July 7, 2021 - 7:00am
Most of you are probably unaware that there is a football tournament going on right now, and that on today England play Denmark.
Presumably everyone will want Denmark to win; having lost their first two games, and with their star player almost dying on the pitch, they have the best story arc of any football champions since, well, Denmark won it in 1992.
But there are lots of other reasons to cheer on this small Scandinavian country, which is remarkable in many ways.
1. It’s the least corrupt country in the world
Danish diplomats at the UN in New York always used to pay their parking fines, which is often used as a test of how corrupt a political culture is, since until 2002 diplomats didn’t have to.
2. It is the second happiest country on earth
(And male suicides have almost halved in a decade).
3. The Danes are very impressive at infrastructure building…
… and now they’re going to build an enormous artificial island in Copenhagen. In Britain that would take us 80 years to get done.
4. Copenhagen is the best place to cycle
As with Amsterdam, this was the result of a conscious decision taken in the 1970s when car use was at its highest point — as were road deaths. They built hundreds of miles of segregated cycle lanes and the majority of people cycle to work…
5. … and when they get there Danes work very few hours, which might explain:
Absolutely loving the straight inverse correlation between level of prosperity and hours worked pic.twitter.com/QbvazuYneB
— Thomas Escritt (@tomescritt) June 20, 2021
6. King Canute
Probably one of our finest kings; sure he was bloodthirsty and ruthless in his youth, and cut off some people’s ears in Kent and blinded some other people, but he grew up to be a wise and effective ruler of Denmark, Norway and England.
Also, his point about telling the waves to go back was probably a joke on his sycophants, but one that backfired spectacularly.
7. Vikings
The Danes conquered England in 1016 but they probably fought on the English side at the Battle of Hastings. There is some evidence to suggest that the king of Denmark was alarmed enough about the Normans that he sent troops to help King Harold. There were, of course, hundreds of “settled Danes”, the descendants of Vikings who had settled in the Danelaw and whom by now were becoming English. King Harold himself had a Danish mother. More famously, Viking settlements in Yorkshire and the east Midlands had a huge influence on our language.
8. It ‘punched above its weight’ historically
For a tiny country, Denmark had a surprisingly big empire, with colonies in India, and the Caribbean (Alexander Hamilton grew up in the Danish island of St Croix). Iceland was still a colony until 1918, while Greenland still is. The Faroe Islands voted for independence but they never got around to actually leaving.
9. However…
… imperialism aside, Denmark was the first country to abolish the slave trade, in 1792.
10. Renewables
Yes, it’s boring but Denmark is a world leader in wind power — almost half of its energy now comes from the renewable source.
11. Trust
Denmark is such a high trust society that mothers leave their prams outside restaurants — with their babies inside. In Britain, social services would be on your case for that.
12. Even more trust
Likewise, it’s far more common for children to walk around unaccompanied there, while here you’d assume they were feral “hoodies” about to pull a knife on you. (Okay, maybe that’s just me).
13.
Lego.
14. The men are very popular!
In the 10th century it was observed how Englishwomen weren’t entirely put off by Viking men, who unlike the English washed their hair. Today it seems Danish men are still something of an attraction, providing “almost half of all non-British male reproductive material imported into the country”, in the poetic language of the fertility industry.
15. On a more serious note…
… England fans are not shy of mentioning a certain 20th century conflict, but Denmark’s story under Nazi occupation is remarkable, as Dominic Sandbrook narrates in his excellent new children’s book on the Second War:
At the end of September, the Danish leaders had a word with the Jews’ religious leader, the Chief Rabbi. On the morning of the 29th, the Rabbi told his congregation that they should go home, pack their bags and tell their friends. The Danes would take care of the rest. Two days later, when the SS burst into Jewish homes in the capital, Copenhagen, they found them deserted. The occupants had vanished. All over the country, ordinary people had taken Jewish families into their homes, hiding them in cellars and attics, back rooms and summer houses. Like their King, they saw it as ‘a human and a national duty’ to help their neighbours in their hour of need.
The vast majority of the country’s population reached safety in Sweden, brought over by ordinary Danish men and women, who had got together in an extraordinary fashion.
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Subscribeshe’s not stepping down and she didn’t get fired following the Daniel Morgan inquiry which found the MET to be ‘institutionally corrupt’ with Dame Cressida personally censured for obstruction . She’s the modern establishment through and through, says all the correct Guardian / BBC talking points, meanwhile knife crime soars. She is more interested in policing hurt feelings than stopping or solving crimes. The MET is rotten this case has showed they cant even vet their own officers properly.
