Thugs

“Don’t they speak English?” asked my husband, tossing over a copy of the Daily Mail as though it were my fault. The headline read: “Missing in action.” It referred to Dan Jarvis disappearing from view in his new job as Defence Secretary. The headline writers should know that, militarily, those missing in action are presumed dead. The Mail meant AWOL – absent without leave. In 2024, I remarked how odd it was that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should say about mob violence outside a migrant hotel near Rotherham: “It is organized, violent thuggery.” Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it.

The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than he perhaps knew. ‘I won’t shy away from calling it what it is – far-right thuggery.’ Thuggery throve in India, was suppressed by imperial authorities and has been revived in a different form in the gangsta culture of black America. A thug was, the OED tells us, ‘a member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims’. The word was first noted in English usage in 1810.