When leftists fall out

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!

White liberals know best

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

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth

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?

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

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!

"It never occurred to us"

Did anyone else watch "Rivers of Blood", the BBC2 documentary on Enoch Powell's famous speech, on Saturday night? I did, and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. Although I didn't agree with all of its conclusions, it was far from being the hatchet-job that I was expecting, and it certainly seemed strongly sympathetic towards Powell's critique of multiculturalism, even if it did, rather bewilderingly, imply that his speech was responsible for bringing state-sponsored multiculturalism about. It was also a pretty well put-together programme, with plenty of interesting talking-heads, balancing out the predictable ("he was a wicked racist!") contributions of a couple of race hustlers, and the execrable Roy "Tub of Lard" Hattersley. Plus, the Socialist Worker and the New Statesman both hated it, which can only count in its favour! As a regular critic of the BBC, I must say that on this occasion they've actually done rather well. Now, if only they could get it right the other 99% of the time...

If you didn't catch it, then it's been uploaded to Youtube, and the first segment can be seen here. It's all interesting, but I was particularly intrigued by some comments from Lord Lester, the left-wing barrister, and former advisor to Roy Jenkins, who as Home Secretary in the mid-1960s first articulated the leftist doctrine of multiculturalism. Speaking at the very end of the film, he said:

The model we had was, everyone would share the broad values of being British; what we did not expect, was that there would be those who would unwisely suggest that, for example, Sharia law should be applied in this country, or that the punishment of stoning for adultery might be looked at...It never occurred to us that there would be those kinds of unwise challenges to the broad values of a liberal democratic society.

It really is astonishing that the liberals who launched the multiculturalist agenda that has dominated (and disrupted) society for over forty years never even considered the possibility that not everyone was going to accept the "broad values of a liberal democratic society", however they might be interpreted. They never thought it possible, that encouraging people to continue living their lives as though they were still in some backwater village in Pakistan, would also have the effect of encouraging them to continue to adhere to the moral, social, and political codes prevalent in those backwater villages. Their naivety was simply astounding!
Of course, while Lord Lester, and, apparently, Roy Jenkins by the end of his life, may have realised that something is not quite right, there are still a Hell of a lot of liberals who have not achieved this realisation. They still believe, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, that the increasing size and influence of the Islamic population in Britain is nothing to fear, and that, indeed, it is those of us who oppose Islamification who are the real threat to this country. I have had plenty of liberals tell me that even should Muslims eventually become a majority in Britain, it will be no problem, because they will have accepted all our values. Well, they haven't done so in the last forty years, but have rather become more extreme with each passing generation. The fact is, these liberals who decry any attack on Islam as part of some "racist" conspiracy may well find, that in thirty or forty years' time, they, like Lord Lester today, will be complaining that "it never occurred to us" that British-born Muslims would actually start executing apostates, or establishing separate Sharia jurisdictions in cities such as Birmingham or Oldham. But by then, of course, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

Taking the biscuit

Culture minister Margaret Hodge has put her foot in it for the second time in a week by boasting how she can ease racial tensions over coffee and biscuits.

Her recipe for peace and harmony was delivered during a debate about research showing political disillusionment among the white working classes.

The millionaire MP for Barking, where the British National Party has established a foothold, said: "It is really interesting what I am doing now, because I am doing things like, simple things, asking people to come and have coffee and a chocolate biscuit with me."

Wow! Coffee and biscuits with Margaret Hodge! I'll be surprised if people don't move to Barking just to be able to partake!

"And people from all sides of my community come in, white and black, they may come in feeling really hostile and angry with each other, and they engage in a conversation and actually at the end of it you see a change in attitudes."

Mrs [sic] Hodge was immediately accused of patronising her constituents.

Well, yes. I can quite see that being told, in effect, "come, you dear little people, and bathe in the glory of my enlightened tolerance for a few minutes, and you will see that all your apparent problems are really just as silly as you are" might seem just a tad patronising. Even if coffee and biscuits, or even tea and cake, are thrown in.

Of course, aside from being patronising, her comments are idiotic, and her "solution" utterly superficial. People are not going to change their whole set of attitudes, simply because they have coffee and biscuits with a nice friendly person of another race. Indeed, in many cases there is very little reason why they should change their attitudes: clearly, many people, particularly working class whites in places like Barking, have a lot of legitimate concerns about the demographic, cultural, and infrastructural impact of mass immigration (among other issues), and those concerns do not become any less legitimate simply because one has a nice chat with a friendly Nigerian.

But, of course, Hodge, like all liberals, refuses to accept that any concerns anyone might have about the path Britain is taking could ever be anything other than utterly irrational fears, born out of ignorance and bigotry. As such, it may be quite logical, from her point of view, to believe that her "coffee and biscuits" method could work: after all, if the concerns themselves are only superficial, then the solution to them also needs only to be superficial. Like almost all contemporary politicians, she's out of touch, and, hopefully, come the next election, she'll also be out of Parliament.

