being a tad unfair to blame it all on Sir Tony. I had assumed, from its name, that it was one of those venerable bodies from the mists of time - like the Royal College of Physicians, founded in 1518. But no: it dates all the way back to 2012.
Er, right. And who was prime minister in 2012?
That would be Mr Cameron. Or "Lord" Cameron of Chipping Norton, as he prefers to be known since entering the witness-protection programme of the House of "Lords".
Ah, but it had been announced by the Home Secretary a year earlier - December 2011.
And who might that be?
Um, Theresa May - since ennobled as "Baroness" May of Maidenhead.
A decade after this Cameron/May creation - in December 2021 - England's Court of Appeal ruled à propos the College of Policing guidance on "non-crime hate incidents":
Does the Guidance sanction or positively approve or encourage unlawful conduct [by the police]? In my judgment it does.
Her Ladyship added that the guidance constitutes a "chilling effect ... on the legitimate exercise of freedom of expression". Of course! As the computer types say, that's not a bug, it's a feature.
So, naturally, the Home Office and College of Policing ignored the court and carried on as before, which is how Julian Foulkes wound up behind bars.
So who were the PM and Home Secretary after that ruling?
That would be Boris Johnson and Priti Patel. Oh, sorry, Dame Priti.
Oh, and as a bonus the man who presided over the UK constabulary's descent into "lawlessness", the head of the College of Policing, was just last year knighted: Sir Andy Marsh QPM.
For a decade and a half, UK voters made the mistake of electing repeatedly the Tosspot and Arsehole Party - whoops, my mistake, the Conservative and Unionist Party, who are neither and so made everything worse. They've all got knighthoods and ersatz peerages - and you're sitting in a gaol cell because some bozo plod thinks your copy of this week's Spectator marks you down as "very Brexity".
That would be the same Spectator edited by the same Michael Gove who sat in the Cabinet and supported all of the above. Oh, wait, he's now "Lord" Gove. There's a surprise.
They did this to you. Everything Keir Starmer has done to you these last nine months, "Lord" Cameron, "Lady" May and Fat Blair enabled him to do to you.
In a political system that offers a choice between the Authoritarian Party and the Totalitarian Party, I rather doubt you can vote your way out of this. But, at the bare minimum, there can be no progress in UK politics until the Tosspot and Arsehole Party has been completely destroyed. Nigel Farage - who is useless on issues and a squishy finger-in-the-windy last-on-the-bandwagon when it comes to paedo rape-gangs and freedom of speech - is nevertheless quite good at destroying parties (especially his own), so he is to be encouraged in that respect. There can be no progress until the non-Conservative and non-Unionist Party is dead. Only when the Tories are in their grave with a stake driven through them can space be made for something new. No more second eleventh thirty-seventh chances. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thirty-seven times, shame on me.
At the speed Starmer is now using the powers Cameron, May and Johnson gave him, it astonishes me that even the brain-dead London media can retain their fascination in who next week's Lord Privy Seal is going to be. Who cares? Meet the new Lord Privy Seal, same as the old Lord Privy Seal. Nor do I think middle-class insouciance about the degeneration of the UK police will work out for them: oh, yeah, sure, the Diversity Outreach SWAT team got a bit carried away, but let's face it, these social-media blowhards shooting their mouths off are frightfully déclassé. As I learned in my Canadian battles almost twenty years ago, what starts at the fringes always moves inward.
For example, I did not think about it quite this way until this morning, but all three of my weekend-show guests have been sorely traduced by the peelers. None more so than Sammy Woodhouse: aside from what can be just about passed off as a kind of recurring "incompetence" - entrusting the South Yorkshire police with the diary of all her rapes, only to find that they've "lost" that and much of the other evidence ...aside from all that, one night two coppers burst in on Sammy and her rapist in flagrante, and instead of arresting Arshad Hussein, who "groomed" with his brothers dozens if not hundreds of under-age girls, they charged Sammy with possession of an "offensive weapon" - a baton Mad Ash had given her. That's the South Yorkshire plods: Intruding on a scene of rape, they arrest not the rapist but the raped. So, to make the problem of child rape-victims go away, they gave her a criminal record.
Samantha Smith first appeared on The Mark Steyn Show in 2022. The following morning, two constables from West Mercia Police banged on her door and demanded to question her - and to take notice that they "needed to know" if she was going to go on telly and talk about them. In West Mercia as in South Yorkshire, the plods are on the side of the rapists.
Well, they're just the "white slags" and "Paki-shaggers" of northern and central England, so nobody cares. But what are we to make of Allison Pearson, a respectable columnist with Britain's biggest-selling broadsheet newspaper? Last Remembrance Day, while getting ready to attend the local observances, she opened the door to find two policemen from the Essex constabulary wanting to interrogate her about an unidentified tweet. As Allison responded, the men we honour at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month would revile such a land and not consider it worth the sacrifice.
West Mercia... South Yorkshire... Essex... Kent Police... AJP Taylor famously said that, until August 1914, the average Englishman lived in such blessed conditions that he could pass his life without contact with the British state save for the local postmistress and the village constable. Ah, but they were a very different constabulary. Today one should operate on the assumption that a police officer is your enemy, and act accordingly.
So do as Samantha Smith did, and refuse to play along. Don't do as Julian Foulkes did after eight hours behind bars, and agree to accept a "caution" from police without having to be dragged into court. Mr Foulkes did so because, as the coppers discovered during their search of his premises, one daughter died in a hit-and-run in Ibiza and his surviving girl lives in Australia, and he was worried that, if convicted, he would be denied entry to visit her. (Oz, as we learned during Covid, is one of the few countries that excludes even its own citizens if they are insufficiently compliant.)
And, whatever you do, don't let a friendly solicitor talk you into pleading guilty because then they'll go easier on you. Peter Lynch, a Southport "rioter", did that, and died in prison. Work on the assumption that an English policeman wishes you ill and he's itching to demonstrate that. Walking around with enough rope and an eye on the nearest lamppost probably rises to the level of at least a "non-crime hate incident", but it will come to that, because, in its descent into evil, a formerly peaceable kingdom is incentivising violence and making the death of social tranquility inevitable.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with our continuing eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time: Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K Jerome. Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight.
Saturday brought the latest edition of Steyn's weekend music show, and Rick McGinnis's movie date - The Shoes of the Fisherman. As part of The Mark Steyn Club's eighth birthday observances, Steyn's Song of the Week opted for the only possible choice. And our marquee presentation was the first brand new video edition of The Mark Steyn Show since Mark's third heart attack in Trieste two years ago: a special on the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs and their victims, with Sammy Woodhouse, Samantha Smith and Allison Pearson.
If you were too busy this weekend watching Kent Police go through your back-issues of The Spectator, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
