Fulham Reactionary

Blogging fatigue

2008-07-25T19:35:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the lack of posting recently. I've been pretty busy in that strange place known as "the real world", and, to be honest, I simply haven't been able to motivate myself to write anything here. I'm going away for a couple of weeks at the end of the month, so will probably return to blogging when I get back in mid-August.

A latter-day Sophie's Choice

2008-07-17T00:37:00.004+01:00

At ATW, Mike Cunningham proposes a truly thought-provoking ethical dilemma...

The latest Victims of Oppression

2008-07-14T01:07:00.003+01:00

Morbidly Obese History Month, anyone?

Do they know it's Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month?

2008-07-13T00:48:00.013+01:00

I'm delighted to report that a new blow has been struck for racial equality, with the introduction of Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?). As the name suggests, this is the latest bright idea from some ~~parasitic do-gooder~~ doughty warrior against injustice: a celebration of the enormous cultural contribution of gypsies! It follows in the footsteps of the equally worthwhile Black History Month, and LGBT History Month, and is already making its presence felt.

For example, the government has provided £70,000 to "the gypsy, Roma and traveller community" (for which read, a small number of self-appointed representatives of the said community), which has been used to fund a magazine, snappily entitled Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month Magazine (GRTHMM), 23,000 copies of which were distributed to schoolchildren across the UK last month. Like many such "anti-racist" politico-historical publications, it makes a number of rather questionable claims about the ethnicity of well-known figures, attempting to draw them into the ethnic group that is being "celebrated", whether the facts like it or not. However, while the website, 100 Great Black Britons, only claimed that a queen, Philippa of Hainault, was, contrary to all the evidence, of African descent, GRTHMM has gone further, and claimed that the King was a gypsy. Yes, apparently Elvis Presley was a gypsy, as were Charlie Chaplin and Rita Hayworth. Now, call me a bigot if you will, but, from the summary of the arguments used in justification of this assertion, it seems that its truth is questionable, to put it mildly:

Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month magazine also suggests that Elvis’s ancestors were Sinti – German gypsies who emigrated to America in the 18th century.

It goes on to claim that Elvis’s mother Gladys’s maiden name was Smith, a common Romany name.

Riiiiight. Elvis's mother was indeed called Smith, and that may well be a common gypsy name. But, well, it has been known to be held by people who weren't gypsies. All I'll say is, that if being called Smith is proof of gypsy origins, then there are a lot more gypsies in the UK than I'd previously thought.

Actually, it is a matter of supreme indifference to me whether Elvis was or was not a gypsy. And, since he's already been claimed as one of their own by the Scots, the Jews, and the Cherokee Indians, I see no reason why the gypsies shouldn't stake a claim as well. However, while people are entirely at liberty to believe whatever they like about anyone's ancestry, I do rather object to them being given large amounts of money to promote their pseudo-genealogy in the nation's schools.

But the education system is not the only part of the establishment which has embraced Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month. The Metropolitan Police are getting into the spirit of the event (by which I mean, extreme political correctness matched with tokenistic gestures) too:

...in a move which has caused disbelief amongst rank and file officers, Scotland Yard has asked staff to 'celebrate' the contribution of Roma gipsies to 'London's culture and diversity.'
In a notice posted on the force's intranet website, Denise Milani, director of the Met's 'Diversity and Citizen Focus Directorate', urges officers to observe the first ever 'Gipsy Roma Traveller History Month.'
Ignoring the huge drain on resources caused by Romanian pickpockets who target commuters and tourists in the West End, Miss Milani - a protege of Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair - says Roma gipsies are welcome in the capital.
She says: 'We welcome the celebration of the community's history and contributions to London's culture and diversity.
'The Met Police works to make London a safer city for all and we are committed to understanding and working with all communities, including the Gipsy Roma Traveller community.'

I wouldn't mind betting that many officers have rather a lot of experience of working with the gypsy community...

'The Gipsy Roma Traveller History month celebrates their history, culture and contributions to the rich tapestry of Britain's diversity.'
The mother-of-two's comments were described as 'political correctness off the Richter scale' by one furious detective. He added: 'What planet is this lady living on? We have been run ragged by gangs of Romanian gipsies who are targeting innocent people in the West End.
'How is that enhancing the rich tapestry of cultural life in Britain?'

Quite aside from the fact that the job of the police is not to celebrate anyone's cultural heritage, but to prevent crime, I have to ask what officers are supposed to do in order to "'celebrate' the contribution of Roma gipsies to 'London's culture and diversity'"? Sell pegs and heather? Tell fortunes? Camp out on people's lawns? It sounds to me like Miss Milani's command is simply (thankfully) an empty gesture, albeit one that serves to illustrate the extent to which political correctness has corrupted the police force, just as the very existence of Gypsy Roma Traveller History Month serves to illustrate the extent to which political correctness has corrupted the public sector generally.

Immigration and the birth rate

2008-07-11T21:54:00.006+01:00

Immigrant mothers are behind Britain’s biggest baby boom in 34 years, official figures revealed yesterday.

One in four babies delivered in this country last year were born to women from outside the UK.

Experts warned this was putting massive strain on hospitals and local services as the soaring figures show no sign of abating.

Government statistics reveal more than 160,000 babies were born last year to women from overseas.

This has pushed fertility levels in this country to the highest since 1973, with the average number of babies born to each woman up to 1.91 from 1.86 last year.

23% of all births were to immigrant mothers last year, up from 21% in 2006. In 1996, the year before Labour came to power, the figure was just 12%. As you can see, such births have, as a proportion of all births, nearly doubled in just twelve years - a literal embodiment of the present government's open door immigration policy.

As I have said many times before, it's clear that we are experiencing levels of immigration unprecedented in our history. The make-up of this country is being changed before our eyes. And yet even the bravest among our elected representatives can only bring themselves to discuss mass immigration itself, and its significant short-term impact, in the most tentative and apologetic terms, and there isn't one MP who wouldn't rather run ten miles in the pouring rain than even consider the long-term implications of this colossal demographic change. Speaking for myself, this total abdication of responsibility is one of the most enraging aspects of the whole immigration debacle.

The Red Racist under the Bed

2008-07-08T01:28:00.006+01:00

This is one of those stories which really does leave one speechless:

Toddlers should be taught about racism and singled out for criticism if they have racist attitudes, a Government-funded advisory group said yesterday.

It told nursery teachers, playgroup leaders and childminders to record and report every racist incident involving children as young as three.

These could include saying 'Yuk' about unfamiliar food.

Even babies should not be ignored in the hunt for racism because they can 'recognise different people in their lives', a new guide for nurseries and child care centres said.

The instructions for staff in charge of pre-school children in day care have been produced by the National Children's Bureau, which receives £12million a year, mostly through taxpayer-funded organisations.

[...]

The new 366-page guide, Young Children and Racial Justice, warned that 'racist incidents among children in early years settings-tend to be around name-calling-casual thoughtless comments, and peer group relationships'.

It said such incidents could include children using words like 'blackie', 'Pakis', 'those people' or 'they smell'.

Children might also 'react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying "yuk".'

Nursery staff are told: 'No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist intent, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.'

If children 'reveal negative attitudes the lack of censure may indicate to the child that there is nothing unacceptable about such attitudes'.

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many racist incidents as possible to local councils.

'Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution,' it said. 'In fact, the opposite is the case.'

The assertion that it reflects well on an institution to report large numbers of "racist incidents" implies that those institutions which report few or no such incidents are covering something up. The people who drafted this advice must actually believe that "racism" is almost endemic among the tiny tots.

The guidance said that anyone who disagrees is racist themselves.

Well, that attitude is pretty much par for the course with these "anti-racist" types. They're so tolerant and good, you see, that anyone who doesn't share their views must, by definition, be pure evil!

It also suggests cultivating the home languages of new immigrants - despite Government anxiety to promote the learning of English.
It said: 'English is now viewed as the major language of the world but this is not because it has any innate linguistic advantages - it is because English is the language of power in a world dominated by English-speaking peoples.'

Possibly. More pertinently, English is also the native and majority language of the UK, and you probably won't get very far in Britain without being able to speak at least passable English (John Prescott being an obvious exception to this rule). That is why it's considered important that children learn English: astonishingly enough, it's not all about perpetuating post-colonial power structures, or anything like that.

Critics of the race programme for pre- school children labelled it 'totalitarian'.

They would say that - they are, by definition, "racist".

Author and researcher on family life Patricia Morgan said: 'Stepping in to stop severe bullying is one thing, but this is interference in the lives of children. It smacks of totalitarianism.
'It is regulation of private speech and thought. They intend nursery staff to step into children's playground squabbles and then report them to the local council as race incidents. Who would ever have thought that the anti-racism crusade would go so far?'

Well, if you look at the past record of the "anti-racist" movement, and particularly its lengthy record of witch hunts against those who have displeased it (including schoolchildren), then this latest proposal appears, if not predictable, then at least in keeping with its noble traditions.

The very notion that babies or toddlers are capable of being "racist" in any meaningful sense is, I think, ridiculous. I find it very unlikely that children that young are actually able to develop ingrained negative generalisations about groups of people, and suspect that if nursery staff follow this advice too closely, then we may well see large numbers of children being labelled as dangerous racists, for utterly trivial instances of misbehaviour. Certainly, the notion that one can identify actual or prospective racists by their culinary habits is too deranged for words. Still, it does have one benefit: in common with pretty much anyone who dares to express any negative views regarding immigration, multiculturalism, or Islam, I have on occasion been accused of "racism". However, since I like curry, I can now prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that I am not guilty of the charge!

The state of British education

2008-07-07T01:58:00.007+01:00

The headteachers of two of Britain's leading schools have recently made some interesting remarks about the impact of government policy upon the quality of education in the nation's schools. First, the headmistress of the North London Collegiate School, Bernice McCabe:

Education policy in England is leading to the "cultural and intellectual impoverishment" of a generation of schoolchildren, a leading headmistress has warned.
The introduction of new-style courses - teaching children how to use English and mathematics in the work place - has been at the expense of academic rigour, said Bernice McCabe, head of the independent North London Collegiate School.
She said children's enjoyment of subjects at school had taken a back seat in recent years as ministers use education as a vehicle to boost their basic skills.
Mrs McCabe, whose school gained the best A-level results in the country in last year's Daily Telegraph league table, condemned the "woolliness" of the present system in which subjects were "relegated to the bottom of the pile".

And, if some educationalists have their way, such "middle class creations" may be abolished altogether!

The comments were made at an annual summer school for teachers - staged by a charity founded by the Prince of Wales.
The Prince's Teaching Institute was established in 2002 to encourage staff to rediscover their passion for subjects, such as English, history, geography and science.
Mrs McCabe, the course director, said it was "not always easy" for teachers to focus on academic subjects because of political interference.
It comes just days after it emerged that schoolchildren will be able to study travel brochures, magazines and biographies under a new-style "functional" GCSE. The course - an alternative to traditional English literature and English language - is designed to develop students' "understanding of language use in the real world".
But Mrs McCabe said: "By far the most serious consequence of this emphasis on functionality in education policy is that it may lead to the cultural and intellectual impoverishment of a generation of school children.
"Certainly one of the regular conclusions of our previous summer schools has been that pupils are encouraged by being challenged, that it is possible for them to enjoy 'difficult' and that problem-solving can be popular. By having high expectations and ensuring that all pupils, irrespective of their backgrounds, are taught the aspects of our subjects that we most value rather than those that are immediately accessible, we can raise standards.
"I believe strongly that academic standards are also improved by offering more ambitious and challenging lessons, rather than those that are merely 'relevant' and accessible."

Second, the (soon to be former) headmaster of Bexley Grammar School, Rod MacKinnon:

A leading headmaster who is leaving one of the most popular schools in the state system to work in the private sector has accused the Government of turning teachers into "social workers and surrogate parents".

Rod MacKinnon, the head of Bexley Grammar School, south-east London, said schools were being forced to shun traditional lessons as ministers manipulated the education system for the purposes of "social engineering".
He said schools "cannot solve all of society's ills" and should be left to teach.
His comments came just days after ministers published new guidance requiring schools to monitor obesity rates, drug taking and teenage pregnancy as part of a new duty to promote pupil "wellbeing".
According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bexley Grammar is the most sought-after school in England. Last year, 1,927 parents named it as their first choice – for just 192 spare places. It means the school rejected nine pupils for every one it admitted.

Mr MacKinnon's full article is here. Both he and Mrs McCabe lead highly successful schools - when they discuss matters of education, it is fair to assume that they know whereof they speak. It would behove the government to listen well to what they say. But, of course, it won't.

"We are now going to pray to Allah"

2008-07-05T01:18:00.005+01:00

Two schoolboys were allegedly disciplined after refusing to kneel down and "pray to Allah" during a religious education lesson.
It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.

Yesterday parents accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing them to take part in the exercise.

One, Sharon Luinen, said: "This isn't right, it's taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn't join in Muslim prayer.
"Making them pray to Allah, who isn't who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful."

Another parent Karen Williams, 38, whose 12-year-old daughter is a classmate of the boys, said: "I am absolutely furious my daughter was made to take part in it and I don't find it acceptable.

"The teacher had gone into the class and made them watch a short film and then said 'we are now going out to pray to Allah'.

"Then two boys got detention and all the other children missed their refreshments' break."

She added: "Not only was it forced upon them, my daughter was told off for not doing it right.

"They'd never done it before and they were supposed to do it in another language."

She said the pupils were asked if they had water on them, and when one girl produced a bottle, the teacher began washing her feet with it.

Her husband Keith, 44, a painter and decorator, said: "The school is wonderful but this one teacher has made a major mistake. It seems to be happening throughout society. People think they can ride roughshod over our beliefs and the way we live."

The alleged incident, at the Alsager school, one of Cheshire's top performing schools, happened on Tuesday afternoon. The teacher, Alison Phillips, the school's subject leader in RE, is understood to be staying away from the school until the furore dies down, although she has not been suspended.

She is said to have got prayer mats out of the cupboard and also asked children to wear Islamic headdresses.

Deputy headmaster Keith Plant said: "I have spoken to the teacher and she has articulately given me her version of events."

Sources at the school said the incident could have been down to Miss Phillips instigating a role play and not properly briefing the pupils, all aged around 12, what she was doing.

A couple of points stand to be made here. The first is that compelling children to engage in or to simulate Islamic rituals, without asking the consent of their parents, and treating them as miscreants when they refuse to do so, is totally unacceptable. As many other bloggers have already pointed out, it is rather difficult to imagine that any teacher would dare to compel Muslim children to engage in acts of Christian worship against their will.

It's true that British state schools are obliged to hold acts of collective worship of a Christian character. But this simply reflects the fact that Christianity is, and has for 1,500 years been, the majority religion of our country, and is a fundamental building block of our native culture. More pertinently, parents have the right to withdraw their child from all such collective acts of worship, should they feel strongly enough about it. From the details of the incident at Alsager School, it would seem that Ms Phillips' actions went, at the least, against the spirit of respect for parental choice which is the basis for this exemption.

More generally, I am inclined to wonder why the children were being expected to perform or simulate Islamic acts of worship anyway. After all, in order to learn about Islam one does not actually need to engage in such acts. Presumably, this is simply another instance of the ridiculous "make learning fun" approach, under which children spend their time imagining what it might be like to be a Muslim, or "a Spanish sailor about to embark in the Spanish Armada", or, as occurred in my own schooldays, a fellow passenger of Rosa Parks', or an Egyptian slave labourer working on the pyramids. All very enjoyable no doubt, and easy on the teacher too (washing one's feet and distributing prayer mats is probably rather less challenging than explaining the finer points of Sharia law), but not something which leaves the pupil with any actual knowledge of the subject, and not something which really has a place in any class other than Drama.

Finally, I have to ask: if Ms Phillips really wanted to show the children how Muslims pray, should she not have taken herself and the girls in the class off to a separate room, to ensure that lewd thoughts did not distract the boys from their devotions? That is, after all, what would have happened in a real mosque. Or do RE teachers commonly write Islam's less palatable aspects out of the script?

Hat-tip: Homophobic Horse (in the comments)

A Counterblaste to Tobacco (but not to crime)

2008-07-02T01:07:00.014+01:00

Violent assaults and serious antisocial behaviour are lower priorities for councils than stopping people smoking, town hall targets showed yesterday.
Despite a government poll showing community safety was voters' overwhelming priority, anti-crime initiatives will not be the main focus of authorities.
Details published yesterday by Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, set out the targets picked by each local authority — and agreed by her department — to be their future priorities. While performance will be measured across the whole range of 198 indicators, targets will be set only for the 35 chosen as top local concerns.
Jobless 16-18 year olds, reducing teenage pregnancy, providing housing, protecting the environment and cutting child obesity were the five selected by most councils. While reducing “serious acquisitive crime” such as thefts from cars was sixth, cutting the rate of “assault with injury” was 13th and domestic violence 20th.
Considered a higher priority than both by most councils were stopping smoking and boosting the numbers of local people “who feel they can influence decisions in their locality”.
The local targets are agreed with central government after consultation with bodies such as local police, health service and jobcentres.
Alongside the new targets, Ms Blears published a YouGov poll, commissioned by the Government, showing that 82 per cent of respondents considered “creating safer communities” among their top priorities.
The councils that do best at meeting their chosen targets will qualify for extra cash.

Presumably the number of people "who feel they can influence decisions in their locality" might best be increased by actually listening to the concerns of people, and placing the issues which they worry about at the top of the agenda, rather than by according those issues less importance than something which they don't really care about one way or the other.

But, of course, dealing with crime and anti-social behaviour might prove to be rather difficult. By contrast, in the present political climate, smokers are a remarkably soft target, and cutting levels of smoking (which, in my opinion, are not a matter for local government, anyway) is a remarkably easy challenge. Indeed, since the number of smokers is already in steady decline, it may be quite possible for councils to do nothing and still hit their targets! Perhaps that explains the claim that preventing people from lighting up every now and then is more important than preventing people from mugging one another. Or perhaps this rather bizarre ordering of priorities simply testifies to the prevalence of nanny statist attitudes among our political masters, national and local. Either way, it's idiotic.

Hat-tip: Julia M

Money well spent

2008-06-29T05:45:00.005+01:00

British MEPs are joining a 200-strong European parliament jaunt to Paris this week, costing the taxpayer up to £200,000.
The three-day trip, organised by the European People’s party (EPP), a centre-right group, will include dinner at the Palais de Versailles and a champagne boat trip down the Seine.
EPP leaders say it is an opportunity for MEPs to leave their normal Brussels working environment and “discuss security issues”. They describe the break as “study days”.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but isn't "discussing security issues" the kind of thing they normally do - or should be doing - anyway? Not that they're going to be doing a whole lot of discussing, in any case, unless maybe it's discussing whether the white wine is better than the red:

Details of the entertainment are not available on the EPP website but a leaked agenda sent to MEPs and staff reveals a whirlwind of sightseeing and entertainment. The fun kicks off on Wednesday with a two-hour lunch hosted by France’s ruling party, the Popular Movement Union (UMP), at the 18th-century residence of the president of the national assembly, the Hôtel de Lassay.
MEPs will then debate European defence policy for 2½ hours before being whisked away, with a police escort, from their luxury hotel on the Right Bank to a drinks reception hosted at the Elysée Palace by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president.
On Thursday they will attend a three-hour debate on energy, followed by a three-hour cruise down the Seine on Le Paquebot (billed as an “immense floating palace”), the largest boat available at the exclusive Yachts de Paris tour company.
The MEPs, spouses and staff will have a cocktail lunch of 22 hot and cold culinary specialities created by Jean-Pierre Vigato, a top Paris chef. Champagne, French wines and liqueurs are also on the menu. Those invited were reminded that “you may wish to bring a sun hat”.
Dinner that evening is at the Palais de Versailles, once the principal royal residence.
Next day there will be a three-hour debate on food security, before another buffet lunch, complete with wine.

So, from the details given above, it seems that they will be spending a total of about eight and a half hours on various discussions and debates. A normal working day, in fact, but spread over three days, and interspersed with plenty of opportunities for the poor overworked (those expenses don't fiddle themselves, you know) politicos to luxuriate.

Aren't we taxpayers generous?

The liberal paradise

2008-06-28T23:32:00.007+01:00

While the British education system leaves rather a lot to be desired, we can at least be thankful that we have not sunk quite so irretrievably into the swamp of liberal lunacy as Sweden. In May 2007 I mentioned claims that Swedish parents were being encouraged to send their sons to school wearing dresses - in order to break down male chauvinistic hegemony, naturally - and now we have this:

It was supposed to be a party with balloons and a birthday cake but the eight-year-old Swedish boy had not reckoned on his country’s obsession with equality and inclusiveness. Two of his classmates were left off the invitation list – and that, deemed his school – was forbidden and a violation of their rights in the strictest “nanny state” in Europe.

The case has been sent to the Swedish parliament and has sparked a national debate about individual liberty. Does a child have the right to invite anyone he wants to a party, even if he risks hurting the feelings of those who were left out?

[...]

Before the beginning of lessons the boy had cheerfully threaded his way through the class handing out invitations. When the teacher spotted that two children had not received one he confiscated the invitations.
“One of the children had not invited my son to his own birthday party,” explained the father of the boy, who lodged an official complaint with the parliamentary ombudsman. “The other one had been bad to my son for six months. You do not invite your antagonists.”
That was not convincing enough for the headmaster or government deputies. “I believe the staff acted correctly, in a model way,” said Lars Hansson, of the Swedish Liberal party, one of the four ruling coalition partners in the country.
“It is their duty to reject any forms of insulting behaviour. To eliminate individual children from parties is not acceptable.”

Mr Hansson is evidently also an advocate of revised spelling: specifically, he seems to believe that fascist is spelt l-i-b-e-r-a-l.

I assume that the basis of this decision lies in the belief - exhibited in this country by those who oppose the eleven plus on the grounds that it "stigmatises" those who fail it, or who dislike competitive sports in schools because not everyone gets to win - that children must never have their feelings hurt. In fact the precise opposite is true: upsetting as not being invited to a party (or failing an exam, or losing at football) may be, it is itself a vital part of the social learning process. In just the same way as it's better to learn about death when one loses one's rabbit at the age of eight, than when one loses one's parent at thirty, so it's better to become hardened to - or at least aware of the possibility of - rejection (or, as Lars Hansson puts it "insulting behaviour") with small childhood instances like this, than with something really important in adulthood. Wrapping children in cotton wool will only harm them in the long run.

Even disregarding this point, however, the notion of a society in which the guest list at a child's party is a matter for the state is simply bizarre. The Times also notes that:

Lena Nyberg, the Children’s Ombudsman, is waging a campaign against collective punishment in schools too. Children have been complaining to her about the way that entire classes are kept behind after hours to punish an offence committed by a single pupil.

It seems that, for Swedish liberals, children are individuals when facing the prospect of a small dose of old-fashioned discipline. When it comes to their birthday parties, however, they, and their parents, are very much subject to the collectivist norms of the state.

Hat-tip: ATW

Wishful thinking?

2008-06-27T17:02:00.006+01:00

A still from last night's BBC Ten O'Clock News:

Hat-tip: Biased BBC

At ATW...

2008-06-26T23:54:00.001+01:00

...a post on the Henley by-election, the result of which will be announced in a couple of hours. How badly will Labour do?

