Thinking of all those in the capital who are having to just get on with life today the best way they can.
It’s hard not to give in to hate when people rush to use tragedy to score political points, while doctors and nurses are desperately trying to save lives but we are better than those people.
Farage, Hopkins, Trump Minor and Pauline Hanson have been at the top of their game today. Odious scumbags every one.
I’ve just told the offspring to stay safe, which is a fatuous thing to say really, when any car can mow you down at any time. But they assured me they would, so I feel a little better anyway.
I know it’s a waste of time and energy and pointless but I read Katie Hopkins’ reaction in the Fail last night and had to get up and walk around, breathing deeply for a few minutes.
What a shameless, disgusting creature she is. I know her wicked witch schtick is a construct to attract clicks and generate traffic and outrage namby-pamby vague liberals like me, but my God, really.
She’s also the most powerfully fucking THICK person in British public life. Let’s just remember that all she is, is a stupid sociopath who didn’t win a reality show once. She has no imagination, no class, no understanding of anything. But she gives bigots cover to say awful things out loud – that’s her only function. To pander to the worst in human nature and give people permission to say and think reprehensible things.
As someone on Twitter said this morning – hell yawns for her, Farage and Tommy Robinson.
I take no notice of her whatsoever, sparing myself the grief you all seem to experience by paying her the complement of reading her crap. Just move on.
Up. I have little concept of what she is or what she says, but it seems weird that in the aftermath of a terrorist attack everybody hates a person who had nothing to do with it.
It’s a bit like being unexpectedly stabbed by a stranger on your way home, and then having a member of your own family tell you that you deserved it, even as the doctors are still assessing the damage. You can be aggrieved with both parties.
It’s not like that. It’s like being stabbed by a stranger and a passer-by yelling something mean at you from the other side of the road. You can be irritated at the passer-by but you’ve got more to think about than chasing them down the street and having it out with them.
I’ll stop here, though, else I’ll be falling into the trap of talking about Katie Hopkins and that’s precisely what I don’t want to do.
Fine, use your simile then. Unless you’re spectacularly incapable of multi tasking, you’d still be annoyed with both people.
I take the broader point re: Hopkins, who makes a living out of this stuff. I do think it’s profoundly irresponsible of the Mail to have published it though.
BBC and Guardian both reported on her recent libel case. And every newspaper in the land seemed to be (rightly) outraged at her comparing refugees to cockroaches a while back.
Not heard of her anywhere. I suspect a state of Hopkins indignation high readiness at work. She thrives on people seeing what she said so they can be angry about it you know. Just ignore her.
No, I think the whole “don’t feed the trolls” way of thinking is just a wee bit too easy. Provocateurs need challenging sometimes. Bigotry needs challenging.
Well, to my knowledge, she doesn’t post here, so it’s all there is. But she gets plenty of push-back elsewhere.
Anyway, I’m not sure “moaning” is the right word. Like Bingo says above, it’s perfectly possible and non-contradictory to be disgusted with both the attacker (who is beneath contempt) and the foaming mob of twats who are so clearly loving this opportunity to push their bigotry.
I suspect the attacker and the foaming mob of twats would actually discover they have plenty of common ground, were they ever to sit down over a drink or two. They certainly share both an enemy and a target.
Oh I agree, I was just messin’. I don’t like her either but I don’t waste emotional headroom on her. I have plenty of other more important things to be pissed off about than some dull troll.
I think Jack Monroe showed it was possible. You can’t shame trolls like her but she’s facing a very large bill.
From time to time I’ll engage in a bit of keyboard indignation. Maybe it makes no difference, but sometimes it’s all there is. I’m sending a few quid to Stop Funding Hate too. All in all it’s not much but it’s a little something.
And as so often happens in situations like this, I am always moved, usually to near tears, by the reactions of people. The Police Officer; the workers from the hospital who just ran out to help, according to the reports that I read; the Minister who was trying so hard to save life on the spot.
It’s nearly impossible to stop a single crazed person in a large city like London. It is a price that we pay when we want to live in a free society.
The story isn’t about the attack, or the perpetrator. It’s about how ordinary people react.
Like the man said – “look for the helpers”. There are always helpers.
