The Evil of Banality

On Keir Starmer and the death of Peter Lynch

I once read a newspaper interview with a certain TV personality. He kept insisting to the journalist that he wasn’t an interesting person. She, assigned the task of interviewing him, kept trying to prove him wrong. Upon finishing the interview, I had to agree that he had been telling the truth. Sometimes, there just isn’t much to a person. When such people say they’re not very interesting, one feels a charitable urge to disagree, but sometimes that is naive. I think, in the case of Keir Starmer, we have someone who really is very hollow, but who has been given power. The result is a salutary lesson.

Much has been said of Starmer’s cold eyes and blank stare. Of course anyone can take a bad photo, but with him it seems to happen again and again. The word “psychopath” has been bandied about, especially since the summer’s riots.

Now, with the suicide in prison of “rioter” Peter Lynch, it can legitimately be said that Starmer has blood on his hands.

It is well-known that British prisons today are split into ethnic factions and that Muslim gangs predominate, often by intimidation and violence. In the wake of the riots, it was smugly predicted by journalists that the “far-right” and “racist” rioters sent to prison would face “a pretty cold reception from… Asian gangs”. Apparently, that is exactly what has happened. In one case, two rioters were placed on a wing that was 90% Muslim, and both were battered. That is the environment into which a judge knowingly put Peter Lynch, a 61 year-old man of fragile health. It seems that two months in this terrifying environment drove him to take his own life. The prison sentence was, in effect, a death sentence.

What had he done to deserve this?

Lynch was a working-class “family man”, married for 36 years with four children and three grandchildren. He had worked in the packing industry but recently became unemployed. According to his sister, he had “never been in trouble before”. His sister-in-law said:

Peter wasn’t a violent person. There’s no free speech anymore, is there. He’s not a criminal. He was a working father and grandfather. A fantastic brother-in-law. The last place he should have been [was] in a prison cell.

A neighbour said:

He wasn’t a criminal - he wasn’t a bad person at all. I would say he was a kind man actually. It’s unthinkable that someone in his health was put in prison for the first time. He was a victim of politics. He should never have been put in there.

On the day, Lynch did not commit any violence or vandalism. In court it was said that he “encouraged” the rioting, but that is extremely vague. What he certainly did do was insult and “challenge” some police. He apparently shouted at them that they protect people who rape “our kids”. He lived in Rotherham, a town where this has been proven systemically true.

But this was not a Rotherham grandfather of 2014, seeing the rumours confirmed in print for the first time. Lynch had had time to investigate the power structure of his society and beyond. No doubt he had been trying to understand how the evil in his town was allowed to proliferate, why the police are complicit in this appalling crime, and why the local media cover for them, and the national media, and the politicians, and the judiciary. At the riot, he had a placard condemning all of these groups as “corrupt”:

Can anyone honestly disagree?

Demonstrably, he was no longer merely angry at the local police for letting Pakistanis rape local girls; his anger extended to every level of British society and to the global governance of which Britain is a vassal state. He was, though perhaps in an amateurish way, political. The names denounced on his placard suggest he was a “covid denier”, a “vaccine denier”, an opponent of globalism, probably a doubter of anthropogenic climate change, and, most ominously, an opponent of central banks. There really wasn’t much of modern governance that he agreed with. For the Champagne Socialist of today, he was the perfect “gammon” - parochial, uneducated, conspiratorial, paranoid, outspoken, bigoted and ignorant - and with the temerity to display these traits in public, in a coarse act of defiance against “our democracy”.

For his insolence, this grandfather with serious health issues (diabetes, thyroid problems, angina and a recent heart attack) was sent to prison for two years and eight months.

Under “Two Tier Keir” there are countless examples of criminals - actual criminals - getting much less punishment for much more crime. As Lynch’s sister-in-law said:

Any other time it would have been just a fine or a suspended sentence.

She is probably correct. But Starmer directed the courts to be tough on everyone involved in the riots, so a Black rapist goes free while a White grandfather rots in prison. Indeed, Black rapists are freed from prison so as to make space for White grandfathers. It could hardly be more perverse. With our society in this state, it is farcical to suggest that we shouldn’t be asking questions, or that Lynch’s placard was wrong to describe politicians, the police, the media and the judiciary as corrupt. They all are. And, with grim irony, what happened to him proves it.

Let’s start with the media. At the time of his sentencing, the BBC referred to Lynch as a “conspiracy theorist grandad” who shouted “racist and provocative remarks”. He got similar treatment from his local newspaper the Rotherham Advertiser, which also accused him of racism. But we know that his remarks were nothing more than:

[You police are] protecting people who are killing our kids, raping them and they have got protection from your s***. We’re on the streets now to protect them from them and you. Your family live on our streets.

[You police are] Muslim raping protectors, child killing protectors.