Hideously white, part 94,000

If members of the public were asked to identify one thing that embodied British culture, many would pick the Proms. Weeks of classical music; the Royal Albert Hall; Union Flags and Land of Hope and Glory on the last night - what could be a better modern symbol of the nation? And it's certainly popular: hundreds of thousands of people attend the the thing itself, and millions of people across the World tune in to watch.

This, however, is not enough for Margaret Hodge, who holds the post of culture minister in one of the most uncultured governments we have ever seen. Delivering a speech on "Britishness" to the left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research, Hodge complained that the Proms were insufficiently inclusive:

The audiences for some of many of our greatest cultural events - I'm thinking particularly of the Proms - is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease in being part of this.

I know this is not about making every audience completely representative, but if we claim great things for our sectors in terms of their power to bring people together, then we have a right to expect they will do that wherever they can.

By contrast, the BBC reports that

...Mrs [sic] Hodge praised other institutions for "creating the icons of a common culture that everybody can feel a part of" - such as the Angel of the North, the British Museum and the Eden project as well as TV and radio shows "from Coronation Street to the Archers" and shared public holidays.

Quite how one can "feel a part of" the Angel of the North is unclear, unless one is speaking literally. But, generally, Hodge's preference for Corrie over Elgar speaks volumes about Labour's philistine outlook on the world. It evinces an instinctive preference for popular culture over high culture, purely because it is popular. The actual artistic or aesthetic merit of a thing is irrelevant to Hodge: all that matters is how many people tune in.

How many people tune in, and how many of the right sort of people tune in. Because, aside from the philistinism that Hodge's comments betray, there is also an evident racial subtext: when she talks about "inclusiveness", she is quite clearly complaining that the Proms are just too hideously white. This is not the first time that a Labour culture minister has attacked the arts for this heinous crime: in 2005, David Lammy accused arts organisations "of being 'too exclusive' and not doing enough to promote black people in senior roles".
The fact is, that events like the Proms tend to attract white people, in much the same way that rap concerts tend to attract a disproportionate number of blacks (albeit balanced out by middle-class white teenagers attempting to be edgy). Classical music is white music: it is our cultural heritage, not that of non-whites. This is not to say that non-whites can't enjoy classical music, and no doubt some do, but it does explain why the audience at events like the Proms is overwhelmingly white. Non-whites aren't being excluded: they're just not interested.

The other main reason for Hodge's attack is that the Proms, and particularly its famous last night, are proudly, openly, and traditionally British. Its white attendees wave the Union Flag and listen to Land of Hope and Glory, with nary an emblem of multiculturalism in sight. Watching the last night, one could almost imagine that the war that the left has waged against this country's heritage for many decades had never happened. For the left, which delights in the damage it has done to this country in the name of multiculturalism, this is just unacceptable.

The morally bankrupt left

The deputy leader of the party that has ruled this country for nearly eleven years was answering questions from readers of the Independent on Monday. Along the line, this interesting little nugget arose:

David Newton, Edinburgh: Fidel Castro: hero of the left, or dangerous authoritarian dictator?

Harriet Harman: Hero of the left – but time for Cuba to move on.

She's right, of course: plenty on the left do regard Old Uncle Fidel as a hero. And arguably, David Newton was creating a false dichotomy: being a "dangerous authoritarian dictator" is no bar to being hero-worshipped by the left. Indeed, some might say that it was a necessary qualification.

But since Harman is a proud member of the (far) left, one assumes that she was proclaiming Castro to be one of her heroes. Now, how long do you think any vaguely right-wing contemporary politician would last, proclaiming his admiration for, say, General Franco? Indeed, just think how quickly Nigel Hastilow's career was killed off after he expressed agreement with Enoch Powell, a man who, so far as I am aware, was not responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people. Among those who weighed in against Hastilow was one Harriet Harman, who said that his comments demonstrated that the Tories were "the same old nasty party". If admirers of Powell are "nasty" what, I wonder, are admirers of Castro? Is there a word strong enough to describe them?

Of course, unlike Nigel Hastilow, Harriet Harman won't lose her job over her admiration for Castro, because the media, which launched a witch hunt against Hastilow, is largely ignoring this. Only the Times and the Spectator's Coffee House blog have devoted any real attention to Harman's comments, although the Daily Mail did mention them, very briefly, in passing. The BBC, which happily stoked the flames for the burning of the heretic Hastilow, makes no mention of this. Quelle surprise!

Harman's remarks expose the utter moral bankruptcy, and complete hypocrisy, that is the hallmark of the modern left. As Pete Moore of ATW, to whom I owe a hat-tip for this story, puts it "no matter how low your opinion of them, they'll always demonstrate that it wasn't low enough". Damn right!

Update: It seems that Harman is not alone in her admiration for Castro. Via CentreRight, I see that sixty-nine other MPs have signed an Early Day Motion tabled by obscure Labour backbencher Colin Burgon, which states that "this House commends the achievements of Fidel Castro".

The War against Golliwogs continues

Golly dolls - the black and white toys which many believe have offensive racist connotations - are being snapped up in NI shops.

A Belfast woman said she was "horrified" to find them in a local shopping centre.

Nicola Bailey said: "I can't believe people are making, selling or buying them."

But for the shop owner, the dolls have proved a top seller.

