The Red Racist under the Bed

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!

Today's Witch Hunt

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.

Promoting Christianity is now a hate crime

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

'Straight' added to the List of Banned Words

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

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.

Undercover Mosque vindicated

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?

Thought Policeman of the Day: PC Paul Hughes

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

Lionheart arrested

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

Witch hunt of the day

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"!

Answer: he's white

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...

Thought Crime Roundup (2)

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)

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.

Innocent until proven naughty

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain's most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

'If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,' said Pugh. 'You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.'

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database - the largest in Europe - but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. 'The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,' Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling - everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database - is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.

Civil liberty groups condemned his comments last night by likening them to an excerpt from a 'science fiction novel'. One teaching union warned that it was a step towards a 'police state'.

And, on this issue, I agree 100%. It is bad enough that adults are having their details permanently stored on this database, simply because they were once arrested, regardless of whether they actually committed the crime, or whether they were ever convicted of anything. The notion that children below the age of criminal responsibility should have their DNA taken and kept forever for crimes that they might commit in the future is downright sinister. As, indeed, is the idea that adults who have never had so much as a parking ticket could nonetheless have their DNA kept on a database, simply because when they were seven or eight years old someone decided that they might one day become a criminal.

I say "someone" because it's not made clear who will actually be taking the decision. Will all children who are sent to the headmistress now be swabbed as a matter of course? I assume not, but it would be interesting to know who, if Gary Pugh ever gets his way, will decide that a child is a potential "threat to society", and on what basis they will make this decision.

Pugh says that "we have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society". Well, I would have thought that the answer to this question could be determined with greater accuracy by paying attention to those teenagers who are actually convicted of committing crimes. Surely proven fact is a better indicator of a tendency to commit crime, than even the most well-informed speculation? I would also point out that Pugh is not simply interesting in "finding out" which children are more likely to commit crime as adults, but he is also interested in forcibly taking their DNA, with or without the consent of their parents, and keeping it on a database for the remainder of their lives. There's rather a big difference between that, and simply "finding out".

I do not have any great objection to convicted criminals being obliged to provide DNA samples, but it is a severe violation of our civil liberties to compel the rest of us to do so. This does not cease to be the case, simply because doing so assists the police in solving crimes. It is quite clear that at least some senior police officers want, ultimately, to see the establishment of a compulsory nationwide DNA database, even if they regard the costs or logistical problems as being too great to allow such a programme to be implemented at present. The gradual growth of the database, the gradual increase in the types of people who can be forced to give up their DNA, and the consequent gradual acceptance of compulsory DNA testing, can only serve to hasten the day when all of us are ordered to submit to such testing by the state. As I have noted several times before, that is a day that I for one hope never to see.

As a final thought, it occurs to me that many people homeschool their children - as many as 100,000 British children are educated in this manner. Clearly, the agents of the state have far fewer opportunities to observe these children on a day-to-day basis, and are consequently far less able to identify potential evildoers among this group - the next Shipman could be out there, for Heaven's sake! I wonder what kind of (no doubt authoritarian) measures Pugh and his ilk would like to see put in place, to root out any potential criminals from among the ranks of the home educated?

Thought criminals make bad parents, part 2

Last October, I wrote about Vincent and Pauline Matherick, the Christian couple removed from the register of foster parents in Somerset, after they said that they would not be happy discussing homosexual relationships with eleven year-olds.

Thankfully, the Mathericks were subsequently reinstated. However, now a similar case has arisen, up in Derby:

Lawyers are to seek a judicial review of a decision by social workers to ban a Christian couple from fostering young children because they refused to sign up to new gay equality laws.

The action against Labour-controlled Derby City Council is likely to become a test case for the Government's Sexual Orientation Regulations. Social workers rejected an application by Eunice and Owen Johns, who have four grown-up children, to be foster parents because they refused to agree to tell any children in their care that homosexual lifestyles were acceptable.

The couple, who have been married for 39 years, had applied to offer weekend respite care for foster children under the age of 10.

Okay, so far, so bad. But there's more:

But the adoption panel was also unhappy that the couple was adamant that any child in their home would have to go to church with them on Sundays. Mrs Johns, a retired nurse, is a Sunday school teacher.