I’m not doing anything [illegal], I’m praying for our children. I pray for my children.

These remarks are wholly truthful, but even if they were false, they are not “racist”. To publicly describe a man as “racist” for saying these things, given the damage that will certainly do to his reputation and his prospects of future employment, seems grossly unfair, unprofessional and biased. But that is today’s media.

Meantime, our impartial judiciary, in the shape of Judge Jeremy Richardson KC, who sentenced Lynch to prison but has let off rapists and killers with suspended sentences, said to this family man who was beloved by his relatives and liked by his neighbours:

What a disgraceful example you are as a grandfather. [Not] a man of good character.

As for politicians, only Andrew Bridgen has talked about Lynch’s case or his death. The rest of them hide behind procedure, pathetically. Starmer himself, so vocal about causes dear to the rainbow, is silent on the matter.

So that is the police, the judiciary, the media and the politicians, all demonstrably rotten and corrupt. Peter Lynch was right.

But is that why he was imprisoned? I don’t believe it was really for insulting the police, or for displaying the political placard, or for encouraging rioting (as countless antifa protesters have done without receiving any punishment). It is more tragic than that, more prosaic: he was imprisoned simply for being present. Starmer declared that anyone present at the riots would be considered “culpable”. Judge Richardson would have known this instruction and acted accordingly, finding Lynch guilty simply for being present and then mustering whatever justifications he could from the evidence. Lynch himself pleaded guilty, no doubt advised to do so in order to better his chances. That was a forlorn hope.

After all this corruption, the result was a harmless grandfather, who had done nothing criminal and had been motivated by perfectly legitimate concerns, publicly pronounced a “racist” and condemned to rot for years in jail and be abused by foreign thugs until he was driven to suicide. He is dead because of Starmer’s callousness.

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From the perspective of Keir Starmer, Peter Lynch’s real crime was a moral one: he defied “the Power”. I refer to the ruling nexus which is protected by woke orthodoxy and, practically, by the apparatus of the state in every Western country. The Power is not an ideology; it is a nexus, and not even one that is terribly ideological, though it does use wokeism as a rationale for social engineering. Indeed it is difficult to say exactly what the Power is - a cabal, a social class, an ethnic group, a structure - but we know that it must exist, because umpteen things are done to protect it and advance its interests. Contradictory things are done, and said, and can only be reconciled when one understands that the goal is not to be consistent, still less to improve the world, but simply to protect the Power.

And the Power has no stauncher protector than the current Prime Minister of Great Britain, Keir Starmer.

This situation seems to clarify why Jeremy Corbyn was ousted as leader of the Labour Party. Imagine a government today, headed by Corbyn, reacting to the riots. We can debate whether he would come to see the White working-class as his beloved “underdog” and thus develop sympathy with their plight, or whether he would stubbornly side with the foreign no matter what - it would be a conflict between his Old Left and his New Left convictions. But either way, his government’s reaction would be nothing like what we have seen from Starmer. It would be weaker, but more nuanced and sympathetic and therefore, in the long run, probably more effective - at least, if the goal is to protect the wellbeing of the British people. But that is not Starmer’s goal. Also, I can imagine the equivalents of Starmer’s public statements - Corbyn responding to journalists and addressing the public. Even with the lefty shrillness and doctrine, there would be a note of warmth and concern in his voice, in his face. We get the icy opposite with Starmer. Corbyn would have a strong desire to understand “the human angle” - he might even bury himself in the complexities like an absent-minded professor, and lose sight of practicalities. For Starmer, the human angle couldn’t be less important - “it doesn’t matter”.

Similar things are true of the Conservative Prime Ministers we have had over the last five years. Imagine Boris Johnson leading a government response to the summer’s riots, or Rishi Sunak. Johnson would be hopeless, fumbling, making embarrassing gaffs with which the press would have a field day, and just not have the heart to be ruthless. About Sunak, the less said the better, but again we can be assured that weakness or cowardice or nerves or something human would prevent him “laying the smack down”.

Keir Starmer is the only party leader who would behave in this way - and he is a party leader only because of a high-level coup against the man Labour supporters actually liked. And Labour are in government only because their opposition, the Conservative Party, was crashed - entirely avoidably - into a wall. It really is as if “they” wanted to ensure Starmer would be the Prime Minister of the 2020s. He could be as ruthless as he was this August because, unlike all the other men who could have been in No. 10 right now, he has no human frailties to prevent him.

This seems to be the over-riding trait of Keir Starmer. He is like a robot - cold, unfeeling, uncaring. People will use the word “Communist” and invoke the gulag and the figure of the commissar. Others, more naive, will mention the Nazi concentration camp guard - unthinking, doctrinaire, ruthless. But invoking such tropes is hazardous because it’s an open question how much ideology actually matters in the behaviour of such men, including Starmer.

