It was the UK tabloid press’ worst nightmare, wasn’t it? A man drives a car into a crowd celebrating Liverpool’s Premier League win, injuring scores of men, women and children and it turns out that he isn’t Muslim, an immigrant, illegal or otherwise, or just foreign and non-white. You could feel the shock waves passing through Fleet Street as they were forced to report the news that the perpetrator was actually white, British, a company director and happily married with two kids. Worst of all, he was a former Royal Marine! The horrors of it all! He wasn’t even motivated by some wacked out religious fervour or dangerous leftist ideology – he was just off his face on drugs. “He was a lovely family man!” said the headlines, quoting his neighbours. The sense of incredulity that somebody respectable and middle class could do such a thing was palpable in the reporting. It always amazes me that, despite the evidence of history, this country’s press – and its citizens, the press seem to believe – still think that criminals are somehow ‘different’, that you can tell they are criminals just by looking at them. The more heinous the crimes, the more ‘different’ they are expected to be. It’s a throwback to the Victorian notion that there was an entire ‘criminal class’ of society who were easily identifiable by their physical characteristics.
But the fact is that they look just like us. Even the quietest, most respectable looking of people can turn out to be a psychopath. That’s how they get away with it – they hide in plain sight. The only murderer I’ve ever met (he wasn’t a murderer at the time, that came a bit later) was just about the meekest, most insignificant looking character you could imagine. Yet, a while after I met him in the course of my then job, he murdered a woman. Getting back to the issue in hand, you can guarantee that if the suspect in this appalling business in Liverpool hadn’t been white, had been a Muslim or an immigrant, then those headlines would have been very different. Rather than the sense of bafflement that pervades them, it would have been naked hatred, screaming for retribution and trying to implicate that every other Muslim and immigrant in the UK somehow shared responsibility for the crime.
Another startling recent headline from Britain’s right-wing press: ‘Son of Top Chinese Communist Party Official Raped Over a Hundred Women in UK ‘. It’s the way that the emphasis seems to be upon the fact that this guy is a) foreign and b) a Communist (by association with his father, if nothing else), rather than that he’s a rapist. It says a lot about the priorities of the right that being a Chinese Communist is apparently considered a greater crime than sexually assaulting women on an industrial scale. But I suppose that it ties in with their general world view that Britain should be for the British. Specifically, the white British. According to this world view, even Britain’s crime should be reserved for domestic offenders – how dare these bloody foreigners come here and start muscling in on our criminal activities? Remember the good old days when, if a woman had the misfortune to be raped, she could at least take solace in the fact that she was the victim of a British sex offender. Who, we all know, would do it far more efficiently, with less brutality, definitely take his hat off before doing the deed and undoubtedly make his victim a cup of tea afterwards. (If the attacker were also middle class, the press would doubtless also contrive to show that it wasn’t really a crime – the woman was ‘asking for it’ for God’s sake!) In this case, just to make it even worse, the bounder wasn’t just some foreign Johnny attempting to monopolise the entire sex offending business, but he was a bloody Commie to boot. The bastard probably quoted from Marx and that ‘Little Red Book’ (which is undoubtedly some kind of vile Red Chinese guide book for twisted sexual perverts), while he was attacking those women.
These same prejudices underpin much of the right’s characterisation of immigration into the UK – the idea that hordes of foreign, generally non-white, criminals are invading our shores. According to this world view, there are bands of swarthy brigands roaming Britain’s streets robbing, pillaging, murdering and raping as they go along. This isn’t unique to the UK – just look at how Trump and his cronies characterise the illegal immigrants coming over the US’s southern border from Mexico: they’re all part of crime cartels taking over US crime. Somehow, they, like their UK equivalents, are worse than indigenous criminals. (Say what you like about the Mafia, but at least they were born in the USA. Except the ones from Sicily, of course). In support of this world view, you find the right-wing press emphasising only those criminals who can be characterised as being somehow ‘foreign’. Just look at the coverage of ‘grooming gangs’ here in the UK – if we are to believe the press and the racists of the right, these are exclusively run by men of Asian origin. Statistically, of course, it is a different story – the majority of sexual offenders targeting children, including ‘grooming gangs’ are actually white and British – but that’s a story they don’t want to hear as it doesn’t fit their narrative. Foreigners, especially non-white ones, are bad. They only come here to commit crimes – crimes that should be being perpetrated by white Brits. Damn it, it’s a national disgrace that the title of ‘Britain’s Most Prolific Rapist’ should be held by a Chinese communist! Never mind the victims – for the right-wing press this is the real issue, it seems.
What all of this reveals is the tabloids wilful refusal to try and explain criminality in any terms other than race and wealth. Only the poor and/or non-white (which, to them, implies non-Britishness, also) can be criminals. If you are well off, white, living in a nice house with a family and respectable job, you can’t possibly be a real criminal. Sure, you might cheat on your taxes, break the speed limit, engage in some mild fraud by falsifying your expenses claims, but those are middle class crimes. In fact, they aren’t really crimes at all, are they? They’re just misdemeanours and really shouldn’t be punishable with anything other than a slap on the wrist. Certainly not prison. That should be reserved for real crimes. This utter hypocrisy is why their claims about ‘two tier justice’ are so insidious – it’s ‘two tier’ alright, but not in the way they like to report it. It’s instead about entitlement – if you are entitled enough, whether it be through race, social class or wealth, in the logic of the press, you shouldn’t be punished too harshly and preferably should be let off altogether. Because, of course, in their cases crime is always a one-off aberration, rather than a lifestyle choice, as it is for the oiks, the foreigners and the non-whites.
Doc Sleaze