Today's Witch Hunt

2008-06-24T00:54:00.012+01:00

As many readers will have noticed, the latest Evil Racist to be hounded out of his job is Boris Johnson's former adviser James McGrath, who has been sacked after saying that all darkies should leave Britain. Except that, of course, he didn't really say that. What he actually did was respond to whining race hustler (and Labour activist) Marc Wadsworth - who had quoted whining race hustler Darcus Howe's hysterical suggestion that Johnson's victory would lead to "a mass exodus of older Caribbean migrants back to our homelands" - by saying "well, let them go if they don't like it here". A couple of thoughts suggest themselves:

First, to quote Ed Balls, so what? It's not as if he said that all blacks should be rounded up at gunpoint and forced to leave. He simply said that, if some people find the thought of living in a Johnson-controlled London so terrible that they want to leave, then they should not be prevented from doing so, and the rest of us should not beat ourselves up about it. And what, exactly, is so appalling about that? Is the Mayor of London supposed to base his entire policy around the wishes of a handful of paranoiacs? Was Mr McGrath supposed to fall on his knees before Wadsworth, imploring him to prevent the postulated "mass exodus"?

Second, what McGrath said is pretty mild compared to certain remarks made by Ken Livingstone while he was in office:

Today at one of his regular press conferences, Ken Livingstone was discussing plans to regenerate Stratford in east London. He said the following about Simon and David Reuben, well-known property developers who are involved in the project:
Perhaps if they're not happy they can always go back [to their own country] and see if they can do better under the ayatollahs.
Asked to clarify his remarks he added:
If they're not happy here, they can go back to Iran and try their luck with the ayatollahs, if they don't like the planning regime or my approach.
The Reuben brothers are from India and are of Iraqi Jewish descent.

As readers may have noticed, Livingstone did not resign after saying this.

Third, I agree with Steve at Pub Philosopher that Boris Johnson's response to this incident demonstrates the spinelessness of the Cameron Tories. Johnson's decision to sack McGrath, which has been endorsed by Cameron himself, was a display of supreme moral and political cowardice. The screams of "racism" emanating from a race-baiting Labour activist, and echoed by sympathetic elements of the media (for example, the BBC initially said that McGrath had made "an apparently racist remark", and in other ways misrepresented the incident to show him in a negative light), achieved their desired effect: the sacking of a man who had done nothing wrong. To put it more succinctly, the left said "jump", and the Tories paused only to ask "how high?".
The justification given for McGrath's sacking, by Johnson and others, is that, while McGrath's comments were not racist, they might have given rise to a public perception that the man who made them was. However, this is a public perception (or perhaps only an illusion of one) that is formed and driven by the left, and which will only be given credence by the Tories caving in as easily as they have done. In order to ensure that "anti-racist" witch hunts like this one do not achieve a 100% success rate, no matter how lacking in substance the accusations of "racism" might be, and to ensure that we can actually speak openly about important issues like race and immigration, it is necessary to stand up to the witchfinders. The Tories have utterly failed to do this, and, as such, one has to question whether, even if they have the desire to change anything in this country (which I rather doubt), they also have the guts. As Steve puts it:

If this episode is anything to go by, all any noisy, self-righteous pressure group will need to do is say "BOO!" and the Tory government will roll over and die.

The last refuge of a (black) scoundrel

2008-06-22T21:14:00.009+01:00

Dr Johnson famously remarked that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel". He was, of course, referring to ostentatious displays of false patriotism, and the enduring truth of his statement is evident in the "Britishness" agenda of the present government. However, if you are a scoundrel who happens not to be white, then you have available to you a far more effective last refuge: the groundless accusation of racism. This is demonstrated in the recent remarks of two disgraced "celebrities":

Naomi Campbell last night blamed racism for her outburst on a British Airways jet, claiming she had been called 'a golliwog supermodel'.
In an interview with Sky News, Miss Campbell said she was not going to apologise to BA as they were "disgusting."
She said: 'I was called a racial name on that flight. And that was part of my reaction. Again, nothing to do with the police but yes from British Airways.'
'I was called a golliwog supermodel, I don’t think that’s really fair do you?'
The supermodel did not say exactly who had called her the name only that it was not one of the passengers.
When asked who called her the name, she replied: 'Someone on the flight, not the passenger.'

[...]
Miss Campbell avoided jail yesterday despite admitting kicking, hitting and spitting at police officers on board the jet at Heathrow.
Extraordinary details of the supermodel's vicious assault on two officers emerged in court as she was sentenced to a 200 hour unpaid community service order.
Magistrates told the model that the community service was part of a 12-month order.
They also ordered her to pay compensation of £200 each to the two police officers she assaulted, and £150 compensation to the aircraft captain, Miles Sutherland.
In addition she was ordered to pay fines for committing a public order offences totalling £2,300 and a £15 surcharge.
[...]
In court, Melanie Parrish, prosecuting, told how flight crew said initially that Campbell was very friendly and professional.
But after she discovered a bag of hers had gone astray, Campbell became upset and demanded to know where her bag was. Meanwhile the captain began to go through her options with her.
Miss Parrish said: 'To say that this process was difficult would be something of an understatement. Miss Campbell made no attempt to listen to him and talked over him, stating: "I don't want to hear".'

The court heard Campbell continued to shout at Capt Sutherland, saying: 'I can't believe you have lost my f***ing bag. Bring me my f***ing bags now.'
Miss Parrish said: 'She instructed him to personally get off the aircraft and get her bag and show it to her.
'The captain explained this wasn't going to happen. He repeatedly tried to take control of the situation and asked if he could get a word in.'
The magistrates were told that when Capt Sutherland tried to explain her options, Campbell snapped: 'How dare you tell me what my options are? You are not leaving until you find my f***ing bags.'
As the captain walked away Campbell shouted after him: 'You are a racist, you wouldn't be doing this if I was white.'
[...]

The court heard that police were called and three officers arrived.
The officers made no attempt to touch her but Campbell seemed to 'completely lose control', screaming 'You can't f***ing touch me' and shouting down her phone to 'make sure the press know'.
'She said: "You can't arrest me, my cousin is in Scotland Yard."

'When PC John Eastick moved towards her, she went berserk, striking PC Eastick on the arm with her mobile phone.'
Campbell continued to struggle violently and she was described as throwing her right leg back and thrusting forward, striking another male officer, PC Campling, on the thigh.
Miss Parrish added: 'At the time she was wearing formidable platform boots with stiletto-style heels.'
The court also heard how Campbell kicked PC Eastick and PC Charles Campling both in the groin area with her heeled shoes.
'Then she spat and hit PC Eastick on his arm,' said Ms Parrish.
As the continued to kick out indiscriminately, she caught PC Eastick on the right shin and left thigh before slumping down in her seat.
The court heard she continued to shout and swear and then pulled her head back and threw it forward, spitting at PC Eastick.
As they tried to remove the model from the aircraft she continued to be abusive and became increasingly violent, shouting at the officers: 'Don't touch me.'
Campbell then shouted at the officers: 'It is because I am a black woman, you are all racists. I am going to sue you. I am going to f*** you,' and continued to kick out as they tried to remove her.

Is it cos I is black? No, it's cos you is a violent thug.

Still, it is quite impressive that Campbell - who may now face libel action from the BA cabin crew whose reputations she has impugned - was able to eke three entirely separate accusations of racism out of this one incident. Although, according to some reports, the shoe was rather on the other foot:

While Naomi Campbell claimed racism was the cause of her arrest after pitching a hissy at London's Heathrow Airport last week, it was she who allegedly hurled the epithets. Cops claim the patience-challenged supermodel screamed, "F-ing white honkies!" at them and called a female officer a "white bitch".

And let's not forget this:

Naomi Campbell's former maid is suing the battling supermodel over claims that she called her a "dumb Romanian", the New York Times reports.
Gaby Gibson, 40, filed papers on Tuesday in a New York court which allege Campbell subjected her to "repeated discriminatory assaults based on national origin". Specifically, Gibson claims Campbell asked her: "Romanians are not usually as dumb as you?"
Gibson described Campbell as a "violent super-bigot" who "called her names and threatened to press charges for theft when the model was unable to find a pair of Stella McCartney jeans".

Meanwhile, via Barnsley Nationalists, I see that Linford Christie has also been playing the race card:

Former Olympic champion Linford Christie has claimed there is "institutionalised racism" in Britain.
And Christie, who won 100 metres gold at the 1992 Olympics, is adamant he should have carried the Olympic torch on its way through London in April.
"I think there's institutionalised racism in this country," Christie told BBC Radio 4. "How many black knights from British athletics do you know?
"I've achieved more single-handedly than any other sportsman in (Britain)."
Christie was banned for life by the British Olympic Association in 1999 after he failed a routine drugs test.

Is it cos I is black? No, it's cos you is a cheat.

The War on Alcohol

2008-06-20T01:12:00.014+01:00

Having sent smokers packing, the People Who Know Better Than You are turning their attention to another form of "incorrect behaviour" - drinking:

Buying drink at the supermarket could involve a walk of shame to an “alcohol-only” checkout counter under new plans to help Scotland curb its binge-drinking culture.
The scheme, announced yesterday by Nationalist ministers in Edinburgh, is designed to deter shoppers from making excessive purchases by placing them under the scrutiny of fellow customers. It is part of a package of radical measures aimed at tackling Scotland's alcohol problems, which is estimated to cost the country's economy more than £2 billion a year.
The alcohol-only checkouts would mean that families doing their weekly shop would be faced with queueing twice - using one checkout for their groceries and another for alcohol in the same way as cigarettes are sold separately in supermarkets at present.
The proposal was floated in a pre-legislative consultation document from the Scottish government that aims to put in place a plan to tackle the near-epidemic of alcohol abuse in the country.
The document states: “Similar arrangements [to the purchase of cigarettes] for alcohol sales could encourage shoppers to make conscious decisions about whether to purchase alcohol and help to emphasise that alcohol is not an ordinary product. In stores where alcohol is sold, a separate checkout, or checkouts, would be used for the sales of alcohol products. No other products could be processed through the alcohol checkout.”
The dedicated checkout idea was immediately branded absurd by critics. Fiona Moriarty of the Scottish Retail Consortium, representing supermarkets, said: “No one buys alcohol by accident. Those determined to drink excessively will not be put off by separate checkouts but they would inconvenience responsible customers, pile on thousands of pounds of refit and staffing costs and further demonise alcohol.”
“It is only a small minority of Scots who have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. Draconian legislation will not change that, but it will penalise the overwhelming majority of customers who consume alcohol perfectly responsibly.”

She's right, of course. I'd add that the proposal is, like all manifestations of the nanny state, incredibly patronising. The proposal's authors write that this will "encourage shoppers to make conscious decisions about whether to purchase alcohol". However, I would imagine that most shoppers, being slightly more than mindless automatons, are already fully capable of exercising rational choice in their shopping decisions. I'd also suggest that the moment at which one exercises that choice comes when one picks up the items one wishes to purchase and places them in one's shopping basket, rather than at the moment when, having done that, one walks to the special "naughty till".

The planned introduction of the "walk of shame" - which, let's face it, might be rather more shaming were it not something that most adults will be doing on a regular basis - is not the only bright idea contained in the proposals:

Scottish ministers also want to introduce a system of minimum pricing for drink - possibly about 35p per unit of alcohol, although a definite price has not been fixed - in an effort to ensure that the price better reflects the strength of alcoholic drinks.
Critics of that plan last night seized on the disclosure, from Scottish government officials, that it would mean the price of a bottle of supermarket-branded whisky produced in Scotland would rise by almost a quarter and would thus be more expensive than the same bottle sold in an English supermarket.

These "critics" may have spoken too soon, however, for the same idea is being considered south of the border:

Ministers at Westminster are considering plans similar to those already put forward in Scotland, to impose a minimum price for alcohol.

Any legislation could see English supermarkets and corner shops ordered to charge a minimum of between 35p and 40p per unit.

The move is aimed at curbing the binge-drinking culture among teenagers, who according to recent figures drink more than youngsters in most other developed countries.

How much does alcohol cost in those countries? British alcohol is certainly the most heavily taxed in Europe, if not actually the most expensive. As such, the government might like to consider that maybe, just maybe, the binge-drinking "epidemic" has not arisen in a vacuum, and will not be eliminated by measures like this. Perhaps if the government really worry that much about binge-drinking, they should start the process of stopping it by looking at its root causes.

But what are those root causes? I would suggest that the increase in binge-drinking probably has a lot to do with general societal breakdown, the collapse in self-discipline among some people, and the decline of the family. The very problems, in fact, which people like the present British government worked so hard to bring about. So perhaps they might not be so keen to solve them. Instead, they apparently want to interfere in the workings of private companies, and to penalise the large number of drinkers who do not binge drink (or who, even if they do, do not actually break the law after doing so), but who may now have to pay considerably more for the alcohol that they do consume.

Personally, I'm not hugely concerned about binge drinking per se. I am concerned about crime, including alcohol-related crime, but I think that that should be dealt with by targeting the minority of people who commit it, rather than the large majority of harmless drinkers. I'm also concerned about societal breakdown, which is a cause of the apparent increase in binge drinking, but I can't imagine that the government will do anything to reverse that. Instead, they are giving me another cause for concern: the fact that our rulers - be they at Holyrood or at Westminster - seem determined again and again to interfere in our lives and dictate our behaviour.

London's vibrant diversity

2008-06-19T21:16:00.002+01:00

Police were appealing for witnesses today following the attempted murder of a man who was doused in petrol and set on fire in east London.

The 20-year-old, who is fighting for his life in hospital, was torched as he sat in his car in Forest Gate.

It is believed the Hindi [sic] victim, who suffered 65 per cent burns in the attack, was targeted because he was dating a Muslim girlfriend.

He had just parked his car, a green Honda Prelude, in St George’s Road when he was approached by the suspect or suspects and had petrol poured over him before being set alight.

[...]

Two men aged 20 and 21 have been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and released on bail.

While this report tells us that the victim was a Hindu, and his girlfriend a Muslim, no details are provided regarding the religious affiliation of his attackers. They could be literally anyone...

Hat-tip: Dhimmi Watch

When leftists fall out

2008-06-19T21:04:00.005+01:00

Ding ding! Seconds out!

Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti is threatening to sue a Cabinet minister she says "set out to smear" her dealings with ex-Tory MP David Davis.
Ms Chakrabarti said that she would sue Culture Secretary Andy Burnham if "you continue down the path of innuendo and attempted character assassination".
It follows an article in which he said he found her alliance with capital punishment backer Mr Davis "curious".
A spokesman said Mr Burnham had not meant any offence.
Mr Burnham's comments came in an interview with New Labour magazine Progress.
He expressed dismay at civil liberties campaigners and other people who had been "seduced by Tory talk of how liberal they are".
He said he found it "very curious in the man who was, and still is I believe, an exponent of capital punishment, having late-night, hand-wringing, heart-melting phone calls with Shami Chakrabarti".

Oh, I do so hope that Chakrabarti - whose letter to Burnham can be read in full at Liberty's website - carries out her threat. I mean, Labour cabinet minister vs. supremely irritating - and utterly hypocritical - liberal hand-wringer: the only sad thing is that they can't both lose!

An ideal politician

2008-06-18T21:25:00.007+01:00

Romanian villagers have voted to re-elect a dead man as their mayor, to prevent his living rival winning.
Neculai Ivascu - who led Voinesti for almost two decades - died from a liver disease on Sunday, too late to cancel the contest.
The village's loyal residents still gave him 23 more votes than his rival, Gheorghe Dobrescu of the ruling National Liberal Party.
"I know he died, but I don't want change," one villager told Romanian TV.

In a controversial decision, the electoral commission declared the runner-up and rival Mr Dobrescu the winner.

Impressive as the election of a dead guy undoubtedly is, it does not quite match the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the wholly fictitious Andre Kasongo Ilunga has been Minister for Foreign Trade since February 2007, heroically overcoming the drawbacks generally associated with non-existence. As I remarked on Ilunga's case, politicians like Messrs Ilunga and Ivascu would probably be a great improvement on our own current crop of living, breathing ones. They'd cost less for a start!

More sowing and reaping

2008-06-18T00:16:00.008+01:00

A union activist was branded a racist for producing a leaflet with an image of the Three Wise Monkeys proverb.
Onay Kasab, secretary of Greenwich Unison, is one of four branch officers facing a disciplinary hearing after handing out the pamphlet at last June's conference for the union, which represents more than a million public sector workers.
The four say the leaflet used the image of the "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" monkeys to lampoon the committee for removing important issues from the agenda. But union bosses said the image was a "racist" slur aimed at one black committee member.
Mr Kasab, 40, from Bexley, said: "It's upsetting that I am accused of racism by my own union. We felt it was an apt image to illustrate our point that the committee were refusing to listen to members' concerns over issues such as the funding of the Labour Party, the election of full time officials and control over strike action.
"But in the conference hall the Unison president denounced it as racist and when we went to respond the microphone was switched off. We have been gagged and subjected to a witch hunt."

Now, up until this point I had some sympathy for Kasab, trade union activist though he may be. After all, the Three Wise Monkeys is well known imagery, devoid of any racial connotations, and there appears to be nothing indicating any racist intent or content in the leaflet in question. Rather, the Unison bosses just seem to be adopting the traditional leftist strategy of silencing an opponent by invoking the demonic chimera "racism".

But my sympathy rapidly diminished to the point of non-existence, when I read the next paragraph. For Kasab continued:

"I have dedicated a lot of my life to representing Unison members in Greenwich from all backgrounds. I led a 13-week strike against the civil service over the employment of a senior BNP activist. I am Turkish-Cypriot and have faced racism so to be accused of being something I despise is terrible."

It really does take a special kind of hypocrisy to be able to complain that one is the subject of a witch hunt, and then in the next breath to boast of having led a witch hunt against someone else. And a witch hunt which, if successful, would have had far more serious consequences for its victim (who would have lost his livelihood) than the alleged witch hunt against Kasab will have for him.

The three other members under investigation are Glenn Kelly, secretary of Bromley Unison, Suzanne Muna, secretary of the Housing Corporation Unison branch, and Brian Debus, chairman of Hackney Unison. All are also in the Socialist Party. Matthew Waterfall, who is not a member of the Socialist Party, was investigated but not charged.
"The fact they cleared Mr Waterfall shows that this is motivated by the New Labour supporters in Unison against the Socialist Party," said Mr Kasab.

Again, Kasab's hypocrisy is evident. He resents the fact that he may perhaps be being hounded out of his trade union because of his involvement with a far-left political party. However, he also believes that membership of a "far-right" political party should not only disqualify one from union membership, but that it should also disqualify one from the right to earn a living, full stop. Certainly, it is hard to put any other construction on his attempt to have the unidentified "senior BNP activist" dismissed.
Sadly for Kasab, hypocrites do not make very suitable objects of sympathy. Kasab has made his bed - he has willingly helped to create a situation in which "anti-racist" witch hunts are the order of the day, and in which people deemed "racist" can safely be subjected to inferior treatment - and now the time has come for him to lie in it.

The real terrorist threat

2008-06-16T00:26:00.007+01:00

BBC bosses have defended the grisly beheading of a Muslim by a Christian zealot in new drama Bonekickers.

In the bloody scene, ex-EastEnder Paul Nicholls plays a fundamentalist who decapitates a Muslim with a sword.

Producer Rhonda Smith said: "It's not meant to be shocking or to cause offence and it comes very much from the storyline."

BBC chiefs are planning to warn viewers about the gruesome beheading scene.

A BBC spokeswoman said: "It is in a 9pm slot in early July and viewers will be advised of the content immediately before broadcast."

The six-parter billed as Time Team meets Indiana Jones follows a group of archaeologists solving historical mysteries. It stars Julie Graham, Hugh Bonneville and Adrian Lester.

The beheading scene comes in an episode dealing with the excavation of medieval soldiers from the time of the Crusades.

It leads to the hunt for the cross on which Jesus was crucified which the Crusaders may have brought back from the Holy Land.

Also keen to find the cross are right-wing Christian fanatics who also want to use violence to drive Muslims out of Britain.

Hmm. Haven't I come across this last plot detail somewhere before? Consider this Daily Mail summary of an episode of Spooks, broadcast on BBC1 back in 2006:

[The episode] showed a group of evangelical terrorists who carry out a number of attacks on the Muslim community and attempt to spark a religious war in the UK.
The programme also depicted a rogue Bishop, who was also a government advisor, organising the assassination of a radical Islamic preacher.
[...]
In the programme the Christian terrorist group was seen carrying out a hand-grenade attack on Muslims and planing to blow up a Mosque in Manchester.

It featured a video broadcast by the fictional group saying: "Britain is a nation under Christ - we will no longer tolerate the Muslims in our ranks - this is a declaration of war against Islam."

With the BBC raking in all that money from the licence fee, you'd hope that they could at least manage to think up new and original ways of demonising Christians!

I accept that there is an element of "if you don't like it, don't watch it" with programmes like this. And I certainly don't say that no Christian should ever be depicted in a negative manner on any TV show.

But what I object to is the sheer mendacity and hypocrisy displayed by the Beeb. When this programme is broadcast it will be the second time in as many years that a BBC drama has featured Christian terrorists targeting Muslims. This despite the fact that there is a distinct paucity of such incidents in the real world. The BBC is inverting reality, and allowing its programmes to give the impression that there is a problem with Christian violence, when such a problem simply does not exist.

At the same time, of course, there is a genuine and significant problem with Muslim terrorism in Britain (and many other places too). But will the BBC make a drama featuring Islamic terrorists targeting Christians, Jews, or Hindus? You know, a drama with a plotline that actually reflects reality. No, of course they won't. They won't even dare to broadcast a joke with a vague, non-insulting, reference to Islam in its punchline! After all, if they were to suggest that followers of the Religion of Peace could get even slightly violent, then, not only would that be horribly non-PC, but it might also put them at risk of, um, violence. Violence being the only appropriate response to such a slanderous accusation, obviously. By contrast, Christians, being designated oppressors, are eminently legitimate targets, and, since they are not actually violent, you can get away with saying that they are.

Hat-tip: Dhimmi Watch

The final nail?

2008-06-15T00:32:00.008+01:00

The Czechs have hammered another nail into the coffin of the Lisbon treaty by declaring that ratification must stop.
Czech president Vaclav Klaus, who is supported by the country's largest political party, called the Irish referendum vote a "victory of freedom and reason" and said "ratification cannot continue".

His view was echoed in the Czech senate.

"Politicians have allowed the citizens to express their opinion only in a single EU country," Mr Klaus said.
"The Lisbon treaty project ended with the Irish voters' decision and its ratification cannot continue," he wrote on his own website, according to Czech news agency CTK.

The resounding Irish no was a "victory of freedom and reason over artificial elitist projects and European bureaucracy," he said.

Premysl Sobotka, Czech senate chairman, also said there was "no sense" continuing with ratification, according to the agency.

So, it looks like we could now see two countries refuse to ratify the treaty. The Telegraph report says that that would kill it off once and for all.

Here's hoping!

Cheers Ireland

2008-06-13T20:13:00.005+01:00

Irish Referendum result:

Yes: 752,451 (46.6%)
No: 862,415 (53.4%)

It's not the end of the matter, of course. Our own government plans to push ahead with the ratification process, and I imagine that even as I write various Eurocrats are plotting to force the constitution through, regardless of what the people of Ireland, or anywhere else in Europe, want. But, despite this, the fact remains that today the Irish electorate stuck two fingers up at the EU, and at all those seeking to railroad us all into an undemocratic United States of Europe. And for that we should all be thankful.