I’m particularly moved by the people who run towards danger at times like this. (I hope I might have the stones to do the same, but who knows until you’re tested? I’m not at all confident I wouldn’t just look to my own skin.) But huge admiration for the police and emergency workers and, yeah, Tobias Ellwood. A bit like the banality of evil, something I always find powerful is the mundanity of heroism. It just happens. There aren’t any low-angle shots against the setting sun, rousing music, slo-mo helicopters overhead. Just men and women who went to work that morning thinking it was a normal day, and found themselves helping people to not die.
“London is a city so desperate to be seen as tolerant, no news of the injured was released… an entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And Dumb.”
“We are taken under the cold water by this heavy right foot in the South, a city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most”.
“The war is between London and the rest of the country”.
Printed in one of the nation’s most popular newspapers, before the bodies are even cold.
Thankfully, London has plentiful prior experience of dealing with noisy fascists, of all stripes. Completely normal commute to work this morning, life goes on. Nobody in the office is talking about it, nobody mentioned it at the school gate as we, the monkeys, watched our little mob of multi-racial, interfaith children go trooping into class, seemingly oblivious. No one’s taught these kids how to hate each other yet, but maybe a few of them will read the Mail one day.
Meanwhile, these columnists can pen their essays from the security of the Home Counties, telling us all how we should respond, what we should feel, and how our multiculturalism and our Muslim mayor means we deserved this. Hate preachers like any other.
We’ll just get on with living in one of the world’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities, we’ll shoulder the actual security threat, and we’ll continue to set an example of fortitude and tolerance.
And let us not forget that London in 2017 is continuing the city’s long multi-cultural tradition. One of my favourite songs about my old home town was written in the 50s by Lord Kitchener from Trinidad.
Kitch and his calypso contemporaries were very conscious of the friendly way people treated them in London compared to their experiences in the USA.
You’ll be pleased to hear that that odious witch who writes for the Mail is completely unknown here in Sweden.
As far I know (I may be wrong here) her opinions did not get much coverage in the Swedish media. That quote sounds like the kind of thing one reads on the neo-fascist hate sites here.
Swedish multi-culturalism is alive and well, despite the very real problem of gang violence in some areas of the big cities.
I had to shut down Twitter and Facebook last night as they were making a bad day considerably worse. After the misinformation and speculation, and the obvious trolls, my screen was full of righteous angels gleefully condemning any comment they deemed to be inappropriate, inadequate or insincere. I’m not sure which depressed me more. Anything other than a fumbling attempt to express sincere condolences for those involved seemed like opportunism somehow. Then I realised that judging the judgemental made me one of them, and that’s the point where I walked away from the laptop.
I’m of the opinion that Kunty Katie should be fitted with a Gimp Mask (mouth stretched wide open type) and manacled to the railings in the middle of Westminster Bridge for a period of 28 days wearing a large sign around her neck saying “Oops! Me and my big mouth!”.
At exactly 14:40 each day she could be used as a target for competitive spitting tournaments.
How sad. Knowing @LandoCakes a tiny bit, I know that his motive for the OP will have been genuine sadness, compassion and a desire to give others a chance to voice their feelings. And what happens? It descends into a discussion about katiefuckinghopkins, ffs.
A perfect piece of music and, for what it’s worth, I was getting angry yesterday with Sky News. Illogical, I know, but, hey, have you ever met me? They continued it this morning, interviewing MP’s, the Mayor, and security experts, goading all of them to admit that we cannot defend against this kind of attack. We all fucking know that, you idiots. What do you want Sadiq Khan to do? Throw his hands up, scream his head off and provoke mass panic, yelling ‘we’re all doomed, doomed d’yer hear’?
The lovely words that were written by a Tube employee, on the usual notice-board, (I’ve seen them, in a few tube stations, where they have sane, humorous, well meaning staff – handwritten homilies, or kind words that, for a second, make you smile, make you think about something nice, for once in your day,) were read out in Parliament this morning? A Sky employee tweets that it’s a fake sign, generated on an app, and social media descends into another snipe-fest.
People of the media. The one thing we Londoners* want to do today is to feel a little bit good about life, about ourselves, about our situation. And all some of you want to do is drag us down into your mire, your pit, your hell. Where there is never good news, never nice, ordinary people, never any positive.
I have binned a gig at The Borderline tonight, because I am shattered, still struggling with last year’s illness. But, jeez, I feel guilty. I pray that everyone else with a ticket to Jarrod Dickenson’s gig turns up, that he isn’t playing to a half-empty room, and that they whoop and holler like it’s NY Eve. I feel bad enough about not going, without Jarrod feeling that us Londoners were all talk, and no action.
