The dumbest thing I did was be a 'good boy' for my entire working life: work hard and pay my taxes. 45 years of being systematically and arbitrarily robbed by criminals, some wearing blue ties, some wearing red, and even some sporting a splash of yellow.
I now struggle to pay my bills in retirement and I am still being fleeced via tax by the same clowns.
Meanwhile, these crooks choose to send cash abroad, squander it on insane initiatives such as 'net zero' and DEI, pay themselves tidy expenses, fund wars, and welcome with open arms anyone illegally entering the country, people they are happy to spend billions of pounds on whilst simultaneously making those of us who paid a fair whack into the system, struggle.
People often ask me why I don't vote any more ... and I think it should be fairly obvious. None of these 'senior politicians', across all parties, have any interest in the wellbeing of the common man or woman. They are only interested in their own self-promotion and pressing ahead with whatever harebrained agendas they support whilst in power.
It's only the window dressing that changes ... what awaits in the shop is always the same bullshit that shafts the good, honest folk of this country.
At around 9pm on 17 March 2024, on Otley Road in Headingley, he came up behind a woman in her thirties walking home from dinner and set about her with a broken bottle. Head, neck, chest. It was reported he tried to stab her more than thirty times.
She is alive for one reason. A group of lads outside the Original Oak heard her scream and ran at him.
Not the Home Office. Not the asylum system. Passers-by.
He’s now been handed 25 years and a hybrid hospital order. The court heard he suffers catatonic schizophrenia with persecutory beliefs. Judge Robin Mairs found there was a sexual element to the offending, following previous reports of Albashir making sexual advances towards women.
Which leaves the only question worth asking. Why was he here at all? A homeless, severely ill man, off his medication, already the subject of reports about his behaviour towards women, and the British state’s answer was to leave him wandering Leeds until a woman was nearly murdered on a busy high street.
He should never have been our problem. He certainly should never have been a threat to her life.
Jason Arday shouldn’t be dead.
But he is dead - because he didn’t tell the truth.
And Cambridge University didn’t look for the truth - because he’s black.
And fellow black professors didn’t ask for the truth - because he is black.
Jason lied repeatedly.
And he told the exact lies that allow one to excel in the system that elite universities have adopted.
A system that factors in race, hardship, and lived experience under the banner of equity, instead of pure performance.
Nearly everyone in these institutions ignored Jason’s lies, to try and protect black people.
They called the people seeking the truth racists.
Of course there were some racists.
But the majority of people just wanted the truth.
Avoiding the truth didn’t help black people.
Double standards in academia aren’t helping black people.
They hurt the perception of black people who are truly the best, and would have held prestigious positions at elite schools, solely off the merits of their performance.
Double standards always backfire.
Even when well intentioned.
Even when intended to correct for past oppression.
Race-conscious hiring and admissions have created a situation where it is rational to wonder whether a black person has achieved their position because they were simply the best, or because they were good enough, and black.
This is not a racist thought.
It’s a rational thing to wonder when a system promotes people based on race.
It’s a thing I’ve wondered about myself, as someone who graduated from Harvard - which had race-conscious admissions.
No amount of insistence that it’s racist will make it racist.
It’s no more racist than it would be to wonder whether a white player got into the NBA off of just performance, if the NBA decided to focus on “fixing” the underrepresentation of white people.
This is the logical downside of race-conscious hiring and admissions.
You can think the downside is worth the upside.
But the downside remains.
Calling people with legitimate concerns racist didn’t protect black people.
It didn’t protect Jason.
It hurt black people who have earned their positions.
And it allowed a troubled man who built his career on lies to rise to a height so great that his fall from grace killed him.
We could have just had the truth.
Instead, we have a tragedy.