Passport to Tottenham!

Is it time to try a movie experiment from the 1940s?

Thanks to the Metropolitan Police's ridiculous policy of appeasement, a large part of North London resembles a bombed out scene from the 1940 Blitz following a night of rioting by the city's Afro-Caribbean "community." The riots started after about 300 people gathered outside a police station in the gang-infested area and demanded "justice" following a shooting incident in which a policeman and a suspected gang member were both shot in what appears to have been an exchange of fire.

Faced by what initially started as a peaceful demonstration, the police responded with their usual "culturally sensitive," "softly softly" approach of showing sympathy, maintaining a low police presence, avoiding assertive gestures, allowing the mob to vent its emotions, and retreating behind barriers, effectively giving a green light to the rioters and anyone else who was interested to run amok.

With other emergency services unable to intervene, scores of shops were looted and burnt, while the inadequate numbers of police officers sent to contain the violence were not properly equipped with riot gear resulting in several officers being hospitalized.

Despite the unfortunate results of this policy and the obvious criminality of a large section of the West Indian "community," much of the emphasis in the mainstream media has been on rationalizing the actions of the mob as an understandable if regrettable reaction to police shortcomings and attributing all negative actions to a "tiny unrepresentative minority" – the typical hallmarks of the leftist multiracial state in damage limitation mode.

The truth is that whatever the Metropolitan Police do to police the gun, knife, and drug crime of London's West Indian "community," it will breed resentment. Drug-fuelled criminality and gang culture are so ingrained among young West Indians that any effective policing has to involve frequent interactions between the police and this group that can only breed tension and resentment.

The attempt to eradicate the criminality of the West Indian "community" is problematic for the leftist multiracial state as it essentially involves the imposition of White standards on an ethnic group that clearly has little inclination to accept these standards. For this very reason most of the establishment types have been calling for greater interaction with "community leaders." This is a subtle recognition of the fact that Tottenham and other heavily Black neighborhoods are de facto independent statelets whose main connection with wider British society is as recipients of welfare and repositories of badly retailed drugs.

London Photo

Photo: AP

In 1949, a few years after the original Blitz, Ealing Studios released an amusing little film called Passport to Pimlico in which the Pimlico district of London gains independence after an ancient charter is discovered ceding the area to Burgundy. The Pimlico "Burgundians" then connive to turn their state into a free-trade zone for entrepreneurs, crooks, and those eager to escape Britain's harsh rationing restrictions. The British government then respond by closing the border with barbed wire and cutting off water and electricity.

With the British state being unwilling to effectively police Tottenham and to effectively cut off its drug trade, perhaps the time is here to try the Pimlico Experiment for real. If London's Afro-Caribbean population really is a "community," one way to deal with its White-defined criminality in a way that won't breed constant ethnic resentment might be to give it its own little statelet based on the area they have clearly marked out as their own in North London. After the Union Jack is lowered, then perhaps we can deal with the crime and drugs that would inevitably flow from that area by closing the border in the same way that the British government did in the film.

In Passport to Pimlico, the resourcefulness and resilience the "Burgundians" show in their good-natured confrontation with the British government is ironically used to demonstrate how "British" they are. One character, Mrs Pemberton proudly states: "We've always been English and we'll always be English; and it's precisely because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundians!" Eventually the cultural affinity of the Burgundians with England wins out and the area is reincorporated into the United Kingdom. If the Pimlico Experiment was ever to be used in North London, one suspects that the rupture would be permanent.