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Welcome to Thought-Police Britain Kafka predicted our age of petty tyranny

Kafka's monster is coming for us. Victoria Jones/Pool/Getty Images

Kafka's monster is coming for us. Victoria Jones/Pool/Getty Images


November 19, 2024   6 mins

“Kafkaesque” has long been a byword for the distinctive type of tyranny imposed by impersonal bureaucracies. Franz Kafka himself was a petty bureaucrat: he spent his life working in insurance, writing late into the night. But as a tiny cog in the bureaucratic machinery, he understood its sensibility intimately.

In The Trial, published 1925, Kafka recounts the tale of Josef K., accused by a remote and impersonal authority of an unknown crime, whose nature neither Josef nor the reader ever discovers. Now, as we approach the centenary of its publication, in Britain The Trial reads less as dystopian fiction than a Telegraph headline.

On Remembrance Sunday, Essex Police visited the journalist Allison Pearson, to inform her that — in Pearson’s telling — she was the subject of a non-crime hate incident report. Allegedly this concerned something she posted on X a year ago, and subsequently deleted. But the police would not specify what. Nor would they disclose who had made the report. In a subsequent statement, it transpired that the “non-crime hate incident” was in fact a criminal investigation for “inciting racial hatred”.

The row has since escalated. Elon Musk got involved. Tories have denounced Essex Police for “policing thought”. And Starmer has declared that police should focus on actual crimes rather than mean tweets.

From America, if my most recent visit is anything to go by, Thought-Police Britain is now viewed as somewhere between a laughing-stock and tragic cautionary tale. For this is far from the first such incident. In 2021, Harry Miller took the police to court and won, for allegations of “transphobia” based on internet posts. Feminist writer Julie Bindel reports that she was visited by police for her tweets in 2019. And Sex Matters founder Maya Forstater was subjected to a 15-month “hate crime” investigation by Scotland Yard on the basis of a post, and that was only recently dropped. What these surreal incidents illustrate is the gap between bureaucratic promise and reality: one in which, the more impersonal the system, the more effectively it can be weaponised by those who understand it.

“In America, Thought Police Britain is now viewed as somewhere between a laughing-stock and tragic cautionary tale.”

One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust, especially at scale. And as “post-liberal” critics such as Patrick Deneen have observed, a liberal social order that declines to embrace a unified moral vision will end up bureaucratising those aspects of life that would elsewhere be governed by morality. Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good. We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us.

The allure of this promise is illustrated by a grim concurrent story: the Makin Report. It is an ugly mirror-image of the Pearson story: where Pearson is the subject of a possibly vexatious allegation of wrongdoing toward a vulnerable group, Makin documents the Church of England’s inaction in the face of genuine wrongdoing towards a different vulnerable group. The historic physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by barrister turned Evangelical lay reader John Smyth were known by senior figures in the Church, who failed in their duty to take Smythe’s wrongdoing seriously, escalate it to police, or meet with victims. The resulting row has precipitated the resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I won’t mourn Welby. But I also suspect that some of those who called for his resignation were motivated by factors other than his handling of historic abuse — not least a loathing for the managerialist streak his tenure brought to the Church of England, and that has recently galvanised the “Save the Parish” movement. I also suspect that the managerialism disrespecters may find Welby’s scalping a hollow triumph: for despite his resignation, the proceduralising instinct is stronger than ever.

Christian moral language contains abundant vocabulary that would seem to fit the topic at hand — “sin” and “wickedness” remain serviceable, for example. But in the Church’s response to the Makin fiasco, I’ve seen not the language of public moral confidence but the arid one of procedure: statements about disclosures and processes, calls for more resignations, and demands for new independent bodies. This tendency is visible even at the parish level, where you can’t move for safeguarding officers even in local churches with 10 superannuated congregants all of whom have been friends for decades.

A kind of dry rot of bureaucracy is visible everywhere. With it comes the implicit assumption that individual moral judgement and authority are suspect by definition, and the only surefire guarantee of “safety” is their removal from or replacement by systems. With doubtless the best of intentions, Welby contributed greatly to the spread of such systems. But when we contrast this proliferating moral managerialism in the Church with Pearson’s experience of moral managerialism run sinisterly wild in the police, something unnerving comes into view. If the positive intent of bureaucracy is to protect us from the wickedness that can erupt in the absence of trust, the reality is that it often provides cover for the very wickedness it was supposed to forestall.

In 1979, social scientist Malcolm Feeley published The Process Is The Punishment, a study of the lower court in New Haven, Connecticut. Here, Feeley showed how the cost in time and lost earnings of pursuing formal legal rights and due process often vastly outweighs simply pleading guilty. He argued that in this context, rights are often both formally available, but also in practice out of reach. More recently, “the process is the punishment” has become a byword for a kind of bureaucratic warfare, in a style very similar to the one Feeley describes.

Pearson’s, Forstater’s, and Miller’s experiences are cases in point. In each case, a bureaucratic “hate crime” process whose positive intent was to provide a neutral, procedural replacement for moral norms that roughly correspond to blasphemy has become a weapon used to hurt a perceived enemy. For it turns out that contra the forlorn hopes of those now implementing new processes and procedures and layers of accountability and transparency and so on in the Church of England, replacing moral authority with administration does not in fact cure the human propensity for wickedness. Kafka saw this a century ago.

The central thread in The Trial is the horror evoked by the bureaucratic monster that devours Josef K.; but a key secondary theme is the recurring role of weaponised sexual desire, whether coercive, manipulative, or otherwise corrupted. Josef K. sexually assaults a fellow-lodger; the first hearing is interrupted by a man assaulting a washerwoman in a corner; the washerwoman later tries to seduce Josef K.; other “inappropriate” sexual entanglements abound in the story, poisoning relationships and multiplying suspicion and confusion. The crucial insight Kafka provides, in the aggregate picture, is more than borne out in our modern managerial landscape: the more impersonal the procedures, the darker their moral underbelly — and the more scope they afford for coercion, corruption, and brutality.

We find this abundantly in the Pearson fiasco: pace Welby, wherever managerialism flourishes so too will our darkest urges. What makes Pearson’s predicament so disturbing is its facelessness, and the lack of individual accountability involved. It can almost certainly be assumed of Essex Police, for example, that no one on the force is actively working to persecute Pearson. But according to The Guardian, the individual who made the report is a “public servant”. And for such an individual, their understanding of how the machinery operates, means they can easily weaponise it.

For though procedure is meant to save us from bad actors, in reality it just empowers them — as in, perhaps, a public-sector worker who would prefer a conservative journalist to stop writing. One need only pull the correct lever, and institutional procedures will rumble into gear whose operation is designed to minimise individual judgement and agency. Even if it exonerates Pearson in the end, as Forstater and Miller were exonerated, the process is the punishment.

Kafka understood, more than a century ago, that bureaucracy will never be a cure for sin or cruelty. To the extent that we trust in such systems at the expense of our capacity for moral judgement, we will only produce new sins and cruelties. And this applies well beyond sexual wrongdoing, to every one of the darknesses that lies in human hearts. Far from increasing safety and probity by eliminating moral judgement from the messy business of public life, and saving us from our own wickedness in the process, bureaucratic architecture affords new openings for just that wickedness. And these openings prove difficult to close because the process resists those individuals whose moral sense remains functional enough to see and protest them.

If there’s a crumb of comfort to be gained from this dispiriting episode, it’s in the outcry it has prompted. It had come to seem dispiritingly as though the Covid-era national character was all we had left: a mean-spirited, curtain-twitching, pettifogging snitch Britain. But this mood suggests that neither the Welbyan HR-ification of our souls, nor the hi-vis Stasi of Starmerism, have consumed us yet. We still know wickedness when we see it — even the kind inflicted via procedures that were meant to save us from ourselves.


Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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Matthew Powell
Matthew Powell
1 month ago

If you try to outlaw all cruelty the only pleasure left for the sadists is the enforcement of the law.

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
1 month ago

The purpose of bureaucracy is, of course, the evasion of responsibility; no one can be blamed for following a “process” or a “procedure”, and if the process or procedure is itself faulty, then the blame is naturally credited to the root of all modern evil: the past. Anyone culpable for drafting and enacting the process is usually safely either out of office and/or dead, and thus no one is responsible. Because if there’s one thing our civilization absolutely cannot withstand, it’s people being held responsible for their actions.

Matt Sylvestre
Matt Sylvestre
1 month ago

Indeed!

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago

Another example which perfectly illustrates this point is the Post Office Scandal. Employees went to jail, lives were ruined. Accountability is proving very difficult to come by due to the nature of the machine – in this case, corporatism – the brother of bureaucracy.

Richard Hopkins
Richard Hopkins
1 month ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

It was the Mother of All Bureaucracies, the British legal system, that prosecuted, convicted and jailed hundreds of sub-postmasters – for crimes that didn’t even happen.

Yet, there is not even a whiff of accountability from the generation of lawyers and judges responsible for the ‘most widespread miscarriage of justice in British legal history’.

This inconvenient truth seems to be continually overlooked or ignored.

Why?

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
27 days ago

So very true, and the recent sentences passed upon ” hate speech” clearly display that our judiciary are not what they were, following every other totalitarian state in the world, and the arrival of the internet and abolition of jury qualification, albeit some years ago now has added to the problems- I have been aghast hearing stories from people whom I know who have done jury service recently.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago

You’ve forgotten good old fashioned ‘institutional racism’, the excuse trotted out by the police to explain why they had ignored the murder of a young black man in order to protect the son if one of their criminal friends. ‘Move along now, it was the institution!’

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
1 month ago

That doesn’t make any sense.

The phrase ‘institutional racism’ was not invented by the police as some sort of self-exculpation (and how would that work, anyway?)

It was a condemnation in the Stephen Lawrence report chaired by a High Court judge, Sir William Macpherson.

Alan Lambert
Alan Lambert
1 month ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

I think what CB was pointing out is that by inventing the concept of Institutional anything, the reality of individuals being responsible can be ignored. And more importantly, there is a whole institution to sue, far richer than those individuals who perpetrated , In Lawrences’ case’ hideous acts.

Wilfred Davis
Wilfred Davis
1 month ago

Because if there’s one thing our civilization absolutely cannot withstand, it’s people being held responsible for their actions.

Could I adjust that a little by saying the thing people can’t bear is being held responsible for their own actions.

Blaming other people, cancelling them, expecting them to resign, go to prison, commit suicide, or whatever is just fine. In fact, it’s a national sport.

And, please, don’t let us forget that we must be held responsible – all of us – for somebody’s else’s ancestors’ involvement in slave-ownership.

Our civilisation thinks responsibility’s as wonderful as champagne. Just make sure the bottle’s pointing away when opening it.

Terry Raby
Terry Raby
1 month ago
Reply to  Wilfred Davis

Incisive

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 month ago

Brilliant.
Also all organisations become bureaucratic oligarchies run for th benefit of the top. Also evasion of technically difficult, dirty and dangerous wor is a priority.
Visiting a middle aged woman journalist is far less dangerous than arresting an east European gangster who has spent time in military/intelligence services;trains in martial arts and weight lifting and is very good at hand to hand combat. When the Police included ex WW2 Special Forces/ Commando NCOs they would be better at hand to hand combat than eastern European gangsters.

JOHN B
JOHN B
1 month ago

Very true. It seems obvious that the ultimate purpose of the bureaucracy is to aggregate to itself (and those within it) power, influence and money (without responsibility), which is why it will always chose whatever course most involves it and against which it can least be measured e.g. net zero, anti racism. Its excesses can be killed but only by starving it of money.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago

The purpose of bureaucracy is, of course, the evasion of responsibility;
True, but truer is that the point of bureaucracy is its own survival and expansion. What we are witnessing now is what happens when bureaucracies expand to a scale that is out of all proportion to any genuine need. The US Dept of Education is a perfect example. It wasn’t really necessary in the first place and, now that it has expanded beyond any conceivable need, it has begun to impose regulation on schools that actively undermines their fundamental purpose. Fortunately, if Trump keeps his word, it will soon be gone. We can but hope that the same thing happens here before too long.

Walter Lantz
Walter Lantz
1 month ago

The article is spot on. The Kafkaesque nature of thought crime policing flip flops between hilarious and frightening. What is truly frustrating however, is the weak pleading offered up by pols that want to see an end to it. “Please, pretty please concentrate more on actual crime”. This is an ineffective approach against entrenched ideology.
Better to focus on the parameters that interest the general public. What’s your solve rate on burglaries? or sex crimes? or break and enters? Let real crime stats set the benchmark for career advancement and minimize to the point of utter disregard subjective ersatz transgressions such as “likely to cause offense”.
Reward the police work we want – and need – done. If dullard progressives want to trawl through anonymous complaints about decades-old tweets looking for ‘gotcha’ nuggets then go ahead but don’t expect any career advancement.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago
Reply to  Walter Lantz

The politicians don’t want to accept responsibility for the outcomes of the public sector agendas that they set. They therefore pretend that institutions such as the police are not under their control.

John Tyler
John Tyler
1 month ago

Absolutely right! They pretend it even after basking in the glory of having obtained “swift justice” for right-wing violence. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Ben Scott
Ben Scott
1 month ago
Reply to  Walter Lantz

But solving real crime is a difficult, time consuming process. It’s dead easy getting KPI’s ticked off with simple stuff like NCHIs. Which, is probably part of the problem: far too much emphasis on KPIs and box ticking, not enough on real life with all it’s complexities and refusal to fit neatly into fileable categories.

Norfolk Sceptic
Norfolk Sceptic
1 month ago
Reply to  Ben Scott

Yes, solving real crime is difficult, but on TV, they always manage to do it within the allotted time.

David Lonsdale
David Lonsdale
1 month ago

Yes, but on TV most of the actual sleuthing is done during the ad breaks when the cameras aren’t on them!

Richard Hopkins
Richard Hopkins
1 month ago
Reply to  Walter Lantz

Sadly, the police bureaucracy have realised that the easiest way to reduce crime figures, is to not record crime. Simple!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-55251366

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago

Yes, and isn’t this what Speaker Johnson is doing when he argues that bureaucratic issues prevent him from releasing the findings of the House committee investigation of Gaetz; preventing the public knowing of sexual deviance and possible sexual crimes of a person proposed as US Attorney General is immoral and obscene.

Saigon Sally
Saigon Sally
1 month ago
Reply to  Walter Lantz

Why have the British police become so woke and extremist? British policing is fast coming to resemble that of totalitarian regimes past and present, is it just love of power or what?

Anne Humphreys
Anne Humphreys
1 month ago
Reply to  Saigon Sally

The requirement on most new police to have a degree has contributed- recruits arrive ready indoctrinated

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
1 month ago
Reply to  Anne Humphreys

Indeed, the move towards degree-level entry requirements also has the effect of excluding (or excluding from promotion to ranks which make the important decisions) those in the community who’re able and willing to take on the task of keeping the peace and preventing/enforcing crime but whose academic interests are negligible.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 month ago
Reply to  Saigon Sally

As a nation we are not producing enough fit tough competent people with a sense of duty . Those we produce enter the Armed Services or go into heavy engineering. Historically many entered the Police from the Armed Services and Colonial Police were were extremely tough and very experienced. This does not happen any more. A Garrison Segeant Major ( senior RSM ) told me the Police do not recruit ex military if they can avoid it, especially ex SF/Commandos .
Dealing with middle aged women is less dangerous than eastern European gangsters.

