{"id":100784,"date":"2026-02-10T03:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=100784"},"modified":"2026-02-09T15:25:35","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T20:25:35","slug":"dispatch-from-the-uk-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/02\/10\/dispatch-from-the-uk-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispatch from the UK: Beatings will continue until morale improves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On his Substack, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/mr-bean-britain\" target=\"_blank\">Ed West<\/a> shares some of the highlights, lowlights, and WTFites of the last week&#8217;s stories from formerly Great, now Mediocre Britain, including the case of an American asylum-seeker, the state of the jury system, and Birmingham among others:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_100785\" style=\"width: 490px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-100785\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE-480x320.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"320\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-100785\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE-480x320.png 480w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE-150x100.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE-768x512.png 768w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Union-Jack-tracking-down-Custom-image-by-FEE.png 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 480px) 100vw, 480px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-100785\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Image from the <em>Foundation for Economic Education<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p>The quintessential UK news story mixes the sinister and comical. As I put it last time: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/theres-some-corner-of-a-foreign-field-226\" target=\"_blank\">the &#8220;Yookay&#8221;<\/a> has elements of authoritarian menace with total farce and incompetence, a slapstick comedy in which WPCs turn up at your house to arrest you over Facebook posts while your son sits in a classroom next to a 30-year-old Iranian man pretending to be a child asylum seeker. All the internet mockery of Britain in the past few years focusses on the theme of a bizarrely mismanaged country, run by people whose priorities are totally upside down. <\/p>\n<p>In her recent <em>Wall St Journal<\/em> column, <a href=\"https:\/\/wsjfreeexpression.substack.com\/p\/britains-buffoonery-puts-mr-bean\" target=\"_blank\">Louise Perry<\/a> wrote about what she described as &#8220;Mr Bean Authoritarianism &#8230; after the comic character played by Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain&#8217;s most successful comedy exports. Mr. Bean is childish and incompetent. He constantly gets things wrong. He can&#8217;t understand the most basic facts about everyday life, which results in various slapstick disasters. The British government frequently manifests Mr. Bean-style incompetence but without his genial manner.&#8221; She wrote:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>&#8220;Pathways&#8221; isn&#8217;t the first example of government messaging that treats the British public like naughty children. In 2023, Police Scotland came up with another, much-mocked cartoon character called &#8220;the hate monster&#8221;. &#8220;Before ye know it, ye&#8217;ve committed a hate crime,&#8221; announced the voice-over, with an effect that was simultaneously sinister and risible. &#8220;You are constantly on the brink of criminalization,&#8221; the ad implicitly told us. &#8220;Now look at this silly cartoon.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Incompetence and authoritarianism are often bedfellows. Governments that frequently make mistakes will feel compelled to hide those mistakes, for fear of the public&#8217;s response.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><strong>Take a hike<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The British countryside will be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2026\/02\/01\/diversity-drive-make-countryside-less-white\/\" target=\"_blank\">made into a less &#8216;white environment&#8217;<\/a> under nationwide diversity plans. Officials in rural areas, including the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, have pledged to attract more minorities under plans drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food &#038; Rural Affairs (Defra). The plans follow Defra-commissioned reports that claimed the countryside would become &#8216;irrelevant&#8217; in a multicultural society, as it was a &#8216;white environment&#8217; principally enjoyed by the &#8216;white middle class&#8217;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;More diverse staff will be recruited, marketing material will be produced featuring people visibly from ethnic minorities, and written in &#8216;community languages&#8217;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Isn&#8217;t English a &#8220;community language&#8221;? I&#8217;ve written about the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/the-war-on-the-countryside\" target=\"_blank\">War on the Countryside<\/a> before; the powers-that-be are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/the-bbc-needs-more-bolshevism\" target=\"_blank\">obsessed<\/a> with getting Muslims to hike, for some reason. Just recently, a woman received an MBE for walking up hills <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/MrPaulStott\/status\/2015895665180586236\" target=\"_blank\">while wearing a <em>hijab<\/em><\/a>. It all seems so counter-productive, increasing a sense of paranoia among everyone, when no one is stopping anyone from taking a walk in the countryside, and no one is going to give you a hard time. As <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/amwilson_opera\/status\/2018953642263650407\" target=\"_blank\">Alexandra Wilson<\/a> explains, some of this is downstream of the incentive systems within academia.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><strong>Official secrecy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the characteristics of the UK state, and which differentiates it from the US, is a tendency towards secrecy. I think it&#8217;s in the English character, which is why we basically <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Francis_Walsingham\" target=\"_blank\">invented spying<\/a>, and are very good at it, give or take the odd communist traitor. This was most egregiously displayed by the government&#8217;s secret plan to airlift huge numbers of Afghans into the country, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/contra-populum\" target=\"_blank\">without telling the public<\/a>, and it has become a regular feature of the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n<p>Just last month it was revealed that a &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/SAshworthHayes\/status\/2015904071605960863\" target=\"_blank\">reporting restriction<\/a> was put in place at Nottingham Crown Court in September last year, preventing any mention of the defendant&#8217;s immigration status&#8221;. The man in question was from Pakistan and the authorities were worried about the risk of disorder, but he was unmasked by local <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-15499987\/Judge-ordered-jury-NOT-told-Pakistani-national-raped-teenage-girl.html\" target=\"_blank\">Reform MP Lee Anderson<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is the second time in a month where a British court has deliberately withheld the nationality of a rapist: &#8220;Last May in Leamington Spa, <a href=\"https:\/\/spectator.com\/article\/the-public-keep-being-kept-in-the-dark-about-asylum-crime\/\" target=\"_blank\">a girl was abducted and raped<\/a> by two Afghan asylum seekers who had arrived by small boat just months before. Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as &#8216;two 17-year-old boys from Leamington&#8217;, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a &#8216;young woman&#8217;. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the <em>Daily Mail<\/em> was granted. Meanwhile, the &#8216;horrific footage&#8217; played at the trial has still not seen the light of day, with their barrister saying: &#8216;I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands&#8217;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think the press habit of referring to foreign offenders as &#8220;Newcastle man&#8221; or &#8220;Burnley man&#8221; really helps the situation. All the details are immediately shared on social media anyway; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.edwest.co.uk\/p\/the-dulwich-horror\" target=\"_blank\">it&#8217;s not the 90s any more<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On his Substack, Ed West shares some of the highlights, lowlights, and WTFites of the last week&#8217;s stories from formerly Great, now Mediocre Britain, including the case of an American asylum-seeker, the state of the jury system, and Birmingham among others: The quintessential UK news story mixes the sinister and comical. As I put it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,53],"tags":[459,343,554,99,558,388],"class_list":["post-100784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-immigration","tag-racism","tag-refugees","tag-secrecy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qdy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100784"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100786,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100784\/revisions\/100786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}