Shock of the Day

2008-06-12T00:31:00.005+01:00

An influx of hundreds of thousands of foreigners is fuelling social tensions in parts of the country which were totally unprepared for large-scale immigration, the Government has admitted.
Hazel Blears, the Communities and Local Government secretary, said teams of Whitehall officials were being sent to areas where there was "friction" caused by the arrival of large numbers of foreigners.

A Government study looking at the social impact of migration found that new immigrants to the UK accounted for nearly half of the population growth over the past five years.

Some 860,000 people swelled Britain's population from European Union countries, as well as Commonwealth and other states, it said.
It acknowledged that the scale of this migration had increased public concern in some parts of the country which were unused to large communities of foreigners. Schools and hospitals were often hardest hit.

The report - Managing the Impacts of Migration - A Cross-Government Approach - found large scale migration "has affected many areas with little previous experience of large migrant communities".

It said: "In some places it is the pace and scale of change which have an impact on local communities and services", while "other places experiencing significant migration for the first time may not have the institutions and programmes in place to help them manage that change."

Particular pressure was being felt in schools and hospitals, where migrants were failing to register with their local GP and instead going for basic treatment to Accident and Emergency departments in hospitals.
[...]
Miss Blears said she was sending in specialist teams to help some areas cope with the extra pressures on services.

Three experts from Miss Blears' department are starting work at Breckland district council, in Norfolk, this summer. Breckland council saw its population rise by more than 1,300 in 2005/06, almost entirely due to the arrival of immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Portugal.

Miss Blears said: "The change in the population has caused some friction and some tensions there. And they have had a few incidents. We are sending in some specialists who have a background in grassroots activism.

"They want to learn from the good things that are going on in Breckland but also help to build new relationships and make a better atmosphere in that town."

As Ronald Reagan once said, "the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help'". I can't help but hear those words as I read about Blears' proposals.
After all, who exactly are these "specialists who have a background in grassroots activism"? Are they anything more than common or garden race hustlers? Does their "grassroots activism" consist of anything more than whining about "racism" to anyone who'll listen (and most who won't)? Because I find it rather doubtful that sending a trio of Trevor Phillips wannabees to Breckland is going to improve the situation.

In any case, it seems that no one in the present government is able to recall the adage, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Anyone with at least half a brain (a category which, I admit, may exclude most Labour ministers) ought to have foreseen that immigration on the unprecedentedly large scale presided over by Labour would be likely to both put pressure on public services, and create social tensions. As such, I would suggest that the obvious solution would have been to refrain from opening the borders to all and sundry in the first place. But none of this seems to have occurred to Labour. As I have previously remarked, the shortsightedness of the left when dealing with immigration and its attendant issues really is astounding.

Compare and contrast

2008-06-10T18:00:00.007+01:00

A lawbreaker:

A bus passenger is launching a legal challenge after being handed a criminal record amid a dispute over a 90 pence fare.

Tom Usher believed he had paid the charge by swiping his Oyster travel card as he boarded the bus in December.

But a spot check by an inspector found that the payment had not been debited.

Although Mr Usher, 37, still had £1.30 on his card when challenged and maintains that he offered to pay it as soon as the oversight was discovered, he was ordered before magistrates, found guilty of failing to pay the fare and fined £90 with costs of £100.

A lawmaker:

Giles Chichester resigned as Conservative leader in the European Parliament after a scandal surrounding expenses worth more than £145,000.

Europe's most senior Tory was forced to step down after Caroline Spelman, Conservative Chairman, demanded that he opened his books to Party auditors within 24 hours, for a "full explanation".
Mr Chichester had at first tried to shrug off a "technical breach of rules", which he claimed, had followed a misunderstanding of the Parliament's financial regulations.
[...]
Mr Chichester's case was not helped by comments he made while admitting a "mistake" during a television interview on Wednesday night.
"Whoops-a-daisy I am shown up to have made a mistake," he said, in comments that angered Conservative HQ in London.
Mr Chichester first admitted on Wednesday that he had broken rules over the last five years, after a change in financial rules, by paying the Parliamentary Assistant Allowance, worth an annual £160,000, into a family owned firm, where he is a paid director.
Between 2003 and 2007, Francis Chichester Ltd, the family company named after Mr Chichester's famous round-the-world yachtsman [father], received £134,499 in Parliament payments, according to figures seen by the Daily Telegraph.
During the same period, the directors, Mr Chichester and his wife, were paid £30,660.
Payments continued into the company until June 2008, taking the total sum thought to be under investigation by the Parliament authorities over the £145,000 mark.
The Parliament first contacted Mr Chichester 18 months ago about a "potential conflict of interests" but pressure built after media reports that Mr Chichester had paid the family firm £445,000 in allowances since 1996.

Another lawmaker:

Another top Tory MEP has lost his job in the second expenses scandal to hit the party in two days.

Den Dover has been replaced as the Conservatives' chief whip in Europe after admitting paying his wife and daughter £750,000 for work.

And another:

Michael Cashman, a leading Labour MEP, has paid his boyfriend more than 8,000 pounds a month from his taxpayer-funded expenses, the Telegraph can disclose.

Documents show that Paul Cottingham was given secretarial allowances worth £8,143 a month to administer in 2002. This was the maximum allowance available at the time. Euro-MPs can now receive an allowance for staff of £160,000 a year.

Back in 1696 Samuel Garth observed that "little villains must submit to fate/that great ones may enjoy the world in state". And boy, was he right! Whatever way you look at it, it is surely self-evident that the three MEPs listed above - not to mention the numerous other MPs and MEPs whose greed has been widely and extensively chronicled over recent months - are infinitely more morally culpable than Tom Usher. But he's the one with the criminal record, and they're the ones who are still "enjoying the world in state", and dictating how the rest of us live our lives, into the bargain.

Hodge hassled

2008-06-09T08:03:00.005+01:00

Over at the Palace of Westminster, it looks like it's time to break out the coffee and biscuits:

Tourism Minister Margaret Hodge was involved in an extraordinary slanging match with one of the leaders of the British holiday industry at a cocktail reception on the House of Commons terrace.
Guests were shocked as Mrs Hodge stormed off after clashing with Philip Green, chairman of UK Inbound, a trade group that encourages foreigners to take holidays in Britain.
She was furious after guests booed her speech. One heckled: 'You don't know what you are talking about,' and she fired back: 'Yes I do, you are totally wrong.'
Mr Green had enraged Mrs Hodge by accusing the Government of driving away foreign tourists with 'high taxes disguised as green initiatives, ridiculous red tape and a schizophrenic approach to air travel'.
She stormed: 'I came here for a pleasant summer evening on the terrace, not to be lectured.'
Mrs Hodge then claimed British hotels were overpriced and big visitor attractions offered poor service - and left the moment her speech was over.

One guest said: 'I have never seen anything like it on the terrace before - there was heckling and even booing.'

I can't profess to be an expert on the state of the British tourism industry, but if the government's handling of tourism has been anything close to its handling of the rest of the economy, and, indeed, the nation as a whole, then Philip Green probably has every right to feel aggrieved. And you can hardly blame him for acting as he did. After all, if you had the opportunity to tell Margaret Hodge, or any other government minister, what you think about the way they're running the country, would you pass it up?

But in any event, isn't the mental image triggered by this story absolutely wonderful? I wouldn't generally advise overindulgence in hubristic schadenfreude, but surely the thought of the odious Hodge being jeered and then throwing a childish tantrum merits at least one discreet chuckle!

Return to Alum Rock

2008-06-08T01:34:00.014+01:00

I see that the pressure group, Christian Voice, have announced plans to descend on the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, where two Christian preachers were recently threatened with arrest by a PCSO. As Christian Voice have often been described as "Christian fundamentalists" by left-wing secularists who wish to imply that they are some Christian equivalent of al-Qaeda, we can presumably expect to see them engage in a vengeful orgy of violent destruction? Astonishingly enough, no. Rather, they will be restricting their activities to the handing-out of leaflets, the same heinous act that Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham committed.

The protest will take place next Saturday, the 14th June. According to the Christian Voice website, the organisation's director, Stephen Green (who has himself previously been arrested and prosecuted for handing out leaflets), had this to say:

The case also raises concerns about the association of Islam and the Police. If people like Naguthney are using the British Police as a launching ground for Muslim activism, whether in the National Association of Muslim Police or in day-to-day police activities, then they should be expelled.

It is less than two years ago when the then Home Secretary John Reid was asked by Abu Izzadeen at a meeting in Leyton, East London : "How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?" There was an outcry, but now we find a Muslim police employee, someone his Chief Constable probably regards as a 'moderate', clearly has the same mind-set as a convicted terrorist.

By the grace of God, this no-go area for the Gospel will be challenged. West Midlands Police Chief Constable Sir Paul Scott-Lee has an odd sense of humour creating a post of counter-terrorism and cohesion for Anil Patani to be in charge of. But with people like that at the top, and with its tarnished record, we need to ask how far up West Midlands Police the peculiar bias to Islam demonstrated by the Dispatches affair and Naeem Naguthney's attitude actually goes.

N.B. Anil Patani is the officer responsible for the Undercover Mosque debacle.

It is to be hoped that the West Midlands Police will manage to resist the temptation to arrest, or otherwise impede, Mr Green and his supporters. After all, you'd think that they might have learnt their lesson by now! But then again, it is the West Midlands Police we're talking about: who knows how far their ability to make complete fools of themselves goes?

The reaction of the local Muslims will also be interesting to see. Will the "moderate majority" behave with the same restraint as the "Christian fundamentalists", I wonder?

Hat-tip: Pub Philosopher

Edukayshun, edukayshun, edukayshun

2008-06-06T20:52:00.008+01:00

Just a quick round-up of some recent stories illustrating the continuing decline of British educational standards:

#1: Yet more evidence that A-levels are getting easier, and the impact that this is having on the nation's economic competitiveness:

A “lost generation” of mathematicians has cost the economy £9 billion, while GCSE maths has become a “pick ‘n’ mix” test rather than the key staging post it once was, according to a report.
The decline in standards threatens the future of the economy, say the authors, and is having a devastating impact on the City, with some firms recruiting most of their maths graduates from overseas.
The report, by the Reform think-tank, accuses the Government of marginalising the interests of employers, teachers and students. It claims that ministers are focusing on exam results, rather than educational outcomes, and are trying to get pupils to pass any five GCSEs to meet targets, rather than concentrating on the core subjects of English and maths.
[...]
Maths exams are much easier now than 30 years ago, Reform says, because of efforts to make them more relevant to the workplace. This means that children are not being taught key skills such as problem solving. As a result, it is “now possible to achieve a grade C in GCSE maths having almost no conceptual knowledge of mathematics” and by scoring less than 20 per cent in the top paper.
“A coherent discipline has changed to ‘pick ‘n’ mix’, with pupils being trained to answer specific shallow questions on a range of topics where marks can be most easily harvested.”

#2: Imperial College votes with its feet, and the count doesn't go A-levels' way:

One of Britain's leading universities is to introduce an entrance exam for all students applying to study there from 2010 because it believes that A levels no longer provide it with a viable way to select the best students.
Sir Richard Sykes, Rector of Imperial College, London, suggested that grade inflation at A level meant that so many students now got straight As that it had become almost “worthless” as a way of discriminating between the talented and the well drilled.
Last year one in four A-level marks was a grade A and 10 per cent of A-level students achieved at least three As.
“We can't rely on A levels any more. Everybody who applies has got three or four As. They [A levels] are not very useful. The International Baccalaureate is useful but again this is just a benchmark,” Sir Richard said.
He added: “We are doing this not because we don't believe in A levels, but we can't use the A level any more as a discriminator factor.” The move will make Imperial, which specialises in science and engineering and ranks third in the UK after Oxford and Cambridge in The Times Good University Guide, the first university to introduce a university-wide entrance exam since Oxford scrapped its own version in 1995.

#3: If some people have their way it will get a hell of a lot worse, before it gets any better:

Children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are "middle-class" creations, a Government adviser will claim today.
Professor John White, who contributed to a controversial shake-up of the secondary curriculum, believes lessons should instead cover a series of personal skills.
Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.
He will outline his theories at a conference today staged by London's Institute of Education - to which he is affiliated - to mark the 20th anniversary of the national curriculum.
Last night, critics attacked his ideas as "deeply corrosive" and condemned the Government for allowing him to advise on a new curriculum.
Professor White will claim ministers are already "moving in the right direction" towards realising his vision of replacing subjects with a series of personal aims for pupils.
But he says they must go further because traditional subjects were invented by the middle classes and are "mere stepping stones to wealth".
[...]
Professor White wants ministers to encourage schools to shift away from single-subject teaching to "theme or project-based learning".
Pupils would still cover some content but would be encouraged to meet a series of personal aims. The curriculum already states some of these but is "hampered" by the continued primacy of subjects.
The aims include fostering a model pupil who "values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development".

Hmm. I think the following quote from Yes, Prime Minister says it best:

Employment Secretary: The National Union of Teachers are scared stiff that conscription will expose the fact that school leavers, while of course being tremendously integrated socially and creatively aware...
Sir Humphrey: Can't actually read, write or do sums, yes.

Britishness Day

2008-06-03T09:46:00.009+01:00

I am delighted to announce the return, after an unwarrantably long delay, of Mr Liam Byrne to the pages of this blog. In his latest stunningly wise pronouncement, the Sage of Hodge Hill has proposed that the August bank holiday should become "Britishness Day". On "Britishness Day" people will engage in a "celebration of what we like and love about living in this country", and will hold street parties and carnivals. Sounds fun, doesn't it?

Well, no, actually. Personally I find the idea of participating in some completely artificial celebration of Britishness, instituted by a New Labour apparatchik whose other major contribution to cultural debate has been the prediction that compulsory ID cards will become a "great British institution", thoroughly nauseating. After all, whatever is celebrated on this day, you can be sure it won't be Britishness in any meaningful sense, but rather a watered-down, plastic "Britishness" of empty and meaningless platitudes about "tolerance", "fair play", and the like.

Besides which, I regard all the expressions of patriotism that come from this government as the grossest hypocrisy. This is, after all, the government that has done more than any other to erode the British identity, through its policy of open door immigration, which has transformed large parts of the country, without the consent of the existing population. It is also the government under whose rule perfectly innocuous displays of patriotism have become increasingly frowned upon by those in authority - just consider the number of cases in which displaying the Union Flag and (especially) the Cross of St George has been banned.

To me, Liam Byrne's proposal has the look of a pressure valve. This government, which has done so much to undermine the British (and, particularly, the English) identity, hopes that by giving over one day a year to overt but phoney patriotism, it can keep in check the disquiet engendered by the fact that genuine, albeit often understated, patriotism is taboo the whole year round. Thankfully, I think that the vast majority of people will see through the charade.

Quote of the Day

2008-06-02T00:30:00.003+01:00

Anthony Blair announces that he wants to spend most of his remaining years ‘ensuring that religion is seen as a force for good’.
It’s a noble aim, Mr Blair, and, if you really mean it, here’s my suggestion as to how you can achieve it most easily and effectively.
Convert to atheism, today if possible.

Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

Promoting Christianity is now a hate crime

2008-06-01T19:46:00.010+01:00

What is wrong with the West Midlands Police? Just last month they had to pay out £100,000 over their handling of the Undercover Mosque fiasco, and now they are being taken to court by two Christian evangelists who were threatened with arrest for handing out leaflets in a Muslim area of Birmingham.

Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, both of whom are American, were talking to a group of young men in the Alum Rock Road area of the city when they were approached by a PCSO, who began questioning them about their beliefs. When he discovered their nationality, he, displaying the professionalism for which PCSOs are justly renowned, favoured them with a lengthy diatribe against George Bush, before telling them that as the area was a Muslim one, they were not allowed to preach Christianity there, that doing so constituted a "hate crime", and that if they did not desist they would be arrested. He also told them not to return to the area, saying, "you have been warned. If you come back here and get beaten up, well you have been warned".

As I've remarked before, it seems that incidents like this are happening on a weekly basis, if not more frequently. The West Midlands force has a particularly poor record, but officers from all police forces seem quite happy to use threats and intimidation in order to silence politically-incorrect views, and prevent politically-incorrect behaviour, a category within which promulgating Christian doctrine apparently now falls. I particularly note that, rather than make an effort to ensure that all people are safe to go anywhere in the country without getting beaten up, the PCSO in this case evidently feels that if Messrs Cunningham and Abraham were to get attacked, it would be their own fault, and no concern of his. No wonder dissatisfaction with the police is at record levels!

The PCSO's comments also indicate that, when Michael Nazir-Ali made his famous remarks about "no go areas", he was absolutely right. After all, the PCSO - who I rather suspect may have been a Muslim himself (update: he was) - made no bones about telling the men that if they preached Christianity in a Muslim area they were at risk of being assaulted. If that doesn't make an area a "no go area", then what does?

This, then, is Britain in 2008: a country in which Muslim preachers can incite murder with impunity, while Christian preachers are threatened with arrest for peacefully handing out leaflets; a country in which free speech is stifled to appease favoured minorities; a country in which certain areas become unsafe for non-Muslims, and our political and religious leaders turn a blind eye. And liberals still can't understand why we don't all embrace multiculturalism and "diversity"!

Hat-tip: Anon, in the comments

Institutionalising Islam in our schools

2008-05-30T23:58:00.011+01:00

The other day, Bernard left a comment with a link to an editorial in the Church of England Newspaper, warning of the encroachments of Islam into our national life. The editorial has now been replaced with a more recent editorial, although you can still read it at a couple of blogs, such as Jihad Watch. One of the interesting points that the editorial made was this:

At all levels of national life Islam has gained state funding, protection from any criticism, and the insertion of advisors and experts in government departs national and local...we hear of municipal swimming baths encouraging ‘Muslim women only’ sessions and in Dewsbury Hospitals staff waste time by turning beds to face Mecca five times a day — a Monty Pythonesque scenario of lunacy, but astonishingly true. Prisons are replete with imams who are keen to inculcate conservative Islam in any inmates who are deemed to be culturally ‘Muslim’: the Prison service in effect treats such prisoners as a cultural block to be preached to by imams at will. Would the Prison service send all those with ‘C of E’ on their papers to confirmation classes with the chaplain?! We could go on.
The point is that Islam is being institutionalised, incarnated, into national structures amazingly fast, at the same time as demography is showing very high birthrates.

Today, we see yet more evidence of this phenomenon of Islamic institutionalisation:

Imams will teach in state schools under Government plans for tackling extremism to be announced next week.
Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, admitted today that a minority of children could be “at risk” from extremists and said that schools must be able to deal with radicalisation.
British-born imams will be drafted in to schools to instruct children about Islam and the Koran as part of the Government’s “Prevent” strategy, which aims to weed out extremism before it takes root.
Lessons will include teachings from the Koran and discussions about equality between the sexes, the sanctity of life and the rights of the individual. Mr Balls said the citizenship lessons would help young people to feel “part of their society, and resilient to those who seek to divide rather than unite”.
The battle against radicalisation in schools is a major plank of the Home Office’s wider policy on extremism but the National Union of Teachers (NUT) met fierce opposition when it suggested a similar scheme in March. The NUT proposed that Muslim clerics and other faith leaders should go into every state school as an alternative to faith schools. Critics warned this could allow extremists to target pupils.
But the Government believes that if the imams are British-born they will imbue children with the multicultural values.

Because, of course, no British-born Muslim has ever turned to extremism, have they? And "multicultural values" (whatever they may be)? They're just what we haven't had enough of lately!

Even a stopped clock...

2008-05-29T01:42:00.005+01:00

The police force that issued a teenager with a court summons for calling Scientology a cult could face a judicial review over the legality of its policing guidelines.
Although prosecutors last week declined to take the 16-year-old to court, freedom of speech campaigners are to ask City of London police to explain how the initial decision to issue the summons was made.
Campaigners said they would call for a judicial review if it is found that the force's guidelines for policing demonstrations led officers to confront the schoolboy.
If it emerges that the policy relates only to anti-Scientology demonstrations, a complaint could be lodged with the Independent Police Complaints Commission instead.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the civil liberties organisation Liberty, which spearheaded the teenager's defence, said: "We want to know who gave the instruction to issue this summons.
"Curtailing people's freedom of speech is a very serious issue and it's important to know whether this is part of the force's policy or a decision relating specifically to the Church of Scientology. There is the possibility of a complaint to the IPCC or a judicial review."
Chakrabarti said she was concerned the police action could have a "chilling effect" on other protesters who wanted to express their opinions.
"Some people are very easily intimidated and will be put off exercising their right to free speech by the thought that they may face court action over it. We have to defend that right and show how wrong the police were in issuing this summons," she said.

Well, on this occasion, Chakrabarti's right, and it is good that Liberty (indeed, that anyone) is challenging the police's handling of this matter. Although I'm not quite certain of the manner in which Liberty "spearheaded the teenager's defence", other than by the lovely and fragrant Ms Chakrabarti describing the summons as "barmy", and thereby getting herself in the papers.

But, while on this occasion Chakrabarti's organisation is doing the right thing, it's worth pointing out that she seems to take a remarkably selective approach to the question of free speech, and its suppression. After all, in recent years we have seen, inter alia, the leader of the BNP twice prosecuted for calling Islam a "wicked, vicious faith", an anti-Islamic blogger arrested for the content of his postings, a schoolgirl arrested for complaining that fellow pupils did not speak English, an academic forced out of his job for expressing politically incorrect views about the link between race and IQ, and measures passed banning BNP members from certain jobs. Yet on all these issues, and many more, Shami Chakrabarti has, notwithstanding her abundantly evident love of the media spotlight, maintained a strict silence. Maybe she was on holiday when they happened.

White liberals know best

2008-05-29T00:03:00.004+01:00

The following story from the Cambridge Evening News provides a rather interesting insight into the workings of the liberal mind:

ENTERTAINMENT and arts provision in Cambridge does not adequately meet the needs of the multi-cultural mix of the city's residents - according to Cambridge councillors.

But members of the black and ethnic minority groups the council say are under-served feel there is plenty of provision for them.

David Warford, a member of the Cambridge Caribbean Association, said: "I have never heard any of our group complain about a lack of provision of services. We regularly organise trips to the Arts Theatre and the Corn Exchange and proportionally there seems to be a good mix of show and plenty of Afro content."

But council bosses have now been told to look into developing a wider range of entertainment, art and shows to "better meet the interests of the black and minority ethnic communities in Cambridge" after councillors unanimously voted to review the services at a meeting.

So, black people don't actually believe that they are being discriminated against. But, hey, what do they know? The white liberals on Cambridge City Council say that blacks are being oppressed, and they must be right!

And now there will no doubt be some lengthy process of consultations, specially-contrived events aimed at showcasing "Cambridge's cultural diversity", and what not, carried out with plenty of liberal hand-wringing, not to mention the liberal application of public money - all to solve a problem no one ever knew existed!

Hat-tip: Central News

Democracy, EU style

2008-05-27T23:25:00.005+01:00

Plans to eliminate Eurosceptics as an organised opposition within the European Parliament are expected to be agreed by a majority of MEPs this summer.
The European Union assembly’s political establishment is pushing through changes that will silence dissidents by changing the rules allowing Euro-MPs to form political groupings.

Richard Corbett, a British Labour MEP, is leading the charge to cut the number of party political tendencies in the Parliament next year, a move that would dissolve UKIP’s pan-European Eurosceptic “Independence and Democracy” grouping.

