SLR: Jou ma se p* - the ANC export Westminster is about to adopt

When Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina swore at a man on a crutch, most South Africans winced and moved on. Sharp elbowed satirist Simon Lincoln Reader thinks Westminster was taking notes. Writing for The Daily Friend he reckons the ANC has had three decades to perfect its contempt for voters and critics. Britain's political class now borrows £113bn a year just to pay interest, levies more taxes than it did during the Napoleonic Wars, and has no answers. Its faces go red whenever accountability knocks. Labour's Samantha Niblett and Lucy Powell are nominated as early adopters. Is South Africa about to export its least attractive political product?.By Simon Lincoln Reader for the Daily Friend*.When the ANC’s Minister for Water and Sanitation Pemmy Majodina called a man with a crutch ‘jou ma se p***’ at an event some weeks ago, left-wing white South Africans – tired of having to explain why Donald Trump is a much bigger threat to women than serial killers – were thrilled. “Damn right, uPemmy,’ they cheered, “you tell that that crippled peasant to get well f*****. How dare a bloody hop-along interrupt your hustings. The shame!”Unfortunately, because the scene went viral, there’s every chance Green, Lib Dem or Labour party backbenchers or their dependants in Westminster saw it.A very long time ago, British politicians might have condemned such a spectacle, huffing that this behaviour is unbecoming of an elected official. No longer. Now, a sorry episode like Pemmy’s may well have been recorded for reference, as when Lee Kuan Yew’s speeches on fiscal discipline were once recorded by MP’s special advisors. “Now look at this from South Africa,” a note attached to the clip would read, “perhaps you can learn something from this impressive woman ahead of your latest constituent surgery?”At some point Westminster will learn Afrikaans-coloured: not the language, but the intemperance, and it will become impulsive. An insult like ‘jou ma se p*** ’ was once a default of Kalk Bay fishermen accosted by marine officials to inspect their catches; soon, MPs like Labour’s Lucy Powell or the Lib Dem’s Luke Taylor will be ‘jou ma se p***’-ing the length and breadth of Great Britain, snarling at an electorate asking why the number of taxes in the country today exceeds those during the Napoleonic wars, before getting into their blue-light cavalcades and hightailing it.At the moment the rage is hardly contained.Scratched browsYou can see this in MPs’ scratched brows whenever the country is discussed outside parameters they deem acceptable. It takes nothing to turn it on: a report from a right-of-centre think tank proving that a wealth tax won’t work, a whistleblower’s leak revealing that just 1% of the country’s asylum claims are legitimate, a column suggesting that borrowing £113b annually to service the interest on national debt is just not smart economics. Soon it will bubble over into the same contempt with which the ANC has always treated its voters and critics alike, and it will be ‘jou ma se p***’ from Cornwall’s emerald bays to the oil rigs of the North Sea, a political class seized with hatred for the inconvenience and insult of accountability.The first candidate to explode in fits of Muizenberg road rage is probably going to be Samantha Niblett, the Labour MP for South Derbyshire. She became briefly famous this year when she launched ‘the summer of sex’, which wasn’t as easy to understand as it sounds. The idea was to position dildos and other paraphernalia around Parliament, but how to get something like that past the various MPs for Gaza or Kashmiri-Pakistan, I have not the faintest idea.Samantha went on holiday just as the guidance from the Supreme Court about single-sex lavatories was to be implemented. She made a video. Lying by a pool on a chaise longue and wearing sunglasses, Samantha’s first remarks were sarcastically pleading with viewers not to be cross with her for having a holiday. Unlike everyone else, you see, she needed a break, so shut the f*** up.Then Samantha flew into her loathing of the guidance issued by the court. “Today is a sh*t day,” she said, her cheeks reddening. She shook her head, compressed her lips, ground her teeth and started finishing every sentence with “ugh” in disgust at those beastly judges who had taken a long time to uphold the dictionary’s view of a ‘woman’.Imagine being an English judge who just so happened to be holidaying in the same locale and witnessed the atomic ire of a woman spitting into a phone? You’d leave sharply, I think. You’d leave before the deranged wench cracked your skull open and started trying to snort its contents.The next candidate is possibly Lucy Powell, mentioned earlier. Before the Starmer administration demoted her last year, Powell appeared at a televised debate where a panelist raised the subject of Pakistani grooming gangs. This did not please Lucy, whose eyes iced over. “Let’s get that dog whistle out,” she hissed. Here, she was talking about (conservatively) tens of thousands of young women violated at the hands of a client rapist class her party has consistently defended. That panelist may have escaped that night via the fire exit. In future he might not be so lucky..Read more:.Harber’s dismissive response mirrors ANC’s mishandling of legitimate issues.Egging on the truculence is something barely spoken of. When the subject of political violence is raised, it is almost always blamed on the right and frantically publicized. But attend any ‘Stand Up to Racism’ or Palestine hate march and you’ll discover that today’s white British extreme-left activists have abandoned the pursuit of ideas, and want their MP meat a little redder. Demanding more confrontation from the likes of Samantha or Lucy, or Ed Davey and Zack Polanski, may not lead to politicians attacking each other in Parliament, as happens in Belarus or Turkey, but it will exacerbate the pressure within the establishment.Irresponsible politicsThat pressure is self-inflicted. Failing to heed the cautions of financial catastrophe or seeking new constituencies via pandering and the imposition of tiered and race-based everything is irresponsible politics. Now, the only way out of the hole is the ANC charted course: extreme hostility to criticism and layers of insulation. As problems worsen, and as it slowly occurs to today’s western political class that they are hopelessly incapable, or too cowardly to find solutions, they look south to the ultimate template of defiance..*Simon Lincoln Reader was born in Johannesburg. He spent a decade living in London, where he worked in financial services, eventually co-founding investment marketplace Lofotr Investors. He writes a Friday column for The Daily Friend, podcasts twice week and is a trustee of the Kay Mason Foundation, a charity awarding bursaries to young people in Cape Town..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

SLR: Jou ma se p* - the ANC export Westminster is about to adopt

Related Stories

SLR: Lamola's Washington strategy could push South Africa further out in the cold

You want honesty, Andy? Britain is out of easy options

Hartford: The rainbow fades - how SA’s non-racial dream is giving way to fragmentation and fear

Reform UK's leader dodged the count, not the questions over his finances