London has a knife problem.
They have a gun problem too, but the knife problem is far worse. Last year, 64,000 Londoners were held up at knife-point, violently assaulted, mugged or worse. That figure breaks down to 175 assaults every single day, more than any other country in Europe. That’s a lot of knives.
This came as quite a shock to me. Like most Americans, I generally think of London as a kind of morally, culturally superior place to my own lovably simple home. A place of good breeding and excellent manners. Polite to the point of being disadvantaged, witty, urbane. Cultured folk who know about art and world affairs and tea and crumpets. And all that crap.
But this was not the London I discovered. Far from its worldly image of sophistication and culture, I found a very different, much darker place.
A city in the grip of violent knife and gun crime. Of third world poverty housing estates. A city of aggressive, snarling commuters. Trains filled with soccer fans in various stages of fury. Leering, middle aged men, grunting and stroking their pockets as groups of young schoolgirls walk disgustedly by. A country excited by mindless stories of pedophilia. Of pickpockets and ATM crime. Children publicly drinking beer or smoking marijuana while an invisible police force droves past on the way to another unsolved shooting, another unsolved stabbing, another unsafe Friday night on the streets of London.
Now, I have been around the world. I’ve lived in Northern India, Cambodia. I’ve even visited Glasgow. The world can be a dangerous place. But what made the sudden knife pandemic in London all the more frightening, was the impression that no one was doing anything about it. That people were just going to “Carry on”. The people blamed the gangs, the gangs blamed the community, the community blamed the police, the police blamed the politicians and the politicians, well, they blamed Hip Hop artist Fifty Cent, who apparently takes time out of his touring schedule to stab 175 people, every day.
Worse yet, few if any Londoners were willing to accept the fact that there was a problem, perhaps in a few of the poorer areas, yes, but not a problem, not London, just a phase darling, the blacks probably and immigrants. And that’s all there was to say on the matter.
As a rule, the British do not take criticism of their country well. Any conversation on the shortcomings of London is reserved exclusively for the British themselves. Foreigners should consider themselves lucky to be in the country. Any mention that England was in someway not-up-to-scratch, as observed by an American, call immediately for an incendiary retort fuelled by some furious yet unspoken transatlantic rivalry. The interesting, (and at times, quite frustrating) thing is that there’s an awful lot London could do better. We’re just not allowed to talk about it.
Now, I won’t labor this point with another litany of England’s manifold inadequacies. At times it feels a little like emptying the Atlantic ocean with a small, leaking teaspoon. Instead, I’m going to take a look at what it is about the British that makes them so unable to accept criticism. Their inability to acknowledge that something could possibly be wrong in their glorious nation and to take the steps needed to repair it.
And I’m going to look at three contradictory attributes of the English character starting with that most tedious of English traditions; class-consciousness.
You may say that in a country where men routinely push women out of the way to get onto a train, matters of class are somewhat a moot point, but in day-to-day Britain, class-consciousness informs almost every act an Englishman makes.
From his opinion on world affairs to his taste in music and leisure, the cut of his suit, the scuff of his shoes, the pace and timbre of his accent, his political persuasion, his careful friends, his choice of supermarket, his view of minorities, his ideas about ideas, his blah blah blah blah blah, everything he does is to maintain an image. The most neurotic offenders of course, being the tiresome English middle class, noticeably paranoid about all matters of class distinction on account of the Upper class having all the cookies and the Lower class having all the guns.
Now alongside class-consciousness is another dreary hyphenated English national attribute; self-loathing. The English, as informed from folklore, think of themselves as moderately okay. You can test this if you like, by asking the average Englander how they are and to listen to the reply, the top three as measured by a 2004 university sociological study being:
“Not bad”,
“Okay”
and “I’ll live”.
The phrases that the average American would use after surviving a tornado are the exact same phrases an Englishman would use to describe his temperate elation at having won the national lottery.