Then again, ideology clearly does matter for him. Compare his reaction to Whites rioting with his reaction to Blacks rioting. (Both reactions are disgraceful, of course, in their own ways.) The difference is stark, and it is enforced solely by ideology.

I suppose the question becomes whether any of these people - Starmer or some other petty tyrant - actually believe in the ideology and care about its goals, or whether they would be equally committed to any ideology, with whichever one is en vogue becoming their excuse (and their means) for exercising control - sometimes gleefully for sadism, and sometimes, as in the case of Starmer, with icy indifference.

I think this is the truth. Ideology in itself does not matter to Keir Starmer, any more than human emotions matter to him. In a Nazi society, he would own a pristine copy of Mein Kampf. In a Communist society, he would own a pristine copy of Das Kapital. He wouldn’t necessarily have read the book, but it would be vital for him that it be displayed in his home. In our age, this man is not a Nazi or a Communist but a frequenter of Davos. He is attracted to that because the globalist stage is where true power resides today, not in national governments. He admires power. He desires it, too, but not as much as he admires it. He is a willing servant to it because he has no ego; like Angela Merkel, he acts not in self-interest but in robotic obedience. The more human part of him might regard this obedience as “duty”, but it will never morally evaluate it; there isn’t enough human there for such a task.

Good men and bad men can seek power. Men can be suited and unsuited to holding it, for all sorts of reasons. There is the danger of the man who has too rigid designs, who knows exactly what he wants to do with power and is vicious once he obtains it. But, opposite to that, is the danger of the man who has no real ideas at all. Such a man might seek power out of sheer ego - but that is not Keir Starmer. He is of our age, in which there is a type of man who seeks power not because he has ideas that require it, nor an ego which demands it, but simply because he is mechanically driven to seek it out, unthinkingly. This is so even though the limitations of his character preclude him doing any good with power. Such a man, in such a situation, can only protect the power itself. A dull bureaucrat, elevated to leader, has nothing to do but protect the system which elevated him.

Having attained power - even if only at the meagre level of a national government - Starmer has nothing to use it for. How will “Starmerism” be defined, in retrospect, except as the unfeeling use of authority? He has no “grand vision” for Britain. His only vision is of the rules and people’s compliance with them, for that indicates the stability and security of the Power. For him, power is not something to be used, but something to be protected. It is something to be valued and worshipped in and of itself - above all other things, maybe. After all, what might he value more highly? His family? Perhaps. But there I think we more normal people run the risk of assuming him to be like us.

And clearly, he is not like us. He is an abnormal man, hollow even by the standards of our age. Apparently, besides football, he doesn’t have any hobbies or interests. He has no phobias, and no favourite books or poems. There appears to be no mental activity of the non-practical kind, at all. He doesn’t even dream at night. He does his work, then goes to bed, falls asleep, then eventually wakes up and, having taken care of those biological necessities which enable him to do his work, resumes his work.

But his work is not meaningful in the way it is for a healthy man. For Starmer, work matters because it leads to success, which is the same reason he enjoys football, and in either sphere, success matters because he is an animal. But he is not what we would once have called “a man”, with a well-formed character. His character is anaemically-formed. That blank look always on his face... he almost seems like he has no character at all. I would suggest, given the challenges of his family life growing up, he is psychologically under-developed. But, even if that is true, I’m not sure it can be the whole story. Does under-development cause icy indifference?

Contrast all of that with Peter Lynch. He had no power, no education, no standing in society, and at the time of his “crime”, no job. Yet he had something to protect, something he believed in and, ultimately, died for. I don’t think it is indulgent to suggest that Peter Lynch and Keir Starmer were the polar opposites of each other. They certainly are now: one prospers because, even though he has ability and options, he conforms to the Power and serves it, while the other is dead because, with little ability and few options, he questioned the Power and opposed it. One married into a foreign tribe, the other was loyal to his people. One indifferently sells out his society, the other attended a protest one day because he realised his society had been sold out.

Starmer seems like a testament to how much one can transform mere flesh and bone into a machine, something that performs a task without question, doubts, moral compunction, remorse. As such, he is the perfect Prime Minister for the ailing and failing Britain of 2024. He will question nothing, except why people would dare to be questioning anything. In an age as perverse as ours, replete with glaring contradictions that demand to be questioned, the powerful could not ask for a more useful tool than Keir Starmer.

That is why he was made leader of the Labour Party, and why the Conservative Party was crashed into a wall - to ensure that Britain would be ruled by this hollow man. It is also why he now acts with impunity; the Power is on his side. That means “there are no brakes on this train”. Things which would once have been thought impossible in this country - such as a decent ordinary man being made to die because of his politics - will become chillingly common.

Yes, there will surely be more Peter Lynches. But in the end, I believe his death will not have been in vain.

RIP Peter Lynch.