So here we are, ten years after Brexit. The pure air of sovereignty. Taking back control from the unelected Brussels bureaucrats and handing it to Elon Musk, JD Vance, Nigel Farage, Tommy Robinson and a handful of faceless crypto billionaires and hedge fund managers, some of whom choose not themselves to live in Britain.
We have riots on the streets of Southampton and something close to a pogrom on the streets of Belfast. A rising politician is threatening to deport “millions and millions” of people. The most popular political leader denigrates the police without pausing for evidence.
We’re invited to scorn the BBC, which, by and large produces an accurate, balanced and truthful account of what’s happening around us. The billionaires have funded their own versions of reality, one of which is used to goad the mob out onto the streets. We’ve been through six prime ministers, and counting.
Nothing about this feels particularly “British.” Orwell’s vision of old maids bicycling to Holy Communion was adapted by John Major to include “long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers.” Instead, we have arrived at a different version of Orwellian. One in which people are expected to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears... “And if all others accepted the lie ... then the lie passed into history and became truth." It was all there in 1984.
A widely accepted “truth” since Nigel Farage’s “emergency address” of ten days ago in the wake of the Henry Nowak affair is that Britain has two-tier-policing. That white people are treated worse than brown or black people by officers who have been brainwashed by senseless DEI training. That, yes, there may have been a problem with racism in the ranks 20 or so years ago, but that was all sorted out in the immediate aftermath of the Macpherson Report in 1998.
That is broadly Farage’s message—amplified, naturally, by Reform’s very own TV station, GB News—but also parroted by a legion of editorial writers, talking heads and social media influencers.
For those who favour monosyllabic diagnostics, the problem is “woke”. The police have gone woke. All that DEI nonsense is woke and has to go. But for those woke Hampshire coppers Henry Nowak might be alive today. Wake up, sheeple. Declare war on woke.
Before this lie passes into history and becomes the truth, let’s cast our mind back to the state of Hampshire police force within the lifetime of Brexit. In 2018 the police force was forced to mount an undercover operation into its own elite Serious and Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) based in Basingstoke. This involved bugging the office for a month and recording what went on.
There is no nice way of telling this story, so apologies in advance for bluntly describing the behaviour of more than half a dozen officers towards one black officer, Detective Constable Sol Koranteng.
They joked—oh how they joked!—that Koranteng had been flown to England from Africa in a crate and that he had escaped from London Zoo. They compared their black colleague to a dog. The squad placed a map of Africa above the area in the office where DC Koranteng and another officer of African heritage sat and nicknamed it “African corner”.
In WhatsApp messages, an officer posted a video showing a black man having sex with a drunk white woman at a bus stop with a caption stating “And that’s where Sol is today.” Another message showed a black man exposing his genitals, which was shared with the caption “That’s where Sol was on Saturday.”
The counsel to the subsequent internal inquiry, Jason Beer KC, described the culture in the SOCA unit as “toxic and abhorrent”. The officers joked about migrants having a long swim and drowning in the sea. They adopted fake Caribbean accents to mock their colleague and said Albanians should be killed with a nerve agent.
Racism was not their only problem. The covert surveillance found them mocking “queers” and gay c***s”, and using the phrase “horrible tranny f****s”. They exchanged jokes about “sugar tits” and saying a female colleague should “show officers their tits”. One officer shared an AI video of the Duke of Sussex having sex with the Duchess of Cambridge. One officer begged not to be sent out on a rape investigation because he was too drunk from a night out with the lads the previous evening. His colleagues covered up for him.
The covert recording lasted just 23 days, but Beer said it contained enough racism and sexism to last a lifetime. The investigation had revealed a culture that had become “ingrained and normalised.”
Most of the above details of the hearings into this scandal come from the archive of the Hampshire Chronicle and the Southern Echo. Most of the national media gave the affair cursory attention. Doesn’t quite fit the prevailing narrative.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the Hampshire Chief Constable, confronted with this devastating evidence about the culture of even the most elite members of their force. Wouldn’t you embark on an immediate and thorough training scheme to try and eradicate the toxic attitudes and behaviours exposed by your own inquiry? Answer: of course. It would be grossly negligent not to.
In the coverage of the Nowak affair, I’ve only been able to find two fleeting references to the SOCU scandal, which resulted in the sacking of five officers. The predominant narrative is that Hants Police is—to the contrary—woke and that cops feel pressurised to go along with the DEI “orthodoxy” they are now taught (in fact, only 15 per cent of those said they felt that way).
And so a lie passes into history and becomes the truth.
Have you been reminded this week by commentators that only last October a BBC Panorama investigation exposed a most disgusting pattern of racist and sexist behaviour in Charing Cross police station? Of course not. In today’s monosyllabic politics, the police are woke. All you need to know. End of.
So now we live in the reality that three seconds of video—if it shows a black person attacking a white person—can lead to riots and mobs in balaclavas burning people with the wrong skin colour out of their houses.
From Moscow, where he is visiting, along with Elon Musk’s father, Errol, Tommy Robinson used X to get the rioters out onto the streets. Musk, who has a personal following of 240m, reposts the timings and locations of the protests and repeats his encouragement to Robinson’s supporters: “You either fight back, or you die.”
In Musk’s view, “Only Restore Britain can save Britain.” They are the ones who want to deport millions and millions. Meanwhile, Robinson says that in Putin’s Russia, he can see the” beauty of a civilised society here.”
The US vice president, JD Vance, is clear that Henry Nowak would be alive today if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants. He died “the same way a civilisation died”.
There is no point in blaming those who willed Brexit on us 10 years ago. Who could have predicted how they and their ideological fellow travellers and billionaire backers would trash any respect for truth or history? But please go ahead and savour the pure air of sovereignty.