The adoption panel has admitted in internal documents that Mr and Mrs Johns could feel that they had been "discriminated against on religious grounds".

Now why on Earth would they think that?

Mrs Johns said: "I would love any child, black or white, gay or straight. But I cannot understand why sexuality is an issue when we are talking about boys and girls under the age of 10."

Clearly the words of an unfit parent, and all round ne'er-do-well.

As I wrote back in October, regarding the Mathericks:

Is there even any suggestion that, were a child with homosexual tendencies to be placed with them, they would do him any harm? No - simply because a (foster) parent might disapprove strongly of some of their (foster) child's lifestyle choices does not mean that they cannot raise them in a loving and appropriate manner. I would add that I find it very unlikely that foster parents - or, indeed, legal parents, whether by birth or by adoption - commonly sit their eleven year-olds down and lecture them on the wonders of homosexual relationships, or that they take their teenagers to "gay association meetings" (whatever those are). Yet, somehow, children do not seem to be growing up permanently scarred by the absence of these formative experiences. I would therefore suggest that they are, at best, completely unnecessary.

And as for banning foster parents from taking children in their care to church: well, I think that just illustrates the extent to which far-left, anti-Christian, ideology dominates social services departments. It's fine, it seems, to sit children down and force them to hear about homosexuality, but raising them in the religion which is still adhered to by the majority of Britons - well, that's just beyond the pale!

This case is particularly ridiculous, when one considers that we have for some time had a nationwide shortage of foster parents. Banning couples like the Mathericks, or the Johns, from fostering is not going to solve that situation, and will not help any children. But for the social workers, helping children evidently comes a poor second to promoting leftist ideology.

Hat-tip: Cranmer

Police confirm Lionheart arrest claim

It seems that the news of Lionheart's impending arrest has made the MSM. Well, alright, it's only the Bedfordshire on Sunday local paper. Still, it's better than nothing.

The full article can be read here, although most of it simply seems to have been regurgitated from Lionheart's own posts on the matter. But there is one interesting piece of information, right at the end of the piece:

A spokesman for Bedfordshire Police said: "We are aware of this particular internet site and we are taking action."

This would appear to be the first confirmation of Lionheart's story by the police. Some bloggers and commenters have expressed scepticism, to one degree or another, about the veracity of Lionheart's claim that he was facing arrest, on the grounds that it was uncorroborated. I myself was only prepared to accept his story provisionally, pending confirmation from an impartial source. Well, the fact that the police spokesman admitted that "action" is to be taken over Lionheart's blog constitutes that confirmation. As does the Bedfordshire on Sunday report, in fact.

Hat-tip: Lionheart

Anti-Islamic blogger facing arrest?

In my perambulations around the blogosphere, I have occasionally come across the Luton-based anti-Islamic blogger Lionheart. Well, yesterday he left the following message at his blog:

I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, and all for writing words of truth about the barbarity that is living in the midst of our children , which threatens the very future of our Country.

Now, not being involved in this case myself, I cannot say for a certainty that Lionheart's claim is accurate. However, I will say that this would not be the first time that a British blogger has been arrested on account of his writings: in June I wrote about the case of Andrew Love, who pleaded guilty to committing a "racially-aggravated breach of the peace", after writing a blog in which he "directed insults at groups including black and disabled people, Muslims and homosexuals". If it can happen to Andrew Love, why can't it also happen to Lionheart, or, indeed, to any other blogger who offends against the dictates of political correctness, now given legal force by the ever-growing body of "anti-hatred" legislation?

Ultimately, those of us not directly involved cannot be certain of the truth of this matter until Lionheart returns to Britain, and the police act (or don't, as the case may be). Personally, given Andrew Love's case, as well as the numerous other cases of people being arrested on spurious pretexts over accusations of "racism", or related thought crimes, I am provisionally inclined to believe Lionheart's account. Certainly, the ramifications of this story for free speech in general, and the British blogosphere in particular, are potentially enormous. If Lionheart is arrested, how long will it be before more arrests follow? As he himself puts it:

Today it is me and my blog and tomorrow it is you and your blog.

All bloggers, all blog readers, and everyone with an interest in the maintenance of what free speech we in Britain have left, should be very concerned by this.