Rambling rant over. Be safe, be nice to people. Thank a policeman.
*Yes, I live in leafy Berkshire, but I’m a Londoner, okay?
Excellent post @niallb.
As you know I am a Brummie but go down to London enough to have a real affinity with the city which I do believe to be the World’s finest.
The media coverage was complete vomit. Even the BBC went completely over the top and everyone was asking the most ridiculous questions. Reducing the coverage would surely lessen the appearance that we are giving oxygen to and glorying in this horror.
Everything is apocalyptic – its almost as if the media want death and destruction to sell their papers. I weaned myself off them years ago thank God.
People will go to the show tonight, just as they went to work this morning. It’s not an act of bravery or defiance, or the blitz spirit, or because London is the greatest city in the world or any of that bullshit. It’s because it’s Thursday. Despite the media furore most people on my train this morning seemed to have managed to keep a sense of perspective about this. It’s not like we all suddenly started talking, giving up our seats for old ladies or being nice to each other.
Thanks, Niall. You have, characteristically, ‘got it’.
I’m not a Londoner myself. Lived in Slough for a few years and we spent a lot of time in London. Well, as you would.
I’m remembering too that for 10 years or so in the 90s/00s I used to help run a small medical charity. We used to meet at an office in Great Peter Street, round the corner from Westminster. Those slightly grand premises came about from the coincidence that one of the other people running the charity worked there and so we got to use it for nothing.
So, 3 or 4 times a year I flew down from Edinburgh and made that walk from Westminster tube station, past Parliament to Great Peter Street and back. The familiarity plus the association with what was quite an intense time are no doubt part of why this feels so close to home. I’m sure that many others will have their own associations – we are not Londoners but certainly London-ish.
“How sad. Knowing @LandoCakes a tiny bit, I know that his motive for the OP will have been genuine sadness, compassion and a desire to give others a chance to voice their feelings. And what happens? It descends into a discussion about katiefuckinghopkins, ffs.”
As someone who has absolutely zero interest in “giving voice to my feelings” here (and little interest in reading other people’s, to be honest), but genuine interest in how KH is perceived by decent people in the UK, I didn’t find it sad at all. Or a descent. Perhaps Lando should have stipulated a criteria for posts and the likes of me would have skipped the thread?
Honestly think Marina Hyde is the best newspaper writer alive in Britain today. She makes all the “Why quinoa means you’re racist” Comment Is Free drivel worth wading through just to read her stuff.
Marina Hyde is certainly right about KH wanting to make in the US. The trip to Sweden that Skirky mentioned was on behalf of Fox News along with the Mail.
She claimed that she had been “invited by concerned local citizens in Rinkeby”, a Stockholm suburb with a large number of immigrants. That sounds so unlikely.
Her conclusion was that Sweden was going to the dogs as a result of the unholy combination of immigrants and, would you believe it. feminists. The latter have the country in an iron grip and were destroying everything good about it. Fox must have been delighted by her report.
I suspect she did her best to find a few Mexican criminals and rapists while she was here too.
V good article. I can’t help wishing the people who thought the idea up of the Apprentice had just concluded it would have never worked and threw the plans in the wastepaper bin. It would have saved us from President Trump and Katie at one fell swoop.
🙂 Yeah, I’d sort of love to ignore her but she manages to get through even when I don’t want her to. I’m sure that says nothing good about me, but hey. (Plus I have to confess to being a leetle bit nasty about Hopkins herself, in fairness. 🙂 )
Social media does this, it’s not a good thing. The rush to be the first with an opinion or be the most offended or hurt, the first to come up with a snappy “Je Suis Charlie” type tag line, fighting over which celeb is the biggest bell end and over how we should react to this. The actual press are no better, full face shots of the PC who pulled the trigger, the naked legs and feet of the policeman that died, blood soaked pics of the MP who tried to save his life. We’ve all gone mad one way or the other, Hopkins madness is just more extreme, nasty, vicious and self serving than most. I found myself rolling my eyes at a Brendan Cox tweet, I hate myself for it but it’s what I’ve become, so cynical and world weary. People died yesterday at the hands of an evil lunatic and we are right to be angry, scared, brave or shocked. Do we need to do it so publicly with such self aggrandising haste and poor taste, I don’t think so. It’s time I shut Twitter and Facebook down, but I won’t. I hate the world I live in today and don’t think much more of myself or the rest of the human race either
This was one of the first things I saw on yesterday’s events, it’s by the poet Colin Bancroft and takes as its starting point Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”. Marvelous and moving, I think. http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/af344/embraman/sonnet.jpg
It’s been interesting to hear what “normal” people have to say about yesterday’s horrific attack rather than having everything filtered through the perspective of the Swedish TV news. Not that they’ve done a bad job, but news programmes constantly want the latest developments.
