Living In England now Kathy’s TCW week in review = Hijab Heaven?
I am talking about the ever-present hijab that is fast becoming the fashion norm in so much of London. Is it just Muslim women wearing them?
Living In England now Kathy’s TCW week in review
The Conservative Woman
Although it was another great week for TCW output-wise, pressing and breaking ground on a number of issues, I can't pretend I did anything exciting. A bit quieter than of late, it did give me a chance to take stock and ponder on some of the smaller things in daily life as well as the apparently big ones.
Like the number of babies I see being carted around by distracted or inattentive parents without any sort of hat, hood or bonnet despite the wet and chilly weather. And the number of parents, including mothers, who don’t hold their infant’s or child’s hand. I have been seriously tempted to stop them, to give respective lectures on babies losing more heat from their heads than any other part of their body and the importance on busy roads and crowded streets of never letting go of your child’s hand. I haven't – yet – but I feel it coming. Nor have I yet confronted any of the far too many women I see on my local shopping street sporting head-covers that, by contrast to those poor bare-headed babies, they don’t need. I am talking about the ever-present hijab that is fast becoming the fashion norm in so much of London. Is it just Muslim women wearing them? Looking at the faces has had me wondering whether it’s the faith or the fashion that’s gaining converts. My lecture to them? Why are you sliding into this? Do you have no idea what this symbolises or how regressive this is?
Don't worry, I haven't!
But I would like each and every one of them to see a short but very effective tweet sent to me via a WhatsApp Group I am on – a photographic contrast between the freedom and modernity of women in Iran in the late 50s, 60s and 70s and today. Every woman should fear it, the tweeter, a Dr Maalouf, wrote. They should, because it is happening under our eyes here in an 'invisible' revolution that's called normalisation.
Normalisation is what you come to accept that you shouldn't. Like the crazy man who elbowed a 17-year-old girl on the temple and knocked her to the ground in front of my local town hall last weekend. ‘No one helped, they just stared – and the man ran away. She has a massive injury,’ her mother wrote in a Nextdoor Village email.
Like the ever-growing episodes of what Mark Steyn has coined the 'diversity stabbing of the day'. Here are a couple from last week in London (it really isn't a great place to live any more): an '18-year-old man’ charged with stabbing a schoolboy to death with a ‘zombie knife’, charged with stabbing a schoolboy, and a 'large group fight involving knives' in south London leaving a man in his 20s dead and two others in hospital. Traffic on diversion for two full days was the only reason most people got to know about it.
If you think it couldn’t get worse, it did. Next up was the 'diversity rape of the day' – the quite horrible allegation that an unconscious woman, a mother of three, had been orally raped to death on a London park bench. On trial at the Old Bailey for rape and manslaughter is a homeless man, Mohamed Iidow.
Of course it is not just London. Wolverhampton is where 'Britain’s youngest killers for a generation', two 12-year-olds, conducted their vile and savage machete murder of 19-year-old Shawn Seesahai for which they have now been locked up, though for only nine years. That, according to the Times report, was for stabbing Seesahai through the heart as well as punching, kicking, stamping on him and ‘chopping’ him with the weapon so brutally that it broke his skull. What were they on? Who were they? We are not to be told.
And it's not even front page, Laura emailed me. Nor was the terrible 'diversity house fire deaths' of four small boys left locked in a house full of rubbish by a mother whom 'the social services had been tiptoeing around'.
That's not to forget the acid attack, outside a West London school, which left a 14-year-old girl with life-changing injuries. There has now been an arrest so that’s OK. Nothing to see here.
Walking back from the tube on Friday afternoon and having to get past a noisy group of ‘diversity’ teens and the start of what looked like a bit of a fight, I heard myself shouting a sharp ‘Hey!’ To my amazement a 6ft dreadlocked boy pulled back and turned to me with an ‘It’s ok, miss’! There's hope yet.
We should all be getting angry. Anger is one of the most useful emotions we possess, Bryan Harris wrote in these pages a week ago. Righteous anger is evident in North Carolina where Hurricane Helene has proved to be an unmitigated disaster made worse by MSM sanitising and under-reporting so as not to make Kamala and the Democrats look bad, Bernard Carpenter, our man in the US, wrote to me. There is fury at their belated and insulting financial recompenses offer. They find the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has, guess what, been reshaped to prioritise 'equity' and social justice initiatives and is rumoured to be short of cash after spending $1.4billion on illegal migrants. It doesn't help that those affected are in red (majority Republican) states, Bernard says. So hurricane survivors, without a steady food supply, any power, their homes and businesses wrecked, are to get a paltry $750 each.
Over here we have both main political parties to blame for the dire state we are in. The inadequates running for leadership of the rump of the Tory Party had their one chance to rise to this and steal Farage's thunder at their annual conference. They botched it. Like those tiptoeing social workers, they skirted the question of NetZero and climate change. Instead of confronting it, Robert Jenrick actually said Yes to Net Zero (it's just the targets we need to adjust) while Kemi Badenoch told anyone who'd listen that she was not a climate change sceptic, just a Net Zero one. What was that meant to mean?
No wonder Farage can say with such confidence that the Tory brand is broken, that no one cares who is its leader. I don't. No wonder he beat all four Tory leadership contenders in a recent poll on having what it takes to be 'good PM'. He gave a masterclass on it at the end of week. Straight to camera and straight to the point on the industrial massacre of Britain thanks to Net Zero insanity and its ever rising energy prices. Short, sharp and to the point on both the globalism and poverty it leads to, his clarity once again lifted my spirits. Let it lift yours!
Best wishes, Kathy Gyngell
Editor, TCW Defending Freedom