RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Why are police investigating a Viking monument and shopping centre over alleged links to ‘Far-Right’?
Here’s another one of those stories I don’t know whether to file under Mind How You Go or You Couldn’t Make It Up.
Northumbria Police are investigating a Viking monument and a shopping centre in Jarrow over allegations that they could be linked to ‘Far-Right’ extremism. Along with South Tyneside Council, officers have been taking part in a review of statues and other landmarks ‘to determine if any have links to slavery or oppressive behaviour’.
The review was launched in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests two and a half years ago.
Quite what the Vikings have got to do with the murder of a black man by a rogue police officer in a city four thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic is anyone’s guess.
Mind you, there is compelling evidence that Viking explorers landed in North America several centuries before Christopher Columbus. So perhaps the Minnesota cop who killed George Floyd could be distantly related to the Norse invaders who settled in Geordieland.
RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Northumbria Police are investigating a Viking monument and a shopping centre in Jarrow
Quite what the Vikings have got to do with the murder of a black man by a rogue police officer in a city four thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic is anyone’s guess
That might explain why, having targeted statues of Edward Colston in Bristol and Cecil Rhodes in Oxford over links to slavery, the woke witch-hunters have now turned their attention to…
Noggin the Nog.
Or Nog On The Tyne, as we should probably call him today in light of recent developments.
The Vikings first arrived in the North East in 793, on the island of Lindisfarne, and went on to colonise Northumbria under Ivar the Boneless and his brothers Halfdan and Hubba.
Perhaps they were the models for the sculpture of two Viking warriors erected in Jarrow in the early 1960s and which are now being investigated for ‘associations with Far-Right symbolism and Nordic mythology’, along with a local shopping precinct called ‘The Viking Centre’.
How long before Halfdan and Hubba are toppled and the shopping centre is renamed in honour of George Floyd?
Just about anyone can be smeared as ‘Far-Right’ if they dissent from modern woke ideology — even mild-mannered Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been included in a list of Right-wing extremists by the taxpayer-funded Prevent programme, allegedly because he opposes illegal immigration and supported Brexit. (Maybe they discovered he has Viking ancestry and is descended from a Norse warrior called Moggin the Mog.)
After the Summer of Stupidity 2020, which saw BLM demos on the streets of London and elsewhere, South Tyneside rushed to join other councils desperate to get in on the action.
Having targeted statues of Edward Colston in Bristol (pictured), the woke witch hunters have now turned their attention to Noggin the Nog
Oxford University’s Oriel College with a statue of Cecil Rhodes on the second floor above the door
Across the country, statues have been pulled down, streets and buildings renamed to cleanse them of any association with slavery, however tenuous. But it takes an extra special leap of the imagination to get round to the Vikings.
We’ve come to expect this kind of lunacy from the Left-wing halfwits who gravitate towards jobs in local government. But what the hell were Northumbria Police doing getting involved? Then again, that’s where the ITV cop show Vera is set. And, as I’ve observed previously, despite Brenda Blethyn’s star turn as the female DCI, Vera has become a tedious exercise in woke box-ticking.
I’m not the only one who thinks that, either. I’ve had a string of emails recently complaining about the way this otherwise bog-standard Sunday night drama paints a completely unrealistic portrait of largely rural North East England.
Half the characters are from black and ethnic minorities, despite the last census in 2021 reporting that 97.6 per cent of the local population describe themselves as white.
In Vera’s Northumberland, even the gamekeepers are black. Two Sundays ago, the programme featured a mixed-race lesbian couple, a trans woman and a dwarf.
Just when you thought no box had been left unticked, the most recent episode had a morbidly overweight sergeant in a wheelchair, at least 20 years beyond retirement age.
So that’s obesity, disability and ageism all covered, too, on top of every other ‘vulnerable’ minority under the sun.
Yet after reading about Northumbria Police investigating Viking statues, I began to wonder whether Vera is more accurate than most of us think. Police forces — sorry ‘services’ — everywhere are in thrall to the cult of ‘diversity’.
Having examined the Northumbria Police website, I can’t be sure if Vera is a case of life imitating art, or art imitating life. For instance, the home page features a female officer of Asian heritage with a prominent tattoo. Naturally, Northumbria Police ‘celebrates and embraces diversity, equality and inclusion’. So it would appear that Vera is more in tune with real life than we might at first believe.
Surely it is only a matter of time before DCI Stanhope is sent to Jarrow to investigate the Viking menace. Vera arrives in her battered Land Rover, clutching a bacon sandwich and a cardboard cup of coffee.
‘What have we got, Kenny?’
‘A couple of Viking warriors, ma’am. Suspected of having links to Far-Right extremism.’
‘What do we know about them?’
‘Been here since the 1960s, ma’am. They’re implicated in rape and pillage and possibly profiting from slavery. Do you think they did it?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to find out, pet. Have forensics give them the once over and then bring them in for questioning.
‘And have Jac back at the station check their mobile phone records and bank statements. I want to know what they were doing on Lindisfarne in 793 . . .’
My great aunt Gladys has died a few days shy of her 103rd birthday. Many of you were kind enough to send good wishes on her 100th.
Gladys contracted Covid in hospital after being admitted following a fall at home. It was a great innings by a great lady.
Let’s hope the NHS don’t record her passing as another death ‘with Covid’ statistic.
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