These two traits are related. Class-consciousness, as archaic as it is, still grips the tepid heart of an English. The idea that the person standing opposite you right now is silently judging your rank against his own by virtue of your shoes, your hairstyle, the lilt of your accent and the topics of your allowable conversation must surely, at length, cause one to become resolutely f**ked in the head.
And by way of proof allow me to suggest that the Accent Schools found in London that teach young people from the country how to enunciate their vow-ells so as to avoid sounding working class are unlikely to find a parallel in any other modern city on the planet.
No matter what you do, how much you earn, the impact you have on society or how much you change the world, the English will always remind you that unless your mother is the queen of England, you will always, always remain a lower order to someone who’s mother is. Even if they have ginger hair.
And once you know your place in the world is ultimately limited to the lineage of your parents – What else would you expect from the jumped up son of an immigrant grocer? – you can’t help but see yourself as reflected in the myriad of glass ceilings above you, beneath men of lesser capacity, but older, wealthier genes.
So, we come to the single soft spot I reserve for the British, and that is the awful injustice of their low self esteem at the hands of an all pervasive, outdated social hierarchy based on breeding, (as in the case of dogs and prize pigs). Though I find them an irritating tribal-minded pack of xenophobic pig-weaklings, a tiny, tiny part of my heart goes out to them. It must be a terrible thing to live under the oppression of a bullying social culture that they simply cannot fight against.
And so, the British loathe themselves and one another. From an early age they learn there’s something crudlike about being a British nobody. Pasty, unloved by mother nature in their assorted pugly physical atrocities , a genetic grab-bag. Something second rate, the smell of decay, like a second hand book, there’s something faintly mouldy about it. Indefinable yet ever present.
Unable to derive a self worth of their own for reasons of class, the British cling to their groups. Their soccer teams, their political parties, their choice of beer and, in it’s most desperate case, their crumbling, pustule of a country. That Fanatical English Patriotism that believes, in view of demonstrable evidence to the contrary, that the UK is perfect. Not because it’s true, but because The English really, really want it to be true.
It’s the same manner in which children believe in Santa Claus.
National pride is an altogether stupid convention. The idea that a country, however steeped in tradition is without reproach is as grossly fascinating as a two-headed boy. And in England, it’s made all the more unbearable because of it’s shaky underpinnings. A quick look at English National Pride will find it is supported on three spindly legs.
Historical battle victories that helped build an Empire.
Economic strength.
The notion that, bad as it is, the rest of the world is still vaguely inferior to glorious England.
Equally quickly, we can dispatch these legs as follows.
I used to be a contender; The last important battle England won on it’s own merits was against the Faulkland Islands, which, as has been pointed out more times than I can recall, was a little like picking a fight against a midget. Ditto for Cyprus. In the modern day, they have followed the US to every major conflict from Vietnam to Iraq and so share in our uncanny ability to mess things up and run away when it gets too hard, (although in Britain’s case, it’s all the more cretinous, because while we start the fight, they seem to join it like a comedy sidekick). Their military training is so sub-par that the modern British army is virtually rendered cannon fodder in the current Iraq war and their weapons industry has become, as pointed out in the latest issue of Prospect Magazine, the punchline in a Haliburtan in-joke. They used-to-could but now they just plain can’t.
Show me the money; The incredible irony of England is that it has a first rate economy and a third world standard of living. How on earth can a country whose exchange rate towers over the rest of the world reduce its own people to virtual poverty? On top of this, a luxury tax at almost 20% means that, as I’ve said since the beginning of this blog, the only time it’s good to be British, is when you are outside Britain, spending British pounds. (And invariably, this is when you Englanders whine the most).