Under the rule change, the largest and most pro-EU groups would tighten their grip on the Parliament’s political agenda and keep control of lavish funding.
”It would prevent single issue politicians from being given undue support from the public purse,” said Mr Corbett.

”We want to avoid the formation of a fragmented Parliament, deeply divided into many small groups and unable to work effectively.”

Mr Corbett’s proposals will also give the President of the Parliament sweeping powers to approve or reject parliamentary questions.
[...]
Current rules allow 20 MEPs from a fifth of the EU’s member states to form groupings, giving them a say in the Parliament’s administration and power structure.

Under the changes, the threshold would become 30 MEPs from one quarter of the EU’s member states.

What this proposal shows, once again, is the deeply undemocratic tendencies of the European Union, and of many of its most fanatical supporters. Richard Corbett complains that allowing "small groups" to organise will lead to the "fragmentation" of the European Parliament, which will be left "unable to work effectively".
Now, with the caveat that I don't believe Britain should be in the EU at all, I'll agree that it is desirable that any parliament "work effectively". However, I imagine that my definition of "working effectively" would differ substantially from Richard Corbett's. Because I think that a parliament is working effectively when it is representing the views of as great a share of the public as possible, and when it is closely scrutinising all the measures brought before it, with an eye to rooting out all unnecessary or bad proposals. This model of effectiveness is best achieved within a system which positively encourages as wide a variety of disparate and dissenting voices as possible. Corbett's idea of an effective parliament, by contrast, appears to be one whose members are in substantive agreement on all major issues, and which passes legislation as quickly as possible, without being disrupted by the subversive actions of "small groups", and without concerning itself with any scruples about what the public want, or who they voted for. This model of effectiveness is best achieved in a one party state.

I also note that, while the Lib Dems are, to their credit, opposing this measure, the majority of Britain's Tory MEPs appear likely to join with their Labour colleagues, and give it their full support. Should they do so, then that will provide further evidence that anyone who asserts that the Tories are even vaguely Eurosceptic is either fooling himself, or trying to fool others.

Denounced!

2008-05-25T20:14:00.005+01:00

A traditionalist Anglican has said he will continue with a campaign for the Church of England to work explicitly to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Paul Eddy, a lay member of the General Synod, has come under intense pressure from bishops to withdraw his plan.
But he has secured enough support for his motion to be debated at the next meeting of the Church's ruling body.
The motion calls on the Church to proclaim Christianity as the only route to ultimate salvation.
Mr Eddy, who is training to become a priest, has been denounced by some Muslims, but says the Church can no longer avoid hard questions about its beliefs.
He said he had received angry e-mails and telephone calls from senior figures in the Church denouncing his motion.

How depressingly typical of the Anglican leadership. Personally, I'd always assumed that spreading the Gospel was one of the primary purposes for which the Church of England (and, indeed, all mainstream churches) existed. But apparently not. Rather, it seems that the purpose of the CofE, as defined by its leaders, is to grovel like good dhimmis while the Islamification of Britain continues apace, and to denounce anyone who fails to kow-tow with sufficient promptitude. Rather than upset their Islamic friends by asserting their own faith, and seeking to convert Muslims, the likes of Rowan Williams and John Pritchard would prefer to see their congregations continue to dwindle, ultimately into non-existence. Looking at the way they behave, I sometimes wonder whether Williams and his ilk are in fact fanatical atheists, who have infiltrated the Church with the sole aim of destroying it from within. They probably aren't, but it must be said, that they couldn't do more damage if they were.

And, once again, I am struck by the contrast between these snivelling cowards, and Christians in other parts of the world who are putting their lives at risk in order to practise and promulgate their faith. While Christians in countries like Iran are successfully converting millions of Muslims, and risking their lives and freedoms in the process, our own senior clergy, "faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads", are so terrified of upsetting the Muslims and the Guardianista chatterers that they denounce Paul Eddy for simply desiring that the Church stand up for what it is supposed to believe in.

"One of Hartlepool's most extravagant showers"

2008-05-24T00:13:00.009+01:00

Some of the details of the expenses claims put in by fourteen leading politicians have now been published in the newspapers. These, it will be recalled, are the ones that the Speaker of the House of Commons went to court to try to keep secret, and they do make very interesting reading. Although perhaps they would have been even more fascinating, had they been complete: as I noted previously, House of Commons staff conveniently contrived to destroy some of Tony Blair's expenses claims, prior to their release. Anyway, here are some highlights:

While Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett put in a bill for £638.03 to renew the lighting in her sun lounge. The papers also show that Mrs Beckett had a claim for garden expenses partially rejected, with £600 for plants and pergola disallowed.

[...]
As Mr Blair was preparing to send British troops to Iraq, he also had more mundane domestic concerns on his mind. In March 2003, a new kitchen was fitted in his constituency home in Trimdon Colliery, Co Durham, at a cost to the taxpayer of £6,500.
Two months later, another bill arrived to cover the £4,174 cost of other work to the kitchen, including fitting cupboards and tiles and redecorating the room. It brought the total expense of the Blairs' new kitchen to £10,674.
During 2005, the then Prime Minister claimed for utility bills, as well as £515.75 for a dishwasher and £50 on servicing an Aga stove in 2002.
By contrast, Gordon Brown spent just £4,471 refurbishing his own kitchen in Fife, including its Seville cream wall tiles, in 2005. Mr Brown's claims include bills for £1,396 for redecoration as well as the £33-a-month cost of his Sky TV connection.
[...]

Peter Mandelson, formerly Mr Blair's closest confidant, must have fitted one of Hartlepool's most extravagant showers. The bill for fitting a shower and decorating the bathroom in his constituency home in July 2003 – a year before he resigned to become a European Commissioner – was £2,981.

[...]

John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, claimed £6,707.06 to cover external repairs to his constituency home in Hull in 2005, including replacing windows and sills and supplying and fixing mock Tudor boards to the front gable.

[...]

Stevenage MP Barbara Follett, the wife of millionaire novelist Ken Follett, claimed more than £1,600 for window cleaning at her London home, with the cleaners visiting on 18 occasions at £94 a time during 2003-04.

To consider our beloved ex-leader for a moment: at the time he spent £10,000 of our money refurbishing his kitchen, Blair had two official homes - 10 Downing Street and Chequers. His constituency house, Myrobella, was thus his third residence, and not one which I imagine he spent much time in. His salary was then well over £150,000 a year, and his wife was earning considerably more. A little over a year after claiming £10,000 for Myrobella's kitchen, the Blairs spent roughly £3.5 million on a town house in Bayswater - their current primary residence. They are also, infamously, the owners of two flats in the nicest part of Bristol.

All of which adds up to the question: why on Earth should the public be expected to cough up the money to buy these multi-millionaires a new kitchen in a house they rarely inhabit? Well, I suppose there is no greater reason to object to this than to the public funding Gordon Brown's Sky connection, or Peter Mandelson's new shower (although it doesn't matter how often you wash, Mandy - the taint of corruption isn't coming off!), or John Prescott's "mock Tudor boards".
The fact is, that these luxuries should be paid for by the people who want them, and who benefit from them. If MPs want Sky connections and new showers, then should they do what everyone else does, and purchase them themselves, out of their own salaries.

What these details also reveal (if it is indeed a revelation), is that MPs are a set of grasping chancers, who look to claim whatever they can get away with, rather than what is fair or reasonable. How else can you explain the audacity of Margaret Beckett's demand that the taxpayer should shell out for her Dahlias? Or, indeed, any of the claims highlighted above?

'Straight' added to the List of Banned Words

2008-05-23T23:21:00.011+01:00

I see that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided that prosecuting the teenager who called Scientology a cult would not be in the public interest. I suppose that we should be thankful that the CPS have, on this occasion, demonstrated a modicum of good sense. However, the fact remains that the police attempted to stifle free speech, purely on the grounds that that speech was, or might be, "offensive".

On Tuesday, I noted that cases such as the above - innocuous conduct being treated as criminal by an overbearing police force - seemed to be happening on a weekly basis. Well, I may have underestimated the frequency with which it occurs, for here is yet another instance of this phenomenon:

A complaint has been made to police over a banner declaring a former gay bar in Sunderland city centre has now gone "straight".
The sign outside the Retox bar, in High Street West, read: "Retox under new management! Now Straight! Top totty dancers on match days!"
A police inquiry is under way into a complaint that the sign, which has now been taken down, was offensive.
The bar owners said it was never their intention to offend.
Assistant manager Carl Lovett said: "We admit it was not the best banner but there was never any intention to cause offence."

I assume, from the way in which this is reported, that the "offensive" part of the sign was the word 'straight', although I suppose that it might just possibly have been the "top totty dancers" bit that did it. Either way, while the sign might have been slightly crude, I fail to see what, precisely, was so upsetting to the complainant. Is mentioning the very existence of heterosexuality now deemed "homophobic"? This bar had changed its commercial direction, to one which it presumably hopes will prove more profitable: is it to be prohibited from announcing that fact to the world?

In any event, as I have repeated time after time, the fact that something is offensive to someone is not in itself sufficient reason for banning it. After all, the right to free speech would have precious little meaning if it was restricted in scope to speech which no one would ever want to silence. But, as we see time and again, that is the road down which this country is heading, at a pretty rapid rate. And, as the behaviour of the complainant in this case demonstrates, there is no shortage of people who not only support the suppression of free speech, but are also willing to assist in it, by becoming informers against those who transgress against the state's notion of acceptable language.

The banned C word

2008-05-20T19:57:00.009+01:00

Yes, 'cult'. This is the word that has led to a fifteen-year-old boy being taken to court, after participating in a protest against the Church of Scientology, outside the organisation's headquarters in the City of London. During the protest, the unnamed malefactor held a placard which read "Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult". A police officer immediately informed him that the word 'cult' was prohibited, and he was subsequently told that his sign violated section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, and was "strongly advised" to remove the offending placard. When the teenager refused to do so, he was handed a court summons, and the sign was confiscated. According to the City of London Police (whose officers, incidentally, have something of a track record of taking ~~bribes~~ gifts from the Scientologists), the matter will now be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service.

It seems that we can barely go a week in this country without hearing of the police taking action against some perfectly harmless person, for engaging in perfectly innocuous behaviour, on the grounds of that behaviour's real or (more often) imagined offensiveness to members of some minority group. A Down's Syndrome sufferer is subjected to a seven month investigation for having a playground spat with an Asian girl; a man is arrested for singing "I'd rather wear a turban"; an Oxford undergraduate is prosecuted for questioning the sexuality of a police horse. These are just a handful drawn from the growing litany of such absurd cases. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the eradication of our freedoms, in the name of non-offensiveness.

Fortuitous circumstance of the day

2008-05-18T20:27:00.007+01:00

Some of Tony Blair’s expenses claims, which the High Court last week ruled should be disclosed to the public, have been shredded. The documents, itemising Blair’s claims for household expenses during a year of his premiership, were destroyed in the midst of a legal battle over whether they should be published. All MPs’ expenses are funded by taxpayers.
It is a criminal offence to destroy documents to prevent their disclosure under freedom of information (FOI) laws, but Westminster officials say they were unaware that the files were the subject of a legal challenge. They insist they were destroyed by mistake.

They didn't realise that the files were the subject of a legal challenge? Do civil servants not read newspapers?

...some of Blair’s files covering claims for Myrobella, his constituency home, were destroyed by Commons officials after they rejected The Sunday Times’s FOI request in January 2005 to see his claims for £43,029 of public money covering a three-year period.

"After...January 2005" isn't particularly clear. It would be nice to know at what precise point in the last forty months the files were shredded. After all, the closer in time the shredding was to the order that the files be released to the public, the greater the likelihood that this was not just a mindless blunder.

Norman Baker, who has campaigned for more transparency in his fellow MPs’ expenses, said: “How convenient that some of Tony Blair’s expenses have been shredded. This is either incompetence or obstruction of the Freedom of Information Act and should be properly investigated.”

"How convenient" indeed!

As ye sow...

2008-05-16T19:15:00.006+01:00

Race equality council managers refused to give an employee the payrise he had been promised because he was the wrong kind of black, a tribunal has heard.
Nolan Victory, 41, claims his bosses, who were all black, ignored his complaints and even bellowed at him because he was from the wrong part of the world.

He told an employment tribunal that managers at Oxfordshire Racial Equality Council took a disliking to him because he was of Caribbean origin and they were from Africa.

"The management was made up of black Africans and they discriminated against me because I was the only black Caribbean," he told the panel sitting in Reading, Berks.

This is not the only case of race hustlers turning on one another in this manner. The chief executive of the Nottinghamshire Black Partnership is currently suing her employer, claiming that she was a victim of racist and sexist discrimination from Pakistani members of the Partnership's board. And in 2003, a former Commission for Racial Equality solicitor launched legal action against the CRE, claiming that he was discriminated against for being Asian rather than black.

I have no idea whether any of the allegations that have been made have any substance to them. But even if they don't, then the Oxfordshire Race Equality Council and the Nottinghamshire Black Partnership should not be surprised that they have been made. After all, if you run an organisation full of people whose job it is to see racism everywhere, then you shouldn't be too shocked if they eventually start to see it in you. You play with fire, you get burnt; you play with race hustlers, you get accused of racism.

Undercover Mosque vindicated

2008-05-15T19:13:00.007+01:00

An update on these stories:

West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have apologised for accusing the makers of a Channel 4 documentary of distortion.
The apology and the promise of £100,000 were made at the High Court on Thursday.
It follows comments made about a Dispatches programme, Undercover Mosque, which tackled claims of Islamic extremism in the West Midlands.
The police statement said the force was wrong to make the allegations.

[...]
The statement, released to the media after the High Court hearing by West Midlands Police, said they accepted there had been no evidence that Channel 4 or the documentary makers had "misled the audience or that the programme was likely to encourage or incite criminal activity".
It added that the Ofcom report showed the documentary had "accurately represented the material it had gathered and dealt with the subject matter responsibly and in context".
The police statement concluded: "We accept, without reservation, the conclusions of Ofcom and apologise to the programme makers for the damage and distress caused by our original press release."

So, if the police now accept that the programme was wholly accurate, what are we to make of the force's earlier claim that the programme makers - Hardcash Productions - were guilty of "completely distorting" what was said? Or, indeed, of their long-running vendetta against Hardcash, which included attempting to have them prosecuted for "inciting racial hatred", and, when this plan was frustrated, making an official complaint about the documentary to the communications regulator?
Presumably the police have not seen any new footage which might have explained their change of heart. As such, their original claim that the programme distorted what was said must surely be no more or less tenable than it was when they first made it. Why, then, have they now performed a complete U-turn, and accepted that it was untenable? I suspect that it is because they always knew that the accusations they were making were utterly unfounded, but that they hoped that, by making them, they could intimidate the programme makers, and anyone else who might be tempted to criticise Islam (or, indeed, any Muslims), into silence. As with so much else that the police do these days, their conduct in this matter really does beg the question, whose side are they on?

MPs want a bigger trough

2008-05-12T00:12:00.012+01:00

MPs ought to be awarded a 23% pay rise, taking their salaries to £76,000, a committee of senior members chaired by Michael Martin, the Speaker, is set to recommend this week.
The MPs believe they are underpaid compared with managers in the public sector.
They are ready to put off their pay rise, however, until after the next election to avoid provoking voters at a time when other public sector workers are seeing increases capped at about 2.5%.
[...]
The consultants concluded that MPs’ salary of £61,820 does not adequately reward them in comparison with public-sector employees in middle to senior ranks, such as a police superintendent.
They earn more than £70,000, while private sector managers with equivalent responsibility are paid six-figure salaries. However, MPs also claim generous allowances.

Yes, there is that. If you factor in such perks as the £23,000 MPs can claim for a second home, or the £10,000 of taxpayers' money they can use to buy themselves a new kitchen, then I would imagine that the average police superintendent is left looking distinctly impoverished by comparison. Plus, being a police superintendent is a full-time job; if the officer doesn't turn up, he'll be fired. MPs, by contrast, can do as little work as they like, and face no sanctions. They can also easily augment their income with a second job, an option not available to the majority of workers, in either the public or the private sector. Most public sector managers don't get to set their own salary and perks either, do they?

And it's not as though the nation's MPs are actually scrounging a bare subsistence on the bread line. Consider this quote from another Sunday Times article, about John "Two Jags" Prescott:

The Prescotts reside – I use the word advisedly – in a grand former Salvation Army home on the outskirts of Hull, where he has been MP since 1970. Here, he is not a banana-skin politician or a working-class hero but an Englishman in his castle, complete with turrets, eight bedrooms, servants’ staircase and electric gates (needs must); which is not bad going for the son of a maid who failed his 11-plus.

It might not be Dorneywood, but, as the journalist says, it isn't bad. In how many professions other than politics could a cretinous thug like John Prescott get anywhere close to being able to afford such a house?

The fact is that being an MP is extremely lucrative. Perhaps there are some people who are better paid, but these people are, in theory at least, highly qualified and highly skilled. MPs, by contrast, need, and sometimes have, no qualifications and no skills whatsoever. They may feel that they are equivalent to senior managers, but I'd wager that if they all set out to climb a conventional career ladder, a great many of them would remain stuck on the bottom rung, because they are essentially talentless people.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they are all polymaths, who would thrive in any environment. But if that is the case, then no one is forcing them to stay in politics. They are at liberty to resign their seats and seek a more profitable career whenever they want. That would be for the benefit of all, since it would mean that only those (very few) MPs who actually have public service at heart would be left. But of course, MPs know which side their bread is buttered on, they know that they're on to a damn good thing, and they wouldn't give up their seats on the gravy train for anything.

Priest bashing of the day

2008-05-11T00:16:00.012+01:00

A SECOND priest has been beaten up in his own churchyard in the space of just eight weeks in London’s East End — this time over an argument about a football.

The Rector of St Matthew’s in Bethnal Green, The Rev Kevin Scully, was attacked on Tuesday afternoon by three drunken youths who had returned to take their revenge for a row three days before.

He had taken their ball last Saturday after he saw them using a cross on the church as a basketball hoop.

He has been taunted with religious and racist abuse in the past, but believes the beating was more alcohol-fuelled than anything more sinister.

The attack follows the vicious assault on Canon Michael Ainsworth at St George-in-the-East church in Shadwell in March [see here - FR].

But although that attack was treated as a ‘faith hate’ crime, police consider the latest incident as simple assault.

Fr Scully, 45, who was left with two black eyes, cuts and bruises, told the Advertiser: “I’m still a bit shaken up.

“It came out of an incident where some teenagers were using the front of the church as a basketball hoop.

“I took their ball and told them to leave—but they came back on Tuesday, drunk, to demand their ball back and attacked me.”

He recalled: “One of them was instigating the violence.

“I thought the other two were going to stop it, but in the end they joined in.

“Even a passer-by who saw what was going on and tried to intervene got a kicking too."

[...]

Mr Scully, however, insists it was not a ‘policing’ problem, but a ‘community’ problem.

“These are someone’s sons, someone’s brothers,” he said. “These people are known in the community.”

“There is a certain racial and religious element to this,” adds.

“I have been and was taunted religiously — and that is a worrying aspect of it.

“But I would not make that a ‘flag of convenience.’

“These are drunken yobs and that is the shame of it.

“They could probably have a very bright future ahead of them if they only did something about it.”

Police are investigating the assault and say they are looking for three Asian youths, all aged about 16.

Now, there clearly was a "history" between Fr Scully and the three attackers. This does not, of course, excuse their behavior, but it does suggest that they were not motivated solely by Christianophobia or Kuffarphobia.
However, the actions of the three "youths" in this case are, I think, indicative of a certain attitude among Bethnal Green's Muslims, which allows the area's Christian minority to be treated in a manner that would not be tolerated in respect of fellow members of the Ummah. For example, can you imagine that, had these three young men had a similar altercation with an imam, they would have felt such little compunction about going back a few days later and beating the shit out of him? Indeed, would they even have rowed with an imam in the first place? Certainly, I doubt that they would have treated a mosque with the same disrespect that they apparently accorded to St Matthew's Church.
Maybe they didn't attack Fr Scully because he was a white Christian, but it is highly probable that they felt that, being a white Christian, Fr Scully was a more socially acceptable target for violence than he might otherwise have been. In any event, the fact that Fr Scully had been "taunted with religious and racist abuse in the past", taken together with the attack on Canon Michael Ainsworth back in March, serves to demonstrate that there clearly is a problem with Christianophobic violence in the East End, with young Muslim men emerging as the principal (indeed, the sole) culprits. Now there's a surprise!

Hat-tip: Laban Tall

Thought Policeman of the Day: PC Paul Hughes

2008-05-10T00:45:00.007+01:00

Here is a short video which really sums up the extent to which free speech is being suppressed in Britain today. A man is arrested on suspicion of a "racially aggravated public order offence", for singing the words "I'd rather wear a turban":

The speed with which PC Hughes pounced on the man as soon as he heard the "racist" words was really rather impressive. And am I being utterly paranoid, or did a slight smirk, as of a bully exulting in his own power, briefly leap across his face as he told his victim what his "crime" was (at 14 seconds in)?

Still, I'm sure we can all agree that arresting people like the heinous (and totally unrepentant) evildoer seen in this video is a far more valuable use of police time than such petty trivialities as, for example, stopping axe wielding burglars. Thank Heavens the police have their priorities straight!

Hat-tip: John Trenchard

Treating adults like children

2008-05-09T23:35:00.011+01:00

Travellers face a ban on drinking alcohol on trains, buses and trams across the country, it was revealed last night.
The drastic plan to cut loutish behaviour will be considered as part of a Government review aimed at making public transport safer.
It comes less than a week after Boris Johnson swept to victory in the London mayoral contest on the same policy - leading to claims that a desperate Labour Party is stealing Tory clothes.
Announcing the review yesterday, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "I understand people's concerns about anti-social behaviour on public transport. We want to stamp out antisocial behaviour on our buses, trains and trams.
"If more powers are needed to protect staff and the travelling public, we will provide them."
Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the Tories were delighted their ideas were being copied by the Government, but added that the devil would be in the detail. He said: "Even when this Government looks like it is getting it right, it often ends up getting it wrong."
Police already have powers to designate trains and coaches going to and from sporting events as "dry", but a wider ban would prove controversial.
Critics warn that it could fail to curb violence as troublemakers have usually been bingeing in pubs and clubs. It would also stop law-abiding travellers enjoying a glass of wine with a meal on an inter-city journey.
It could even raise the farcical prospect of passengers on Eurostar trains being made to drink up before entering England. Opponents point to the differences between a long cross-country trip and a short Tube ride in London.

Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said: "A drinks ban on all public transport including long-distance rail would be completely over the top, widely ignored and impossible to enforce.
"This would be the nanny state gone mad. Ordinary passengers should not be punished for the misbehaviour of a minority."
A spokesman for the Police Federation said additional officers would be needed. "It could involve an enormous amount of officers and there are definite questions about how it would work and how officers would be protected," he added.

And for every extra officer who is deployed to prevent the consumption of alcohol on trains or buses there will, of course, be one less officer out preventing, you know, real crimes.

I must say that I find this whole idea utterly ludicrous, albeit not surprising, coming as it does from a government which seems to think that if it isn't banning something this week, it isn't doing its job properly. Indeed, the government is being so ridiculous that I actually find myself forced into agreement with Chris Huhne!