Nevertheless, the owner of the Mr Christmas shop in Connswater has apologised for any offence and said he would send the rest of his stock back.

The Equality Commission said the dolls were a "throwback to the 50s".

They have been stocked at the Connswater centre since September.

They are very popular, the shop said and, at one point, they were sold out. The dolls have been one of their best selling items in a number of years.

But the shop's owner said it was never his intention to offend. Once his display dolls are sold, he won't sell any more and will return the rest of the stock to the manufacturer, he said.

Chief Commissioner of the Equality Commission, Bob Collins, said the dolls were not appropriate.

"The world has moved on a great deal and everyone should move with it," he said.

Does this middle-aged man really have nothing better to do with his time than fixate over the sale of children's dolls? Apparently not.

Still, at least they didn't get the police involved this time...

On a related note, I wonder if anyone has any details regarding the number of racially-motivated crimes committed as a result of contact with golliwogs? For some inexplicable reason, I have yet to see the (no doubt very detailed and damning) figures.

The Dhimmi Mindset

One of the strongest indicators of a dhimmi mentality, both on an individual and a societal level, is the willingness to anticipate Muslim outrage, and to act to remove the potential source of offence, even in the complete absence of any actual complaints from the Muslims. An example would be the recent craze for prohibiting images of pigs, or stories about Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. Well, today has furnished us with two paradigmatic instances of this same phenomenon of voluntary submission. First, via Dhimmi Watch:

A BRITISH children’s author who named a mole Mohammed to promote multiculturalism has renamed it Morgan for fear of offending Muslims.

Kes Gray, a former advertising executive, first decided on his gesture of cross-cultural solidarity after meeting Muslims in Egypt.

The character, Mohammed the Mole, appeared in Who’s Poorly Too, an illustrated children’s book, which also included Dipak Dalmatian and Pedro Penguin, in an effort to be “inclusive”.

This weekend Gray said he had decided to postpone a reprint and rename the character Morgan the Mole even though there had been no complaints.

“I had no idea at all of the sensitivities of the name Mohammed until seeing this case in Sudan,” said Gray. “As soon as I saw the news I thought, oh gosh, I’ve got a mole called Mohammed this is not good.

“I feel incredibly sorry for that teacher,” added Gray. “Luckily for me, I’m in a position where I can avoid this.” The book has sold 40,000 copies in Britain and abroad since 1999.

And Exhibit Two:

Shepherds dressed in old sheets, Christmas carols and the competition to see who will play Mary and Joseph… nativity plays have been a feature of British primary-school life for generations.

But a survey has revealed that headteachers are watering down or ditching the centuries-old Christmas story in favour of secular tales to avoid upsetting pupils of other faiths.

Only one in five schools are ­planning to perform a traditional nativity play this year. They are now outnumbered by schools that say they will be either putting on a non-religious play, such as Scrooge or Snow White, or giving no performance at all.

Almost half the schools said they planned to put on modern reinterpretations of the Christmas story, with extra characters, new songs and modern themes, such as The Bossy King, Whoops-a-Daisy Angel or The Hoity-Toity Angel.

The findings will add to fears that Christian teachings are being abandoned by schools, despite the wishes of parents. Recent surveys show an overwhelming majority of families would like the nativity play, telling the story of Christ's birth, to live on in schools.

Of course, since they (or at least, the majority of them) are only white British Christians, their cultural sensitivities can safely be ridden over, roughshod.

One point common to both these cases (and to the various pig ban cases as well) is that no Muslim, or virtually no Muslims, have actually complained. Certainly, I've never heard tell of a Muslim objecting to a nativity play, and Kes Gray himself acknowledged that, for 40,000 books sold, no one had complained about his fictional mole's name. But that doesn't stop either Gray, or the legions of do-gooder headteachers, from behaving in this utterly craven manner. They have become so well-indoctrinated into "cultural sensitivity" that they are now more sensitive to perceived "Islamophobic" slights than all but the maddest of mad Muslims. Were it not so utterly contemptible, one might actually be rather impressed with the capacity of multiculturalism to so completely brainwash its adherents.

Islam is a threat to Britain, and to her cultural identity. If present demographic trends continue, then it will, before long, become an enormous, potentially overwhelming, threat. But, as Klein Verzet wrote last month, for the time being, the threat posed by Islam, significant as it is, is as nothing against the threat posed by the little Vichyists of the politically-correct, pro-multiculturalist, liberal-left.

Idiotic Academic of the Day

THE head of a Celtic supporters' trust has provoked outrage by defending the singing of pro-IRA songs by the club's fans during matches.

Dr Jeanette Findlay [actually Ms Findlay - she doesn't have a PhD], who chairs the Celtic Trust, which represents supporters and small shareholders, claimed chants about the IRA were "songs from a war of independence".

She was speaking during an interview on BBC Radio Five Live's breakfast programme. Her comments prompted a furious response from listeners.

Dr Findlay, who is a research fellow and economics lecturer at Glasgow University, had been replying to questions by presenter Nicky Campbell about the trust's opposition to the appointment as club chairman of the former home secretary, John Reid, who was a cabinet minister at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Dr Findlay said the trust's opposition was to do with Mr Reid's "leading role in relation to what many believe is an illegal and immoral war".