Thinking of all those in the capital who are having to just get on with life today the best way they can.
It’s hard not to give in to hate when people rush to use tragedy to score political points, while doctors and nurses are desperately trying to save lives but we are better than those people.
Stay safe
https://youtu.be/aTsIMVIWjlQ
Farage, Hopkins, Trump Minor and Pauline Hanson have been at the top of their game today. Odious scumbags every one.
I’ve just told the offspring to stay safe, which is a fatuous thing to say really, when any car can mow you down at any time. But they assured me they would, so I feel a little better anyway.
I know it’s a waste of time and energy and pointless but I read Katie Hopkins’ reaction in the Fail last night and had to get up and walk around, breathing deeply for a few minutes.
What a shameless, disgusting creature she is. I know her wicked witch schtick is a construct to attract clicks and generate traffic and outrage namby-pamby vague liberals like me, but my God, really.
She is a vile human being. Ever read Jonathan Coe’s excellent novel ‘What A Carve Up!’? The character of Hilary Winshaw is Hopkins.
She’s also the most powerfully fucking THICK person in British public life. Let’s just remember that all she is, is a stupid sociopath who didn’t win a reality show once. She has no imagination, no class, no understanding of anything. But she gives bigots cover to say awful things out loud – that’s her only function. To pander to the worst in human nature and give people permission to say and think reprehensible things.
As someone on Twitter said this morning – hell yawns for her, Farage and Tommy Robinson.
I take no notice of her whatsoever, sparing myself the grief you all seem to experience by paying her the complement of reading her crap. Just move on.
Up. I have little concept of what she is or what she says, but it seems weird that in the aftermath of a terrorist attack everybody hates a person who had nothing to do with it.
It’s a bit like being unexpectedly stabbed by a stranger on your way home, and then having a member of your own family tell you that you deserved it, even as the doctors are still assessing the damage. You can be aggrieved with both parties.
It’s not like that. It’s like being stabbed by a stranger and a passer-by yelling something mean at you from the other side of the road. You can be irritated at the passer-by but you’ve got more to think about than chasing them down the street and having it out with them.
I’ll stop here, though, else I’ll be falling into the trap of talking about Katie Hopkins and that’s precisely what I don’t want to do.
Fine, use your simile then. Unless you’re spectacularly incapable of multi tasking, you’d still be annoyed with both people.
I take the broader point re: Hopkins, who makes a living out of this stuff. I do think it’s profoundly irresponsible of the Mail to have published it though.
So you have expectations of responsibility from the Mail. Hope springs eternal I suppose.
In the post Thomas Mair political landscape, I think a national newspaper declaring “war” on liberal London is both deplorable and worthtalking about.
If you don’t, then fair enough, but I don’t really understand why you’ve made multiple posts on this thread to tell us so.
Oh, Twang. You’re so delightfully high minded.
Not especially but I assume that is some sort of pop. Unnecessary.
Less a pop, more some gentle piss taking.
Feel free to ignore it, as you would a Hopkins op-ed.
Her often vile, often stupid comments get reported all over the place. To ignore her completely you’d have to ignore all British media.
Yeah, this too.
Not at all. I come here, the BBC, the Guardian and the Huffington Post. Hopkins-free zones all!
Well, except the reason I know about Hopkins’s Fox News comments is this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/fox-news-and-katie-hopkins_uk_58d39945e4b0f838c62f8cc4
Fair enough, I missed it that far down the page.
BBC and Guardian both reported on her recent libel case. And every newspaper in the land seemed to be (rightly) outraged at her comparing refugees to cockroaches a while back.
Not heard of her anywhere. I suspect a state of Hopkins indignation high readiness at work. She thrives on people seeing what she said so they can be angry about it you know. Just ignore her.
No, I think the whole “don’t feed the trolls” way of thinking is just a wee bit too easy. Provocateurs need challenging sometimes. Bigotry needs challenging.