William Amos
William Amos
1 month ago
Reply to  Saigon Sally

The police represent the Establishment line, that is all.
They are accountable to the Crown in Parliament, not ‘the people’. The oath is made “to truly serve The King in the office of constable”
It is striking how few Britons, let alone Americans, are aware of this.
The spiritual sickness lies much further up stream.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago
Reply to  Walter Lantz

Where is the ‘thought crime’ behind writing and then publishing (which is what a ‘tweet’ is) a bunch of nasty lies about a picture?

Peter B
Peter B
1 month ago

This should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in the activities described (like the oddly misnamed “safeguarding” which seems to be more about safeguarding the process jockeys rather than the vulnerable).
Excellent though the article is, there are no solutions on offer.
How about this – anyone involved in these bureaucratic processes should not be allowed to continue in such a role for more than 3 years. Perhaps by time boxing the roles we might thin out the bad actors that seem to accumulate in these policing type roles. And make sure that those who do them are more in tune with the public as a whole.

b blimbax
b blimbax
1 month ago
Reply to  Peter B

“And make sure that those who do them are more in tune with the public as a whole.”
But this raises the question, does the public still sing the same tunes? Or is there a cacophony? It may be that a breakdown in “communal singing” has helped pave the way for these bureaucratic processes.

David McKee
David McKee
1 month ago

This reminds me of the film “Suite Francaise”, set in occupied France during the second world war. No sooner had the Germans set up shop, the French were queuing up to denounce their neighbours. They were motivated by malice, envy and jealousy. From there, it was only a short step to outright collaboration with the Germans.

Those French who prospered were the powerful, the greedy and the ruthless. The losers were the weak, the honest and the patriotic. And, of course, the Jews.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
1 month ago
Reply to  David McKee

A friends relative who set up a resistance group in Normandy said the Gestapo were so overwhelmed they had to bring in extra staff. He said the first two years, 1940 to 1942 just just trying to get an group together and not be betrayed, there was hardly any fighting.
What happened was that people used the Gestapo ; someone who wanted somebody’s land reported them ; the person who wanted revenge on someone who had slept with their partner was reported. A French woman betrayed Khan GC to the Gestapo because she was envious of her beauty.
Noor Inayat Khan – Wikipedia

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago
Reply to  David McKee

Ms Pearson found a picture then wrote a whole bunch of nasty lies about it – she is the false accuser in this case!

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

It wasn’t a “whole bunch” of lies, it was one incorrect statement. And it was only nasty because she had misidentified the event and hence defamed the individuals pictured. If it had been the event she thought it was her comment would have been entirely accurate. The tweet was quickly deleted when she realised her error and, of course, it wasn’t the individuals pictured who complained.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  David McKee

So true. Abwehr officers were shocked by the enthusiasm that a significant proportion of the French population expressed for the holocaust project. After the war our grandparents were brainwashed into believing that it was purely a German project when, in fact, it was European.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  David McKee

I think that the master of French pomposity, Charles de Gaulle, said inter alia that’s during the war over 90% of his fellow country men collaborated one way or another. The Resistance was he said about 5% and the communists not only fought Germans but betrayed the non-communists to the Gestapo. I curse myself for not being able to get a precise reference but detailed research will find German film, albeit propaganda, showing Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers with many a lovely femme or two in tow. Some other European films can be found showing the brave resistance but the actual stats show that Nazi Party membership in Germany during the war was only over 70% while Holland had an NSB (Nazi Party) that was nudging 80%; and the Austrians unsurprisingly ranked second. If I find the time I will get back to some old research paper, unexamined for a while.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
29 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I did not mentin that between June 1940 and June 1941 The French Fascists ( I think they called thmselves the Iron Cross) and the Communists betrayed resistance members to Gestapo.

Ex Nihilo
Ex Nihilo
1 month ago

Another excellent essay by Ms Harrington. This is a moral problem that cannot be solved simply by electing the right politicians; although some politicians can definitely accelerate the decline. Morality cannot be legislated nor, as Ms Harrington reminds us, bureaucratized. Absent a critical mass of citizens with a common sense of decency, responsibility beyond themselves, and respect for a cogent system of morality, no amount of social engineering will suffice. To turn Chaucer’s aphorism upside down: “for if the Sheep are shitty, how shall the Shepard be clean?”

AC Harper
AC Harper
1 month ago
Reply to  Ex Nihilo

Plus the moral decline of ‘just following the rules’ or ‘more than my job’s worth’ lead on to the people and organisations who exploit the decline by weaponising lawfare.
Rather than some social norm morals have become transactional. What’s in it for me?

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
1 month ago

“We still know wickedness when we see it”
Yes Stammer, Rayner, Reeve, Ali 

Paul Airey
Paul Airey
1 month ago

The evil and wickedness of Starmer and Ali should be punished using a suitable length of greased rams horn and a white hot poker.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
1 month ago

One of MH’s best essays.

Victor James
Victor James
1 month ago
Reply to  Jim Veenbaas

Alls she’s doing here is using euphemisms. The ‘bureaucrats’ in question are on the far-left. Britain is an institutional leftist dictatorship. The British morality police are only enforcing leftist morality. So why not say that?

Matt Sylvestre
Matt Sylvestre
1 month ago

Great to see Ms. Harrington has gotten off the snyde (an old time American sports saying) and produced this hard hitting and pragmatic piece….

“We view procedures as more neutral than people; hence instead of needing to argue morality, make judgements, or form relationships, we increasingly rely on these purportedly neutral, impersonal mechanisms to do it for us…” – Brilliant observation…

Time for adults to steel their back bones, stick their necks out, and blast through these useless bureaucratic machines run by weak little nothings.

Terry M
Terry M
1 month ago
Reply to  Matt Sylvestre

I think you meant ‘sidelines’ since in my 70 years of closely following sports here in the US I’ve never encountered the word snyde.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
1 month ago
Reply to  Terry M

I’ve heard the term many times since childhood, although not necessarily exclusivly relative to sports.

Matt Sylvestre
Matt Sylvestre
1 month ago
Reply to  Terry M

Nope I did indeed mean “Snyde” which was once said of baseball players especially when they started to overcome a cold streak in hitting (though my spelling may be poor, see the link below)… What I was saying is the Ms Harrington has not had a major hit like this one in her last few tries in my opinion. She may well be our best player (save maybe Douglas Murray) but its been a minute as the kids say)…

Schneid Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
1 month ago

Great article. However, it misses a simple point. Huge numbers of public sector employees (and to be fair also many private sector employees) are motivated by laziness. I doubt that all of the police officers molesting Pearson believed that she had committed a crime. Most simply preferred a stroll through the Essex countryside to say dealing with a domestic abuse or rape case.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago

Almost. The laziness is about preferring to sit in front of a computer rather than doing real work.

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago

This is bureaucratic thinking par excellence, ie, sitting in front of a computer is not real work! Just fake work, I guess.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Barry Dank

Not bureaucratic because I’ve seen it in all walks of life. Looking at a computer is basically boring. Try reading a 100 page document written by the Treasury Department of a council. So, the mind slips into a soggy state, then looks for messages from family and friends, then reads another page…. And the time drags and drags. Every day is the same and you are desperate to find something ‘interesting’. Maybe you cheat a bit and make up something interesting.

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago

Huge numbers of public sector employees motivated by laziness is not a simple point since Barclay has no way of knowing that public employees in huge numbers are motivated by laziness. Maybe he has a laziness meter. What Barclay is doing is engaging in stereotypical thinking. In any case, deciphering the motivations of any person is extremely difficult to do. In essence, Barclay is also engaging in bureaucratic thinking, he is taking a bureaucratic category and mediating persons thru that category.

Stuart Bennett
Stuart Bennett
1 month ago

“Starmer has declared that police should focus on actual crimes rather than mean tweets.”

Laughable. It is his world that gave license to this crap.