Mr Campbell then asked her if she was more uncomfortable with the singing of pro-terrorist songs or the appointment of Mr Reid.

Dr Findlay responded: "I have tried to explain about the nature of Celtic as a club. It was founded to help the poor Irish immigrants to Scotland.

"They may take a particular view of the history, of what happened in Ireland, which is different from many other people, so I don't call those pro-terrorist songs. What history tells us is that it is facile to say that politics and sport will ever be separated."

Mr Campbell said he was not referring to songs such as The Fields of Athenry, but to "actually chanting: 'The IRA'."

She replied: "Many of those songs are songs from what was essentially a war of independence going back over a hundred years."

What a vile woman. Still, I can't say that I'm surprised to hear this kind of thing coming from within the groves of academe. After all, academics have repeatedly sided with the various terrorist organisations seeking to destroy Israel - supporting the IRA, or at least acting as an apologist for those who do, is simply in character for most of them.

Harry Potter and the (vain) Search for the Philosopher's Brain

In the world of Hogwarts there are certainly inequalities. But at the same time, since culture is open to all, Hermione – the child of Muggles – can outperform Malfoy, the child of wizards.

So what appears as elitist is in fact real equality, as opposed to the false equality of the Muggles. In this, Harry Potter is a war-machine against Thatchero-Blairism and the 'American way of life'.

So says left-wing French philosopher (oh dear, oh dear, oh dear) Jean-Claude Milner, speaking on the day that the last Harry Potter novel was released in France. He added that:

Reading it, one can see that J.K. Rowling -- like many cultured English people -- believes there was a real Thatcherite revolution, that it was a disaster, and that culture's only chance is to survive as an occult science.

Which rather ignores the point that British culture was not destroyed by Margaret Thatcher, but by generations of leftist "intellectuals" attacking all notions of cultural worth, partly through their doctrine of multiculturalism, but mainly through their conserted effort to destroy all notions of high culture, to assert that all forms of "artistic" expression are equally valid (think of the kind of trash that, year-on-year, wins the Turner Prize, for example, while any artist who attempts to produce anything of any value whatsoever is denounced as "kitsch", or dismissed as someone who "paints pretty pictures", or, worst of all, accused of being "old-fashioned"). It is the left, not Thatcherism (or even "Thatchero-Blairism", whatever that is), which has been in the vanguard of the attack on culture.

But the eminent philosopher, that worthy heir to the mantle of Aristotle, has more pearls of wisdom up his sleeve:

According to Mr Milner – a professor of linguistics at Paris university – the scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in which Harry's aunt is blown up like a balloon is a satire on Thatcher.

"Here we can see a reference to [the film] The Great Dictator by Chaplin, featuring an all-powerful middle class figure gone mad.

And one cannot help but note that the aunt is called Marge – a clear allusion to Thatcher."

Um, "a clear allusion"? Really?

Marge is short for Marjorie. Not Margaret. And I have certainly never heard anyone refer to Baroness Thatcher as "Marge". Had the character been called Maggie, he might almost have been one-hundredth of the way to having a valid point. As it is: he's talking merde.

However, while the professor is clearly either mad, stupid, or, most probably, both, he does make some valid points about the extent to which culture has been undermined (I would agree, for example, with his belief that education is good in itself, rather than simply as a means to an economic end), even if he wrongly blames the right for doing the undermining, and wrongly implies that it will be the left that will save it.

As a further point of interest, I would add that this is not the first time that a lefty has used the Harry Potter stories to illustrate their point. Dumb Jon has previously recorded Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti using the boy wizard to illustrate a point about torture, while, in the aftermath of JK Rowling's recent outing of Dumbledore, a spokesman for the homosexual organisation Stonewall practised torture on a defenceless victim, when he said:

It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster.

Sadly, satire was left so badly injured by the treatment he received at the spokesman's hands, that the decision was made to turn off his life support machine...

Frankly, it's just bizarre the way the left seems obsessed with finding deeper meanings in what is no more than a rather successful set of children's stories. And Professor Milner's intervention, with its blatant factual inaccuracies, is more bizarre than most. Still, what else do you expect from a twenty-first century professor of linguistics? The cancer of post-modernism has been eating away at universities across Europe and America for forty years, and this is the result: legions of professors who spout utter crap, the actual intellectual content of which would disgrace an educationally subnormal five year-old, but who routinely denounce those who disagree with them as being "anti-intellectual".

Britain's youngest thought criminal?

The race hustlers are really out in force at the moment. I'm not quite sure why - there isn't a full moon or anything. But out in force they are, and here is their latest good deed:

A headteacher has defended her decision to investigate an allegation that a four-year-old boy was guilty of racism during a game of chase.

Anne Phipps acted after Rocky Smith spat at a 10-year-old black boy on the school's playing field. She said she had no choice but to pursue the accusation, despite the child's age.

The investigation, at Bedenham Primary School in Gosport, Hants, has angered Rocky's parents.

How very intolerant they must be!

Mrs Phipps said: "When a child makes an allegation of any kind, whether it's bullying, racism, or general unhappiness, we investigate by talking to them. We couldn't dismiss this.