It’s a shithole, but it’s home; London, unsurprisingly, did not rank in the Top 5 most livable cities on earth. Nor did it place in the Top 10 , the Top 15 or even the Top 20. In fact, London makes no appearance in the world’s most livable cities list until we descend to the unfashionable depths of the +30 mark. That’s at least thirty other cities, (such as Tokyo, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Edinburgh, Aukland, and good ole NYC herself) that are far more livable than London. In fact, if you look at London’s closest neighbors on this list, you’re staring at places like Mexico City #29. On top of this, you can’t rely on your weather because it sometimes floods the country. You can’t rely on your relaxed pace of life because your people are among the most time pressured in Europe. You can’t rely on your scenery, (The rock dominoes of Stonehenge?) You can’t rely on your clean air as the droves of soot fingered tube commuting nose pickers demonstrate each morning. In fact, not even the English themselves can bare to live here, with London experiencing the highest rate of emigration in its history as reported in various tube trash over the last two weeks.
So we see your bloated sense of National Pride, as proudly hung from the kitchen windows of housing estates everywhere is little more than an emaciated lie. You cling to an idea of an England that no longer exists.
Why?
For a multitude of complicated reasons, one of which being, it feels good to think that while you as a individual British idiot aren’t very powerful or rich or intelligent, that the English AS A WHOLE are pretty powerful and rich and intelligent. AS A WHOLE you are an important nation, AS A WHOLE you matter. You align yourselves with the WHOLE so you don’t have to look at yourselves. You defend the nation because you cannot defend yourselves.
Take a look at the average English soccer enthusiast. It’s not enough to simply want your team to win, after the game finishes the defeated English soccer fan looks to find someone they can assault. How many times has a game been, “lost on the field but won in the carpark” in a violent, puffing, beer bloated and sweaty confrontation. This is not only abnormal, it’s a telling sign of national neuroses.
To criticize England is to wobble the thin, spindly sticks that hold the average Englander’s self esteem above water. To suggest that England is imperfect is to look behind the curtain. To see the English for what they are, to point and cruelly laugh.
The English don’t support, they cling.
They don’t just like a team, they become a team.
By themselves they are nothing, useless, weak, chubby, pale.
But supporting a team, a party, a nation - well, then they have significance.
I’m someone, they seem to say. I have a team. I have a flag. I’m part of something important.
It’s kind of sad.
But mostly, it’s disgusting and primitive. Like England.
And I’m not sure you can change this. When I envisage the English genetic code, I see something covered in wet beer-urine. I see something that cannot be reasoned with, nor fixed nor educated nor changed, not because it is strong, but because it is mentally deficient.
In plain terms, this is a nation of meat-heads.
Asking England to give up it’s ridiculous class system and resulting sense of self loathing is like asking France to give up cheese or America to give up being really cool and friendly and tough and handsome.
So, I am going to put forward the following idea. I hope you all link to this piece and tell all your Anglophobic, anti-british friends about it. I want this idea to permeate every part of the world and even if it doesn’t, at least it’ll give your English hating friends something to laugh about.
So, here goes…
I, The Duke OF New York, put forward that the European Union, together with the United Nations and the United States, sanction the United Kingdom to one child per family.
That these three same governmental bodies grant cash bonuses to mixed marriages to encourage interbreeding between cultures.
That English women should have to apply for a permit to begin a relationship with another English man, (and vice versa) and that the number of permits be strictly limited.
By my calculations, within 20 generations, we will have effectively bred the English out of England. Noone gets hurt, (or knifed), the ugliest people on earth are encouraged, (and in some cases finiancially rewarded) for breeding with better stock, and once the class system is gone, (and with it, the English mindset), we can start building a utopia.
England is a beautiful country. Green, green grass, beautiful sunsets, calm, temperate weather. The only thing that ruins it, are the donkey-faced, pig-thinking sensibilities of the fugly assed English.
With them gone, we can fill this glorious island with Italian and French chefs, Brazilian, Swedish and Spanish girls, Australian bartenders, Irish comedians, German engineers, and every New York born person from Mike D to Rudolph Guilliani, (Ixnay on the Umptray). We’ll get some Turkish guys for the late night kebabs, and some Scottish people to run the banks and I think we’ve got ourselves a blueprint people.
As The Kinks once famously observed, “There’s no England anymore”.
The UK is over.
This new utopia is a brand new kingdom with a bright new future.