Andrew R
Andrew R
1 month ago

Wales is looking to become an “Anti Racist Nation” by 2030, one must wonder how on earth they will achieve that.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrew R

One the ‘advantages’ for Wales in this aim is that we currently have very low levels of immigration, compared with England and Scotland. I think that this was a fiendishly clever plan from the Assembly when they made the rule that all children must learn Welsh at school and that all government employees must speak at least some Welsh.
Perhaps somebody should prosecute the Assembly to say that forcing children to learn Welsh is racist.

Steven Targett
Steven Targett
1 month ago
Reply to  Andrew R

Given the Welsh antipathy towards the English I can’t see them ending racism anytime soon. Witness the village trying to stop non-Welsh speakers from buying property.

Katharine Eyre
Katharine Eyre
1 month ago

But this mood suggests that neither the Welbyan HR-ification of our souls, nor the hi-vis Stasi of Starmerism, have consumed us yet.
Stasi of Starmerism? Mary’s flirting with a non-crime hate incident. Police being dispatched as I write…
I know I shouldn’t laugh, it’s really tragic and disturbing. But I’m with the Americans on this one: watching Britain so consumed with long-since-deleted mean Tweets while the country disintegrates is a sight to behold.

Dr Anne Kelley
Dr Anne Kelley
1 month ago
Reply to  Katharine Eyre

It’s a tragedy.

Victor James
Victor James
1 month ago

‘Moral managerialism’ is a euphemism for what? Who’s ‘morality’ is being enforced on these issues 100% of the time???

The people doing this are the radical left. Leftists have a vice grip on the institutions. Leftists are the petty little fascists being discussed here. So why not say it?

Is it because if you point fingers directly at the problem, then you actually have to do something about it?

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago

Essex’s policing and crime commissioner (a Tory, incidentally) says that the Essex constabulary prioritise crime by the length of the maximum sentence and the maximum sentence for hate crimes is seven years. Thus the Essex police will prioritise persecuting Ms Pearson over any of the following crimes, each of which has a maximum sentence less than that for hate crimes:
Trading in firearms without being registered as firearms dealer (5 years)
Selling firearm to person without a certificate (5 years)
Repairing, testing etc. firearm without a certificate (5 years)
Falsifying certificate etc. with view to acquisition of firearm (5 years)
Carrying of any offensive weapon in a public place without lawful authority or reasonable excuse (4 years)
Unlawful marketing of knives as suitable for combat, or in ways likely to stimulate or encourage violent behaviour (2 years)
Female circumcision (2 years)
Racially-aggravated common assault (2 years)
Assault occasioning actual bodily harm (2 years)
Abandonment of children under two (5 years)
Dealing in firearms (5 years)
This is just a small selection of the crimes that the Essex police will ignore in order to prioritise persecuting Ms Pearson, according to their own crime commissioner.

Dr Anne Kelley
Dr Anne Kelley
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

My conclusion from this is that our sentencing needs review. How can a ‘hate crime’ (‘hate’ being a rather subjective adjective here) which inflicts no actual damage to a person’s body or property, have a longer maximum sentence than racially aggravated common assault?

Claire Grey
Claire Grey
1 month ago
Reply to  Dr Anne Kelley

According to the CPS website regarding Hate Crime;

“There is no legal definition of hostility, so we use the everyday understanding of the word which includes ill-will, spite, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike.”

Considering that, how is anyone to escape prosecution once they’ve been accused ?
It is almost incomprehensible that such a law could be passed in the UK, until you understand it is there to enforce multiculturalism on the native population.

Terry M
Terry M
1 month ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

Presumably all other crimes are love crimes!

Karen Arnold
Karen Arnold
1 month ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

The implication of this is huge, any of us could be accused of unfriendliness by those who wish us harm and find ourselves in a difficult position, how do we prove we are not guilty of unfriendliness?

Max More
Max More
1 month ago
Reply to  Karen Arnold

“I am NOT the messiah!” “….Only the true messiah would deny being the messiah!”

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 month ago
Reply to  Karen Arnold

I’ve seen more than one employment tribunal case reported in The Times (London) where the allegations include unfriendliness in the workplace attributed to the complainant’s race.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 month ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

I’ve always noticed that sprinkled in a list of words describing malice there is also ‘unfriendliness’ and ‘dislike’. Interestingly, although with similar meaning they’re not together as if the intention is to bury them. Ill-will, spite, prejudice, antagonism and resentment can all be unlearned. But dislike and unfriendliness are human rights. They’re not ‘nice’, not Christian, but they are universal human characteristics and I’d defend the right of every human to feel what they feel.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

Awhile ago, Posie Parker, the founder of Let Women Speak, said something disparaging on her YouTube show about pedophiles. Something most people would say, as pedophiles aren’t very popular. Anyway, several policemen arrived at her door to inform her that she had committed a hate crime. Apparently, a pedophile had complained about her “hateful “ comments. You just can’t make this insanity up.

Jane Awdry
Jane Awdry
1 month ago
Reply to  Claire Grey

7 years for ‘unfriendliness’…

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
1 month ago
Reply to  Dr Anne Kelley

The laws themselves, not just the sentencing, needs changing (not just reviewing). ‘Hate crime’ is oxy-moronic, a normal human emotion shouldn’t be a crime. Damage to person/property should.

Saigon Sally
Saigon Sally
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

This is utterly appalling: Tony Blair has a lot to answer for

Max More
Max More
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

You need a state-issue certificate to repair a firearm? So glad I left England in the 1980s.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

This is not dissimilar to the days when stealing a slice of bread could result in a devastating sentence.

andy young
andy young
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

2 years for FGM? TWO YEARS??? I’d throw away the bloody key.

A Robot
A Robot
1 month ago
Reply to  andy young

FGM has a maximum of 14 years. There was some earlier legislation (Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act 1985 s.1) that just referred to circumcision.

Mike Buchanan
Mike Buchanan
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

Circumcision is a prime example of societal / legal gender double standards. There have been laws against carrying out female circumcision (FGM) since the 1980s, although both FGM and male circumcision (MGM) were already implicitly crimes under the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, being at least ABH and almost certainly GBH. No exemptions to the law are permitted for cultural or religious considerations.
MGM is always harmful, anyone with any doubt on the matter might like to check out our playlist of 112-video playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjMscr0TpRqgDT–hnKe3XOKXypbM_R2K
It is long overdue for prosecutions to be brought against those mutilating the genitals of boys and baby boys (illegally, since at least 1861).
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk  
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk  
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com

Michael Meddings
Michael Meddings
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

I wonder if this friendly RoP adherent has had a knock on his door and been invited for an interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia45YXXi6po

Michael Meddings
Michael Meddings
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

I tried to post earlier but it hasn’t appeared, presumably because it contained a hyperlink so I’ll try a different method.
On Instagram “M*slim Man Harasses White Couple For Eating Pork”
I wonder if he’s had a knock on his door and been invited to an interview regarding a NCHI.
I suspect not.

David Holmes
David Holmes
1 month ago
Reply to  A Robot

(a Tory, incidentally)
One would have thought that a policing and crime commissioner would not publicly state political views. Of course, he/she/they/them/whatever is entitled to hold whatever views he/she/they/them/whatever wants, but to publicly state this suggests that their (sorry may be wrong pronoun) is politically biased. Is such a person fit for office?