"A nursery nurse spoke to Rocky and I spoke to the older boy. We talked to them about what happened and why it might have happened. That's what an investigation is in a primary school.

"In this case, a little boy did think something had happened and felt he had been singled out. But after investigating, I decided this was not the case – it was just naughty behaviour."

Note that even professional race hustlers are mystified by Mrs Phipps's behaviour:

Tunde Bright-Davies, the chairwoman of the Racial Harassment Forum, said: "A very young child can hate another person because of the colour of their skin – I have met with a boy of six who said he used to be racist."

Of course, one might wonder whether the testimony of a six year-old can be considered conclusive proof of anything, other than, perhaps, the suggestibility of six year-olds. Nonetheless Ms Bright-Davies is quite correct when she adds:

"But with the circumstances of this incident, there was no name calling, no racial connotation, no 'get away from me', so you can't found racism on just spitting.

"I don't know why it was investigated as a racist incident."

The only explanation that I can think of, is that a white child did something very mildly unpleasant to a black child. In such circumstances, a certain kind of race-obsessed liberal will infer that, because the "perpetrator" was a designated oppressor, and the recipient a designated victim, the action must have been racially motivated. Thus I was once accused of "racism" by a grossly obese, utterly humourless, and terminally liberal German, simply for telling a joke at the expense of an Indian, even though the joke had nothing to do with race. This attitude, whereby racism is specifically sought out in even the most innocuous of situations, is clearly one possessed by Mrs Phipps. Such a wonderful thought, isn't it, that this is the kind of person in charge of our children?

I do note, however, that Mrs Phipps implied that a complaint of racism had been made by the ten year-old black boy. If so, then I must say that he is a child of very promising genius in the art of race hustling. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that he could even be the new Keith Vaz, and to express the hope that his parents will do all they can to nurture his undoubted talent. It really is quite impressive for a ten year-old to be so well acquainted with the magical properties inherent in accusing someone whom one dislikes of the heinous crime of "racism". Of course, it is somewhat less impressive for a ten year-old to go running to teacher over the actions of a child less than half his age, but I suppose that the value of playing the victim is now being instilled in Britain's children almost from birth, and that this, at least, is a lesson many are learning.

Gathering the kindling: thoughts on the fascism of "liberals"

I see that the Wicked Dr Watson has now been suspended from his job as director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, as a result of his heretical comments on race and intelligence. He has also been banned from the Bristol Festival of Ideas, where he was due to give a talk next Wednesday. According to the festival's organiser Andrew Kelly, "James Watson's opinions were unacceptably provocative". Interesting, isn't it, that we now live in a society in which people talk openly about the need to silence "unacceptable" opinions? Meanwhile, I'm wondering how long it's going to be before the liberal lynch mob does what it clearly wants to do, and burns Watson at the stake...

Of course, to call these people liberals is perhaps somewhat misleading. After all, whatever else liberalism stands for, the word does imply a belief in the importance of individual liberty. And it is patently obvious that people who attempt to impose limits of acceptability upon freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, who have people removed from their jobs for transgressing those limits, and who seek to make the expression of opinions inimical to their own illegal, are not in any sense advocates of liberty. What they are is unclear. There are many words that might describe them - some of which are rather colourful - but the most accurate that I can think of is 'fascist'. So far as I can see, the people who are hounding Dr Watson today, the people who hounded Frank Ellis out of his job last year, and the people who, in the future, will no doubt hound many others for expressing the same opinions as Watson and Ellis, or for expressing other views that they dislike, are nothing other than fascists. Certainly they are deeply evil.

It is to be hoped that Dr Watson will not lose his job over this. As I understand it, America has laws designed to protect the right of citizens to express their opinions, without the threat of punishment, legal or extra-legal, hanging over their heads - surely these should operate in Watson's favour. But, whatever happens, I hope that this whole sorry business will cause at least some people in Britain to wake up and smell the proverbial coffee: to see to what extent freedom of speech and conscience has been eroded in this country, and to see the extent to which those we call liberals, are more commonly deeply authoritarian, and utterly opposed to liberty.

Update: The white-hating racists at BLINK, satisfied that Watson now appears likely to lose his job for his thought crime, have demanded that he also return his Nobel Prize as a mark of his contrition. Not because he did not earn it, but simply because these scum wish to extract as much blood money as they can from the wicked heretic - to bring him down to his knees in supplication before them - and because they wish to do all they can to intimidate anyone else who might harbour any politically incorrect thoughts into suppressing them. After all, if they can bring down a Nobel Prize-winner, who else is safe from their evil machinations? One wonders whether, should Dr Watson inexplicably refuse to return the honour, they will seek to have him stripped of it? As I said, these people are fascists, plain and simple.

There was an Englishman, a Scotsman, and, um...a censorious liberal cretin

In the village of St Breward, Cornwall, they have a parish magazine. Until recently, it was edited by Denis Lusby, who also runs the village shop, and is chairman of the parish council. Exhibiting a sense of community pride which impresses and bemuses in equal measure, he gradually, over eleven years as editor, built the magazine up from being a flysheet, to being a fifty-six page monthly publication, selling five hundred copies.