BTW, Dame Cressida is not liked by the Guardian
I don’t disagree with your sentiments. However, the question remains. Why has she not been forced to resign? She is the obvious scapegoat that could be sacrificed so that the Met continues as before, unreformed, corrupt and criminal. The only feasible answer is that she knows where bodies are buried. Might that include the truth behind the murder of de Menezes ?
…more likely the truth behind the Tory/Establishment “paedophile ring” that not only wasn’t, but was probably deliberately confected by the Labour Left…although why a Tory Home Secretary is backing her is a mystery…
She was involved in that too.
So Menezes, Carl Beech and now Sarah Everard: there is nothing a lesbian can do that’s so bad it gets her fired.
This is just bizarre. I would love to know what the met could have done differently to stop this guy.
His own wife had no idea he was capable of anything like this.
Why does someone at the Met have to ‘pay’ – just to make people feel better? The person responsible for this will never see the light of day.
I think as smarter people than me have pointed out that liberalism paradoxically leads to god being replaced by the state. An omnipotent creator is replaced with an omnipotent administrator an illusion of god like powers is projected onto institutions.
This spiritual attitude is now completely widespread in society and the media. They have delusions about the competency of human institutions because of a lack of understanding of the tragedy of life.
It maybe harder to accept that sometimes you can do almost everything right and something terrible still happens – but just because this is hard doesn’t stop it being true.
Well said.
They could have sacked him for the indecent exposure incident in 2015 or the flashing incident 3 days before he murdered Sarah Everard, for example.
If that’s true then then should have prosecuted him with the fullest force of the law. It’s a double crime, the first for the crime itself and the second for the abuse of a position of responsibility.
These were not officially “incidents”, they were alleged to have happened, that’s all. Only now can we surmise they were probably true.
One of the incidents was recorded on CCTV
I think there is some truth in this. The death of God has led to the elevation of the state to replace him. Likewise, no longer believing in an after-life leads to a preoccupation with extending this one ad-infinitum and the growing fetishisation of ‘safety.’
Completely agree with you. The abolishment of God means we set ourselves or others up in His place.
There is lots of evidence that Couzens was a bad’un e.g. exposing himself, swapping extreme pornography and even that fact he was called ‘the rapist’ by colleagues (all listed in articles on the BBC web site no less).
As for Cressida d**k, she is at the centre of many errors by the Met Police e.g. the Jean DeMenendes shooting. The woman is a walking train wreck.
It is clear to anyone by d**k that discipline in the Met Police under her command is non-existant.
Waving down a bus! It’s difficult enough to get them to stop at a bus stop if their timetable is out of line.
I agree with Joan Smith here. This is a failing so bad that it has torn the very fabric of our society. Sacking the idiotic and utterly incompetent Cressida (I am not allowed to type her surname…LOL) should be just the beginning. There then needs to be held a thorough investigation in to what the Police should be via a vis what the Police have become. Years of stupid, woke and nonsensical policies have taken focus away from real crime and allowed this ghastly state of affairs to have unfolded.
She was also in charge of the operation that killed Jean Charles de Menezes. She should have been sacked then.
Not sure that is fair to Dame Cressida. The firearms officers were clearly sent into the tube with orders to liquidate Jean-Charles de Menezes on sight, but the people to blame are those who briefed them, and/or those who set the general guidelines for using firearms in a a terrorist situation. Dame Cressida did neither, AFAIK.
Of course it is a scandal that the police decided after de Menezes that no one made any mistakes, there were no need to change any procedures, and in short they had every intention of acting the same way next time. But if there are no consequences when the police kill the wrong person ‘by mistake’, why do we get so het up because there was a single criminal in the police?
“But if there are no consequences when the police kill the wrong person ‘by mistake’, why do we get so het up because there was a single criminal in the police?“
Because there were no consequences from one massive f!!k up, we should NOT be concerned about a subsequent one? Well, that’s how it reads.
I can see your point – it is a line of argument I generally abhor. But I think there is a disproportionate reaction in this case, compared to de Menezes. Granted, it is scary to feel that the next policeman who stops you might be a rapist. But how big a ‘f!!k up’ was this? Do we even know? There can be rapists in any profession – including policemen. Cousens had clearly never done it before. So, did he give clear signs that he was a likely violent criminal, ahead of time? Should he have been investigated or fired on what was known back then – and how many (hundreds?) of other policemen would have triggered the same flags without proceeding to rape anybody? Of course this should be investigated, to see what can be done better next time. But we ought to wait to react till we know the answers.
