By Larkers
What at the time seemed to observers, those who noticed, to be a passing moment, a gesture, a piece of theatre in the life of a nation, have so frequently become to be viewed by historians subsequently as the turning point after which a series of ever more drastic transformations followed on a path to wider catastrophe. The quotidian foretold a disaster.
On Wednesday 21st February 2024 the ‘Mother of Parliaments’, the British House of Commons fell to an invader. One of the seminal constructs of the British people, the result of centuries of great struggle, warfare and dissension notwithstanding, that it had survived and over come, utterly collapsed at one small blow. It bowed to a greater power in the land where it had once defied kings and dictators. Parliament surrendered to Islam.
The agent of this abject surrender, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Last Speaker of the House of Commons, made it plain: In order that elected Members of the House could shield themselves and their families from the treat of violence to their persons made by Islamists and their fellow travellers, many had apparently pleaded in private to be allowed to vote on a motion they were not entitled to by long convention, in order to appease Islamists with hostile intent. They feared for their very lives. The vote was one that condemned Israel for the fighting in Israel and Gaza. Israel alone. These Members of Parliament to save themselves believed they needed to show they would be willing to spill Israeli blood to secure personal survival. None believed that the vote mattered to either Israel or Iran; it was purely a matter of saving their own skins. They failed in chaos but Parliament collapsed around them, its ancient power gone in an instant.
The demand for this act of obeisance came from a coalition of Islamists and far left organisations that occupied large parts of central London and other cities over each weekend since an original protest (in favour of Palestinian-Iranian aggression) beginning last October 2023. This coalition openly wished for the destruction of Israel: Its defining mantra (but others were even more explicit) is ‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’. This geography encompasses the State of Israel. It was a call to genocide. Such expression was illegal in the former United Kingdom, but never applied to Islamists. The reason given by a police officer on being asked about this one sided application of the law of the land formerly known as the United Kingdom was direct: ‘There are more of [the protesters] than there are of us’.
On that Wednesday the Islamists and leftist fellow travellers used their new powers with impunity. They gathered outside Parliament and bayed for blood.
It was subsequently reported that Ben Jamal, Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign who organised Wednesday’s hate-fest outside the Commons, told demonstrators to “ramp up the pressure” on MPs and to demonstrate in such numbers “that they will have to lock the doors of parliament itself”¹.
Parliamentary rules were torn up and democratic debate scrapped under the pressure of threats to murder British members of parliament in connection with a foreign war … While the mob in Parliament Square waved a phalanx of Palestinian flags and bayed abuse of Israel, the words “from river to sea” were projected onto parliament’s Elizabeth Tower, or “Big Ben”.
And so it was that 1,300 years of Britain as a polity, a thing, came to an end, a history that had been at first questioned, latterly ridiculed then subverted internally, often by state supported enterprises, was erased in a matter of a few weeks with little more than flags.
Tell me I am wrong.
Note:
1. Melanie Phillips 26.02.2024 newsletter