Hat-tip: Homophobic Horse, in the comments.

Update:

Lionheart now writes that he has employed a solicitor, Anthony Bennett, to act on his behalf in this matter. Mr Bennett is something of a minor political notable himself, and the content of the Wikipedia article about him makes for interesting reading. As does this Daily Mail report from last November, announcing that he was to launch a private prosecution for child neglect against Madeleine McCann's parents (having previously failed in an attempt to prosecute Michael Barrymore for drugs offences).

However, while Mr Bennett might have some eccentricities, the fact that Lionheart has taken the step of retaining a solicitor would seem to add credence to his claims. For a start, it is difficult to see why he would do so if he had fabricated the whole story. Secondly, it means that there is, in Mr Bennett, another source to confirm Lionheart's claims. The blogger GW, of Wolf Howling, has been in touch with Mr Bennett, who has forwarded to him the e-mail sent by the police to Lionheart, which does seem to confirm what Lionheart says. GW's post also provides some background details regarding the circumstances in which Lionheart discovered that he was to be arrested.

It is beginning to look like this news is indeed as bad as it appears to be.

The first thought criminal of the New Year

Actually, this happened sometime towards the end of last year, and only became public in the New Year. But the thought criminal bit stands:

A leading bank executive has been forced to quit after making an insulting remark about Muslims.

Marc Howells, who was one of Barclaycard's leading figures, left his £200,000-a-year job after making the quip during a staff meeting as he discussed quarterly figures.

Colleagues were stunned when he said: "The results were like Muslims - some were good, some were Shi'ite."

Offended members of staff complained to senior bosses about the "wholly inappropriate" comment.

Mr Howells, 42, who worked for Barclaycard's European arm and has a £2million home in St John's Wood, north-west London, was forced out last month after negotiating an undisclosed pay-off, classed as "redundancy under compromise".

A company source said: "No one could quite believe their ears when he came out with his Shi'ite joke. He had a very responsible job in a multinational company.

"What on earth was he thinking of?

"There were a few embarrassed guffaws but everyone except him knew he was for the high jump the moment he said it.

"Once word got round and a complaint was made he was toast."

Is this what the corporate world has come to? People who, one assumes, do their jobs perfectly well being sacked for making a (rather obvious and hardly original) play on the word 'Shi'ite'. I thought people at the top of big companies were supposed to be hard-nosed bastards, but clearly the ones in this particular case are snivelling fools.

Thirty years ago, my father was employed at the head office of one of the big supermarket companies. He used to claim that, finding that they had a surplus of bacon on their hands, one of his superiors had proposed exporting it to, of all places, Iran! Informed that the people of Iran tended to be Muslim, and might not, therefore, be the most enthusiastic purchasers of that particular product, he responded with the classic words, "Muslims - aren't they the ones who worship monkeys?". Nowadays, he'd be lucky if they didn't ritually disembowel him! Of course, nowadays everyone is all too aware of who Muslims are...

"Say goodbye to the Britain you once knew"

Singer Morrissey has sparked controversy by claiming British identity has disappeared because the country has been "flooded" by foreigners. The 48-year-old former Smiths star, whose parents were Irish immigrants, suggested that immigration was one of the reasons he would not move back to Britain.

Morrissey, who has spent most of the last decade living in LA and Rome, told NME magazine that countries like Germany still had their own identity and complained of not hearing "British accents" on the streets.

Asked whether he would move back to Britain, he said: "Britain's a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you.

"Also, with the issue of immigration, it's very difficult because although I don't have anything against people from other countries, the higher the influx into England the more the British identity disappears.

"So the price is enormous. If you travel to Germany, it's still absolutely Germany. If you travel to Sweden, it still has a Swedish identity. But travel to England and you have no idea where you are.

He added: "It matters because the British identity is very attractive. I grew up into it, and I find it quaint and very amusing. But England is a memory now."

He agreed that immigration was enriching the British identity but added "you have to say goodbye to the Britain you once knew".

In a follow-up phone interview, Morrissey told the magazine: "I just think that it could be construed that the reason I wouldn't wish to live in England is the immigration explosion.

"And that's not true at all. I am actually extremely worldly and there are other reasons why I would find England very difficult, such as the expense and the pressure."