Why such a big reaction, then? No minister gave interviews about guaranteeing that ‘this should never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen again‘ after Jean Charles de Menezes – or John Worboys. An important reason, IMHO is that this fits into an existing agenda. There are people who already want to change police culture, recruit different people to the police (which people, and from where?), change the power relationships inside the force (to favour whom?) massively increase the resources given to rape cases (and take them from where?). and generally move towards a more feminist society. And so this rape case is a useful handle to push for changes that people already want fo other reasons.
The important thing of course is she went to the right school and university and knows the right people.
Some years ago I socialised with a good number of Met police officers. Some were great guys, but some we always thought were attracted by the uniform and the power it gave them. They really should not have been police officers. Human nature being what it is, I have no reason to believe this has changed.
So we mustn’t recruit police officers who are attracted by the uniform and the power it gives them. How’s that going to work?
It works by putting applicants through a thorough psychological assessment that weeds out people who are seeking the job for the wrong reasons and should not be allowed to carry weapons have authority over other people. Not a perfect system but better than not doing anything.
And once she’s gone can we replace her with someone that won’t just set all their PC PCs at their PCs to make sure we are all being PC?
she’s not stepping down and she didn’t get fired following the Daniel Morgan inquiry which found the MET to be ‘institutionally corrupt’ with Dame Cressida personally censured for obstruction . She’s the modern establishment through and through, says all the correct Guardian / BBC talking points, meanwhile knife crime soars. She is more interested in policing hurt feelings than stopping or solving crimes. The MET is rotten this case has showed they cant even vet their own officers properly.
There is an interesting lecture by Tom Ricks arguing that theUS army was more effective in WW2 because Marshall was willing to move Generals who weren’t succeeding or had lost the confidence of their troops and often redeploy them where they would be a better fit.
Unfortunately there is a reluctance to move senior police officers even when they are not succeeding. That said Cressida D.should probably not have reached the rank she occupies because of previous failures but is not really responsible for the failures to identify Sarah Everard’s killer as unsuitable to continue as an officer. In any case had he been dismissed from the force there was nothing to prevent him using a fake warrant card to carry out his abduction and murder.
In France they have recently identified an ex-police officer as a serial killer, so it’s not just a Met problem.
Apparently, one of the reasons for not replacing Cressida D.is that the next obvious choice is even more of a woke obsessed nightmare.
I used to have a connection with Metropolitan Police Recruitment. It was acknowledged that quite a high proportion of applicants were further towards the criminal end of the aggression scale than was desirable. On the whole, they tried hard to filter them out. Of course, you do need a certain amount of aggression and mental toughness to deal with the grim events that the police cope with, so it’s a hard balance.
I do feel, though, that if I had worked in an organisation where someone was nicknamed, openly, ‘the rapist’ – and not as sarcasm- I would have raised this with my bosses and they would have certainly been concerned.
It will take more than sacking one person to effect change.
And while I don’t wish to belittle your concerns as a woman, it isn’t just women who are being let down by our police force.
I have no insight in the work and/or leadership of the C. d**k but asking to sack somebody does not always solve the issue. Should we not consider that ‘she will take the blame’ is sent away and somebody else comes in and nothing changes if she is sacked…??. Bad habits in the police will sadly not change overnight, they change little by little over sad events as the ones discussed here: society asking questions .. It is never just, fair or right, it is the always a too slow evolution for the better (sometimes) of our society.
Obviously the Met Police like other forces has many problems, most of which go back many years. But this knee-jerk ‘sack someone’ is a rather depressing if all-too-common reaction. Just rearrange the deck chairs.
This article is an amazing combination of woke idiocy and some sensible thoughts.
The “vanishingly small” conviction rate is because these crimes are very hard to prove in an objective way, unless we throw out due process and “#believeallwomen”. Given that there are women who are crazy/vindictive/criminal and those who think that being whistled at is the same as being held at gunpoint and raped, convicting every man who is accused is a bad approach.
The other trope here is using anecdotes to make it sound like abusive, criminal, misogynist police are more common than not. To actually mean anything one needs a denominator. I can give lots of anecdotes of horrible car accidents. Are they “common”?
Perhaps a good way to work towards better policing is to realize that most police are decent folks working in a supercharged political environment trying their damndest to do a reasonable job. Start there, point out the bad apples, and leave the rhetoric aside.
You may be right, but we don’t know. However, this comes over as a little bit like the whining of the so-called victims whom I (and probably you) abhor.