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
27 days ago
Reply to  A Robot

Essex police and their criminal mason bretheren have been bent for decades, as any criminal barrister will tell you.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago

Pearson should not be defended. She posted about ‘jew-haters’ using a photo that had nothing to with pro-Palestinian demos and was about good community relations in a completely different part of the country. It’s difficult to know exactly what was going through her obviously v limited neuronal capacity, but not exactly a surprise this could look like like a racist attempt to stir up hatred. She then appears to have misled about the actual interaction with the Police when they turned up at her home not realising it was being filmed by their bodycams.
Now I don’t think Police should have been calling on her at that time of day. But she’s no free speech heroine. She’s a manipulator with some broad sweeping views about certain communities that if applied to other communities she’d get v worked up about. V poor journalist at best.
I’d pick a better example to make a separate point about bureaucracies.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

Absolutely fair criticism, but that’s the point: she should be criticised and shown to be wrong, not visited by the Police.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

The idea of totalitarianism in the UK is to prepare the way by education and then to decide that non-agreeing thoughts are evil and bad. This keeps sliding down a slippery slope until people only speak in their own houses, then in their own houses near a running tap, then neighbours who are jealous can report the non-agreers and get brownie points, perhaps better jobs in the social community.
Every year it will get worse until there is no way back – EVER.

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago

Repeal the laws. Enact a Free Speech law. The right to express an opinion at all times, in all circumstances.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago

On a serious point – right to incite violence to be included?
Not so straightforward is it.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago

She didn’t speak in her own house – she published lies!

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 month ago

People could move to Venezuela right now if they wanted this lifestyle.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago

If I may say so – total hogwash.
Fact Unherd and loads of other such media exist point in completely the opposite direction. I doubt v much you lived anywhere Totalitarian and would be running back here with totally changed perspective if you did.
It’s only liars and Grifters, not unlike the journalist we are referring to here, want to pedal that tosh.

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

We don’t know what the Telegraph reporter Alison Pearson posted, the police have not told her. What we do know is the post the Guardian thought it was was made by a different Allison Pearson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxU3a47TuZA (about 6 mins in if you don’t want to watch the whole thing)
The issue with the other Allison Pearson’s post is not the flag, which was for a deeply Anti-Semitic political party in Pakistan, but that it depicted officers from GMP and not the Met as that other Allison Pearson claimed.
Facts matter in the real world! Perhaps you should cancel your subscription to unherd and go and live in a bubble on blue sky.

j watson
j watson
1 month ago
Reply to  Adrian Smith

You’ll have noted Pearson neither denied the Post or sought to change her justification for it. Silence on the specifics. Reason being she’s already tied herself in knots telling lies and half truths. She wants the mythology to stay well ahead of the facts.
If having brought it to attention here made you a bit uncomfortable, welcome to free speech and it’s benefits

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

As the Allison Pearson who writes for the Telegraph does not know what she has been accused of, there is nothing for her to either confirm or deny. Why are you so desperate to convict her of something, no matter what it is? The fact is that many ordinary people have faced similar situation and have not had the platform to speak up against it. That is something that should make us all uncomfortable.
I am sure once Allison has had her “voluntary” interview with Essex police accompanied by a lawyer from the Free Speech Union she will update the world on what happened. Until then I would guess her lawyer has rightly advised her not to keep stirring the pot.

Caroline Ayers
Caroline Ayers
27 days ago
Reply to  j watson

I think the bigger picture is being missed here. This is a top down change being rolled out around the world. The world institutions, WHO, UN and similar bodies, are moving against free speech and towards its serious criminalisation. They want to control the internet and social media, particularly in the arena of health. They also seem to want to cause hatred between different groups and destroy successful balanced societies. It’s not good.

Gorka Sillero
Gorka Sillero
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

Of course you would be misinformed. Classic guardianista

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  j watson

Now I don’t think Police should have been calling on her at that time of day.
Precisely what time of day do you think is more appropriate for fascists to pursue their activities?

j watson
j watson
1 month ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Police are facists? Now come come HB you’ll be striding out with BLM and looney left Corbynista’s next. I had this sudden image of you as Rik in The Young One’s screaming that unintelligent phrase.
As regards time, probably could have just written to her, but then again fact they got her on bodycam counters the rest of the misleading victimhood position she tried to adopt.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
29 days ago
Reply to  j watson

Fascism as defined by Mussolini ” Everything in the state, nothing outside of the state , nothing against the state “.

Definitions of fascism – Wikipedia

Claire Grey
Claire Grey
1 month ago

Brilliantly analysed, a perceptive article, thank you Mary.
It seems to me the only answer for us as a society, for now, is to fight each battle one by one in the courts and in the public arena.
There is the Free Speech Union, thank goodness, and journalists like Mary Harrington and Douglas Murray.

Citizen Diversity
Citizen Diversity
1 month ago

One reading of Archbishop Welby’s own account in which he tried to explain himself could have it that he genuinely thought the processes and procedures would adequately deal with Smyth.
In resigning, Welby does something that bureaucracies don’t – resign. In resigning, Welby, to his credit, takes personal responsibility. The failure of the institution in this one instance is located in him. Yet as Ms Harrington observes, though the processes and procedures have disgorged the Archbishop, they will only replicate themselves further.
Another point has to be returned to. The core morality of the Church rests on the Gospel assertion that love does not wrong a neighbour. This is the unifying element. What do bureaucratic processes and procedures – inside or outside of the Church – know of love?
Welby sought fit to smooth the introduction of the Church of England’s creation of a fund to investigate its historic connections with slavery by claiming that he was motivated by the ‘presence of the risen Christ alive in the Church’.
Well, by the tonsure of St Augustine! And pace the cynics, there’s nothing less like bureaucracy than that Presence to any Christian believer (though what that presence looks like in the Church has yet to be revealed). Yet, strangely, the Archbishop could not find that presence a motivation to bring justice and liberation to those child victims of Smyth.
If Jesus of Nazareth was the victim of the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire and that of the leading council of His own nation, it rather looks like these children suffered likewise.

Peter B
Peter B
1 month ago

Welby only resigned because he had to. Not because he thought it was his duty to do so or genuinely recognised he had fallen well short of the minimum standards expected. This was not the “honourable resignation” you seem to portray it as. He’d have gone a years ago if that were really the case.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago

Very important here is recruitment into the police. These things have been getting worse since the police decided only to recruit graduates.
Graduates are easy to manipulate as part of a Thought Police – they are already taught about evil thoughts when they are at university.
Graduates have spent their lives in front of a computer. What better than to get a job sitting in front of a computer.
The worst is that the most computer-savvy police graduates will find their way into middle management. There they would have to spend even more time sitting in front of a computer. In management I guess they would have to spend a lot of time finding recruits who had the correct racial characteristics.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago

Talking of lies, the police recruitment site says “You’ll need an A level (or equivalent) in at least two subjects OR be able to demonstrate relevant experience or training that can be considered equivalent to a Level 3 qualification to apply via either of these entry routes.”

Would you like to withdraw your falsehood about police only recruiting graduates?

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

Not a lie but I will concede that police forces are different. South Wales Police, if you Google it, says ‘a third class honours degree or better”. Further away from me, Dyfed Powys Police is either a degree in any subject or joining the police ‘two-year degree apprenticeship’.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago

South Wales Police website: “To apply for the role of police constable, you will need to be aged 17 years or over (will only be appointed at the age of 18).” Not many graduates are age 18!

Dyfed Powys Police: “The Police Constable Degree Apprenticeship (PCDA) is a 3-year professional degree apprenticeship.”. So you don’t have to have a degree to join.

Get a grip and stop lying!

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

Sorry but a sponsored degree is still a degree. As is an apprenticeship degree. A degree means a certain type of person but not necessarily the type of person who can work with people in the streets.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago

Indeed, heaven forfend that our police, or even any of our youth, should actually be educated beyond school level! So one police force out of 43 (?) in the UK likes its constables to be educated – any others to back up your claim that “police decided only to recruit graduates”?

BTW I agree that many service jobs requiring ‘graduates’ do so quite unnecessarily, but I picked out what you said as such a falsehood I had to comment.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

My only problem is that everyone has to have a degree. Surely there are many jobs in the police force which don’t need a degree? You would have to pay well and there would be shifts but that doesn’t mean that it would fail.
How about a halfway house where you also offer a degree after 5 years. Then the candidate would get 5 years of policing the community and then could get a degree to further promotion prospects. Then the graduate would have developed practical ability as well and would be brilliant at the job.
Btw, no falsehood occurred. I was right. You are seeing the thing only as the police would see it. Bear in mind that thousands of people, not just me, are complaining. What are you going to do, carry on and ignore everybody?