So, why is it that Mr Lusby is no longer the editor of the magazine? Well, it seems he fell foul of the head of Cornwall Council's "Equality and Diversity Service", Ginny Harrison-White, after he published a number of jokes in the magazine, including a couple of Irish jokes. None of these was particularly vicious, and since Mr Lusby is himself a Northern Irish Catholic, one might have considered it self-evident that he was not, in fact, a wicked racist harbouring a deep-seated hatred against the entire Gaelic race.

Ms Harrison-White thought otherwise, however. She was particularly concerned that schoolchildren might read the jokes, and thereby be driven to go and bomb Dublin, or something along those lines. Accordingly, she wrote to local schools, describing herself as a "concerned local resident", and demanding that they refuse to allow Mr Lusby to publish school news in his magazine. As she put it:

There are three items which are distasteful and two of them use racist language or ridicule based on race as defined under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and which may have an impact on the attitude and behaviour of the children and the wider school community.

I am asking if you feel it is appropriate for the school and church to have their articles, which demonstrate and promote respect and celebrate achievement, published alongside such derogatory material.

The "racist language or terms of ridicule based on race" consists in the fact that characters in the jokes Mr Lusby used had the names Paddy and Murphy. Apparently, this was not the first time that Mr Lusby had had a run-in with Ms Harrison-White: she had previously written to object to the inclusion of Essex girl jokes in the magazine. After this latest complaint, Mr Lusby felt driven to resign by the woman's interference.

There is a common liberal stereotype of conservative Middle England, exemplified in the apocryphal correspondent "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells". However, far more common is the "concerned local resident" in the Ginny Harrison-White mould. The kind of sanctimonious, often nimbyistic, always interfering, upper middle-class liberal, equipped with an endless stock of self-righteousness, and a complete and utter absence of anything approaching a sense of humour. I believe that more than half of the politically-correct censorship that goes on in this country is brought about on a purely local level, by people like this. It was exactly the same kind of smug white liberal, no doubt, who disrupted the village fete in another Cornish village, St Columb Major, because some participants made mild fun of Muslims.

Perhaps it was Ms Harrison-White herself who kicked up a fuss about the fete. Certainly, it seems that she is something of a professional do-gooder. Aside from her (completely unnecessary) job at Cornwall Council, she is also president of the (completely unnecessary) National Association of Teachers of Travellers, in which capacity she called in May for Romany, the language of the gypsies, to be taught in schools, in order "to [increase] knowledge of gypsy communities and help break down barriers of prejudice". I wonder if she's even come close to doing anything vaguely useful in her entire life?

Anyway, here is Denis Lusby's finest Irish joke:

Father Murphy [note that the use of the name Murphy caused particular offence to Harrison-White - FR] walks into a pub in Donegal and says to the first man he meets: "Do you want to go to heaven?" The man said "I do, Father."
The priest said: "Then stand over there against the wall." Then the priest asked the second man: "Do you want to go to heaven?" "Certainly, Father," was the man's reply. "Then stand over there against the wall," said the priest.
Then Father Murphy walked up to O'Toole and said, "Do you want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole says: "No, I don't Father."
The priest said: "I don't believe this. Do you mean to tell me that when you die you don't want to go to heaven?"
O'Toole said: "Oh, when I die, yes. I though you were getting a group together to go right now."

The mark of a crypto-fascist bigot? Or simply a rather amusing bit of humour from a good local magazine? Which do you think?

Target Practice

Dumb Jon takes the ball and runs with it.

Really, Janet Snell, the proverbial ball in question, is a Godsend to right-wing bloggers. An instruction to fisk her post on Fran Lyon's case can be interpreted in more ways than a Shakespeare play. A million bloggers with a million typewriters (well, PCs with internet access anyway) could fisk away for a million years and still not find every possible permutation!

Incidentally, Ms Snell has now added a comment to her original post which is almost as fiskworthy as the post itself. I won't bother dealing with it now, since the comment doesn't really add anything that we haven't had in the post itself, but I would point out that her attempts to justify her characterisation of the Daily Mail as "vile" contain just as high a level of dogmatic assertion, and just as little evidence-based reasoning, as the original claim itself. Which is quite impressive, in a way.

Update: Well, Janet Snell's post appears to have been pulled. Clicking on the links to it now just brings up a message telling you that "the page cannot be found". Does this mean that Janet Snell is withdrawing her various claims, and accepting that she was wrong?

I doubt it. Rather, I imagine that she, or one of her colleagues, simply didn't like the attention they were getting. When I last saw the post late this afternoon, it had about twenty comments added to it. The only one of those which was not critical of social workers, was that written by Snell herself.

Of course, deleting the post raises further questions. Such as, what does it say about Janet Snell that she writes a post complaining that no one listens to what social workers have to say, and then deletes it because, um, too many people were reading it? I mean, social workers hiding themselves from public scrutiny? Now I really have heard everything!

