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Telegram and X should be taken off air until they police themselves 

One of the unfunnier jokes during the Troubles in Northern Ireland was the response to ‘How do you bring an end to the violence?’ ‘Send in the Pakis and the Prods and Catholics will unite against a common enemy.’ Well, it has come to pass because at the weekend we saw far-right nasties up from Dublin, draped in the Irish tricolour, drinking with so-called loyalists in a Belfast pub. Their host? Apparently it was the thug who murdered five Catholic men in a bookies in 1992.

 

They had their common enemy and it was decent people like Jamal, Syrian-born manager of a small, independent supermarket and Bashir, a café owner. Both those businesses are no more, looted and burned down by anti-immigration mobs in the violence that spread across the Irish Sea from all parts of England. And being Belfast, it wasn’t long before bored-with-peace UDA paramilitaries brought their tattoos and shaven heads into the early evening light for a spot of Molotov cocktail throwing.

 

It’s all incredibly depressing and unless the rains come, and come hard, the prospect of riots dying out look next to zero; indeed police have forecast that this evening as I write this there are likely to be 100 separate full-scale incidents. And all because a rumour started on social media that the alleged killer of three beautiful little girls was a Muslim immigrant. Wrong on both counts.  

 

But of course the truth doesn’t matter any more and that’s what the likes of so-called Tommy Robinson, Andrew Tate and yes, Nigel Farage rely on. They can put up one post on X and the mindless with nothing to do will jump. Cheer-led by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, the dangerous weirdo who bought Twitter, changed its name to X and immediately allowed back Donald Trump and Andrew Tate to spread the lies which got them banned from Twitter in the first place.

 

How long before someone is killed by these mobs?

 

I hate censorship but if it is possible to take down the calls-to-arms now proliferating on platforms like X and Telegram then it should be done. There’s a reason Telegram is known as Terrorgram.  The Online Safety Act came into law last year with powers to fine offending companies up to 10 per cent of their turnover. And while it was directed mostly at child pornography it also encompasses speech content. So enforce it. Better still, take them off air until they police themselves.

 

As for sentencing the near 400 rioters currently charged (it will be double that by the end of this week) the maximum jail term for rioting is 10 years and for inciting racial hatred seven years. The first three rioters dealt with in Liverpool are all now banged up for between three years and 20 months.

 

But our jails are full and anyway the cost to the state per prisoner, in other words you and me the taxpayer, is £51,000 a year. So let’s be imaginative and make the bastards pay, not by losing their liberty at such a huge cost but by working for us.

 

For starters, everyone found guilty should lose their passport, be tagged for the length of their sentence, curfewed at night from seven to seven and made to work restoring what they have wrecked. Like rebuilding and restocking Jamal’s little supermarket and Bashir’s café in Belfast. And the countless properties in Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool. When that is done put them to work on community projects and filling in those bloody potholes. For exercise they would take a daily swim in the Thames. That would soon whittle down their numbers.

 

That would leave space in prison for Robinson and Tate.

 

Meanwhile Alice, Elsie and little gap-toothed Bebe, three innocent little girls enjoying a Taylor Swift-themed dance class wait to be buried and the youth accused of their murders has just turned 18 so legally an adult, a Briton born in Cardiff of Christian parents who fled the Rwandan genocide two decades ago.

 

No illegal immigrant he, no Muslim either, but the facts never bothered Robinson, Tate or Musk.

 

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Stating the bleedin’ obvious, illegal immigration is the new government’s biggest and most urgent problem. The current numbers are costing us £8m each and every day. But the legal variety has been good for the UK and for Northern Ireland in particular.

 

Growing up there in the ‘60s it was a monochrome place. I don’t remember a single brown or black face apart from a couple of boarders at my school. There was one decent Chinese restaurant and an Indian café in the docks area for sailors from the sub-continent but very little else.

 

The Presbyterians made sure the city was closed on a Sunday, they even padlocked the children’s swings on the Sabbath. But the peace agreement of 1998 turned the place into Technicolor, decent hard-working people from all parts of the globe making Ulster their home, owning corner shops that seem never to close, nurses, doctors and midwives, teachers and professors.

 

Belfast is now a better place to visit than Dublin and up there with Cork and Galway. As for food, yes you can still get an Ulster fry but so too great Lebanese and Greek, Somali and Syrian and some of the best Chinese, Japanese and Indian I’ve enjoyed.

 

Morons must not be allowed to change that.

 

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Aren’t Americans are a strange lot? Kamala Harris picks Tim Walz as her running mate and their first on-stage date together in Philadelphia was basically a who-has-got-the-biggest-grin contest. Very little was said and that wasn’t the point. It made the Democrats feel better.

 

The unholy alliance of Donald Trump and JD Vance was predictable in their response: ‘They are dangerous...extreme liberals like we’ve never seen before. Walz is a Commie.’

 

Walz is right: They’re weird.

 

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 Congratulations to my friend and colleague Dickie Dismore for describing the bridge over the river dividing Bristol and a dry, chapel-ridden Wales as the Temperance Severn. I shall be sure to use it, no doubt claiming it as my own.


ALAN FRAME


8 August 2024