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
1 month ago

There used to be an offence of wasting Police time, which desk sergeants would be happy to explain to malicious complainants. Now it seems that nothing is too trivial not to be dutifully written up and passed up the chain for further action.

Dr Anne Kelley
Dr Anne Kelley
1 month ago

We are always being told how stretched the police are these days. I’m sure there is truth in this but in which case, you have to wonder how they can spare eight police officers in three cars to confront a terrified autistic teenage girl in her home? And subsequently arrest her for a comment which one police woman found personally offensive.
Similarly, why does it require two people to invite Allison Pearson down to the station for a ‘voluntary’ chat?

Caroline Galwey
Caroline Galwey
1 month ago
Reply to  Dr Anne Kelley

So that they can agree on a false story about what transpired at the visit.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
Reply to  Dr Anne Kelley

If you wonder what people and organizations value and prioritize, look at what they make time to do.

Dougie Undersub
Dougie Undersub
1 month ago
Reply to  Dr Anne Kelley

They never go anywhere on their own. It’s not safe …

Adrian Smith
Adrian Smith
1 month ago

Ultimately the problem is we have lost sight of what is really important and made things that are not important equivalent to the things that used to be important.
Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt, used to be the retort to name calling. As soon as we lost sight of that and started describing the speaking or writing of words as violence we were on the slippery slope to where we are now.
We are not even at the bottom of that slippery slope, even though there are people in prison right now for saying nothing more than what we are now 99.9% certain, but the government is too scared to officially confirm it, about the Southport killer.
Scrap all speech laws and give us our own first amendment, which precludes only the genuine incitement of imminent violence.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Some crumb! But I suppose, in the Christian ethic, plenty to feast on!

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
1 month ago

You say “Kafka-esque”, but I think the journalistic go-to – certainly in the Guardian – would be “Orwellian”.
They mainly aim that accusation at “law & order Conservatives”, yet the tag would be far better applied to the “progressive Left” and their insistence we all adhere to the orthodoxy or face the consequences.
Social and New Media companies demand compliance or you’ll suffer the deletion of content, demonetizing of channels or outright bans for straying from what they deem acceptable thought. And the Government seems to be all-in on this anti-dissent agenda too.
We now have our own Police force, once the pride of Britain, acting as though the Moderators of the Guardian Comments page had formed a paramilitary wing!
As many people have found to their cost, the authorities have a hair-triggered offence-reflex in response to voicing any criticism against Islam. A misjudged joke or comment on a public platform has seen people lose their job, face social-backlash and even get a visit from our brave boys in blue – who’ll turn up in numbers (that utterly belie their claims of undermanning) to question or arrest a single private citizen.
Yet openly support the actions of a proscribed terror group and different rules apply. Anti-Israel marchers, overtly expressing support for Hamas, are allowed to celebrate murderers and genocidal terrorists, all while blaming the victims for the actions of the perpetrators. Calls for Jihad and international intifada are explained away – with Police spokesmen straining every sinew, and exploring every semantic loophole, to excuse genuine hate speech.
Stranger still, many refer to this woke orthodoxy as “The Liberal Consensus” – When there’s no “consensus” and it is, surely, the very antithesis of “liberal” thought. What could possibly be more authoritarian than promoting a narrow worldview and punishing and shaming anyone who dares to think outside it?

Terry Raby
Terry Raby
1 month ago
Reply to  Paddy Taylor

“We now have our own Police force, once the pride of Britain, acting as though the Moderators of the Guardian Comments page had formed a paramilitary wing!” Sublime

Paddy Taylor
Paddy Taylor
1 month ago
Reply to  Terry Raby

🙂

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
1 month ago

These hate-filled non-hate-crimes as thought-crimes are not exactly what Judith Butler was getting at re. definitions of historical offence in Supreme Court judgements. So what do they say about the British psychology today?
They doubtlessly speak of the post-imperial country with its inland empire where 50+ languages are spoken in Greater London schools. The key ingredients of British life are now the following as I see it:
Post-Christian mass immigration; football; situation comedy; American liberalism transmitted via the television media; and a destructive socialist healthcare bureaucracy (destructive of the private sector and now the farmers as we see).
They are add up to the worst government in British memory, produced because we now expect static 15-year governments whose principal function is to preserve the UK’s constitutional monarchy.

Santiago Saefjord
Santiago Saefjord
1 month ago

people build bureaucracies because they no longer build churches or parishes…

Kiddo Cook
Kiddo Cook
1 month ago

Bang on the money

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago

But many churches function in part as bureaucracies.

John Riordan
John Riordan
1 month ago

Brilliant article.

If you read it keeping in mind the current controversy over the assisted dying bill, it goes from worrying to terrifying.

J.P Malaszek
J.P Malaszek
1 month ago

This reminds me of meeting a friend of a friend back in 2005, I was impressed that he had a PhD in Philosophy. Later it transpired that he had just got a job reorganising training at a major British police force. I was surprised since he’d told he was a Marxist. It kind of makes sense now looking back twenty years later.

Alan Bekhor
Alan Bekhor
1 month ago

A brilliant and perceptive article. Thank you

Christopher Edwards
Christopher Edwards
1 month ago

What’s petty about it, you’ve got people serving jail time and committing suicide for telling the truth due to this traitorous government

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

Alan Sked

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

If you think England is bad, look at Scotland.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago

While here in the former colonies we had a close brush (in the current election) with the at scale institutionalization of the above Thought Police, fondly do we hope and feverently do we pray that any such effort would run smack dab into the teeth of the Second Amendment.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Fear not. Thought Police staters are licking their wounds, stocking war chests, keeping powder dry for their next assault on liberty. Insidious.

Mike Buchanan
Mike Buchanan
1 month ago

What about the Thought Police who run this website? Unherd gives a platform to numerous feminist writers but NEVER to anti-feminists who would challenge their narratives. My email to Freddie Sayers (Executive Editor) and Sally Challerton (Editor) here:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2024/11/15/why-are-freddie-sayers-and-sally-challerton-promoting-feminist-narratives-in-media-outlets-owned-by-a-christian/
Mike Buchanan
JUSTICE FOR MEN & BOYS http://j4mb.org.uk
CAMPAIGN FOR MERIT IN BUSINESS http://c4mb.uk
LAUGHING AT FEMINISTS http://laughingatfeminists.com

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago
Reply to  Mike Buchanan

You’re absolutely right. The best you can so is keep repeating this under all the feminist writers’ articles.
There is extraordinary ignorance of what gender is and how it was created by academic feminism. I have never seen a mainstream newspaper article explaining what Gender Ideology is.