Because the fact is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, people drinking alcohol on public transport cause no trouble whatsoever, and pose no danger to anyone. True, you do occasionally get drunks on trains, and, in a very small number of cases, they cause trouble. But, if a drunk does cause trouble on a train (or any other form of public transport), then there are, it may astonish Jacqui Smith and Boris Johnson to learn, plenty of laws providing for that.
Besides which, I would add that, in my experience, people do not tend to make the transition from sobriety to inebriation while travelling: on the contrary, every on-train drunk that I have ever seen has been completely plastered long before they boarded the train. Banning alcohol on public transport will have absolutely no impact on these people. It will, however, serve to prevent large numbers of decent, law-abiding, adults from engaging in perfectly innocuous behaviour, while treating them as though they were errant children into the bargain.

But then again, maybe that's the point...

What Lee did next

2008-05-09T01:16:00.005+01:00

It is often said that, whatever the circumstances, cream always rises to the top. That may be true. However, if the following Evening Standard story proves accurate, we may soon find out that scum does too:

Former mayoral aide Lee Jasper made an audacious bid for a safe Labour seat in the capital today.
Ken Livingstone's former race adviser said he had been approached by party insiders asking him to consider challenging maverick MP Kate Hoey in Vauxhall.
Mr Jasper, who quit after the Standard revealed he had sent sexually charged emails to a woman heading an organisation which received City Hall funds, said he wanted to help improve Londoners' lives.
Ms Hoey angered many in the Labour party before the mayoral election when she said she would be taking an advisory role with Tory candidate Boris Johnson if he won.
[...]
In his first interview since standing down, Mr Jasper said: "I've been approached to say whether or not it would be something I would consider to stand as an MP, particularly in Vauxhall.
"I think Kate Hoey is having a difficult time given her stance during the election. I'm considering it, the options are there. I would stand for the Labour party."
He told BBC London radio: "I think that I've got a contribution to make in relation to public office, I've always felt that.
"I'm committed to public services, I'm committed to trying to improve the life of those who face more challenges and difficulties in the city."

Would Jasper stand a chance of unseating Hoey? Possibly: as he points out, her stance during the mayoral election can hardly have endeared her to her constituency Labour party. One also doubts that her position as chairman of the Countryside Alliance has gone down too well with the "Old" Labour class warriors, or that her EUscepticism (at least relative to most Labour MPs) has impressed the "New" Labour federalists. There may well be many people within her constituency party who would be glad to see the back of her.

But would they really remove her in favour of Lee Jasper? After all, he's an avaricious, unprincipled, low life, with a long track record of lining his own pockets, and those of his friends, at the public expense. Can you really imagine such an individual serving as an MP?

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth

2008-05-06T19:21:00.017+01:00

Perhaps the best thing about Boris Johnson's victory last Thursday/Friday has been the sight of the entire British left wringing their hands in palpable woe. Many of them apparently believe that the election of a candidate they don't like represents a failure of democracy! Perhaps they should elect (or rather, speed up the process of electing) a new people! Anyway, here is a brief catalogue of some of my favourite lefty whines:

We start at JuliaM's new blog, where she has found three examples of mournful pieces by Guardian hacks at the paper's "Comment is Free" site. John Harris's "Enter the Jester" is particularly amusing:

...one can surely envisage the idea of London as the ultimate switched-on metropolis - the political class's beloved "world city" - beginning to wilt...corks are already popping in the home of such neo-Thatcherites as George Osborne, William Hague and Liam Fox. The chances of a David Cameron government taking power and laying waste to what remains of the welfare state and the public sector ethos are now all the greater.

Other schadenfreude-inducing whinings include, from the blog Stumbling Sonata, the revelation that it was all those damn lower middle class suburbanites who did it. If only the right to vote were restricted to those who could be trusted to use it properly (a category that is apparently composed primarily of the author's friends and acquaintances) then that nice Mr Livingstone would still be in charge!

I simply cannot get my head around the fact that so many people voted for that shameless, bumbling moron. I have not met a single person who lives in central London who wanted Boris for Mayor so I can only conclude that the bored suburban masses all came out of the woodwork to provide themselves with four years’ entertainment at the cost of the capital. This is what a nation that watched Big Brother will do.

Yes, it's all TV's fault!

Meanwhile, the author of the evidently rather unsuccessful "Stop Boris" blog warns that Johnson's victory will bring out the violent racist in all of us:

With Boris as Mayor and the BNP on the Assembly, we could also see race-hate crime on the increase in the capital for the first time in many years, following years of the capital bucking the national trend with a fall, versus a rise elsewhere.

We could indeed see racist crime rise in London. We could also see the sun darken at noonday (I'm sure many leftists fully expect it to). However, there is no evidence to suggest that the election of people that the left don't like will bring either scenario about.

In any event, as I've pointed out many times before, most racist crime is targeted against white people. So is Mr Stop Boris in fact arguing that all those tolerant minorities will now be going out beating up white people for having the temerity to vote for Boris Johnson or the BNP?

On the subject of the BNP, it has to be said that, owing to the misery engendered by Johnson's victory, Richard Barnbrook's election to the London Assembly has received less attention than it might otherwise have done. But it did serve to further depress the spirits of many leftists. Take this, from the Daily Mirror's political correspondent, James Lyons:

And things look even worse. Forget Labour's May Day mauling and Boris's triumph in London its [sic] another result in the capital that has me holding my head in my hands.

Personally, I suspect that it is not in his hands that Mr Lyons has placed his head...

Richard Barnbrook is the new British National Party member on the London Assembly after the odious far-right party managed to get more than 5 per cent of the vote. They also picked up council seats in other parts of the country.

I met the charming Mr Barnbrook and his travelling circus of slack-jawed goons during the 2005 general election and the idea that anyone could vote for them fills me with horror.

And, of course, pompous lefty hacks being "filled with horror" (as opposed to their normal state of being 'full of shit') is a prospect just too dreadful to contemplate. Remember James Lyons next time you're voting: you wouldn't want to upset him, would you?

But my very favourite display of leftist rationality and common sense came in a comment on this Times article about Mr Barnbrook's election:

Boris as Mayor and the BNP on the Assembly. This is the worst night London has seen since the Blitz.
Steven Morrison, Streatham, London, UK

Nothing like keeping a sense of perspective, is there?

Government's referendum decision to be judicially reviewed

2008-05-03T06:11:00.003+01:00

It is with great pleasure that I read that the multi-millionaire EUsceptic and Tory donor (well, we all have our faults), Stuart Wheeler, has been granted leave by the High Court to seek judicial review of the government's decision not to allow the public a referendum on the EU ~~constitution~~ reform treaty. Mr Wheeler is basing his claim on the government's failure to honour its manifesto commitment to hold a referendum. His application will be heard over the 9th and 10th of June, and, should he succeed, we will presumably get the referendum we were promised.

Of course, being granted leave to apply for judicial review is not the same as succeeding in the application itself. All that has been established today is that Mr Wheeler has an arguable case; whether he has a winning argument has yet to be decided. In 1993 the Tory peer and former Times editor, Lord Rees-Mogg, was granted permission to seek to have the Major government's ratification of the Maastricht Treaty judicially reviewed, only for the court to subsequently reject his application. Personally, I suspect that Mr Wheeler's case will ultimately end in the same manner, although I sincerely hope that my pessimism proves to be unfounded.

But even if Stuart Wheeler does fail in his attempt to compel the government to keep its promise to the people, his actions may nonetheless do some good, by exposing the government's dishonest and undemocratic conduct. Certainly, he is to be congratulated on his efforts to defend the sovereignty of this country, and to uphold democracy, in the face of a government which seems determined to give away one, and undermine the other.

Plus ca change...

2008-05-03T01:14:00.008+01:00

So, Red Ken is gone. And in his place we have a left-liberal who fawns over Muslims, favours an amnesty for illegal immigrants, and declared in his victory speech that London "brings the world together in one city". I'm truly delighted to see the back of Livingstone, but forgive me if I don't break out the champagne just yet.

On the plus side, the BNP's mayoral candidate Richard Barnbrook has been elected a member of the London Assembly. That should be one in the eye for the leftists in all three big parties. The Times informs us that "anti-facist [sic] and gay rights groups have called for protests in the capital in light of the win". There's something rather ironic, is there not, in self-proclaimed "anti-fascists" protesting against the result of a free and democratic election?

Lionheart arrested

2008-05-01T23:49:00.003+01:00

Just a brief note to say that the anti-Islamic blogger Lionheart's long-anticipated arrest, on suspicion of "stirring up racial hatred", took place at the end of March, as the Luton and Dunstable on Sunday newspaper reported a fortnight ago. He has since been released on bail, and will find out later this month whether or not he is to be charged.

Hat-tip: Lionheart

I had no idea!

2008-05-01T22:03:00.002+01:00

Election fraud driven by immigrants practising "village politics" of the Indian sub-continent could be a crucial factor in deciding the future control of Birmingham City Council, a major report warns today.

Family loyalties, the dominance of men and the existence of the "biraderi" clan system among British Asians provides perfect conditions for widespread rigging of postal votes and other electoral malpractice in Britain’s major cities, according to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. In a 94-page report called Purity of Elections in the UK – Causes for Concern, the trust argues that the UK’s election system is close to breaking point and at risk of fraud, as the countdown to May’s local elections gets under way.

The study says the turning point in recognising Britain has a problem with election fraud came in 2005 when a court found six Birmingham Labour Party members in Aston and Bordesley Green, all Asian men, guilty of tampering with thousands of postal ballots.

The incident, which Elections Commissioner Richard Mawrey QC said would "disgrace a banana republic", forced the Government to tighten regulations surrounding postal voting, but the reforms were nowhere near tough enough according to the authors of today’s report.

They say: "The Birmingham election court of 2005 demonstrates that the control of a major city council or the outcome of a parliamentary contest could be influenced by the scale of fraud that was rendered possible by postal voting."

The study says numerous convictions for electoral fraud since 2000, when postal votes first became freely available on demand, resulted from incidents in inner-city wards where a large concentration of voters originate from the Indian sub-continent.

It adds: "Significantly, these convictions have emerged alongside anecdotal evidence of more widespread, and long-run, practices associated with Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi traditions of biraderi (brotherhood) clans influencing voting behaviour.

"It is widely suggested that extended family and kinship networks, frequently with their origins in settlement patterns in Pakistan and Bangladesh, are mobilised to secure the support of up to several hundred electors, effectively constituting a block vote."

So, are our fearless elected representatives from the three main parties taking action to challenge this pattern of behaviour? Are they distancing themselves from those engaging in such activities? Not a bit of it! On the contrary, we are told that "all of the main political parties have sought at times to gain advantage by allying themselves to a Muslim candidate claiming to be able to guarantee a minimum number of votes arising from their support within a wider clan". This is something that is also evident from the fact that, while the overwhelming majority of vote-rigging cases involve Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslims, the party affiliations of those involved seem to be pretty evenly divided between Labour, the Tories, and the Lib Dems. More evidence that for all three parties the primary, or perhaps the sole aim, is to get power, while such things as democracy and public service come, at best, a poor second in the reckoning.

Still, it is nice to see the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, a strongly left-wing organisation, which last year donated £2million to the Lib Dems, coming out and acknowledging that certain sections of the community do indeed have a disproportionate tendency to engage in vote-rigging, and that the advent of postal voting on demand has played into the hands of anyone who should wish to subvert the democratic process in this manner. If we're lucky, this might herald a new era of straight talking about the former issue, and the solving of the latter problem by the simple expedient of abolishing the on demand postal vote. But since all three major parties have, for short-term gain, bought into the long-term corruption of the democratic process, I don't hold out much hope that this new era will eventuate.

Hat-tip: English Rose

Comments

2008-05-01T01:03:00.004+01:00

I've just tried to post a comment on the "ESL pupil numbers still rising" thread, but it has not been published. I then tried posting anonymously (rather than through my Blogger account), and the same thing happened.

It occurs to me that if I can't post comments, then it may be that other people can't either. I have no idea why this is: presumably it's something to do with Blogger. Hopefully it should sort itself out soon...

Update: Having checked again this morning, it seems I can now post comments. Don't know what that was all about!

Alan Craig's judicial review application fails

2008-04-30T23:36:00.005+01:00

An update on this post:

A Christian party has lost a High Court bid to have its party election broadcast (PEB) repeated, after claims it was censored by the BBC and ITV.
Christian Choice said the BBC forced changes to its description of a Muslim group in a PEB aired in London.
The BBC said it expressed concern and Christian Choice responded by agreeing to change the form of words.
The judge said the request had been left "far too late" - although he did not think the PEB had been libellous.
Alan Craig, the party's candidate for London mayor, had argued the action breached his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights - which guarantees the right to freedom of expression.
Rejecting Mr Craig's request for a judicial review, the judge, Mr Justice Collins, said he should have launched the legal challenge before the broadcast took place on 23 April.
He said it was "perfectly permissible" for the BBC to take into account legal advice that the original broadcast might have been libellous - although he did not think it would have been.
However he said he was not a libel lawyer, and that was not the point.
Mr Craig said the BBC had "commanded" the words be changed about the Muslim group planning to build a large mosque in east London; a proposal which Mr Craig opposes.
But the judge said the BBC had indicated that if a legal challenge had been issued before the broadcast it would have "backed down and let them publish as they wished."
"Unfortunately that was not done," Mr Justice Collins added.

According to Melanie Phillips in the Spectator, Mr Justice Collins added that "the Tablighi Jamaat could properly be described as 'extremist'; that it was 'responsible for imbuing ideas leading to terrorist activities'; and that it was 'understandable that Cllr Craig should have concerns'". Nothing in the judgment sounds like a ringing endorsement of the conduct of the BBC and ITV; rather, they appear to have won only because of Mr Craig's delay in bringing the matter before the court.

It's hardly a ringing endorsement of Tablighi Jamaat, either. After all, the organisation has now been described as "extremist" by a High Court judge. That goes some way beyond Mr Craig's preferred term, "separatist", and massively further than "controversial", the word that ITV deemed just too offensive to be broadcast. I'd venture to suggest that Mr Justice Collins' description of Tablighi Jamaat might well make a rather nice quote for the anti-mega mosque campaigners to use in their future campaign literature!

Postscript: As the building of the mega mosque draws ever nearer, and as Ken Livingstone promises to help the Brick Lane mosque get public money to build a minaret, spare a thought for the ten thousand members of Europe's largest church, the Kingsway International Christian Church. They were forced off their site in East London to make way for the Olympic development, and have been unable to find any appropriate replacement premises. It says rather a lot about the religious and cultural state of our country, when Europe's largest church is made homeless, while just a few miles away the authorities connive in the creation of what will be Europe's largest mosque.

ESL pupil numbers still rising

2008-04-30T00:24:00.010+01:00

Official figures today revealed that one in seven pupils don't speak English as their first language - and the number of infant school pupils in unlawfully large classes has risen by more than 50 per cent in the last year.

The statistics, compiled by the The Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF),show that the proportion of pupils whose first language is not English has risen to an all-time high.
In primary schools, 14.4 per cent of pupils speak another language as their mother tongue, up from 13.5 per cent in 2007, while in secondary schools the figure is 10.8 per cent, up from 10.6 per cent.
This equates to more than 800,000 pupils on the school roll with English as their second language.

As I have noted before, there are now over 1,300 schools in the UK in which the majority of pupils speak English as a second language. The number of ESL pupils has risen massively under Labour. In primary schools, for example, it has jumped from just 7.8% in 1997, to 14.4% now - an increase of 85% over eleven years. It is simply fanciful to claim that this will not have a very negative impact on the education of both native and immigrant children, at least in those classes and schools where non-native English speakers predominate, or form a significant minority. As I wrote back in December:

...if half the class is struggling with the language, then, in the first place, they themselves will find it difficult to gain the full benefit of each lesson, and, in the second place, they will occupy a disproportionate amount of their teacher's time, and retard the progress of the entire class, including those who can speak fluent English. And the problem is self-perpetuating: as a Polish immigrant mother told The Times back in May, if you have a school in which large numbers of children do not speak English, then the pressure on them to learn English is reduced, and the progress that immigrant children make with the language is slowed. After all, if you are the only non-English speaker in your class, then in order merely to socialise with the other children you will have to become fluent in English; if more than half your class speaks your language, then that requirement is removed. It must also be more difficult for individual non-English speakers to get the extra attention they need if there are twenty of them, than if there are only one or two.

There is also a significant financial issue. Teaching unions have estimated the yearly cost of educating an ESL child at £30,000. At present, the average amount spent annually on a state school pupil is £5,270. If all ESL children are receiving the support they need, then each one of them is likely to be costing the taxpayer an extra £25,000 each year. With the rapidity of the increase in the number of ESL pupils, that added expenditure quite quickly builds up. And it has to come from somewhere.

Finally, the colossal increase in the number of schoolchildren speaking English as a second language serves to demonstrate the extent to which immigration levels have ballooned under Labour. This is major demographic change - population replacement, indeed - taking place right before our eyes, and it shows no sign of stopping, or even of slowing down.

"Stop being a crusader"

2008-04-29T00:59:00.009+01:00

A British citizen who converted to Christianity from Islam and then complained to police when locals threatened to burn his house down was told by officers to “stop being a crusader”, according to a new report.
Nissar Hussein, 43, from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was born and raised in Britain, converted from Islam to Christianity with his wife, Qubra, in 1996. The report says that he was subjected to a number of attacks and, after being told that his house would be burnt down if he did not repent and return to Islam, reported the threat to the police. It says he was told that such threats were rarely carried out and the police officer told him to “stop being a crusader and move to another place”. A few days later the unoccupied house next door was set on fire.
Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a British human rights organisation whose president is the former Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, is calling on the UN and the international community to take action against nations and communities that punish apostasy.
Its report, No Place to Call Home, claims that apostates from Islam are subject to “gross and wideranging human rights abuses”. It adds that in countries such as Britain, with large Muslim populations in a Westernised culture, the demand to maintain a Muslim identity is intense. “When identities are precarious, their enforcement will take an aggressive form.”

As, indeed, it does in many overwhelmingly Muslim nations, where such identities are presumably not quite so "precarious"!

If the allegations in this report are accurate - and there is no reason to suppose that they are not - then the conduct of the police really was disgusting. Not only did they fail to take action against the people making the threats of violence (a response which, given their track record, is hardly surprising), but they treated the victim as if he himself were at fault. Moreover, in condemning Mr Hussein for having the temerity to live as a Christian in a neighbourhood full of Muslims, and expect not to have his house firebombed (!), the police used terminology straight out of the Islamist lexicon, condemning him for "being a crusader". Still, given that the police tried to have the makers of the documentary "Undercover Mosque" prosecuted for accurately reporting extremist comments by Muslim preachers, we shouldn't be too shocked by their response to Mr Hussein's complaint. Although I do wonder what it is about Muslims that leads the police to treat them in so favourable a manner!

More generally, the treatment meted out to Mr Hussein, and other Islamic apostates, by their erstwhile coreligionists serves to demonstrate the complete incompatibility of Western and Islamic culture. It is quite some time since I last heard of anyone being threatened with death for converting away from Christianity, and I don't recall ever meeting anyone who favoured executing apostate Christians. By contrast, 36% of young Muslims in Britain believe that converting away from Islam is an act meriting the death penalty. As I have noted before, the threats and attacks that Nissar Hussein endured were far from unique.

Censoring election broadcasts

2008-04-28T20:44:00.013+01:00

Readers may be familiar with the name of Alan Craig, the Christian Peoples Alliance councillor in Newham, who has been leading the opposition to the creation of the East London mega mosque. Mr Craig is also standing for the Christian Choice in Thursday's London mayoral election. Last Wednesday, the Christian Choice released their election broadcast for the mayoral and London Assembly elections. The broadcast, which can be seen here, contains a brief mention of the mega mosque, and refers to Alan Craig's opposition to it.

However, Mr Craig today launched legal action against the BBC and ITV, claiming that they had forced him to edit the broadcast to remove criticisms of Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic organisation behind the building of the mega mosque. In the first version of his broadcast, Mr Craig described the group as "separatist". This term proved unacceptable to the broadcasters, who ordered him to substitute the word "controversial", which he did, under protest. Subsequently, however, ITV decided that even this mild description was intolerable, and insisted that the appellation be applied only to the mega mosque, and not to the group building it. Ironically, Mr Craig was even prevented from using the hackneyed phrase "moderate Muslims", in reference to those Muslims who have opposed the mega mosque, because it was felt that this could imply that Tablighi Jamaat was not "moderate". The fact that all the evidence suggests that the group is both separatist and extremist, and that it is, in consequence, undeniably controversial, did not deter the BBC and ITV from censoring anything that could remotely resemble a criticism of the organisation.

But even if one does not agree with Mr Craig's views on Tablighi Jamaat, it is still unreasonable to censor his broadcast. As Andrea Minichiello Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, put it "providing that the content of an election broadcast is within the law, the BBC and ITV should enable the electorate to hear the unedited views of candidates and allow them to make up their own minds as to whether they agree or not". In censoring the Christian Choice election broadcast, the BBC and ITV have restricted the ability of a candidate to put his views to the public, have prevented the public from developing the fullest possible knowledge of a candidate, and have thus sought to undermine democracy.

Hat-tip: English Rose

Who's got all the money?

2008-04-26T20:31:00.004+01:00

More than 100 MPs have declared family members they employ using their taxpayer-funded expenses.
The list of 106 includes the home secretary, environment secretary and the standards committee chairman.
A register of employed relatives was set up after revelations about Tory MP Derek Conway's payments to his son. It will become compulsory in August.
There is no rule against MPs employing relatives but the European Parliament has voted to ban the practice for MEPs.

It really does say something about our MPs, when hundreds of them are behaving in a manner that even the passengers on the Strasbourg to Brussels gravy train deem unethical!

The register is currently voluntary but will be compulsory by 1 August.
It is likely more will come forward. The current list amounts to 54 Labour MPs, 39 Conservatives, eight Liberal Democrats, one independent, two DUP and two SNP MPs.
But in February Tory leader David Cameron said "just over" 70 of his MPs employed family members.

If the discrepancy between the 39 Tories who have admitted that they are employing relatives, and the 70 odd who actually do so is typical of all parties, then somewhere near 200 MPs have family members on the payroll. Out of a total of 646, that seems rather a lot.

There are no rules against employing relatives and previously there had been no obligation to declare them publicly.
Shadow Commons leader Theresa May said: "In principle, there is nothing wrong with employing family members, but it is important that we have openness and transparency so that the system is not abused."
But Matthew Elliott, of the pressure group the Taxpayers' Alliance, said the employment of relatives was "completely outdated" adding: "To dispel any suspicion that they are taking advantage of taxpayers' generosity, this practice should be banned once and for all."
MPs only have to give job titles of employed relatives - they do not have to spell out details of the work they do.

Being in a charitable mood, I'll accept that some of those relatives who are on the payroll are doing the job they're paid for. But in the light of the Conway family saga, one has to wonder how many of those with impressive titles and taxpayer-funded salaries are really just Henry Conway-style freeloaders. A fair few, I'd guess. Certainly, I imagine that we might see some interesting declarations from those MPs who are holding back their declarations until the last minute. It's almost like they had something they wanted to hide...

