ONCE again, Britain’s chattering classes have gone into meltdown over a Donald Trump tweet.
This is a favourite pastime of leftists and snowflakes, scouring Trump’s Twitter feed for controversial comments then whining about them for days on end.
This time, the President’s Twittercrime was to write about London’s knife-crime epidemic and blame Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Referring to the latest spate of violence — which also included a shooting and left three people dead in the space of 55 hours — Trump retweeted a post by controversial commentator Katie Hopkins criticising the mayor.
He added: “London needs a new Mayor ASAP. Khan is a disaster — will only get worse!”
Conservative leadership hopeful Michael Gove, rather pathetically being led round by the nose by Twitter, said: “I think it is always a mistake to retweet anything Katie Hopkins tweets.”
A couple of hours later, Trump took another swipe at Sadiq. “He is a national disgrace who is destroying the city of London!”
Cue outrage in Britain’s pro-Labour, pro-Sadiq circles.
How dare the President comment on crime in London? Apparently, it is a scandal that Trump is sticking his snout into UK affairs.
In fact, the true scandal here — the really disturbing thing — is that it has taken the President of a foreign country to do what our own politicians have utterly failed to do: Treat knife crime in London with the seriousness it deserves.
Trump is right. He is right to be horrified by the plague of stabbings in London.
As Foreign Secretary and party leadership candidate Jeremy Hunt said yesterday, Trump is right to feel “enormous disappointment that we have a mayor of London who has completely failed to tackle knife crime”.
What is happening in London right now is horrifying. Almost every day there is a stabbing.
Someone is knifed to death, on average, once a week.
This past weekend was particularly chilling, with three people slaughtered with blades and a fourth man shot dead in Plumstead, South East London, on Saturday.
These grim deaths are part of a disturbing pattern of murder — this year so far there have been at least 32 knife murders in London alone.
Last year was the bloodiest in the capital in almost a decade: There were 135 murders.
Many of the victims of knife crime in London, and the perpetrators, are young people mixed up in gangs and drug crime.
But others are being swept up in this murderous vortex.
Like Ravi Katharkamar, the 54-year-old father and shopkeeper stabbed to death in Pinner, North West London, in March as he was opening his shop.
And Jodie Chesney, a 17-year-old girl stabbed to death in an East London park in March.
The toll of human misery grows every week. And yet the Mayor and the left-leaning set more broadly seem incapable of even talking about these knife horrors, far less doing something about them.
Sadiq seems to prefer easy political stunts, such as making traffic lights less “sexist”, to confronting the fact that parts of the city seem almost out of control.
Perversely, leftists in the UK got more upset by Trump’s tweet about knife crime than they ever have about knife crime itself.
The politically correct brigade now actively suppresses discussion about the knife-crime horrors in London.
They bandy about words like “racist” and “Islamophobe” to demonise anyone who wants to discuss the stabbing crisis or criticise Sadiq’s miserable failures.
In 2017, according to the Mayor’s own Office for Policing and Crime, two thirds of London’s knife-crime offenders under the age of 25 were either black or ethnic minority.
We need to talk about this. We need to talk about why some communities have high crime levels.
We need to say that most of the victims aren’t white.
We need to talk about the culture of nihilism among certain sections of London’s youth. We need to ask if the corrosion of community life and the falling apart of the family unit itself is helping to nurture the new nasty violent culture.
As broadcaster Trevor Phillips argues, failing to discuss where knife crime is taking place “impedes the fight against these crimes and imperils yet more children of colour”.
And as Krishnan Guru-Murthy pointed out during Tuesday’s Tory leadership TV debate, none of the candidates identified knife crime as their top priority.
In the interests of being PC — but missing the point completely when talking about Trump’s tweets — Dominic Raab said he was proud “to have a Muslim mayor of London and a Muslim Home Secretary” in Sajid Javid.
This is the situation we have now reached, where the liberal elite is actually impeding the fight against knife crime by shutting down honest discussion about it.
Anyone who proposes bringing back stop-and-search or who talks about the absence of father figures in certain communities can expect to be branded a “racist”. Indeed, when Theresa May announced the limitation of stop-and-search in 2014 as Home Secretary, she complained it was unfair to young black men. Knife crime went up.
A few weeks ago, Sajid Javid increased stop-and-search. Knife crime is coming down again. It’s hardly rocket science.
The largely white, mostly middle-class PC Left has clearly decided knife crime is too sensitive an issue to talk about openly.
They seem to think stabbings are a small price to pay for keeping a lid on difficult issues.
The situation is even worse than Trump thinks: London’s chattering classes haven’t merely failed to tackle knife crime — they have turned a blind eye to it.
All the Tory candidates, bar Hunt and Boris Johnson, have rushed to denounce Trump for being alarmist. Another, Rory Stewart offered a paltry response, saying he felt “very strongly that you should be firm” but insisted such words be uttered in private.
This political correctness is no longer just irritating — it is becoming dangerous.