Mike Buchanan
Mike Buchanan
1 month ago

Richard, thank you. Some uncomfortable (for feminists) truths bear repeating, and would be better in Unherd articles than in comments sections, but as Unherd no-platforms anti-feminists (along with the global mainstream media) here goes:
1. Trans ideology is the inevitable offshoot of feminists’ “gender is a social construct”. Professor Janice Fiamengo has written a number of excellent articles on feminism and trans ideology, including:
Meet the New Feminist Hate, Same as the Old Feminist Hate
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/meet-the-new-feminist-hate-same-as?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Single-Sex Spaces for Me, But Not for Thee
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/single-sex-spaces-for-me-but-not?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Anti-trans Feminists Are Now Reaping the Whirlwind
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/anti-trans-feminists-are-now-reaping?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Lia Thomas is the Child of Feminism
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/lia-thomas-is-the-child-of-feminism?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
2. Women are more likely to be abused by female partners than by male partners, the most violent couples are lesbian couples:
https://j4mb.org.uk/2022/12/09/are-women-more-likely-to-be-abused-in-lesbian-or-heterosexual-relationships/
Why does Bindel never write about women abused by women? Does she not care about these women, or does their existence undermine her career as a feminist propagandist?
3. The Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK) https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/ was published in May 2013 in the journal Partner Abuse and is the most comprehensive review of domestic violence research ever carried out. This unparallelled three-year research project was conducted by 42 scholars at 20 universities and research centres. The headline finding of the PASK review was that:
“Men and women perpetrate physical and non-physical forms of abuse at comparable rates, most domestic violence is mutual, women are as controlling as men, domestic violence by men and women is correlated with essentially the same risk factors, and male and female perpetrators are motivated for similar reasons.”
A key numerical result from the PASK review was:
“Among large population samples, 57.9% of intimate-partner violence (IPV) reported was bi-directional, 42.1% unidirectional, 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male-to-female, 28.3% was female-to-male.”
The last point is worth emphasising. In the 42.1% of (heterosexual) couples in which one partner is always the perpetrator and the other the victim, the woman is TWICE as likely to be the perpetrator and (therefore) half as likely to be the victim.

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago
Reply to  Mike Buchanan

Your point 3. is news to me.
Regarding 1. I don’t agree. Feminists, led by Butler, moved on to and adopted transgender quite cynically, and practically, to support their own agenda.
It is fascinating. It is all clearly documented. It is easy to set out and explain. But Unherd, like the other publications you mentioned, will not allow anyone to write about this.
It is also tragic because the gender troublemakers continue teaching gender to young children to this day. I know why they do this, what motivates them, and others know too, but no one will publish this in the mainstream press.

Mike Buchanan
Mike Buchanan
1 month ago

Thanks Richard. All the points fly in the face of longstanding and relentless and unchallenged feminist narratives, which helps explain why the refusal of Unherd (and the global mainstream media, for that matter) to give a platform to anti-feminist commentators is so scandalous.
Apart from anything else, anti-feminist narratives are now familiar to untold millions of people, who must be putting Unherd – along with two other British media outlets (The Spectator, GB News) owned or co-owned by Sir Paul Marshall, a Christian – in the same category as the Guardian, BBC etc. in relation to gender matters in general, and feminism in particular.

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago
Reply to  Mike Buchanan

I agree. No one questions the feminist narrative. Whenever I try to do it, I always get the same response. 1. You are attacking women. (I am not) 2. What you are describing is not Feminism. (It is.)

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
29 days ago
Reply to  Mike Buchanan

An average man is stronger and has stronger bones than the average woman, especially power generated by hitting with hands . Consequently the average man can do more damage with a single blow from the hand( slapping, punching, etc ) to a woman than a woman to a man. This is why women should undertake any sport especially contact sports with men.
Women can nag and ridicule men but this is not physical violence.

Terry M
Terry M
1 month ago

Brilliant, as usual.
Grievance procedures, HR departments, safeguarding, and so on all formalise governance in some aspect of public social and moral life in which we no longer agree on the common good, and hence don’t trust those in power to pursue that good.
The US, being more litigous, would be expected to have more problems than Britain; perhaps DEI encompasses (-ed?) that.
Bureaucrats and other petty tyrants like to enforce the ‘letter of the law’ even when it is counter to the ‘spirit of the law.’ Common sense is uncommon.

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago

A feeble article. This has nothing to do with bureaucracy. Everything to do with law. Everything to do with the Left’s politicising hate.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago

Law and bureaucracy are identical twins. As you say, left weaponizes both.

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago
Reply to  mike flynn

Bureaucracy follows law, acts within it. Remove non-crime from the law and there would be no bureaucracy of non-crime.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
1 month ago
Reply to  mike flynn

Bureaucracy administers the law. For there to be change the law has to change. Bureaucrats are essentially sheep and will enact whatever the law tells them to – with greater or lesser enthusiasm according to their political leanings, but they will still do it.

Tony Price
Tony Price
1 month ago

Hold on – if you ‘tweet’ you have written something and then published it – rather more than just thinking it eh?

And Ms Pearson found a photograph then wrote a whole bunch of total falsehoods about it in a very nasty way – so someone complained, unsurprisingly, and the police investigated. What’s the problem?

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

Problem is – why? Another is this specious persecution applied to all alleged transgression equally?

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
Reply to  Tony Price

The tweet you’re referring to was not written by Alison Pearson

Erik Hildinger
Erik Hildinger
1 month ago

An excellent and perceptive essay.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
1 month ago

If only people had warned about this. Oh, wait; they did warn about this. And too many people stuck their hands in the sand, pretending that it would all go away. Except it hasn’t. A certain dystopian author talked about stuff like this in a book or two that all the right people were sure would never happen in real life.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Been wondering for a while when Kafka and Orwell get banned or burned. I guess dumbing down education has same effect, and leave the books on the shelves, unread.

Gillian Johnstone
Gillian Johnstone
1 month ago
Reply to  mike flynn

Exactly. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one”.

b blimbax
b blimbax
1 month ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Τα χέρια τους στην άμμο, ή μήπως τα κεφάλια;

Richard Littlewood
Richard Littlewood
1 month ago

How many people approve of a law whereby a Facebook comment can lead to 2 1/2 years in prison?
It is bizarre how many people accept this and approve of it!
Anyone who approves or such a law is welcoming thought-control and thought-crime. It’s putting your hands out and asking to be handcuffed.
I don’t understand English people.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
1 month ago

in January 1933 the German people elected a certain insignificant, wholly unqualified little Austrian to lead their nation: the rest, as the old saying goes, is history, yet the same Britain, who laid down the lives of so many to rid the world of his regime, sacrificing its economy, has now followed a chilling parallel in our last election.

As I have said on this medium before, for the first time since Cromwell, in 1974 Britain came within days of a revolution, post to a meeting of powerful people held in a wine company cellar beneath St James’s Street, including at least one member of The Royal Family: in 1969 we saw insurrection on the streets in Northern Ireland, that led to decades of ” civilian war”…… We in Britain are perilously close to both past events, as a democratically elected National Socialist government turns nu britn into a sinister mirror of East Germany, with no legal means of halting their extreme movement to a totalitarian, dystopian and draconian state, aided by police who are out of both control and any desire to remain accountable.

Martin M
Martin M
1 month ago
Reply to  Francis Turner

Say what you like about Starmer, but he isn’t a “wholly unqualified little Austrian”.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
29 days ago
Reply to  Martin M

No, a very mediocre DPP because Labour wanted such a person as DPP.

Warren Trees
Warren Trees
1 month ago

Bureaucratising, managerialism, HR-ification.
The antidote is a Trump.

Barry Dank
Barry Dank
1 month ago
Reply to  Warren Trees

And what is the antidote to Trump? Trump fully embraces bureaucratism accompanied by his cadres of lawyers. Trump never publicly embraces some form of personal responsibility.

Max More
Max More
1 month ago

“One vital function of bureaucracy is as a substitute for social trust.” I would put it more strongly: Bureaucracy directly destroys social trust. The growth of the bureaucratic state has led to the decline of voluntarism. Most people have not read the relevant history and believe that only the state can accomplish (badly and at great expense) many things that were handled voluntarily and with trust in times page.

JR Hartley
JR Hartley
1 month ago

“outcry”? What outcry? Only in the “right wing press” (“far right hate rags”) has there been an outcry. The Graun has instead been victim-blaming Pearson for daring to speak, and “cause offence”.

mike flynn
mike flynn
1 month ago

Call it liberty. Call it personal responsibility. Call it live thy neighbor. Whatever it’s called, it’s what we need to bury “managerialism”

William Shaw
William Shaw
1 month ago

The root of this issue is the belief by the police that their job is to control and regulate the attitudes of individuals towards each other.
In attempting to solve one problem by passing laws the government inevitably creates two new ones.