When public money is being spent, it is only reasonable to demand that the public be allowed to know precisely what it is being spent on, and be able to feel sure that it is not being wasted. Given the Conway scandal, and the claim from Labour MP Chris Mullin that MPs feel entitled to claim as much on expenses as they can get away with, regardless of how much they've actually spent, we cannot simply take our MPs at their word when they assure us that the money they claim in expenses is being used honestly and effectively. Matthew Elliot's suggestion of preventing MPs from giving taxpayers' money to their relatives seems drastic. But given the avaricious nature of many (most?) MPs, it may perhaps become necessary. Or we could just take away all their expenses, and let them fund their own activities from their own pockets...

Witch hunt of the day

2008-04-26T16:58:00.009+01:00

I read that the Labour MP for Hastings and Rye, Michael Foster, has called for members of the BNP to be banned from working in the public services, after it was revealed that the Department of Work and Pensions had granted permission to two of its employees to stand for the party in the forthcoming council elections. Foster's demands have been backed by the general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, Mark Serwotka.

Members of the BNP are already banned from working in the police force, and an officer in the Greater Manchester force is currently facing disciplinary proceedings for allegedly committing the heinous crime of wearing a badge supporting the party. In the past, it has also been suggested that they should be banned from working as firemen, and there have been a number of individual cases of BNP members being dismissed from their jobs, in both the public and private sector, on account of their political affiliations. Oddly enough that great champion of liberty and human rights, Shami Chakrabarti, has yet to interest herself in these matters...

There is no suggestion that either of the two civil servants at the centre of this case have been performing their duties in any manner other than that required of them. Nor, so far as I am aware, has there ever been any such accusation in any of the numerous cases of people being hounded out of their jobs for either supporting the BNP, or in some other manner offending the sensibilities of goodthinkful liberals (vide Frank Ellis). In a decent society, an individual's ability to do their job properly would, in most cases, be the sole determinant of the question whether or not they kept that job.

In modern British society, however, there is an increasing tendency to deny known thought criminals the legal and moral rights that everyone else takes for granted. As I have written before, this is profoundly dangerous to the democratic process (or what's left of it), and has the potential to fatally undermine all political debate. After all, it is difficult to view the bans and consequent witch hunts that the likes of Michael "Matthew Hopkins" Foster favour as being anything other than an attempt to intimidate people into not exercising their rights of free speech and freedom of association in a manner other than that approved by the liberal-left, by threatening to take away their livelihoods if they speak heresy, or associate with heretics. And yet Foster and his ilk have the nerve to call themselves "anti-fascists"!

Whoever wins, we lose

2008-04-20T17:34:00.021+01:00

Londoners really are spoilt for choice in the forthcoming mayoral elections. Who can differentiate between the three towering statesmen, those intellectual colossi and ornaments of public life, who have done us the honour of seeking our votes? Not me, that's for sure! To me, they all seem exactly the same. Consider the forthright and insightful approach that they've all taken to the question of Islam:

Boris Johnson was today forced to defend his stance on Islam, insisting he believed it was a "religion of peace".

What an original way of looking at it!

The Conservatives candidate for London mayor, Mr Johnson, has been criticised for an article he wrote in the wake of the 7/7 London terror attacks in 2005 claiming "Islam is the problem".

But in a televised debate today, Mr Johnson said the problem was extremists taking the words of the Koran out of context.

No trite platitudes from independent-minded Boris! He really does offer a fresh perspective. And isn't it impressive that he knows so much more about the correct context for Koranic verses than, you know, actual Muslims?

In fairness, Johnson did then follow up by suggesting that "there has certainly been too much uncounted and unfunded immigration into London". Which is correct. However, one might be inclined to take him rather more seriously on immigration, had he not repeatedly called for an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Note to Johnson: you do not reduce immigration by rewarding people for entering the country illegally.

But Johnson's genius was more than matched by the wisdom of the incumbent:

The current Mayor, Labour's Ken Livingstone, said London could be a "model for the world" in terms of its ethnic diversity.
But he was forced to justify his decision to share a platform with the controversial preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
The cleric has described homosexuality as an "unnatural and evil practice" and said the Koran permitted wife-beating as "a possibility" in certain circumstances.

He's also expressed support for suicide bombers.

Mr Livingstone said: "He is a man who is prepared to say al Qaida is wrong and to be very strong in that condemnation."

However, I think that, on this occasion, the award for most idiotic candidate has to go to Brian Paddick, formerly Britain's most senior homosexual policeman, and also, we now discover, a renowned Islamic scholar:

Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick, a former deputy assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police, said: "What I said in the immediate aftermath of July 7 was that the term Islamic terrorism, as far as I was concerned, is a contradiction in terms.
"In that there is nothing in the Koran to justify the murder of 52 innocent men, women and children."

First, that's patently untrue. There are plenty of verses in the Koran which could be, and are, used by practising Muslims (a category which does not include Brian Paddick), to justify the use of violence against non-Muslims. There are also plenty of Islamic scholars who are prepared to endorse such violence. On what basis, I wonder, does Paddick assert that his knowledge and understanding of Islam is greater than theirs?

Secondly, it it deeply disingenuous to suggest that when devout Muslims commit acts of terrorism, in the name of Islam, it should be called anything other than "Islamic terrorism". But presumably Paddick prefers Jacqui Smith's Newspeak definition of such atrocities as "anti-Islamic activity".

At a time when the majority of British people see Islam - not a "tiny minority of extremists", but the religion as a whole - as a threat to our country, the three leading contenders for the mayoralty of our capital city are bending over backwards, and performing all sorts of linguistic contortions, to avoid saying anything that might conceivably upset any Muslim. On the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's great speech, when the nation is crying out for someone to take a similar stand against Islam, craven politicians of all parties are merely spouting meaningless platitudes about "religions of peace". This applies not only to the mayoral candidates, but to the overwhelming majority of politicians, and certainly to the senior figures in all three main parties. I have no idea whether Livingstone or Johnson will emerge victorious on polling day (at least it won't be Paddick, thank Heavens). But I can be sure of one thing: whoever wins, London and Britain will lose.

BBC bias on immigration (2)

2008-04-18T23:38:00.015+01:00

Following on from Mark Easton's assertion that public opposition to immigration is almost non-existent, and confined only to a small group of intolerant bigots, his fellow Beeboid Kathryn Edwards has written a piece entitled "Powell's 'rivers of blood' legacy", timed to coincide with the impending fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell's famous speech. In this, she gives us the views of a very diverse range of commentators. They are:

Elias Mattu: a first generation immigrant, Labour councillor in Wolverhampton, and director of the West Midlands Equality and Diversity Partnership. Among other comments, he denounced Powell as "an evil man". Edwards omitted to mention his party affiliation, merely describing him as "a Wolverhampton city councillor".

Dr Clive Harris: described as a "black sociologist". Edwards omitted to mention that he is closely associated with the race relations industry, through his involvement in the Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, and his directorship of the Centre's spin-off, the Frantz Fanon Research Unit, described as "the UK's only black-owned public policy think tank".

Rob Marris: Labour MP for Powell's old seat, Wolverhampton South West, and alleged vandal.

So, two race hustlers, one of whom is also a Labour councillor, and a Labour MP. What a very representative cross-section of the community!

On the other side of the debate, Edwards briefly mentions Nigel Hastilow, before adding that "Mr Hastilow has said he will not give interviews to the BBC about the 'rivers of blood' speech". She does not mention, however, that, as Hastilow has made clear on his blog, he refuses to appear on the BBC because of the corporation's consistent bias. And, in any event, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that, since Hastilow refused to speak to her, Edwards should have made the effort to find someone else to speak on behalf of the vast majority of people who oppose unlimited mass immigration.

The imbalance in the choice of commentators is not the only instance of bias in Edwards' article, however. Her general reporting is deliberately slanted to an anti-Powell stance. Consider the following extract, for example:

Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West, was not the first politician in that era to find himself embroiled in such controversy.
In the 1964 General Election campaign in nearby Smethwick, supporters of the Tory candidate Peter Griffiths were reported to have circulated the slogan, "If you want a nigger for a neighbour - vote Labour".

This appears to be a rather cack-handed attempt to smear Powell by falsely associating him with the overtly racist slogan allegedly used by Peter Griffiths' supporters.

It was the Race Relations Act introduced by the Labour government in 1968 which prompted Powell's speech.

He argued it would mean "British" families losing out on matters such as housing, with immigrants being given an unfair advantage.

Why is the word 'British' in quotation marks? The clear imputation is that there are no such people as the native British.

Black sociologist Dr Clive Harris said that playing the race card at that time had proved to have "mileage" for politicians.

Here, the notion, promulgated by the race hustling Dr Harris, that Powell was "playing the race card" is repeated uncritically by Edwards, as if it was an indisputable fact. This is typical of the way in which Edwards accepts all the claims, no matter how controversial or how obviously false, that are made by her three left-wing interviewees, while barely giving any consideration whatsoever to the views of those who thought Powell was right then, or those of us who think that, with the benefit of hindsight, he was remarkably prescient. Kathryn Edwards should be proud: her whole piece is a classic of BBC propagandising dressed up as impartial reporting!

Answer: he's white

2008-04-18T19:23:00.007+01:00

The Daily Mail has the story of eighteen year-old Jamie Bauld, who recently had a charge of racially-aggravated assault against him dropped, following a seven month police investigation. So, what sort of person is Jamie Bauld? The kind of thug who goes out "Paki-bashing" at weekends, perhaps? Well, no. He's actually a Down's Syndrome sufferer, with a mental age of five.

The incident that led to the police investigation occurred last September, at the special needs department of his school, Motherwell College. Jamie had an altercation with an Asian girl, who also had special needs, during the course of which he pushed her. Hardly the most heinous of crimes in any context, you might think, and particularly not when both participants have the mental age of primary school children. However, some unknown person clearly felt otherwise. They placed an advertisement in the local paper, asking for witnesses to the "racial assault", after which the eminently sensible gentlemen of the police force decided that it was worth their while to get involved, and questioned Jamie, prior to charging him with assault. According to his mother, Jamie did not understand the questions that the police were asking him, and simply agreed with every accusation put to him, out of a desire to please his interrogators. She adds that, like many children, he does not actually notice racial differences.

A fortnight ago the prosecution was finally dropped, and Jamie's parents have received an apology from the Crown Office - Scotland's equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service. At least that's something.
But it really is astounding that matters were taken this far. Or at least, it ought to be. However, given that recent years have also seen a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl arrested for complaining that her (Asian) fellow pupils were not speaking English, and three ten-year-old boys respectively questioned by police for using the word 'gay' in an e-mail, threatened with prosecution for throwing a berry at a Slovak immigrant, and prosecuted over a playground scuffle with an Asian child (a decision that even the judge condemned as "political correctness gone mad"), my response to Jamie Bauld's case was not so much amazement, as resignation. Our country, and, particularly, it seems, our police and our public prosecution services, are infested with censorious liberal thought police, always on the lookout for new victims to persecute, harass, and vilify. What can drive any human being to seek the prosecution of someone like Jamie Bauld is totally beyond me, unless they do it for the bully's thrill that some derive from victimising someone who is utterly incapable of fighting back.

Jamie's mother asks "how can my son be racist"? A valid question, particularly given that there appears to have been no suggestion that the altercation in the classroom was accompanied by anything indicative of racist attitudes, on the part of either Jamie, or the Asian girl. The answer, of course, is that he is white. As such, he is, in "anti-racist" ideology, presumed guilty of racism, and nothing can prove him innocent. Even though there was no racial element in this incident, the fact that he had a conflict with a non-white person, while being himself guilty of being white, proves, to the "anti-racist" thought policeman, that he had a racist motive for his actions. Because those white devils are all evil racists, you know...

BBC bias on immigration

2008-04-18T07:33:00.003+01:00

On the BBC website, the corporation's Home Affairs Editor, Mark Easton, has penned a rather bland piece on the debate over immigration, apparently prompted by the news that nearly two-thirds of British people believe that inter-racial violence is likely to erupt in the near future. The article itself merely rehashes themes which should be familiar to most reasonably well-informed people, and I would not mention the piece, but for the first few sentences, which provide a textbook example of the subtle bias for which the BBC is renowned:

Almost two-thirds of people in Britain fear race relations are so poor tensions are likely to spill over into violence, a BBC poll has suggested. So what does it say about race relations in Britain?
We have witnessed in Britain over the past decade a level of immigration greater than at any time in our history.
A million have recently come from Eastern Europe, but the migration to our shores has been from all parts of the globe.
Yet this extraordinary social change has been conducted with remarkably little hostility or public opposition.
Our experience is testament to the tolerance and adaptability of the British people.

Two points:

First, Easton's assertion that there has been "remarkably little...public opposition" to the colossal increase in levels of immigration that we have seen in the last decade is a blatant lie. As has been demonstrated time and time and time again, approximately 80% of the public believe that immigration levels are too high, and that they should be heavily reduced. If that is "remarkably little opposition", then I can only guess that to achieve the status of "significant opposition", the figures would have to be at least equal to Kim Jong-il's share of the vote in the last North Korean elections!
Admittedly, the public have not manifested their opposition to immigration by rioting, or by lynching immigrants. But that does not mean that opposition is any less prevalent, or any less strongly felt. Indeed, one might almost imagine that Mark Easton regards the general public with something bordering on contempt, given that he apparently believes that the British people invariably respond to anything they disagree with by getting aggressive and "hostile".

Secondly, I would be interested to learn precisely what Easton means by his statement that "our experience is testament to the tolerance and adaptability of the British people". Perhaps he simply means that the fact that the public have abstained from violence is testament to their tolerance, in the same way that Muslims were praised for their "restraint" for only rioting a tiny little bit over Fitna.
But given the close proximity of his statement about "tolerance and adaptability" to his (false) claim that there has been no significant opposition to the present levels of immigration, it is hard to avoid drawing the inference that the (alleged) acceptance of unlimited mass immigration by the British people is what proves their "tolerance and adaptability". And of course, this, almost necessarily, implies that opposition to immigration is intolerant, and indicative of an inability to adapt.
Maybe Mark Easton did not mean to imply this. Maybe he really does believe that tolerance consists of refraining from violence when you're upset or angry. But more likely, he simply regards it as axiomatic that support for mass immigration equals tolerance, while opposition to mass immigration equals intolerance and bigotry. This is the usual nature of BBC bias: not conscious or deliberate, but simply an expression of the subconscious liberal assumptions that may be shared by the overwhelming majority of Beeboids, but which are not shared by the public at large.

Ali Dizaei in race hustling shock

2008-04-18T01:05:00.010+01:00

A senior Muslim policeman has said the Metropolitan Police's (Met) recruitment process is putting off young Muslims.
National Black Police Association President and Met Police Commander Ali Dizaei said the process should be "non- biased and fair".
He said some recruits were discouraged because they come under suspicion if they frequently visited some countries.
A Met Police spokesman said all staff regardless of background underwent the same vigorous security procedures.
Speaking to BBC London, Commander Dizaei said: "Just because someone visits a country several times does not necessarily make them a risk.
"We have to be quite careful to ensure our vetting process is non-biased and are fair and get the best people for the jobs without compromising national security."
BBC London's Home Affairs Correspondent Guy Smith said the National Association of Muslim Police told him another concern was that Muslim officers found it difficult to join SO15, the Met's counter-terrorism command, for which you need to be a detective.
Of the 300 current Muslim officers serving in the Met, half have less than three years experience.

This figure suggests that rather a lot of Muslims have been joining up recently, doesn't it? Or at least, that they've been joining up at a faster rate in the last couple of years than they had done previously. Which somewhat undermines Dizaei's claim that young Muslims are being discouraged from joining the force.

One should also note that the alleged "discrimination" consists, not in Muslims receiving inferior treatment, but rather, in the fact that all potential recruits are treated exactly the same. Dizaei claims that Muslim applicants are more likely to come under suspicion because of the countries they visit. But, had I been in the habit of making regular journeys to, say, Afghanistan, then, were I to apply for a job with the police, it is likely that they would look rather askance at me too. Perhaps Dizaei feels that visiting dodgy countries run or populated by large numbers of terrorists or terrorist supporters should not count against an individual's application to join the Met. But if this is what he thinks, then he should come out and make that case, rather than throwing around unsubstantiated accusations of discrimination. Still, I suppose he's just doing what he does best.

In a similar vein, the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) appears, from this BBC report, to be complaining that Muslim officers are not being recruited into SO15, because they are not meeting a requirement that applies to all applicants equally - i.e. being detectives. This is clearly related to the fact that Muslim officers are disproportionately likely to be new or recent recruits. In order to demonstrate actual discrimination, it would need to be shown that Muslim detectives were being denied positions in SO15, wholly or partly because of their religion. The NAMP has not done this. Of course, certain recent stories suggest that it is not unreasonable to question whether it would be wholly desirable to put large numbers of Muslims in a counter-(Islamic) terrorism force anyway.

When Ali Dizaei talks about making the recruitment process "non-biased and fair", he, like most race hustlers, actually means that it should be unfair and biased in favour of his special interest group - in this case, Muslims. He seems to believe that police vetting procedures should be relaxed in cases where the applicant is a Muslim, while his allies in the NAMP apparently feel that it should be easier for Muslims to enter SO15 than for the rest of us. Either that, or they're both in favour of a general lowering of standards for entry to both the police, and SO15, which might help some Muslim, career-wise, but which certainly won't make the police more effective. Either way, they're wrong.

Of course, while there is no evidence whatsoever that Muslims are being discriminated against, one should not imagine that police recruitment procedures are entirely fair. Members of that entirely legal political party, the BNP, are subject to an absolute ban on joining the police. But they're thought criminals, so it doesn't matter, right?

Thought Crime Roundup (2)

2008-04-16T01:07:00.004+01:00

Nigel Hastilow, who, readers will probably recall, was dismissed (or at least, forced to resign), as Tory parliamentary candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, after favourably invoking the name of ~~Lord Voldemort~~ Enoch Powell, has an interesting article in the Telegraph, considering Powell's legacy:

Whatever the accuracy of Powell's predictions, and however strong his language, his main argument was that the country was "undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history".
That is more true today than it was four decades ago. The level of immigration in the intervening years has been higher than Powell foresaw; the consequences are more far-reaching.
One of the most obvious is the demand for land, infrastructure and housing. Across Britain, local battles are taking place over plans to build three million more houses to accommodate our ever-expanding population.
The Government's own estimates suggest the number of people living here could climb from 60 million to 110 million in the next 75 years.
Of course we need houses for such an explosion in numbers. And roads, railways, schools, hospitals, shops and jobs. So the spiral of development twists on and on.
This will cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions of pounds and concrete over our countryside. Milton Keynes, for instance, will grow to twice the size of Birmingham. There won't be enough water - new homes there will have showers but no baths. It does not seem unreasonable to question how sustainable all this is.

And that's only the infrastructural impact; he hasn't even considered the cultural one. It does not seem unreasonable to question, say, the desirability of having millions of people in this country who support the imposition of Sharia law, either. As the number is, at present, somewhere around 800,000, that possibility is not remote; rather, it is almost inevitable. But very few politicians dare to talk about it - even Hastilow appears to have shied away from doing so.

Yet when I raised the issue, the Conservative Party was horrified. David Cameron has nurtured a politically correct, BBC-friendly, caring Conservatism which despises "nasty party" throwbacks who bang on about immigration.

In other words, a "Conservatism" bearing an uncanny resemblance to modern liberalism.

The mistake was to mention Enoch Powell.
I was told that to survive as a candidate I should confess to being "incredibly stupid" and submit future articles to Central Office first. So I resigned.
Losing the chance to become MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis was a bitter blow. But nothing consoled me as much as the overwhelming support I received from strangers. I was inundated with letters and emails, many arguing that this is too important an issue to let go.
For many politicians, immigration is the subject which dare not speak its name.
That's why so many people feel betrayed. Their elected representatives refuse to articulate the voters' concerns with anything approximating honesty. The conspiracy of silence among mainstream politicians is calculated to drive decent men and women into the arms of extremists.
The BNP is bound to flourish when anyone who tries to discuss immigration openly is howled down by cries of "racist".
Sadly, my experience is likely to intimidate other Tory hopefuls into silence. As one of them told me: "I agree with you completely. I'm just glad it was you who said it, not me."

Here we again see the suppression of democracy and debate that I talked about in my previous post. The issue of immigration, and the numerous other issues to which it gives rise, routinely top the list of the most important issues facing the country, in polls of the general public. And yet this vitally important topic is going unmentioned by almost all politicians from the three main parties, because they know that to discuss it openly, honestly, and forthrightly, would, in all probability, be to commit political suicide. This stifling of debate, in which all three main parties, and much of the MSM, are complicit, is making a veritable mockery of our claim to have a representative democracy.

Mr Hastilow concludes with the following sentence:

And I am glad I won't live another 75 years to see the full hideous consequences of today's population explosion.

On the basis of anecdotal evidence alone, I must say that this view seems to be shared by increasing numbers of people. When people start giving up on their country in this manner, it is in large part because of the failure of the political elite to govern in a manner which inspires people with genuine long-term optimism. The failure of the politicians to respond to voters' concerns, and the rendering of widely-held political beliefs as unspeakable heresy, is a major cause of this failure.

Thought Crime Roundup (1)

2008-04-16T00:11:00.009+01:00

At a time when various leftists are throwing tantrums over the decision of the Hampstead and Highgate Express (the "Ham and High") to publish a BNP advertisement, a potentially rather more important bit of news relating to the party has gone largely unnoticed. BNP for Cleveland relates the story of Barry Towers, who has been dismissed from his job as a steward at Middlesbrough Football Club, allegedly because he stood for the BNP in a recent council by-election in the city.

Now, I have no personal knowledge of the circumstances surrounding Barry Towers' dismissal. In the absence of any MSM coverage, or any comment from the football club on the case, all my remarks must be based solely on Mr Towers' version of events, as relayed via the BNP for Cleveland blog. And certainly, it would be desirable to be apprised of a few more facts about the dismissal; notably, what reason the club gave Mr Towers for dismissing him - did they say that it was on account of his involvement with the BNP, or are they claiming that there was another, more justifiable, reason?
In the absence of such information, it is impossible to be certain what the true situation is. However, the temporal proximity between Mr Towers' candidature (the election only took place a month ago), and his dismissal, is interesting, to say the least. And he would not be the first BNP member to have been sacked for his involvement with the party.

To allow election candidates, whatever their party, to be dismissed from their jobs on account of their political activity is to undermine the very basis of the democratic process. Such behaviour cannot be construed as anything other than an attempt to stifle debate, by intimidating people into not expressing certain views, and preventing certain policies or ideologies from being put before the electorate. If this is indeed what has happened here, then that is deplorable. Equally deplorable is the fact that the decision of a local newspaper to promote free speech and debate has been met with greater outrage, than the apparent attempt of an employer to suppress it.

Cartoonish idiocy

2008-04-15T23:22:00.005+01:00

Pupils will be able to gain 25 per cent of their marks in geography GCSE by drawing cartoons and writing poetry.
The Oxford, Cambridge and RSA exam board yesterday unveiled a course which allows assessment through "creative pupil presentation methods".
These include writing poems and reflective journals, drawing cartoons and making videos, podcasts and posters.
The shake-up is designed to make geography more interesting for teenagers and comes after a fall in numbers taking the subject at GCSE. Last year, 213,124 pupils sat geography GCSE, down from 227,832 in 2004.
The board's "geography A" syllabus allows pupils to study "relevant" topics including the socioeconomic impact of supermarkets.
It is divided into four units, each worth 25 per cent of the total marks.
A unit called You as a Global Citizen is internally assessed by teachers and requires two written tasks.
Task one is to "investigate how consumer decisions may have a positive or negative impact on people", while task two requires students to "investigate a local retail area" such as a shopping centre or out-of-town retail park.
The specification says: "Presentation of this work can take a variety of formats including, for example, presentations, poems, posters, video, oral, reflective journals, fieldwork data collection sheets, research tasks, reports, extended writing and cartoons."
Another unit, Shaping Our Fast Changing World, says that teachers should ensure their pupils have acquired skills including fieldwork techniques and "cartoon interpretation".