I agree but I don’t see anyone challenging her. We’re just moaning about it.
Well, to my knowledge, she doesn’t post here, so it’s all there is. But she gets plenty of push-back elsewhere.
Anyway, I’m not sure “moaning” is the right word. Like Bingo says above, it’s perfectly possible and non-contradictory to be disgusted with both the attacker (who is beneath contempt) and the foaming mob of twats who are so clearly loving this opportunity to push their bigotry.
I suspect the attacker and the foaming mob of twats would actually discover they have plenty of common ground, were they ever to sit down over a drink or two. They certainly share both an enemy and a target.
Oh I agree, I was just messin’. I don’t like her either but I don’t waste emotional headroom on her. I have plenty of other more important things to be pissed off about than some dull troll.
I think Jack Monroe showed it was possible. You can’t shame trolls like her but she’s facing a very large bill.
From time to time I’ll engage in a bit of keyboard indignation. Maybe it makes no difference, but sometimes it’s all there is. I’m sending a few quid to Stop Funding Hate too. All in all it’s not much but it’s a little something.
I’m still thinking this through.
And as so often happens in situations like this, I am always moved, usually to near tears, by the reactions of people. The Police Officer; the workers from the hospital who just ran out to help, according to the reports that I read; the Minister who was trying so hard to save life on the spot.
It’s nearly impossible to stop a single crazed person in a large city like London. It is a price that we pay when we want to live in a free society.
The story isn’t about the attack, or the perpetrator. It’s about how ordinary people react.
Like the man said – “look for the helpers”. There are always helpers.
I’m particularly moved by the people who run towards danger at times like this. (I hope I might have the stones to do the same, but who knows until you’re tested? I’m not at all confident I wouldn’t just look to my own skin.) But huge admiration for the police and emergency workers and, yeah, Tobias Ellwood. A bit like the banality of evil, something I always find powerful is the mundanity of heroism. It just happens. There aren’t any low-angle shots against the setting sun, rousing music, slo-mo helicopters overhead. Just men and women who went to work that morning thinking it was a normal day, and found themselves helping people to not die.
“London is a city so desperate to be seen as tolerant, no news of the injured was released… an entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And Dumb.”
“We are taken under the cold water by this heavy right foot in the South, a city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most”.
“The war is between London and the rest of the country”.
Printed in one of the nation’s most popular newspapers, before the bodies are even cold.
Thankfully, London has plentiful prior experience of dealing with noisy fascists, of all stripes. Completely normal commute to work this morning, life goes on. Nobody in the office is talking about it, nobody mentioned it at the school gate as we, the monkeys, watched our little mob of multi-racial, interfaith children go trooping into class, seemingly oblivious. No one’s taught these kids how to hate each other yet, but maybe a few of them will read the Mail one day.
Meanwhile, these columnists can pen their essays from the security of the Home Counties, telling us all how we should respond, what we should feel, and how our multiculturalism and our Muslim mayor means we deserved this. Hate preachers like any other.
We’ll just get on with living in one of the world’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities, we’ll shoulder the actual security threat, and we’ll continue to set an example of fortitude and tolerance.
‘No news of the injured was released’. So they want the public at large to be told before the next of kin?
Says it all really.
I thought the response from the services and from the public caught up in it was exemplary.
And yes, London is the Worlds greatest city and yesterday was further testament.
…. and now pasted here. So even people who avoid reading the Mail can now disapprove of it without going there
Security of Devon, actually.
Very nicely expressed Bingo.
And let us not forget that London in 2017 is continuing the city’s long multi-cultural tradition. One of my favourite songs about my old home town was written in the 50s by Lord Kitchener from Trinidad.
Kitch and his calypso contemporaries were very conscious of the friendly way people treated them in London compared to their experiences in the USA.
You’ll be pleased to hear that that odious witch who writes for the Mail is completely unknown here in Sweden.
That’s odd – she was over there a couple of weeks ago and was very keen to tell us all about it. Made it sound worse than London, frankly.
“KATIE HOPKINS: The Swedish town where migrant gangs have killed multiculturalism stone dead and laugh at laws they despise and defy“
As far I know (I may be wrong here) her opinions did not get much coverage in the Swedish media. That quote sounds like the kind of thing one reads on the neo-fascist hate sites here.
Swedish multi-culturalism is alive and well, despite the very real problem of gang violence in some areas of the big cities.
