Monty Python star John Cleese is under fire from the left for daringly, controversially pointing out that multicultural London no longer feels very English.
This tells us more about the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the left than it does about John Cleese — or London.
To say that Londonistan is a foreign city these days is about as contentious as saying that sheep make baaing noises and are a useful source of wool.
And who can forget the bizarrely inappropriate but hugely revealing comment of left-wing journalist George Eaton in the aftermath of the March 2017 terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge?
Four pedestrians had been mown down and killed, a police officer had been stabbed to death, and 49 people had been injured, some crippled for life.
But for woke crusader Eaton — then-deputy editor of the left-wing political journal the New Statesman — the main lesson of all these people being murdered and maimed by an Islamic terrorist was just how wonderful diversity is.
A snapshot of London’s magnificent diversity in those injured: French, Romanian, Korean, German, Polish, Irish, Chinese, US, Italian, Greek.
Yes, the tweet (which he subsequently deleted) was weird and disgusting and grotesque but it was also extremely valuable: it offered all us norms a window into how the liberal-left elite thinks these days.
Diversity, in the liberal-left’s Weltanschauung, is such an unimpeachably desirable thing that you can even feel comfortable bigging it up while the blood from murdered pedestrians is still lying sticky on the pavement.
It’s that “can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” attitude the modern left has inherited from formative influences like Lenin and Stalin. Never mind the disruption caused by mass immigration to indigenous communities, never mind the stress it puts on schools, hospitals, transport systems, never mind the depressing effect it has on wages: diversity is something to be celebrated at each and every opportunity — yay, even after terrorist attacks!
I personally love it when the left comes up with stuff like this: it’s always good when your enemy reveals himself.
What I really can’t abide, though, are the hypocrisy and double-standards.
Given that it is objectively, observably true that London is like a George Soros fantasy come true of open borders, multiculturalism and white flight — and given that George Eaton and his fellow progressives are forever celebrating this fact, how come it’s not OK when John Cleese points out the obvious?
Eaton, by the way, is the journalist who got demoted as a result of his appalling treatment of Sir Roger Scruton — whom he traduced and misrepresented during and after a New Statesman interview.
The liberal-left’s behaviour towards John Cleese and Sir Roger Scruton are entirely of a piece: for progressives, there is no such thing as objective truth; for them, the truth is whatever they decide it is at any given moment, dependent for its validity or otherwise on the identity of the person speaking it.
Cleese is just the latest in a long line of impeccably liberal celebrities to discover the truth about the modern left: it eats its own and it has no shame.