The decline in the number of candidates sitting exams in traditional subjects is something that I have noted before, in respect of history and modern languages, both of which are now studied to GCSE by only a minority of pupils. Instead, an increasing number of GCSE and A-level candidates are taking exams in such new disciplines as the infamous media studies, which in some cases is even replacing the generally compulsory English literature exam. The same trend is seen at A-level, where media studies, which was found to be the easiest of all A-levels by an exam watchdog earlier this year, has overtaken physics in popularity.

The rise of these new subjects can be explained, I believe, by the very fact that they do tend to be easier. Weak pupils at least, and perhaps some bright but lazy ones as well, see such subjects as a less arduous route to a decent GCSE or A-level grade than the traditional subjects. This results in a race to the bottom, as exam boards seek to draw pupils back to the traditional subjects by making them easier (a process barely disguised by the use of buzzwords such as "more interesting" and "more relevant"), as we see in this case, and in the recent launch of modular GCSEs by OCR, the same board that is behind these interesting revisions to the geography syllabus. Ultimately, this lowering of standards will benefit no one, and certainly not the pupils, who will increasingly be left with an inferior education, while being told that they are the "best qualified generation in history".

On the plus side, there is something of a backlash against the decline in standards, apparent in the news today that state schools will be able to follow many of Britain's leading public schools in dropping A-levels altogether, and instead offering a new, supposedly tougher, qualification (the "Pre-U") modelled on the old two-year A-level, which was abolished in 2000, and replaced with the current, modular, system. This move is to be welcomed, to the extent that it allows those schools which are still focused on genuine intellectual rigour, rather than simply on finding the easiest way to pass all their pupils, to continue to uphold academic standards. However, I imagine that the majority of schools will stick with A-levels, potentially leading to a two-tier exam system in which pupils in some schools sit the (hopefully) challenging Pre-U, while others sit A-levels which are increasingly easy, and, therefore, increasingly devalued.

Deaf to reason

2008-04-13T23:47:00.009+01:00

I see that the government has caved in to pressure from various "deaf rights" campaigners, and removed a clause in the proposed Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which would have prevented people undergoing IVF treatment from using embryo screening to ensure that they had a deaf child. Deafness was originally included among the "serious medical conditions" which the bill prevents parents from favouring.

Personally, I am astounded to learn that anyone could actually want to have a deaf child, in preference to a hearing child. Deafness places those who suffer from it at a profound disadvantage within society. Since the primary method of interpersonal communication is, always has been, and always will be, verbal, then this disadvantaging of those who cannot engage in verbal communication is inevitable. We can make every effort to minimise the disadvantage, but we can never eliminate it. Because of their inability to communicate verbally, deaf people will always have fewer opportunities, educationally, career-wise, and personally, than those who are able to hear.
Besides which, the ability to hear is good in itself: it can provide those who possess it with a great abundance of positive experiences, which are simply not available to deaf people. To deliberately choose a child that will be deprived of the ability to hear is cruel, to say the least.

Deaf groups, who have evidently understood that the road to success lies through victimhood, have claimed that it is discriminatory to prevent parents from choosing to have a deaf child, while allowing them to choose to have a hearing child. And maybe they're right (although I would point out that deaf people are not actually being prevented from doing anything that a hearing person can do). But discrimination is not, in itself, a bad thing. Whenever we select one option over another we discriminate; indeed, the deaf groups seek to allow parents to discriminate against hearing children in the selection of embryos. And when one option is so clearly preferable to the alternative, as is the case here, then discrimination is perfectly good and reasonable. Of course, one might well have concerns over the "designer baby" scenarios that might come about as a result of allowing IVF patients to select embryos at all, but that is another matter...

Nor does it devalue the lives of deaf people generally to say that we should prevent parents from favouring deaf embryos. There is nothing unreasonable in saying that we can respect people as individuals, while also acknowledging that they have a condition which we would prefer as few people as possible to have.

The desire to select the characteristics of children in the manner proposed is, I think, indicative of a view of children that classifies them as little more than politicised fashion accessories. Consider the following case study, from the Telegraph article linked to above:

Paula Garfield and Tomato Lichy, are at the centre of the debate over the new fertility legislation. Both are deaf – as is their daughter Molly, three.
They would like a second child, but because Paula is in her 40s, she may need IVF treatment.
They want the right to choose to have a deaf child and say it is discriminatory to ban deaf parents from doing this. Mr Lichy said:
"Being deaf is not about being disabled. It's about being part of a linguistic minority. We're proud of the language we use and the community we live in."

It would seem that Miss Garfield and Mr Lichy's aim in selecting their prospective child would be not so much about giving it the best possible start in life (which would, of course, necessitate the child being able to interact with the majority of those around it), as about justifying their self-perception as members of an oppressed minority. If people do have children, then it is self-evidently preferable that they regard them as ends in themselves, rather than as tools for making political points. This does not appear to be the case with those who wish to inflict deafness upon their offspring.

Like the TARDIS

2008-04-12T23:53:00.007+01:00

A WOULD-BE MP is being investigated by police after it emerged 27 people are registered to vote at his house.

And officers are also probing claims a prospective councillor has five people registered at his home who are also listed at other properties in the same town.

Both Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate Mohammed Afzal Anwar and Labour Pendle Council candidate Mohammed Tariq have insisted they have done nothing wrong.
Police launched their investigation after separate allegations were made to Pendle Council and Lancashire Constabulary by the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties in Pendle.

Mr Anwar said there was nothing untoward about the number of voters living at his terraced home which is 214 to 216 Manchester Road, Nelson, and consists of two houses knocked into one.

He said that 27 people were registered to vote at the property, but that not all were resident in this country at any one time.

Mr Anwar said no postal or proxy votes would be requested for the property.

He said that he had discussed the situation with election officials at Pendle Council.

Mr Anwar said: "There are different people who are living in different parts of the properties. There are certain people who go abroad from time to time. One or two are students who have been in Poland for example.

"And other people are going (abroad) and coming back. There will be no postal or proxy votes issued from this address."

His election agent, Coun Tony Greaves, said the property was inhabited by Mr Anwar, his father, three brothers, their respective families and "contains 24 bedrooms."

Only two people registered at the addresses, who were currently resident in Pakistan, were not entitled to vote, said Coun Greaves.

Labour party officials asked Pendle police to launch a probe amid claims that not all residents living there should be entitled to vote.

The claims followed Liberal Democrat allegations over Labour candidate Mohammed Tariq, who is standing in Whitefield ward in next month's Pendle Council elections.

He is accused of having five people registered at his Portland Street home who are also registered at other properties elsewhere in Nelson.

Pendle Labour group leader Mohammed Iqbal is Mr Tariq's election agent and said the prospective councillor had done nothing wrong.

He said: "I have looked into Lord Greaves's allegations concerning Mr Tariq. They seem to centre round two members of our candidate's family."

Police confirmed that they were investigating allegations of electoral fraud in Pendle.

And, of course, there really is very little to be said, pending the result of the police investigation(s). Except that they must be pretty impressive terraced houses that Mr Anwar has, to be capable of yielding twelve bedrooms each. Should the allegations against him prove to be without foundation, we can only hope that those in authority will utilise his evident talents, and task him with solving the nation's housing shortage!

Hat-tip: The Green Arrow

Postscript: Meanwhile, former Slough Tory councillor Eshaq Khan has been charged with conspiracy to defraud, as have four of his campaign workers, all of whom have also been charged with offences under the Representation of the People Act 1983. Last month, an election court found Khan guilty of vote-rigging, in the closely contested election for the town's Central Ward.

Showing his true colours?

2008-04-12T17:33:00.016+01:00

I see that Boris Johnson was jeered by members of the audience at a London mayoral hustings held at the Methodist Central Hall earlier in the week. Apparently the audience, which, the Evening Standard tells us, "was packed with black church groups and student and trade unions who are the natural constituency of Labour rival Ken Livingstone", was initially unreceptive to Johnson's charms, and booed and heckled as he attempted to speak, until one of the event organisers had to ask them to be quiet. Well, it's fairly typical of the left, isn't it, to try to silence their political opponents in this manner, rather than engaging them in debate.

Except that there's very little to suggest that Boris Johnson is the political opponent of these leftists. Of course, he and they are members of rival political tribes, but there's little in the way of substantive political or ideological disagreement between them. The Standard informs us that "by the end of the two-hour event...the jeers had turned to cheers as he won round much of the audience". Huzzah! But it is interesting to see how this apparent transformation was brought about; essentially, he won round the leftist-dominated audience by expressing views which they shared.

First, he treated them to a tasty morsel of welfare state socialism:

The audience began to warm to Mr Johnson after he agreed to fund the "London living wage" of £7.20 per hour for the poorest workers if elected.

Then, he added a liberal endorsement of lawbreaking:

He won over even more people when he talked about housing and agreed to a one-off amnesty for all illegal immigrants living in the capital.

Mr Johnson spoke of his own family's immigrant roots and said his Muslim great-grandfather, who fled to Britain from Turkey, would be "very proud" he was standing for Mayor of London.
The candidate said: "If an immigrant has been here for a long time and there is no realistic prospect of returning them, then I do think that person's condition should be regularised so that they can pay taxes and join the rest of society."

He even accused the present government, which has presided over the highest levels of immigration this country has ever seen, of being just too harsh towards those poor illegals:

Mr Livingstone added it was a "tragic miscalculation" by the Labour government not to have an "immediate amnesty for everybody" when it came to power in 1997.

He wobbled a bit...

However, the Tory faced jeers when he said it was not within his powers to stop the Met staging controversial dawn raids of migrant families. "I've given you as many yeses as I can, my friends," he implored his audience.

...but hit back strongly by implying that he would grant preferential treatment to people who have no right to be in the country at all:

He added that he would "look at" London Citizens' proposal to subsidise transport for failed asylum seekers in London, while Green Sian Berry and Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick backed the idea.

Taxpayer-subsidised transport for failed "asylum seekers" looks set to become a reality whoever wins. Ken Livingstone has pledged that they shall travel for free, telling the audience the heart-rending tale of how "many end up walking for miles across the capital because they are unable to afford the Tube or train fare". Yes, having to walk is indeed a terrible hardship, which no one should have to endure.

Returning to Boris Johnson: he actually concluded with a halfway decent idea:

Mr Johnson was then applauded when he repeated his pledge to scrap the Mayor's newspaper, The Londoner, and plant trees with the money saved.

Notwithstanding the fact that the Londoner is a complete waste of money, and that planting trees would certainly be a better use of the money (although tax cuts would be a still bigger improvement), I see very little reason, reviewing Johnson's comments, to support him, even against Ken Livingstone, in the mayoral election. After all, aside from their differences on the vexed Routemaster v. bendy buses question, they seem to be in perfect agreement on pretty much everything. Certainly, on the basis of his statements at the hustings, Johnson's views are firmly entrenched on the left of the political spectrum, reflecting the widespread ideological surrender of the Tory Party to the liberal-left. Either that, or he is constantly changing his message to suit his audience - hardly an admirable or desirable trait in a politician, albeit a common one.

Getting to know Islam

2008-04-11T21:21:00.007+01:00

This story is a few days old now, but it is still worthy of notice:

A primary school in Amsterdam wished to provide its pupils with an understanding for other cultures. But during a visit to a mosque, the children were told they were dogs.

Developing an understanding of other cultures, and being called a dog, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

With a view to developing understanding and respect for other cultures among children, primary school De Horizon regularly organises outings to various religious organisations. The chairman of the El Mouchidine mosque told the children from group 7 (aged 10) and their chaperones however that non-Muslims are dogs.

Muslims have quite a wide range of such dehumanising insults to throw at the infidels. For example, London's King Fahd Academy teaches children that Christians are pigs, and Jews apes.

In a letter to the children's parents, the school expresses its regret at the incident: "We are shocked that during the guided tour, the mosque's chairman told the children and chaperoning parents that non believers were dogs. We consider this statement as unacceptable since we allow our children to partake in this project to develop respect for freedom of religious choice".

In the meantime, the school's management has addressed the mosque on the undesirable behaviour of the chairman. Both parties will say nothing further on the matter. "We will resolve the matter amongst ourselves and I have no inclination whatsoever to discuss the matter with the media", as newspaper De Telegraaf quoted the school's spokesperson Mariet ten Berge. "We have been to the mosque before and it always went well".

I can't imagine quite how the school is going to broach the matter to the mosque authorities! "Could you please maintain a veneer of respectability, and keep your more bigoted views to yourself next time; we don't want the children getting the right idea about Islam", perhaps? Or maybe the grovelling "We're deeply sorry that some of the children took your honoured chairman's remarks out of context - it won't happen again", will be more to the taste of the school's management?

Angry parents had sent the letter on to De Telegraaf but were reportedly rapped on the knuckles by the school's management. "The school wishes to play this down. That is precisely the problem", as one mother commented.

In this story, and the school's response to it, you have a microcosm of the general attitude of the authorities to Islam, and those who expose the wrongdoing of its followers. A Muslim does something wrong, and every effort is made to hush it up, "resolving the matter amongst ourselves". Meanwhile, those who do no more than publicise the misdeeds of the Muslim are themselves denounced, or at least "rapped on the knuckles", for having the nerve to criticise the Poor Oppressed Victims. I'm rather surprised that the parents in question have not, as yet, been accused of "Islamophobia"!

I wonder whether the school is planning to continue sending children to visit this mosque? Certainly, this report contains nothing approaching an indication to the contrary, and the school's desire to deal with the matter privately, and to downplay any criticism of the mosque authorities, suggests that they hope for rapprochement, and the continuance of this mutually beneficial relationship.

Oh well, at least the children got a more balanced look at Islam than they would have done from simply listening to some dhimmi schoolmistress repeating platitudes about "Religions of Peace".

Postscript: A comment at Dhimmi Watch, where I first saw this story, quotes the following news report (I have no idea what the source was, since no link is given), in which the mosque chairman seeks to explain his statement:

According to a press release by Mohamed Guennoun, chairman of the El Mouhahidine [sic] mosque, the report above is based on erroneous information. He had never called unbelievers dogs and he rejects such statements.

[…]

When one 12 year old asked if Muslims are obligated to go to the mosque he had answered: No that is not obligatory. But there are those among us - those who think extremely - who think that if you as a Muslim don't go to the mosque five times a day to pray then you're really an unbeliever and not more than a dog.

Guennoun stresses that he was speaking of the extremists. He doesn't belong to that group and he rejects their way of thinking.

All the children, however, seem to have got the impression that he was calling them dogs. Bloody Islamophobes!

So proud, so very proud

2008-04-09T00:13:00.001+01:00

Addressing the Pakistan National Council of the Arts, on a visit to the country, our beloved Home Secretary Jacqui Smith favoured her auditors with the following remarks:

After Christianity, Islam is the largest faith community in the UK. 1.6million declared themselves Muslims in the 2001 census, and that figure may now be as high as 2million. Islam is one of many faiths which are practised in UK communities. We are proud to live in such a diverse country.

Three points:

1. It's interesting to note that Jacqui Smith does not refer to the 'community', but to "UK communities". An inadvertent admission, perhaps, of the extent to which mass immigration and multiculturalism are turning the UK into little more than a patchwork of disparate groups, having nothing in common beyond the fact that they inhabit the same patch of land.

2. The fact that the Muslim population of Britain has increased by 25% in just seven years demonstrates quite how rapidly Islam is spreading within our country. True, their numbers may still be comparatively insignificant, at just 3.3% of the total population, but, on the basis of present trends, they will not remain so for long. Considering how much influence they already wield, and the extent to which they are already in receipt of preferential treatment, one wonders how far the craven politicians and media will go in their efforts to appease the Muslims in the future.

3. Who, I wonder, is this "we", who "are proud to live in such a diverse country"? Is it the public at large? Well, since 53% of us say that Islam poses a threat to the West, I rather think not. The British public have never been consulted on whether they wanted to live in "such a diverse country"; they have simply had it imposed upon them, together with the mantra that failure to show sufficient appreciation for "diversity" is to mark oneself out as an evil bigot of the worst kind.

I'm certainly not proud to live in a country with an ever-increasing Islamic population. I am, however, deeply worried. After all, the increase in the size of the Islamic population probably means that the number of people in the UK who want to impose Sharia law has, since the start of the millennium, risen from 640,000 to at least 800,000, not to mention a parallel increase in the numbers who want to engage in such wholesome activities as killing apostates. Hardly an occasion for pride, I would have thought.

Jacqui Smith's comments demonstrate, once again, quite how out of touch she, and the rest of the buffoons running the country, are. At a time when the public is increasingly concerned about the impact that Islam is having upon our society, Smith proclaims, on behalf of all of us, her pride in the presence of millions of Muslims in Britain. The only hope for this country is to kick these cretins out at the next election; thankfully, as Jacqui Smith has a majority of less than 3,000 in her Redditch constituency, she at least should be gone pretty soon.

Will you tell the liberals, or shall I? Part two

2008-04-07T01:39:00.007+01:00

One of the statistics mentioned in my previous post was that 66% of Britons believe that immigrants undercut British workers and take their jobs. This particular belief is the one most frequently mocked by advocates of unlimited immigration, who like to depict it, usually harnessed in tandem with the straw man argument that "they take our women", as a claim made by the stereotypical crude, ignorant "white van men", who, many liberals like to believe, are the only source of opposition to immigration (aside, that is, from taxi drivers, and "racists"). As is so often the case, however, the mere fact that liberals don't want to believe it does not make it any less true (indeed, one might almost say that the probability of a statement being correct increases in direct proportion to the vociferousness of liberals in disputing it). As the Sunday Telegraph reports:

Mass immigration has been accompanied by a fall in the number of Britons with jobs, official figures show.

Since 2004, when citizens of eight central and eastern European countries were given the right to work in Britain, the number of UK-born people working here has fallen by 500,000, from 24.4 million to 23.9 million.

Over the period, the number of migrants in work, including people born abroad but now naturalised as British citizens, rose by 1.1 million - to 3.3 million. They now make up one in eight of the workforce.

The figures, from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), provide the strongest evidence yet that Britons have lost their jobs to immigrants, says a leading expert on immigration.

Robert Rowthorn, a Cambridge University professor who uncovered the findings, said: "It seems hard to deny that immigration from the new EU member states has had a negative impact on the employment of UK natives."

The good professor should be careful what he says. If any lefty student groups at Cambridge should get wind of it, they might try and get him sacked!

Attitudes to immigration

2008-04-07T00:02:00.013+01:00

A poll for Channel 4 has revealed that the public is not exactly ecstatic about the unprecedented levels of immigration that this country has been experiencing over the past ten years or so. 83% of Britons told pollsters that the country faces a "population crisis", a view shared by 58% of "settled migrants". Fifteen percent of respondents were in favour of halting immigration altogether, and fully 84% wanted to reduce it.

Why do the public feel this way? Well, it seems that many of us are not quite so enthusiastic about the myriad benefits of diversity as the liberal-left might wish. While a quarter of people believe the leftist canard that "immigration has led to a rich and varied culture in Britain", 58% say that British culture has been "damaged and diluted" by immigration. Multiculturalism seems to have been convincingly rejected too: 69% of people say that it isn't working, a view shared by 45% of settled migrants, and even 41% of recently-arrived migrants. 66% of Britons also believe that migrant workers undercut British workers and take their jobs.

There's not a lot here that's new, to be honest. The proof that the public was strongly opposed to both immigration and multiculturalism was already pretty overwhelming - this is just another shot in the cannonade of evidence. The important issue is not so much whether people have concerns and objections, as whether any government will take heed of these concerns, and act accordingly. Personally, I doubt that they will.
Responding to the Channel 4 poll, Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch said:

This is stunning confirmation that the public want to see firm and effective action to reduce the scale of immigration. It is a view shared by two-thirds of previous immigrants. The Government cannot remain in denial much longer.

Well, the first two sentences may be correct, but, alas, I fear that he underestimates the capacity of the present government to ignore any fact that does not fit their worldview. They allowed, and continue to allow, unlimited mass immigration against the wishes and without the consent of the public. I expect that they will "remain in denial" up to and beyond the next election. We can't expect any action from Labour. Meanwhile, the Tories have at least called for a limit to be imposed on immigration, but, as we all know, what they say and what they might do should they come into power may prove to be two very different things...

Great excuses of our time

2008-04-05T01:17:00.007+01:00

A SPEEDING driver has avoided a ban after his lawyer argued that he needed his licence to visit both his wives.

Mohammed Anwar, 51, was caught driving at more than twice the speed limit on his way home from work in Falkirk.

The restaurant owner, who has two wives under Islamic law, was clocked driving at 64mph in a 30mph zone on the Cumbernauld Road, Muirhead, Glasgow, on 21 August, 2007.

Yesterday at Airdrie Sheriff Court, Anwar, of Clouston Street, Glasgow, pleaded guilty to speeding, but his lawyer, Paul Nicolson, said: "He realises his licence is at risk, but this is an unusual case and he is very anxious to keep his driving licence as he has two wives.

"Under his religion he is allowed a maximum of four," said Mr Nicolson.

"He has one wife in Motherwell and another in Glasgow and sleeps with one one night and stays with the other the next.

"Without his driving licence he would be unable to be able to do this on a regular basis. He is also a restaurant owner and has a restaurant in Falkirk, which he has had for the past 30 years."

Sheriff John C Morris, QC, allowed Anwar to keep his licence, fining him £200 and imposing six penalty points on his driving licence.

While it is sort of illegal, bigamy brings other advantages in today's Britain. For example, should Mr Anwar's business ever fail, then, as was reported back in February, he will be able to claim additional benefits in respect of his additional wife. Not a bad deal, really.

Meanwhile, I wonder how far an infidel would get claiming that he needed the car in order to commute between his wife and his mistress? About as far as the bus queue, after his licence was withdrawn, I'd guess (and quite right too!).

An imam walks into a bar...

2008-04-02T22:11:00.000+01:00

I read that the left-wing "comedian" Ben Elton has made the astounding suggestion that the BBC is too scared to allow jokes about Islam to be broadcast. Speaking to the Christian cultural magazine, Third Way, Elton, who is apparently a churchgoing atheist (presumably that fits with the hypocrisy of a supposed radical leftist who fawns over the Royal Family, and writes kitsch musicals with Andrew Lloyd Webber), said that:

I believe that part of it is due to the genuine fear that the authorities and the communities have about provoking the radical elements of Islam. There is no doubt about it, the BBC will let vicar gags pass but they would not let imam gags pass...I wanted to use the phrase 'Mohammed came to the mountain' and everybody said, 'Oh, just don't! Just don't! Don't go there!' It was nothing to do with Islam, I was merely referring to the old proverb, 'If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain.' And people just said, 'Let's not!' It's incredible.

Now, I would personally be happy with anything that keeps Ben Elton off the airwaves. I simply don't find the man remotely funny. Indeed, not only do I not find him even vaguely amusing, but I also find him deeply cringeworthy - a kind of real-life David Brent. No doubt his censored joke, whatever it was, was as dreadful as all his other ones.

