Seattle. You have outdone yourself this time. Your whole Seattle Is Dying nonsense has finally crossed the pond and become a weapon for one of the UK's top political nutters and villains: Home Secretary Suella Braverman. This one makes Boris Johnson look sane and gives Trump a run for his money. She hates immigrants like nobody's business, although her parents, Indian Africans, are first-generation immigrants. They came to the UK in the 1960s. That's not long ago. Nothing Mayflower-like is to be found in Braverman. And to make matters more bonkers, she hates people who share her skin color, which in the US would be identified as Black. She is not at all white and is undoubtedly brown, but she talks like and presents as a rabid white supremacist. Indeed, a considerable section of the Conservative Party find her pronouncements and policies to be a tad extreme.   

This crackpot has, it seems, sided with Seattle Is Dying. She said British cities, under Labor, would go the way of San Francisco and Seattle. Has our city finally arrived? Grunge didn't do it; nor did Sir Mix-a-Lot or Macklemore or Microsoft or Amazon. No. It's Seattle Is Dying that's putting us on the map.

Where to begin with this pile of rubbish? How about going back in time. Yes, that's what we shall do. Let's fly to 1988. The location: Greenwich Park, which is one of the Royal Parks of London. We enter a tunnel under the park and find the present writer, who is new to the city, the center of a colonial universe that includes his home country, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia). This young man, still in his teens, comes across (in the tunnel) something that blows his mind. A man begs him for money. One part of the shock is that the man is white (in Zimbabwe, there were no white beggars); the other part is: Isn't the UK one of the richest countries in the world? I could understand begging on the streets of Harare—the whole country is poor. But here? In London? A city with a financial market that's only second to Wall Street? The pound note I gave the beggar was accompanied by a barefaced astonishment.

After that incident, I came across more and more beggars. They were everywhere. And almost all were white. The same was true for squatters. I found them in almost all of the buildings I visited for one reason or another (usually a party). You can imagine the embarrassment I felt when I learned that I was the only person paying for a flat in a Docklands building. I was not a squatter. I gave the man money. Didn't I know what this was all about? It's a class war. It's us against them, you giving them money. 

The reason London's homeless crises did not hit its streets so hard was because squatting laws were, at the time, comparatively lenient. Also, public housing was not yet (as in the US) toes up. This, however, was Margaret Thatcher's UK. Meaning: All of the progress labor and socialists achieved after World War II were completely cut or were under constant attack. The consequences of this Conservative revolt were visible everywhere: The rich no longer lived in another part of the city but in a completely different universe. A year later, I left London for Stockholm, a city that gave me another shock: no beggars, no homeless, no rich people living in the stars. This city transformed me into a teen-wee socialist.            

Back to the nutter, Suella Braverman. Has she ever been to Seattle? If not, she seems to be importing big ideas from our city. Seattle Times reported today that she attacked wokeness (but failed to point out that this line attack was in the same speech as her Seattle Is Dying thing):    

U.K. Home Secretary Suella Braverman railed against unauthorized migrants, human rights laws and “woke” critics of her hard-line policies Tuesday, as she tried to secure her place as the flag-bearer of the Conservative Party’s authoritarian law-and-order wing.

In her keynote speech to the governing party’s annual conference, Braverman called migration a “hurricane” that would bring “millions more immigrants to these shores, uncontrolled and unmanageable.”

This whole anti-wokeness comes from the scrambled mind of one of our own, Christopher F. Rufo. We must now wonder what else Seattle's right has to offer one of the batshit crazy politicians that Great Britain has ever known and will ever know.Â