Jerry Carroll
Jerry Carroll
1 month ago

Splendid article. I told you travel is broadening and here is proof. Britain is taking on an ominious darkness in the view from this side of the pond. It is significant that Trump is emphasizing the need to reduce bureaucratic and managerial authority because great evil has been committed in their name. The never-ending wars waged by the military-industrial complex are an example as is the relentless unspooling of regulatory red tape to smother individual decision making. Trump knows first hand what it is like to be the prey of the centralizing trend always present in government. They even took a shot at him to get him out of the way. In a speech yesterday he said Russia is not the enemy, the deep state is. His appointees are saying a great deal about the evil to be found in the innards of a secularized government beyond the reach of punishment or correction. Taming the bureaucratic overloards will not be easy, it will be a close run thing if Trump doesn’t move fast.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 month ago

I remember in one of my jobs my manager saying to me that someone had complained about me, but I was not to be told who, or when, or about what: but please don’t do it again.
So I pointed out the difficulties with complying. Fortunately, I had a manager who grasped how nonsensical this was.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
1 month ago

In a previous job my manager told me that someone had made a complaint against me, and that I shouldn’t do it again. My manager would not reveal the identity of the complainant, the date of the incident, or its nature. I just asked, “If I don’t know what it is, how do I know if I’ve avoided doing it again?” Long pause, then, “Let’s have a coffee.” End of discussion.

andy young
andy young
1 month ago

Things can only get worse. Starmer is a lawyer, & sees everything through the lens of legality.
He has no moral sense, no moral compass. Hence he sees nothing wrong in receiving donations worth tens of thousands, but considers it right to lock up people for expressing the ‘wrong’ opinions. Furthermore it enables him to turn on a sixpence when it comes to making promises – no legal comeback, so nothing to see here; it also follows from his lawyer’s mindset that he is not concerned with truth or lies, justice or injustice, but with making a case that he can win. As a Prime Minister he is, & will continue to be, an unmitigated disaster.

Michael Semeniuk
Michael Semeniuk
1 month ago

The bureaucrats enforce those laws, but your elected officials put, or left them in, them in place. Including the Tories. It’s very sad to see freedom of speech die in the UK and hard to see how you’re much different from Russia or Red China..

M L Hamilton Anderson
M L Hamilton Anderson
1 month ago

The UK is going down a very long (internationally embarassing) drain in to censorship and authoritarianism. We need Nigel Farage and his Reform team to do ” a chain saw Milei”.

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
1 month ago

Excellent piece.

Bird
Bird
1 month ago

You are right on-point Mary.

Chipoko
Chipoko
1 month ago

Let it not be overlooked that the NCHI system was introduced ten years ago by the Tory government! They created the police-state and heaped the woke revolution upon us all. Labour will undoubtedly worsen this hell; but it was the Tory administration that dumped on us all.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
29 days ago
Reply to  Chipoko

Who are utterly clueless as to understanding the infiltration of Cultural Marxism into the UK.

William Amos
William Amos
1 month ago

The church should know, even more than others, that legalism and formalism are quite as susceptible to corruption and abuse as is individual discernment.
Matthew 23 deals with the subject in the most piercing, memorable and spiritually powerful terms.
One can only conclude that our church leaders do not understand sin, even as they do not understand death.

Andrew Boughton
Andrew Boughton
1 month ago

Brilliant! ‘And these openings prove difficult to close because the process resists those individuals whose moral sense remains functional enough to see and protest them’. What all of this highlights is that far from a genuine interest in liberalism, modern progressivism is merely the use of abstract political ideas as weapons by righteous malcontents, the false-consciousness Marxists. Whose ‘morality’ consists of the Hellfire-and-Damnation brand of secular radicalism. Sublimated instinctual authoritarianism disguised as enlightenment.

Mister Smith
Mister Smith
1 month ago

Hello from a Yank. Reading this article and the insightful comments truly makes me reluctant to ever visit the UK. To voluntarily visit a country that can arrest people for “wrongthink” seems unwise, and unworthy of one’s time or money. These words could indeed warrant investigation as “unfriendly” under your non-crime hate crime code. However, can’t I state my opinion?

C C
C C
26 days ago
Reply to  Mister Smith

I realise that you may not want to visit as a tourist but perhaps as part of an army of liberation ?

Andrew Holmes
Andrew Holmes
1 month ago

As a (retired) bureaucrat in the US for many years, I have some worm’s eye perspectives on the problems. My intention here is to suggest it isn’t simple.
We enforced a huge number of laws and rules that often made no sense to the people who ran afoul of them. The mantra was, we don’t make them, we just enforce them. We were the bad guys, not the legislators and high-level bureaucrats who wrote them. No problem: implementing our instructions was the correct thing to do, far superior to us making up what we thought reasonable as we went along.
There was some slack. Supervisors could look at the risk/benefit equation and allow some procedural slop, just to keep things moving along. One particular type of transaction was handled as low-risk multiple times, until, at last, it wasn’t. It turned out to be 110 lbs. of heroin. Please consider this when you’re dealing with a rigid fool who is apparently devoid of any common sense.

Dee Harris
Dee Harris
29 days ago

” according to The Guardian, the individual who made the [Pearson allegation] is a “public servant”. And for such an individual, their understanding of how the machinery operates, means they can easily weaponise it.”
Which probably accounts for the left-wingers causing the majority of ‘hate crime’ reports going after right wingers. Vote Reform.

Francis Turner
Francis Turner
27 days ago

In my experience, The police are woefully undertrained, badly led, unfit, and due to the neo zero required ” qualifications” attract a very low form of individual: their understanding of the laws that that they are ostensibly there to enforce, is not only pathetic, but they make up and invent ‘ laws’ as they wish.

The on the ground command and control, as seen so many times on media camera during ‘ contact” incidents displays the opposite to that in the army platoon/ section system.

nasty, chippy bullies appear drawn to Gestaplod like moths to a light. I have never met a single plod who I would have had in my Foot Guards platoon, not least because they would have not survived basic training.

Chipoko
Chipoko
27 days ago

I live in a UK market town of c.10,000 residents and worked in a county capital city, itself a major UK tourist destination of c.95,000. In neither place have i seen a Bobby-On-The-Beat for 30+ years. The only occasional glimpse we have of our police locally is when they whizz by in their chequered cars largely invisible behind tinted windscreens. I suspect this is universal in the UK.
Now we know why. The cops are deployed on their bums monitoring computer screens to spy on our social media posts and ferret out any instances of hate crime or non-crime-hate-incidents [NCHIs]. OK, they may also monitoring similar screens to monitor terrorism, especially of the Far Right, fascist type. But hate crime and NCHIs against any people judged to have ‘protected characteristics’! Seriously? I wonder how many people share my diminished faith in and respect for the UK police?

Dr. G Marzanna
Dr. G Marzanna
27 days ago

The majority of us don’t accept this but the woke are willing to fight to the last tooth, ruining peoples careers and lives.
The pushback will be brutal.

Caroline Ayers
Caroline Ayers
27 days ago

Brilliant stuff Mary! Thank you!

rick stubbs
rick stubbs
27 days ago

From a U.S. perspective this is Orwellian. You all need a bill of rights…

Andrew F
Andrew F
27 days ago

Everyone is accusing Welby of responsibility in the abuse case but maybe author should check article by Charles Moore in Spectator explaining why it is not the case.
Main reason being, if I recall correctly, that perpetrator was not employed by the Church of England.
The idea of NCHI is basically attempt by establishment to stop discussion of negative aspects of mass immigration and multi-culti.

Steve Gwynne
Steve Gwynne
26 days ago

“We still know wickedness when we see it — even the kind inflicted via procedures that were meant to save us from ourselves.”

Mary has captured the machinations of the Woke Panopticon (Equality Act + Human Rights Act) very well. It allows passive aggressive behaviour to thrive. The process is the punishment.