Lefty Cop, Marxist Cop

The situation we’re in at the moment reminded me of something from a training weekend we did when I was in the Young Conservatives back in the 90s. We did a personality test which gave us suggestions as to the roles we were best suited to. I’m sure if you’ve ever suffered through modern management training you’ve done similar things.

I came out as having two particular traits or talents. One was being a party person, not so much an organiser or policy wonk, but the chap who facilitates, introduces X to Y etc. and is generally a social lubricant. The second was what we called being a bomb chucker. I was (and am) quite good at coming out with extreme positions forcefully argued. I might not convince anyone, but my colleagues could then come along and say “Well, obviously Packer’s a psycho but…” and so the frame of debate moves our way. It’s a variation on the old good cop, bad cop trope.

The reaction to the death of George Floyd has been a golden opportunity for the left both in the US and here and a classic example of the tactic outlined above. If anyone had talked of defunding the police or re-imagining policing and replacing cops with social workers a month ago, they’d have been laughed at. Now just what defunding might mean or look like is being earnestly discussed. Here in the UK attacks on war memorials and statues have led to not one arrest but have led to earnest debate and the official removal of at least one statue. Bodies are being set up to look at removing more.

Compared to effectively removing the police removing statues certainly seems trivial. I’ll write a post on the statue issue here and why it is important. But make no mistake, Marxists and their fellow travellers are exploiting this situation to the utmost. They may not get exactly what they want, but if we don’t fight them every bloody inch, they will be closer to their goal when the dust settles, and we will be much further from ours.