“Don’t speculate” – the words that tell us more than our rulers want us to know

Thursday blog

We’ve always had some fairly unpleasant criminals in Britain from Jack the Ripper to the Moors Murderers to the Yorkshire Ripper to Levi Bellfield. But one could get the impression that certain types of fairly gruesome crimes seem to be increasing. There are the mass rapes of tens of thousands of mostly underage, mostly working-class White girls covered up by Labour politicians, councils and police, mass stabbings (including the especially ghastly Southport attack), machete fights in the street, bombings at concerts or on trains and the tube, beheadings and, of course, ‘honour killings’. And now we have a newborn baby being killed ‘having suffered 33 wounds from 15 separate stabbings’.

Often, when there’s a particularly awful crime, we’re asked not to speculate about who the perpetrators might be. For example, the BBC reports some senior plod investigating the recent baby murder saying: “We would ask the public to avoid speculating and posting information online about this case while the legal process takes it course.”

Experience suggests that, each time we’re told not to speculate, this means that the suspected criminal/s is/are from one of our multi-culturally-enriching communities. ‘Welsh choirboys’ are one of these communities apparently:

We now learn that those accused of the baby murder are Slovakian. However, they don’t appear to be Slovakian doctors or scientists or architects as such people would tend to be highly educated and speak fairly good English. These ‘Slovakian’ individuals reportedly needed an interpreter. This has led some people to speculate. And they have speculated that the ‘Slovakians’ – Andrea Skopova, 20, formerly of Robey Street, Sheffield, and Peter Horvath, 19, Nina Horvathova, 37, and Peter Horvath, 38, all of Holywell Heights and a 15-year old girl who cannot be named for legal reasons – may actually be Romany gypsies. For example, Professor Google tells us: “Horvath is not originally a Romani name, but it is one of the most common surnames used by Romani people in Central and Eastern Europe”.

So, next time we are asked to “not speculate” on the origins of someone who has committed a particularly unpleasant crime, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the person or people don’t have names like Davis or Brown or Smith and may even be from one of the multi-culturally-enriching communities we have so generously welcomed into our once great, once low-crime country.