There was a certain uncomfortable 2018 inevitability this morning over the fact that where people were offended, arrests would follow.
And the burning of a cardboard model of the Grenfell Tower last night was certainly right up near the top in the pantheon of cretinously offensive things. Many victims of the appalling tragedy, which killed 72 people and injured many more, still haven’t been properly rehomed almost a year and a half later.
But if it’s a CRIME, we have some questions.
Because the crudely-decorated cardboard box burned in someone’s back garden as a hugely tasteless joke was put together on a night when much of the British population gathers in their towns and cities to celebrate the torturing to death of a Catholic man by burning effigies of him in a happy family atmosphere.
In some places, mobs also burn huge mocking effigies of current living politicians, sometimes depicted as Christ, or even of the Pope, and nobody gets arrested.
And in other areas of the UK bonfires are the centrepiece of an openly and proudly sectarian (and racist) annual festival of hatred, which can cause real physical damage and injury to people and property, which the BBC doesn’t condemn but instead makes a huge cultural hoopla about.
Nobody gets arrested for any of that either.
Despite what all the pitchfork outrage would have you believe, there’s no evidence of racism in the video from last night. The figures in the windows of the cardboard tower are of all colours. There’s even a ginger. The only thing that could be argued as bigotry – rather than just appalling taste – is when a single unseen person somewhere in the vicinity makes a reference to a “ninja”, which it’s not too unreasonable to presume means someone in a niqab.
But again, that’s no worse than the sort of thing columnists like Rod Liddle or Richard Littlejohn write for large audiences in respectable broadsheet newspapers for money every week, and nobody goes round and arrests them.
Nor do you get arrested for tasteless mockery of the single worst event in all of human history (unless you get a small dog involved, of course.)
Even when you offend people by referring to it.
Or make a party out of it. (Double meaning intentional.)
And perhaps most to the point, while five people have been arrested for setting some cardboard on fire in their own back garden and hurting nobody, not a single one of the people responsible for the burning of the ACTUAL Grenfell Tower, and the dozens of ACTUAL deaths that resulted, have been hauled down to a police station, had their DNA swabbed and been thrown in a cell, and nor will they be.
(Nor, come to that, have any of the politicians whose policies have brought about tens of thousands of premature deaths of UK citizens in the last few years alone in order to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Maybe instead of arguing with them politically we need to claim that it’s hurting people’s feelings and call the cops.)
We’d love to explain these double standards to you, readers, but we’ve got nothing. Except, perhaps, that if you want to be racist and/or offensive in Britain in 2018, you better make sure you’re either famous, rich or middle-class, or that you get a decent number of people together for it first.
Because apparently it’s only a crime if there’s less than 10 of you.