But readers should not despair. The complete annotated post is still available here. I have also put the Community Care blog, The Child Minder, in my bookmarks, and I can tell you, that Janet Snell's post was really just par for the course over there. There are simply so many posts just crying out for a good fisking. Like this one ("black gang violence is the fault of everyone, except the black gangs themselves"). Or this one ("social workers were the real victims in the Climbie case; I mean, she only died, we get criticised"). Oh yes, I foresee many happy hours ahead, for all concerned.

Update (2): The post is now back up, after having been down for somewhere in the region of five hours. The reason for this volte-face is unclear.

al-Beeb: Biased beyond redemption

From the BBC:

A man has appeared in court accused of preparing acts of terrorism in his home town in South Yorkshire.

Nicholas Roddis, of Reedham Drive, Bramley, Rotherham, appeared at London's Old Bailey on Friday by video link from custody.

The 22-year-old was remanded in custody for a plea and case management hearing on 21 November.

At his next court appearance, the charge of preparing acts of terrorism will be put to him.

Another Robert Cottage, perhaps?

Well, no, actually. Because al-Beeb appears to have left out a rather salient detail regarding Mr Roddis. Thankfully, other, more reputable, news outlets were not quite so reticent. Here's the South Yorkshire local paper, The Star:

A WHITE Muslim convert has appeared in court accused of plotting to bomb his hometown of Rotherham.

Nicholas Roddis, aged 22, allegedly kept a list for attacking Rotherham, along with chemicals for making explosives and bomb-making recipes.

Counter terrorism police claim he also kept extremist propaganda including beheadings at his then home during a two-and-a-half year period.

This is not the first time that the BBC has deliberately misled licence fee payers in this manner. Some readers may have come across the Wroughton Hammer Attack case, in which a white schoolboy was subjected to a racist assault by a large gang of Pakistani thugs. Mysteriously, al-Beeb omitted to make any reference whatsoever to the case's racial aspect, only reporting the fact that an assault had taken place.

The BBC is supposed to be an impartial news organisation. Indeed, as the price for its guaranteed licence fee income, it has a positive obligation to be impartial imposed on it by its charter. However, it now has a liberal bias so deeply ingrained, that it is actively misrepresenting the facts that it reports, in order to avoid doing harm to its liberal agenda. The bias now goes so far, that it is too late to talk about reforming the corporation: the only solution is to close it down.

Hat-tip: Biased BBC

Fish in a barrel; Candy from a baby; Fisking a social worker

Looking through the site stats this evening, I noticed that I'd had a couple of people coming through from a blog entitled, 'The Child Minder', which is run by communitycare.co.uk, a website written for social workers, by social workers. The precise page they've come from is this one, and I thought it worth taking a detailed look at what the author of the post, Janet Snell, had to say. For one thing, her post perfectly illustrates the sanctimonious smugness of the average liberal. So, here goes:

The Dail Mail and its lies about child protection

The "Dail Mail"? Is that something to do with the Irish parliament? Sorry, it was a cheap shot. But those are often the most satisfying...

The Daily Mail is vile.

That's quite a strong assertion. Why is it vile?

Everybody, apart from its readers, must know that.

Yes, its readers are clearly too stupid to understand. After all, why else would they deny what is obvious to all goodthinkful people?

But the problem is the sheer number of people who do read it – more than the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and Independent put together!

Isn't it terrible that lots of people read a publication we don't like? If only we could do something to stop them!
Still, if it's got all those readers, the Mail must be doing something right, eh?

Many social workers, with their tendency to a more liberal and tolerant world view...

No shit, Sherlock! So "liberal and tolerant", in fact, that they allowed homosexual paedophiles to abuse children without objecting, for fear of appearing "homophobic".
Not so liberal and tolerant when it comes to people who, Heaven forfend, disagree with them, though, are they? Those people are vile (and stupid).

But, to return to Ms Snell's clearly-reasoned discourse on the evils of the heretics:

Many social workers, with their tendency to a more liberal and tolerant world view, prefer to just ignore the Mail and all it stands for. But the trouble is the Mail doesn’t ignore them back.
It feeds the 2.3million people who read it every day a constant drip drip of poison against social care staff, questioning the profession’s competence as well as its motives.

"A constant drip drip of poison"! Ms Snell's assertion that the Daily Mail is vile is, however, a well-reasoned and objective critique of the newspaper.

And why would anyone cast doubt on the competence of social workers? After all, the Wathey and Faunch case was a one-off, wasn't it? Just like the Victoria Climbie case was a one-off. And the Rochdale "devil worship" case, that was a one-off as well. As were all the other one-offs.

And I say 2.3million – that’s the number who buy it, meaning that at least twice that number read it. That’s quite frightening really.

Don't you just love this woman? The thought of people reading a conservative-leaning newspaper frightens her. You can just picture the sanctimonious expression of benevolent concern etched across her face when she considers what can be done to teach the dear little people the error of their Mail-reading ways.

It suggests that almost 5 million people will have seen the story yesterday about the “scandalous” behaviour of social workers who have told a woman called Fran Lyon they plan to take her baby away from her shortly after it is born. The piece is written in an emotional, some would say lurid, style, detailing how the woman, “who has never harmed anyone” does not know if she will get to hold her baby.
It’s clearly a very sad case but, as every child care professional reading it will know, there is another side to the story. A side that those 5 million Mail readers will not get to hear.