He said: "My favourite actor is an Israeli, Lior Ashkenazi, and my favourite singer was born in Iraq and now lives in Egypt. So I'm not a part of Little Britain. And by that, I don't mean the show, obviously."

Asked about his parents moving to Britain, he said: "It's different now. Because the gates are flooded. And anybody can have access to England and join in."

Admitting that he would be "pilloried" for his comments, he added: "You can't say, 'Everybody come into my house, sit on the bed, have what you like, do what you like.' It wouldn't work."

NME wrote: "Morrissey, the son of immigrants who has lived for most of the past decade in either LA or Rome, wants others to have the freedom to travel the world like him, but implies he would shut the gates to people coming to live in the UK.

"He might once have been the voice of a generation, but given his comments in these two interviews, he's certainly not speaking for us now."

A hypocrite he may be. And perhaps he doesn't speak for the second-rate hacks at the NME. But the concerns that he voiced about immigration, and about its effects on British society, are shared by the overwhelming majority of British people.

Assuming, that is, that he did voice those concerns. He is apparently planning to sue the NME for libel over the article in question.

But really, whether a faded eighties musician did or did not criticise immigration is irrelevant when compared to the real issue here. And the real issue is, of course, immigration itself, and its impact. There can be no doubt that immigration has had a huge impact on our society and culture. Even the national language is in the process of being replaced - English is now a second language for fully 40% of primary school children in London. Whole parts of London - and many, many other towns and cities - are entirely given over to immigrants, and those of recent immigrant stock. Indeed, there are even some parts of this country into which it is simply not safe for native Britons to set foot. Thanks to Muslim immigration, we now have in this country some 600,000 people who wish to see the imposition of Sharia law across Britain - an attitude of a kind which this country has not witnessed for hundreds of years. And, perhaps worst of all, we are now experiencing the widespread active suppression of native British culture, in order to make the immigrants feel more at home. Even the indescribably vile Keith Vaz has acknowledged that British society is changing. In his Newsnight debate with Nick Griffin he said that "it is wonderful that this country has been transformed" (video link, if you can stomach it, here; he says those precise words at 4:49). And that is the heart of the matter. Not, "has the country been changed by immigration?" (it's abundantly clear that it has been), but "do we like the change, do we want to quicken the rate of change, or do we, on the other hand, want to reverse the change?". Keith Vaz would choose the former option, I (and Morrissey, according to the NME) would choose the latter.

Today's Thought Criminal

DAVID CAMERON has come under pressure to sack a Tory who praised the leadership of Ian Smith, the white minority leader of Rhodesia, who died last week.

Richard Willis, a councillor in Reading, Berkshire, who is on the list of Conservative candidates for the next general election, said on a website that Smith had been a “great and wise” leader whose rule had been “benign and successful”.

[...]

In comments on the politicalbetting.com website Willis defended Smith’s record and insisted there was nothing “inherently evil” about the all-white administration.

He wrote: “I refuse to submit to the prevalent ideology that a government that delivers stability and economic success is inherently evil just because the elite were of a racial minority. Rhodesia was the breadbasket for southern Africa under his wise leadership.” The statements, penned under the tag “Rik W”, drew a furious reaction from other users, who condemned him for supporting a “vile white supremacist”. Willis derided the criticism as “silly leftist responses”.

Sounds fair enough.

Yesterday he stood by the comments. Although apartheid was “indefensible”, Smith’s Rhodesian Front had been “infinitely” preferable to Mugabe’s regime.

He said: “You cannot judge governments of the past by 21st century standards. Ian Smith led a government that actually had people migrating to the country.”

Peter Hain, the cabinet minister who led the campaign against apartheid in the 1970s, said: “As someone who campaigned actively against Ian Smith’s racist, white minority tyranny I am disgusted by these comments. Yet again we see racism remains embedded in the Tory grassroots.”

What I really want to know is, what is a cabinet minister doing kicking up a fuss about the remarks of an obscure provincial councillor? Doesn't Peter Hain have anything better to do? Like jumping under a bus, for example?