Indeed, neo-fascist hate sites like the Daily Mail.
I had to shut down Twitter and Facebook last night as they were making a bad day considerably worse. After the misinformation and speculation, and the obvious trolls, my screen was full of righteous angels gleefully condemning any comment they deemed to be inappropriate, inadequate or insincere. I’m not sure which depressed me more. Anything other than a fumbling attempt to express sincere condolences for those involved seemed like opportunism somehow. Then I realised that judging the judgemental made me one of them, and that’s the point where I walked away from the laptop.
I’m of the opinion that Kunty Katie should be fitted with a Gimp Mask (mouth stretched wide open type) and manacled to the railings in the middle of Westminster Bridge for a period of 28 days wearing a large sign around her neck saying “Oops! Me and my big mouth!”.
At exactly 14:40 each day she could be used as a target for competitive spitting tournaments.
Sensible policies for a happier Britain.
How sad. Knowing @LandoCakes a tiny bit, I know that his motive for the OP will have been genuine sadness, compassion and a desire to give others a chance to voice their feelings. And what happens? It descends into a discussion about katiefuckinghopkins, ffs.
A perfect piece of music and, for what it’s worth, I was getting angry yesterday with Sky News. Illogical, I know, but, hey, have you ever met me? They continued it this morning, interviewing MP’s, the Mayor, and security experts, goading all of them to admit that we cannot defend against this kind of attack. We all fucking know that, you idiots. What do you want Sadiq Khan to do? Throw his hands up, scream his head off and provoke mass panic, yelling ‘we’re all doomed, doomed d’yer hear’?
The lovely words that were written by a Tube employee, on the usual notice-board, (I’ve seen them, in a few tube stations, where they have sane, humorous, well meaning staff – handwritten homilies, or kind words that, for a second, make you smile, make you think about something nice, for once in your day,) were read out in Parliament this morning? A Sky employee tweets that it’s a fake sign, generated on an app, and social media descends into another snipe-fest.
People of the media. The one thing we Londoners* want to do today is to feel a little bit good about life, about ourselves, about our situation. And all some of you want to do is drag us down into your mire, your pit, your hell. Where there is never good news, never nice, ordinary people, never any positive.
I have binned a gig at The Borderline tonight, because I am shattered, still struggling with last year’s illness. But, jeez, I feel guilty. I pray that everyone else with a ticket to Jarrod Dickenson’s gig turns up, that he isn’t playing to a half-empty room, and that they whoop and holler like it’s NY Eve. I feel bad enough about not going, without Jarrod feeling that us Londoners were all talk, and no action.
Rambling rant over. Be safe, be nice to people. Thank a policeman.
*Yes, I live in leafy Berkshire, but I’m a Londoner, okay?
Excellent post @niallb.
As you know I am a Brummie but go down to London enough to have a real affinity with the city which I do believe to be the World’s finest.
The media coverage was complete vomit. Even the BBC went completely over the top and everyone was asking the most ridiculous questions. Reducing the coverage would surely lessen the appearance that we are giving oxygen to and glorying in this horror.
Everything is apocalyptic – its almost as if the media want death and destruction to sell their papers. I weaned myself off them years ago thank God.
Someone’s got to keep the budgets of the forces of Homeland Security going upward. Helicopters hovering over West London today.
Simon Jenkins had a good old pop at the BBC’s coverage on Newsnight last night.
People will go to the show tonight, just as they went to work this morning. It’s not an act of bravery or defiance, or the blitz spirit, or because London is the greatest city in the world or any of that bullshit. It’s because it’s Thursday. Despite the media furore most people on my train this morning seemed to have managed to keep a sense of perspective about this. It’s not like we all suddenly started talking, giving up our seats for old ladies or being nice to each other.
Thanks, Niall. You have, characteristically, ‘got it’.
I’m not a Londoner myself. Lived in Slough for a few years and we spent a lot of time in London. Well, as you would.
I’m remembering too that for 10 years or so in the 90s/00s I used to help run a small medical charity. We used to meet at an office in Great Peter Street, round the corner from Westminster. Those slightly grand premises came about from the coincidence that one of the other people running the charity worked there and so we got to use it for nothing.
So, 3 or 4 times a year I flew down from Edinburgh and made that walk from Westminster tube station, past Parliament to Great Peter Street and back. The familiarity plus the association with what was quite an intense time are no doubt part of why this feels so close to home. I’m sure that many others will have their own associations – we are not Londoners but certainly London-ish.