But in this case, he is absolutely correct. It is abundantly evident that the mainstream media, and not just the BBC, does voluntarily censor itself to avoid offending Muslims, in a manner that it would never feel the need to do with any other religion. One need only consider the fact that, in the whole of the UK, the only newspaper that reprinted the infamous Danish Motoons was the student newspaper at Cardiff University. And when the university's students' union, who publish the newspaper - ironically titled Gair Rhydd (Welsh for "Free Word") - realised what they'd done, they issued a grovelling apology, recalled all the copies, and suspended the editor. Would the same thing have happened had the cartoons been anti-Christian?

This kind of double standard applies not only in the case of direct references to Muslims, or Mohammed. Today also brought the news that a set of books aimed at promoting homosexuality to schoolchildren aged five and upwards have been withdrawn from primary schools in Bristol, after Muslim parents complained en masse. Of course, it is quite reasonable to oppose the left-wing brainwashing of very young children, which was the evident purpose of these books, and complaints were also made by some Christian organisations, such as the Christian Institute. But a comparison of the responses to Christian and Muslim complaints is instructive. Last May, Sunderland University's Dr Elizabeth Atkinson, who is responsible for the production of the books, was scathingly dismissive of Christian concerns, saying that "we knew when we started this that the Christian groups wouldn't like it because they don't like homosexuals. It wasn't surprising." Yet as soon as Muslims complained, the books were swiftly removed, in order to, as Bristol City Council put it, allow schools to "operate safely".

Muslims constantly complain that they are the victims of discrimination, and many on the left are more than happy to give credence to their claims - indeed, Ben Elton's comments have already been recorded as an example of "secular, liberal Islamophobia" at Islamophobia Watch. But the fact is, that, by virtue of a unique combination of whining about how unbelievably oppressed they are, and expressly or impliedly threatening violence against anyone who challenges them (a tactic most recently observed in the actions that led to the temporary removal of Fitna from Liveleak's servers), they have achieved a privileged status in this country, and, indeed, across the entirety of Western Europe. As Ben Elton's comments show, this is something that is recognised by increasing numbers of people, including some on the left. The next challenge, of course, is to actually do something about it...

"The destruction of the BBC"?

2008-04-01T01:05:00.008+01:00

We can only hope:

David Cameron was last night accused of paving the way for the destruction of the BBC after he threatened to hand £250million of its money to other broadcasters.

"Its money" = our money.

The Tories plan to force the Corporation to give away part of its licence fee funds to create new competition in public service broadcasting.

The move will break the BBC's "monopoly" over programmes and guarantee more quality output in areas such as children's television, the Tories claim.

"We must ensure there is plurality of provision of quality broadcasting content," says the party's new blueprint for public service broadcasting, to be unveiled tomorrow.
The move will be coupled with a plan to scrap the governing BBC Trust - itself only set up last year - and replace it with a more independent "public service broadcasting commission".
But the plans prompted an angry backlash from the BBC - which claimed it would mark the beginning of the end of the Corporation.

"Once you take away part of the licence fee you break the trust between the BBC and the licence-fee payer," said a senior BBC executive.

"The viewer won't know who on earth their money is going to and will say, 'why on earth should I pay this any more?'

Actually, some of us are already asking that very question. We would be happier to pay the licence fee, if less of it went to fund an institutionally liberal organisation, which pumps out a solid stream of left-wing propaganda, regardless of who the money went to instead. Abolishing the licence fee altogether might well be better still...

The Tories are now proposing to "top-slice" the licence fee income and put some of it into a new fund available to outside bidders - including the Corporation's commercial rivals.
The BBC could bid for a share of the money but "it would probably be preferable for these funds to go to new organisations or new channels where it has been shown there is a gap in the market," says the Conservative document.

Privately, the Tories have earmarked £250million for the fund to come out of money currently being allocated for the switch-over from analogue to digital broadcasting which is due to be completed by 2012.

This proposal is reminiscent of one made by the former BBC reporter Robin Aitken, in his (very readable) book, Can We Trust the BBC?. Aitken suggested that as little as 2% of the BBC's total income could be redirected to funding a rival, more conservative, public service broadcaster. Of course, Aitken's book focuses primarily on the Beeb's left-wing political bias, rather than its monopoly status. But there seems to be little reason why the principal of competition within public service broadcasting should not be extended to cover non-political areas, such as children's programming.

Personally, I would be quite happy to see the Tories (or anyone else) go further, and really destroy the BBC. But, regrettably, there are still a great many people in this country for whom any attack on dear old "Auntie Beeb" would be an act of secular sacrilege akin to bludgeoning the Queen Mother to death. As such, we are unlikely to see the BBC openly attacked by any major politician any time soon. But efforts to remove the BBC's monopoly are always to be welcomed, and, for once, I am actually moderately impressed with David Cameron's suggestion.

Snouts in the trough, part 94,000

2008-03-31T00:40:00.025+01:00

MPs claim more taxpayers' money for their second home allowance than necessary because they see the upper limit of £23,000 as a "target to aim for", a former minister has admitted.

Labour's Chris Mullin, a highly respected member of Parliament's standards watchdog, said it was "human nature" that MPs would claim as much as they could get away with.
He is the first MP to reveal the Additional Cost Allowance, which helps MPs to run a second home close to Parliament, is seen as an automatic entitlement and not a way to reimburse legitimate expense.
Mr Mullin, a senior backbencher who was a Foreign Office minister in Tony Blair's government, made his outburst during a Commons debate.
Calling for the allowance to be frozen until it is worth the same in real terms as in 2001 - about £14,000 a year - he said: "Spending the entire allowance has become a target to be aimed for, rather than recompense for expenses legitimately incurred.
"Human nature being what it is people tend to spend up to the limit of what they are allowed to spend."
About three-quarters of MPs claimed within a few hundred pounds of the maximum in 2006-07. Mr Mullin was among the lowest-claiming, receiving £13,591.

Personally, I'd be quite happy to abolish the second home allowance (and plenty of their other perks) altogether, and let them fund their own lifestyles, out of their own, far from inconsiderable, salaries. But, failing this, Chris Mullin's proposal to reduce the amount they can claim seems like a good idea.

I'd also suggest that, even if we don't end the payment of all second home allowances, we at least end the payment of such allowances to MPs who live within easy commuting distance (by which I mean, fifty miles or so) of Westminster, thereby ending the ridiculous and offensive spectacle of MPs with constituencies in Greater London claiming hefty allowances for the maintenance of Central London second homes. Of course, this is not going to happen, because while I say that "we" should reduce/abolish their allowances, it is in fact the MPs themselves who set the payment level. And I rather doubt that they will vote to scale down the gravy train.

Ultimately, what Chris Mullin's revelations demonstrate, once again, is that the vast majority of MPs simply see their position, not as an opportunity to serve their country and constituents, but as a chance to "get rich quick", preferably without the public, who pay for it all, ever realising. They don't even see anything wrong in claiming money for expenses they haven't incurred; rather, they regard it as an "entitlement" - as one of the perks of the job. Personally, I regard it as embezzlement, morally, if not legally.

It may be a cliche, but comparing avaricious MPs to gluttonous pigs really is an apt analogy, except that at least when pigs get their snouts in the trough they don't try to suppress this fact with taxpayer-funded legal challenges, and they don't maintain a hypocritical pretence that by feeding at the trough they are performing some necessary public service. And the pigs would probably make a better job of running the country, as well...

Nanny Jowell: hypocrite!

2008-03-30T19:52:00.007+01:00

A week ago I mentioned the news that Labour MPs Sadiq Khan and Andrew Slaughter had been caught campaigning to keep post offices in their constituencies open, while voting in favour of the government's plans to shut thousands of post offices nationwide. Now, I read that Tessa "Nanny" Jowell has been doing the same thing:

Tessa Jowell has been accused of "breathtaking cynicism" after she vowed to keep her local post office open despite voting in Parliament for its closure.

The Labour Minister attended a demonstration in support of the branch in Herne Hill, South London, only last week, and accepted a 3,000-signature petition from its customers.
At the event, she pledged to "go on campaigning to keep your post office open until its future is secure".
But just one week earlier, Miss Jowell, Labour's Olympics spokesman and MP for Dulwich and West Norwood, voted in favour of a Government scheme that will see 2,500 post office branches shut across the country - including hers.

Postscript: The Telegraph has full details (almost - they missed out Andrew Slaughter) of how the ninety Labour MPs who have been campaigning against post office closures in their constituencies voted when the matter came before parliament. I particularly note that among the numerous hypocrites was that paragon of virtue, Keith Vaz. Vaz has been making great play of resisting post office closures in his Leicester East constituency, but he still voted to shut them all down in parliament. Still, what more do you expect from the smarmy little toad?

Will you tell the liberals, or shall I?

2008-03-29T02:08:00.003Z

Ten years of record immigration to Britain has produced virtually no economic benefits for the country, a parliamentary inquiry has found.

A House of Lords committee, which is due to report next Tuesday, will call into question Government claims that foreign workers add £6 billion each year to the wealth of the nation.
It is expected to say this must be balanced against the increase in population and their use of local services such as health and education, resulting in little benefit per head of the population.
"Our overall conclusion is that the economic benefits of net immigration to the resident population are small and close to zero in the long run," the report will say.
The findings of the Lords economics committee threaten to demolish the key argument made by ministers to justify the highest levels of immigration in the country's history.
The inquiry by the committee, which includes two former chancellors and several former Cabinet ministers, is the first to try to balance the costs and benefits of large-scale immigration.
[...]
A Whitehall paper produced for the committee said average output growth over the past five years was 2.7 per cent a year and migration contributed an estimated 15 to 20 per cent of this. The Government said this indicated a contribution of £6 billion - or £700,000 a day- from foreign workers.
However, the committee's final report is expected to say the Government should have focused on the impact of immigration on GDP per head, not the economy as a whole.
David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University, said in his evidence to the committee that the Government had excluded costs from crime, security, the race relations process, health "tourism" and imported ailments such as TB.

My own objections to mass immigration are, as I have made clear many times before, centred upon the cultural, religious, and (dare I say it?) ethnic change that it brings, and the social problems that will arise in the future as a result of these changes, as well as the essentially undemocratic way in which the political elite has foisted mass immigration upon this country, without ever seeking the consent of the public. Even if there were short-term economic benefits to be had from mass immigration, I would still say that these were outweighed by the long-term social costs. Having said that, economic factors are clearly an important consideration, so I am glad to see that the arguments of those in favour of mass immigration apparently fail on this count as well.

Fitna removed

2008-03-28T22:32:00.010Z

Oh well, free speech was good while it lasted. Both versions of Geert Wilders' film have been removed from LiveLeak, and replaced with the following message:

The Removal of "Fitna": Official Liveleak Statement

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed comments from certain members of the British media that could directly affect the safety of some staff members, Liveleak has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.

Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one another’s culture.

We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.

I'm not sure what the "ill informed comments from certain members of the British media that could directly affect the safety of some staff members" were. But I think that we can all guess where the threats of violence came from. A "Religion of Peace" indeed!

I don't blame LiveLeak for taking the film down: if they felt that there was a real risk of violence ensuing then they clearly have a duty not to compromise the safety of their staff. Indeed, they deserve praise for showing Fitna in the first place, when so many other media organisations were doing all they could to prevent the film from being seen. I do not, however, share their hope that "this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one another’s culture". I for one have no intention of accepting Islam, and see absolutely no reason why I should.

But what this really demonstrates is the extent to which it has become virtually impossible, in European countries, to criticise or challenge Islam. To do so is, as has been demonstrated time and again, to put one's very life at risk. Surely the speed with which LiveLeak has been forced to remove the film should serve to demonstrate that Islam is not like other religions, but is a threat to all the values of Western Civilisation.

Fitna released

2008-03-27T21:46:00.004Z

Geert Wilders' anti-Islam film, Fitna, is finally out, after months of delays, and, well, to say that it's "gone viral" would, I think, be something of an understatement. Having been released earlier today, the Dutch-language version is, at the time of writing, pushing two million views, while the English-language version is at just over 1.1million views. To put this in context, when I wrote about the film over at ATW about an hour ago, the Dutch-language version was at 1.6million views, and the English-language version at 780,000. So that's roughly 700,000 viewers in the last hour alone! It's certainly one in the eye for all those - and there were many - who had hoped to ensure that this film never saw the light of day!

I've written more about the film itself in my ATW post, which can be read here, but, since the film's the main thing, here it is (please note that, as is made clear at the start of the film, some of the images used are pretty explicit):

What a NUT!

2008-03-23T17:25:00.009Z

Some readers may recall the name of Baljeet Ghale, the former president of the National Union of Teachers, who last year complained that the government's plans to teach a watered-down set of platitudes, under the general (and generally misleading) designation of "Britishness", were "racist". Well, Ms Ghale has now been replaced as NUT president by one Bill Greenshields, whose old school far-leftism makes Ghale's liberal-left talking points seem positively sane, rational, and benign:

The new head of Britain’s biggest teaching union has called for the private education system to be nationalised.
Bill Greenshields, incoming president of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said such a move would improve state education and make it fairer.

"Fairer" = everyone receives an equally bad education.

The NUT, the most left-wing of the teaching unions...

Which really is saying something!

...has long been hostile to independent education and to Labour’s programme of setting up academies with private-sector sponsors to replace failing schools.
But Greenshields’s comments to the union’s annual conference in Manchester yesterday went one step further.
“Let’s consider our own direction of travel – from private to public, towards bringing all schools into the state sector,” he said. “Then we would soon see some urgent improvements in our state system.”

No, you wouldn't. The existence of private schools does not harm standards in the state sector. Rather, as I wrote when the writer Alan Bennett made similar remarks back in January, it is banning private schools which really would harm the education of millions of children. After all, since chippy little leftists like Greenshields and Bennett are correct in believing that most private schools offer a better education than most state schools, the inevitable consequence of 615,000 pupils being forced to leave their private school, and go instead to the local comp, would be that the majority of those 615,000 children would experience a lower standard of education than they are getting at the moment.
Of course, for crypto-communists like Greenshields, the quality of the education received by the children of the bourgeois capitalist oppressors is probably not a matter of any great concern. But transferring an extra 615,000 children into the state sector would also cause huge disruption to the many thousands of state schools which would find these extra pupils thrust upon them, which would hardly be to the advantage of any of the existing pupils (or, indeed, their teachers).

But what creatures like Greenshields really want is not an increase in standards. Instead, they simply want to assuage their own feelings of envious resentment, by dragging everyone else down into the gutter with them. And they attempt to conceal their resentment and bitterness, by slapping the label "fairness" upon it all, as if that makes harming the education of millions of children - not to mention restricting the right of parents to educate their children in whatever manner they see fit - perfectly alright.

I doubt that any government would be mad enough to actually do what Greenshields proposes. For a start, too many hypocritical champagne socialists (Diane Abbott, anyone?) have their own offspring privately educated. But what is worrying is that a huge number of teachers must surely share Greenshields's deranged views. After all, it was they who voted him into his position, not to mention Baljeet Ghale before him. Which surely begs the question, would you want these far-left NUTters teaching your kids?

Hat-tip: David Vance

Hypocrites of the Day

2008-03-23T01:57:00.006Z

The seventy plus Labour MPs who told their constituents one thing, and then did the exact opposite:

Labour MPs are being criticised for voting against plans to suspend post office closures in Parliament before going back to their local constituencies to protest against the cuts.

Andrew Slaughter, the MP for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush in west London, is the latest to be accused of hypocrisy.
He voted against Conservative plans to suspend Post Office closures at 7.15pm on Wednesday. Thirty minutes later, he was addressing an open meeting at Hammersmith Town Hall to protest against the closures.
Greg Hands, the Conservative MP in neighbouring Hammersmith and Fulham, who was at the meeting, said: "He appeared with me and stood there and decried the local post office closures and even said he would back Ken Livingstone's judicial review.
"He came out with a mealy-mouthed line like he saw the need to close some post offices but disagreed with the choice of closures locally. Even in these times reeking of hypocrisy, it is surely one of the swiftest volte-faces ever."
It had already emerged that Sadiq Khan, the Labour MP for Tooting, voted against the suspension before addressing a meeting to speak out against post office closures.

The Daily Mail reports that Khan was jeered when he spoke at the meeting in his constituency. At least that's something, although I must say that I wouldn't have been satisfied with anything less than pelting him with rancid tomatoes, and possibly tarring and feathering him for good measure. The same goes for Andrew Slaughter, and, it would seem, a great abundance of other Labour MPs:

At least 90 Labour MPs - one in four of the Parliamentary party - have campaigned locally against closures. Several members of the Cabinet are among them. However, only 19 backbenchers rebelled against the Government in Wednesday's vote.

So the remaining seventy-one or so also campaigned against closures, and then voted for them. Forget "Hypocrites of the Day" - this lot would stand a good chance of getting "Hypocrites of the Year"!

Courage and spinelessness

2008-03-22T01:55:00.006Z

In its first session since last week's general elections, the new Iranian parliament is expected to discuss a law that will condemn to death anyone who decides to leave the Muslim faith and convert to other religions.

The parliament, also known as the Majlis, will debate the new law which has been presented by the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Under the proposed law, anyone who is born to Muslim parents and decides to convert to another faith, will face the death penalty.

But...I heard Islam was a Religion of Peace. Where is the moderate, tolerant Islam we keep hearing about?

Currently converts, particularly those who have decided to leave the Muslim faith for Evangelical churches, are arrested and then released after some years of detention.

Ah, there it is.

According to unofficial sources, in the past five years, one million Iranians, particularly young people and women, have abandoned Islam and joined Evangelical churches.

This phenomenon has surprised even the missionaries who carry out their activities in secret in Iran.

An Evangelical priest and former Muslim in Iran told Adnkronos International (AKI) that the conversions were "interesting, enthusiastic but very dangerous".

"The high number of conversions is the reason that the government has decided to make the repression of Christians official with this new law," said the priest on condition of anonymity.

"Often we get to know about a new community that has been formed, after a lot of time, given that the people gather in homes to pray and often with rituals that they invent without any real spiritual guide," he told AKI.

"We find ourselves facing what is more than a conversion to the Christian faith," he said. "It's a mass exodus from Islam."

The total population of Iran is roughly 70 million, of whom 98% are Muslims, of one kind or another (at least officially). Clearly, the conversion of one million people, or 1.4% of the total population, is not going to have an immediate Earth-shattering impact upon the religious make-up of Iran. But it is significant, taking place over a period of just five years, and in the face of such severe persecution of those who do convert. Certainly, it must be worrying the Mullahs, if they want to start executing Christian converts!

But what really struck me about this story related not so much to the future religious direction of Iran, as to the contrast between the courage of these Iranian Christians, and the spinelessness displayed by so many of our own "Christian leaders". In Iran, these brave people are putting their freedom, and, potentially, their lives, at risk in order to reject Islam and embrace Christianity. Meanwhile in Britain, the Canon Chancellor of Blackburn Cathedral expresses his gratitude for Ramadan, the Bishop of Oxford describes plans to broadcast the Adhan - the Islamic call to prayer - over the city as "enjoyable community diversity", and congregations dwindle as churches close and reopen as mosques.

Hat-tip: Gates of Vienna

Eshaq Khan guilty

2008-03-19T19:22:00.010Z

In January I wrote about the allegations that Slough Tory councillor Eshaq Khan had been indulging in a spot of vote-rigging. At that time, the hearing into Khan's conduct was still ongoing. Now, however, the election court has reached its verdict, concluding that Khan did indeed engage in large-scale vote-rigging:

...Khan was found guilty at a special High Court election hearing in Slough council chamber of corrupt and illegal practices to secure his election. He was stripped of his seat and banned from standing for office for five years. He now faces a police inquiry.
Khan, 50, won his marginal seat in Central Ward after his team registered hundreds of “ghost voters” in the month before the election and cast votes using fraudulent postal ballots.
He and his team compounded the fraud with a botched cover-up that included poorly forged tenancy agreements and statements from bogus voters, and an attempt to intimidate a witness. Thames Valley Police said that it would widen its inquiry into the case in light of the judge’s accusations of perjury and attempts to pervert the course of justice by supporters of Khan.
Three people have been arrested in connection with the case. Police have interviewed another three. The Times understands that they include Khan and a leading figure in his campaign, Mohammed Basharat Khan.
The election team registered fictitious voters at derelict houses and claimed that as many as 12 voters were living at two-bedroom flats or three-bedroom houses. Khan beat Lydia Simmons, his Labour opponent, by 120 votes but Labour contested the result by bringing an election petition to overturn the result after almost 450 voters were added to the electoral register in the final weeks before the poll, almost all of whom voted by post for the Conservatives.
Labour succeeded in striking 145 “ghost voters” from the electoral roll. The judge accepted that the true figure was likely to run into hundreds.
Witnesses included a handwriting expert, Kim Hughes, who said that 198 of the postal ballot forms were filled in by Mohammed Basharat Khan, described by the judge as “a serial forger”, and another 79 were in the handwriting of the candidate.
Once Labour began to identify ghost voters, Khan and his team produced forged tenancy agreements. Ten of these were produced on the same computer. Khan’s team also produced 46 statements by individuals claiming that they lived at the disputed properties.
Two Polish women were accused of lying by Khan’s allies when they said that they knew nothing of the six and seven Kashmiri voters registered at each of their homes. One witness, Nighat Khan, who was due to give evidence that the five Kashmiris registered at her flat were fictitious, received a visit from a man claiming to be a lawyer. He produced a typed letter that he asked her to sign, saying that she would then not have to attend the hearing. The court received a letter allegedly from Ms Khan claiming that she was too ill to attend.

This case illustrated two particularly common themes in vote-rigging cases. The first is the potential for misuse offered by the postal voting system. Richard Mawrey QC, who presided over Khan's case, said that the present system whereby one can obtain a postal vote on demand (first introduced by Labour in 32 areas in 2000, and subsequently expanded) was "lethal to the democratic process". The Electoral Commission has also called for tighter controls on postal voting, as has Sir Christopher Kelly, the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Clearly, postal voting is a problem - if nothing else, it makes vote-rigging easier, for those inclined to engage in it. It's also completely unnecessary, since the vast majority of people can quite easily vote in person, if they want to. Personally, I see no reason whatsoever not to go back to the pre-2000 system, where postal votes were only ever given to those who were genuinely unable to make it to the polling station.

However, there is another feature common to almost all of the various instances of vote-rigging that have been exposed over the past few years. Arguably, this second feature is found even more frequently than postal vote fraud (not, of course, that the two are mutually exclusive). But, while everyone is prepared to point out the problems associated with postal voting, no one seems willing to acknowledge the other, still more common, feature of these cases. I'll give you three guesses...

Postscript: When I first wrote about the allegations against Eshaq Khan, I also mentioned the trial of the former Labour Mayor of Peterborough, Mohammed Choudhary, who was on trial, together with his colleagues Tariq Mahmood and Maqbool Hussein, in relation to another vote-rigging conspiracy, which also involved postal voting. Well, last month Mahmood was convicted of 14 counts of forgery, and Choudhary and Hussein of four counts each. They now face likely prison sentences. Clearly, they weren't such highly skilled vote-riggers as Eshaq Khan, because, despite their spot of electoral fraud, they still lost the election!

Amusingly, seven of the twelve comments made by members of the public about the Peterborough case, on the website of the town's Evening Telegraph newspaper, have been deleted, as "unsuitable". Perhaps they drew the link that must not be drawn...