I call it,
The New K.
Who’s with me?
This has been a broadcast from The Duke of New York.
This came as quite a shock to me. Like most Americans, I generally think of London as a kind of morally, culturally superior place to my own lovably simple home. A place of good breeding and excellent manners. Polite to the point of being disadvantaged, witty, urbane. Cultured folk who know about art and world affairs and tea and crumpets. And all that crap.
But this was not the London I discovered. Far from its worldly image of sophistication and culture, I found a very different, much darker place.
A city in the grip of violent knife and gun crime. Of third world poverty housing estates. A city of aggressive, snarling commuters. Trains filled with soccer fans in various stages of fury. Leering, middle aged men, grunting and stroking their pockets as groups of young schoolgirls walk disgustedly by. A country excited by mindless stories of pedophilia. Of pickpockets and ATM crime. Children publicly drinking beer or smoking marijuana while an invisible police force droves past on the way to another unsolved shooting, another unsolved stabbing, another unsafe Friday night on the streets of London.
Now, I have been around the world. I’ve lived in Northern India, Cambodia. I’ve even visited Glasgow. The world can be a dangerous place. But what made the sudden knife pandemic in London all the more frightening, was the impression that no one was doing anything about it. That people were just going to “Carry on”. The people blamed the gangs, the gangs blamed the community, the community blamed the police, the police blamed the politicians and the politicians, well, they blamed Hip Hop artist Fifty Cent, who apparently takes time out of his touring schedule to stab 175 people, every day.
Worse yet, few if any Londoners were willing to accept the fact that there was a problem, perhaps in a few of the poorer areas, yes, but not a problem, not London, just a phase darling, the blacks probably and immigrants. And that’s all there was to say on the matter.
As a rule, the British do not take criticism of their country well. Any conversation on the shortcomings of London is reserved exclusively for the British themselves. Foreigners should consider themselves lucky to be in the country. Any mention that England was in someway not-up-to-scratch, as observed by an American, call immediately for an incendiary retort fuelled by some furious yet unspoken transatlantic rivalry. The interesting, (and at times, quite frustrating) thing is that there’s an awful lot London could do better. We’re just not allowed to talk about it.
Now, I won’t labor this point with another litany of England’s manifold inadequacies. At times it feels a little like emptying the Atlantic ocean with a small, leaking teaspoon. Instead, I’m going to take a look at what it is about the British that makes them so unable to accept criticism. Their inability to acknowledge that something could possibly be wrong in their glorious nation and to take the steps needed to repair it.
And I’m going to look at three contradictory attributes of the English character starting with that most tedious of English traditions; class-consciousness.
You may say that in a country where men routinely push women out of the way to get onto a train, matters of class are somewhat a moot point, but in day-to-day Britain, class-consciousness informs almost every act an Englishman makes.
From his opinion on world affairs to his taste in music and leisure, the cut of his suit, the scuff of his shoes, the pace and timbre of his accent, his political persuasion, his careful friends, his choice of supermarket, his view of minorities, his ideas about ideas, his blah blah blah blah blah, everything he does is to maintain an image. The most neurotic offenders of course, being the tiresome English middle class, noticeably paranoid about all matters of class distinction on account of the Upper class having all the cookies and the Lower class having all the guns.
Now alongside class-consciousness is another dreary hyphenated English national attribute; self-loathing. The English, as informed from folklore, think of themselves as moderately okay. You can test this if you like, by asking the average Englander how they are and to listen to the reply, the top three as measured by a 2004 university sociological study being:
“Not bad”,
“Okay”
and “I’ll live”.
The phrases that the average American would use after surviving a tornado are the exact same phrases an Englishman would use to describe his temperate elation at having won the national lottery.
These two traits are related. Class-consciousness, as archaic as it is, still grips the tepid heart of an English. The idea that the person standing opposite you right now is silently judging your rank against his own by virtue of your shoes, your hairstyle, the lilt of your accent and the topics of your allowable conversation must surely, at length, cause one to become resolutely f**ked in the head.