“How sad. Knowing @LandoCakes a tiny bit, I know that his motive for the OP will have been genuine sadness, compassion and a desire to give others a chance to voice their feelings. And what happens? It descends into a discussion about katiefuckinghopkins, ffs.”
As someone who has absolutely zero interest in “giving voice to my feelings” here (and little interest in reading other people’s, to be honest), but genuine interest in how KH is perceived by decent people in the UK, I didn’t find it sad at all. Or a descent. Perhaps Lando should have stipulated a criteria for posts and the likes of me would have skipped the thread?
Is this the right room for an argument?
No, you want room 12A, next door.
No he bloody doesn’t.
Not looking for an argument or making any judgements, just responding to Niall’s exasperated “ffs!”.
Agreed. Personally I learnt something and I didn’t think anything nasty was said.
(!ncidentally, @Friar, in complete contradiction of what I said yesterday, there are now at least two articles on The Guardian about Katie Hopkins.)
And I can recommend this one (Marina Hyde)
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2017/mar/23/look-out-america-her-comes-katie-hopkins-london-loathing-hate-speech-westminster-attack
Honestly think Marina Hyde is the best newspaper writer alive in Britain today. She makes all the “Why quinoa means you’re racist” Comment Is Free drivel worth wading through just to read her stuff.
Marina Hyde is certainly right about KH wanting to make in the US. The trip to Sweden that Skirky mentioned was on behalf of Fox News along with the Mail.
She claimed that she had been “invited by concerned local citizens in Rinkeby”, a Stockholm suburb with a large number of immigrants. That sounds so unlikely.
Her conclusion was that Sweden was going to the dogs as a result of the unholy combination of immigrants and, would you believe it. feminists. The latter have the country in an iron grip and were destroying everything good about it. Fox must have been delighted by her report.
I suspect she did her best to find a few Mexican criminals and rapists while she was here too.
V good article. I can’t help wishing the people who thought the idea up of the Apprentice had just concluded it would have never worked and threw the plans in the wastepaper bin. It would have saved us from President Trump and Katie at one fell swoop.
Jeez I’ve never read Hopkins before. Never mind her awful views, have you seen her prose style? It’s like Janet and John
Short lines. Very short.
Line breaks for emphasis. Pause. And consider.
Emphatic full stops.
Because. This is.
Deep.
🙂 Yeah, I’d sort of love to ignore her but she manages to get through even when I don’t want her to. I’m sure that says nothing good about me, but hey. (Plus I have to confess to being a leetle bit nasty about Hopkins herself, in fairness. 🙂 )
By the way, just so you know, if Jarrod sings this tonight (he will), I’d have been a blubbing pool of water on the Borderline floor.
Social media does this, it’s not a good thing. The rush to be the first with an opinion or be the most offended or hurt, the first to come up with a snappy “Je Suis Charlie” type tag line, fighting over which celeb is the biggest bell end and over how we should react to this. The actual press are no better, full face shots of the PC who pulled the trigger, the naked legs and feet of the policeman that died, blood soaked pics of the MP who tried to save his life. We’ve all gone mad one way or the other, Hopkins madness is just more extreme, nasty, vicious and self serving than most. I found myself rolling my eyes at a Brendan Cox tweet, I hate myself for it but it’s what I’ve become, so cynical and world weary. People died yesterday at the hands of an evil lunatic and we are right to be angry, scared, brave or shocked. Do we need to do it so publicly with such self aggrandising haste and poor taste, I don’t think so. It’s time I shut Twitter and Facebook down, but I won’t. I hate the world I live in today and don’t think much more of myself or the rest of the human race either
This was one of the first things I saw on yesterday’s events, it’s by the poet Colin Bancroft and takes as its starting point Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”. Marvelous and moving, I think.
http://i1022.photobucket.com/albums/af344/embraman/sonnet.jpg
Thanks for the peom Lando. And for this thread.
It’s been interesting to hear what “normal” people have to say about yesterday’s horrific attack rather than having everything filtered through the perspective of the Swedish TV news. Not that they’ve done a bad job, but news programmes constantly want the latest developments.
I’d rather read Niall’s wise words.
Je suis Attackdog
I am hopeful aspects of the UK media are watching.
Who knows what may transpire.