As for Mr Willis's comments: well, if saying that Rhodesians/Zimbabweans, of whatever race, were better off under Ian Smith than they are under Robert Mugabe makes you some kind of evil white supremacist bigot, then Peter Hain had better apply that label to Paul Themba Nyathi of the Zimbabwean Movement for Democratic Change, who having fought against Smith's government in the 1970s, now says that life in his Rhodesia was "a paradise" when compared with life in Mugabe's Zimbabwe. And RW Johnson, the Sunday Times journalist who reported Mr Nyathi's comments, will also have to go down in the records as an unrepentant thought criminal, since he wrote that:

...everything then was better for Africans than it is now – education, healthcare, standard of living, life expectancy and employment.

Was Ian Smith's administration perfect in every way? No. But it was very far from being the worst government that Africa has ever seen, and it was a damn sight better than the administration that followed. Sadly, Ian Smith has, like Enoch Powell, been declared a heretic by the liberal-left, and anyone who has anything vaguely positive to say about him will receive the same designation, regardless of such irrelevancies as the facts.

And, since Peter Hain raised the issue of "racism", I would also point out that Ian Smith did not preside over an extremely successful campaign of ethnic cleansing. Robert Mugabe has done:

The last vestiges of the people that Ian Smith pledged to protect, the white Rhodesians, are being swept away. From their peak of 300,000, there are barely 20,000 whites, mostly the elderly, in Zimbabwe today...

Where, I wonder, is Peter Hain's "disgust" regarding this? Where is the condemnation of the leftists who were so quick to attack Richard Willis?

Update: In the comments, Mexicano points out that white Zimbabweans were not the first group to be ethnically cleansed in Mugabe's Zimbabawe. Mugabe also presided over the massacre of about 30,000 Matabele tribesmen in the early 1980s. Again, Ian Smith did not tend to go in for that kind of thing.

Some are more equal than others

In the wake of the recent conviction of the self-styled "Lyrical Terrorist", Samina Malik, the Muslim Council of Britain's Inayat Bunglawala has penned a characteristically rambling piece, entitled "An attack on liberty", at the Guardian's Comment is Free site. After ranting for some time on various stock Muslim grievances, he concludes by saying that "a foolish young woman who did not harm anyone now faces a maximum 10-year term in prison for what can only be described as a thought crime".

Now, some might say that possessing terrorist propaganda and joining an organisation, Jihad Way, which aimed to disseminate such propaganda and to support al-Qaeda goes some way beyond mere "thought crime". Personally, I would definitely say that organisations such as Jihad Way ought to be illegal, although I don't really think that she should be punished for her (admittedly appalling) poetry, or for downloading offensive material from the internet. In any event, I fail to see why Samina Malik should be prosecuted, while the likes of Anjem Choudhary are left free to incite murder in peace. So, to some extent I do actually agree with Inayat Bunglawala, and I am certainly glad to see that he is taking a stance against thought crime, an issue which greatly concerns me, and about which I have written on numerous occasions.

But hang on a minute! This Inayat Bunglawala, this champion of free speech, this enemy of the criminalisation of thoughts, surely he cannot be the same Inayat Bunglawala who, in 2005, wrote in favour of the introduction of laws creating a new crime of "incitement to religious hatred"? He must be a different Bunglawala from the one who then said that:

We believe stirring up hatred against people simply because of their religious beliefs or lack of them should be regarded as a social evil...We understand the concerns about free speech, but we think that they are totally misplaced.

And he can't possibly be the same Bunglawala who last year supported plans to widen the scope of the laws against "inciting racial hatred", following the acquittals of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett. No, because anyone who felt that Nick Griffin should go to prison for saying that Islam was a "wicked, vicious faith" (which statement, I would point out, does not contain any explicit or implicit threat, nor any reference to individual Muslims), but that punishing Samina Malik for writing such delightful couplets as "Kafirs your time will come soon/and no one will save you from your doom" and "For the living martyrs are awakening/and Kuffars world soon to be shaking" is "an attack on liberty", would be a complete hypocrite.

Postscript: To be fair to Bunglawala, he's not the only person displaying a distinct hypocrisy over this. Following Malik's conviction, Martin Sullivan, of the Islamophobia Watch blog, quoted approvingly from both Bunglawala's article, and Boyd Tonkin's rather better written piece on the same theme. Yet in the past he too has repeatedly come out in favour of restricting the free speech of people like the BNP.