And by way of proof allow me to suggest that the Accent Schools found in London that teach young people from the country how to enunciate their vow-ells so as to avoid sounding working class are unlikely to find a parallel in any other modern city on the planet.
No matter what you do, how much you earn, the impact you have on society or how much you change the world, the English will always remind you that unless your mother is the queen of England, you will always, always remain a lower order to someone who’s mother is. Even if they have ginger hair.
And once you know your place in the world is ultimately limited to the lineage of your parents – What else would you expect from the jumped up son of an immigrant grocer? – you can’t help but see yourself as reflected in the myriad of glass ceilings above you, beneath men of lesser capacity, but older, wealthier genes.
So, we come to the single soft spot I reserve for the British, and that is the awful injustice of their low self esteem at the hands of an all pervasive, outdated social hierarchy based on breeding, (as in the case of dogs and prize pigs). Though I find them an irritating tribal-minded pack of xenophobic pig-weaklings, a tiny, tiny part of my heart goes out to them. It must be a terrible thing to live under the oppression of a bullying social culture that they simply cannot fight against.
And so, the British loathe themselves and one another. From an early age they learn there’s something crudlike about being a British nobody. Pasty, unloved by mother nature in their assorted pugly physical atrocities , a genetic grab-bag. Something second rate, the smell of decay, like a second hand book, there’s something faintly mouldy about it. Indefinable yet ever present.
Unable to derive a self worth of their own for reasons of class, the British cling to their groups. Their soccer teams, their political parties, their choice of beer and, in it’s most desperate case, their crumbling, pustule of a country. That Fanatical English Patriotism that believes, in view of demonstrable evidence to the contrary, that the UK is perfect. Not because it’s true, but because The English really, really want it to be true.
It’s the same manner in which children believe in Santa Claus.
National pride is an altogether stupid convention. The idea that a country, however steeped in tradition is without reproach is as grossly fascinating as a two-headed boy. And in England, it’s made all the more unbearable because of it’s shaky underpinnings. A quick look at English National Pride will find it is supported on three spindly legs.
Historical battle victories that helped build an Empire.
Economic strength.
The notion that, bad as it is, the rest of the world is still vaguely inferior to glorious England.
Equally quickly, we can dispatch these legs as follows.
I used to be a contender; The last important battle England won on it’s own merits was against the Faulkland Islands, which, as has been pointed out more times than I can recall, was a little like picking a fight against a midget. Ditto for Cyprus. In the modern day, they have followed the US to every major conflict from Vietnam to Iraq and so share in our uncanny ability to mess things up and run away when it gets too hard, (although in Britain’s case, it’s all the more cretinous, because while we start the fight, they seem to join it like a comedy sidekick). Their military training is so sub-par that the modern British army is virtually rendered cannon fodder in the current Iraq war and their weapons industry has become, as pointed out in the latest issue of Prospect Magazine, the punchline in a Haliburtan in-joke. They used-to-could but now they just plain can’t.
Show me the money; The incredible irony of England is that it has a first rate economy and a third world standard of living. How on earth can a country whose exchange rate towers over the rest of the world reduce its own people to virtual poverty? On top of this, a luxury tax at almost 20% means that, as I’ve said since the beginning of this blog, the only time it’s good to be British, is when you are outside Britain, spending British pounds. (And invariably, this is when you Englanders whine the most).
It’s a shithole, but it’s home; London, unsurprisingly, did not rank in the Top 5 most livable cities on earth. Nor did it place in the Top 10 , the Top 15 or even the Top 20. In fact, London makes no appearance in the world’s most livable cities list until we descend to the unfashionable depths of the +30 mark. That’s at least thirty other cities, (such as Tokyo, Munich, Paris, Sydney, Edinburgh, Aukland, and good ole NYC herself) that are far more livable than London. In fact, if you look at London’s closest neighbors on this list, you’re staring at places like Mexico City #29. On top of this, you can’t rely on your weather because it sometimes floods the country. You can’t rely on your relaxed pace of life because your people are among the most time pressured in Europe. You can’t rely on your scenery, (The rock dominoes of Stonehenge?) You can’t rely on your clean air as the droves of soot fingered tube commuting nose pickers demonstrate each morning. In fact, not even the English themselves can bare to live here, with London experiencing the highest rate of emigration in its history as reported in various tube trash over the last two weeks.
So we see your bloated sense of National Pride, as proudly hung from the kitchen windows of housing estates everywhere is little more than an emaciated lie. You cling to an idea of an England that no longer exists.
Why?
For a multitude of complicated reasons, one of which being, it feels good to think that while you as a individual British idiot aren’t very powerful or rich or intelligent, that the English AS A WHOLE are pretty powerful and rich and intelligent. AS A WHOLE you are an important nation, AS A WHOLE you matter. You align yourselves with the WHOLE so you don’t have to look at yourselves. You defend the nation because you cannot defend yourselves.
Take a look at the average English soccer enthusiast. It’s not enough to simply want your team to win, after the game finishes the defeated English soccer fan looks to find someone they can assault. How many times has a game been, “lost on the field but won in the carpark” in a violent, puffing, beer bloated and sweaty confrontation. This is not only abnormal, it’s a telling sign of national neuroses.
To criticize England is to wobble the thin, spindly sticks that hold the average Englander’s self esteem above water. To suggest that England is imperfect is to look behind the curtain. To see the English for what they are, to point and cruelly laugh.
The English don’t support, they cling.
They don’t just like a team, they become a team.
By themselves they are nothing, useless, weak, chubby, pale.
But supporting a team, a party, a nation - well, then they have significance.
I’m someone, they seem to say. I have a team. I have a flag. I’m part of something important.
It’s kind of sad.
But mostly, it’s disgusting and primitive. Like England.
And I’m not sure you can change this. When I envisage the English genetic code, I see something covered in wet beer-urine. I see something that cannot be reasoned with, nor fixed nor educated nor changed, not because it is strong, but because it is mentally deficient.
In plain terms, this is a nation of meat-heads.
Asking England to give up it’s ridiculous class system and resulting sense of self loathing is like asking France to give up cheese or America to give up being really cool and friendly and tough and handsome.
So, I am going to put forward the following idea. I hope you all link to this piece and tell all your Anglophobic, anti-british friends about it. I want this idea to permeate every part of the world and even if it doesn’t, at least it’ll give your English hating friends something to laugh about.
So, here goes…
I, The Duke OF New York, put forward that the European Union, together with the United Nations and the United States, sanction the United Kingdom to one child per family.
That these three same governmental bodies grant cash bonuses to mixed marriages to encourage interbreeding between cultures.
That English women should have to apply for a permit to begin a relationship with another English man, (and vice versa) and that the number of permits be strictly limited.
By my calculations, within 20 generations, we will have effectively bred the English out of England. Noone gets hurt, (or knifed), the ugliest people on earth are encouraged, (and in some cases finiancially rewarded) for breeding with better stock, and once the class system is gone, (and with it, the English mindset), we can start building a utopia.
England is a beautiful country. Green, green grass, beautiful sunsets, calm, temperate weather. The only thing that ruins it, are the donkey-faced, pig-thinking sensibilities of the fugly assed English.
With them gone, we can fill this glorious island with Italian and French chefs, Brazilian, Swedish and Spanish girls, Australian bartenders, Irish comedians, German engineers, and every New York born person from Mike D to Rudolph Guilliani, (Ixnay on the Umptray). We’ll get some Turkish guys for the late night kebabs, and some Scottish people to run the banks and I think we’ve got ourselves a blueprint people.
As The Kinks once famously observed, “There’s no England anymore”.
The UK is over.
This new utopia is a brand new kingdom with a bright new future.
I call it,
The New K.
Who’s with me?
This has been a broadcast from The Duke of New York.
Soon to be available on Podcast via iTunes. Stay tuned.