Now, there may very well be another side to the story. But has Ms Snell heard it? Or is she just working on the basis that if a social worker says something, it must be correct?
Ms Snell seems to believe that if a social worker makes an accusation then, no matter how outlandish that accusation may be, we should all accept it at face value. What we should certainly never do is criticise social workers! But I'm afraid that I do not agree. There have been a considerable number of cases of social workers getting things wrong - often with very serious consequences. Taking a child from its mother is a huge step, and yet one that social workers can take all too lightly. After all, it has been alleged in The Times (also vile?) that social workers are now taking children from their parents solely in order to meet government quotas. The family courts have a default position of siding with the social workers. For a mother whose child is being unjustly taken from her, the media is often the only resort available. If the Daily Mail helps people at risk of injustice at the hands of social workers to fight for their rights, then good on the Daily Mail.

Why should we care about what Mail readers think?

Why worry about the little people? Never mind that their taxes pay our salaries; they can't stop us taking their children, so let them eat cake!

Well, for one thing it helps stoke up real hatred against social workers. The story of Fran Lyon prompted one person to write a blog headed “Save A Life – Shoot A Social Worker".

My moment of fame, cast in the coveted role of 'ignorant Daily Mail reader'. Of course, Ms Snell doesn't seem to have noticed that I actually wrote about this long before the Daily Mail did, and that I linked to the Sunday Telegraph report of it, rather than the report published in the Mail.

I would add, I don't hate all social workers. Indeed, I'm sure that many of them are perfectly decent people. But I do hate people who are possessed of power in as great a degree as social workers are, and who use that power incompetently or abusively. Fran Lyon's case is just the latest in a string of cases in which it has been shown that a significant number of social workers fall into one, or sometimes both, of these categories. And those social workers - yes, I hate them.

That can’t be a good thing.
But, for what it’s worth, Community Care readers will get to hear the other side. On September the 20th we will be running a feature examining the way Fran Lyon’s story was hijacked by the Mail (and the Telegraph) through no fault of her own and how key facts about her psychiatric history were omitted.

Notice the unwillingness to come out and attack Ms Lyon personally (because doing that wouldn't look too good, would it?). While she is accused of lying, the accusation is made indirectly, with the Mail and the Telegraph (is that vile too?) getting the blame for "highjacking" the story. Well, that's just not good enough. Ms Lyon provided those newspapers with the supposedly misleading information, and she has subsequently spoken directly in the comments thread following Pete Moore's post on the case at ATW (in which she endorsed the entire Sunday Telegraph article, bar one minor factual inaccuracy regarding her degree), as well as at her own newly-established website. Let's face it, if, as Ms Snell alleges, there has been misrepresentation going on, then Ms Lyon has certainly been complicit in that. It would be nice if Ms Snell could come out and make her accusations directly.

Some Community Care readers have written in saying they don’t want to read about “child-snatcher” allegations against social workers in the national media. Notably 32 members of the social work team at Bolton Council protested at our coverage of John Hemmings [a Lib Dem MP, actually Hemming - FR] and his claims that children were being taken into care to meet adoption targets.
I think Community Care shouldn’t ignore every anti-social worker story that appears in the national media (though you have to ignore a lot of them otherwise it becomes too exhausting!) Hopefully our coverage of Hemmings – and the forthcoming feature on the Lyon case – is helping, just a tiny bit, to set the record straight. It’s at least worth a try, surely?

Well, the other side of the story is certainly something to look forward to. Hopefully it will explain a bit more than Ms Snell's post did. I particularly note, that Ms Snell never mentions any of the numerous criticisms of the very concept of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, the highly-dubious psychiatric condition which has provided the justification for taking Ms Lyon's child. Nor does she explain why the evidence of one particular doctor was accepted over that of others, even though he was not a specialist in the area in question, and even though he had never actually met Ms Lyon. Perhaps these will be explained on the 20th. But, until these, and the other rather serious questions hanging over the case, are satisfactorily answered, then it is likely that people will continue to sympathise with Ms Lyon. After all, the arguments in Ms Snell's post really amount to little more than "we elevated social workers know better than you, and you should just accept what we say, and never ever criticise us. If you're lucky, we'll explain why in a couple of weeks".

Finally, I couldn't let this go without once again emphasising the liberal smugness with which this post is riddled. Far more than a comment on Ms Lyon's case, about which it really says very little, it is an attack on the Daily Mail and, arguably, upon any who dare read it. Now, I can appreciate that the Mail is not beyond criticism, but Ms Snell's comments about this "vile" paper, providing "a constant drip drip of poison", go far beyond criticism, into irrational hatred. After all, I wrote the post of which she complains a full ten days before the Mail first mentioned this case. And yet, I am held up by Ms Snell as an example of an ignorant person, corrupted by the wicked Daily Mail. This post really does provide a fascinating glimpse into the liberal mentality, in which a newspaper can become the object of such fanatical hatred, that the facts themselves can be ignored and misrepresented in order to further justify the hate. The rest of the piece also does quite a good job of showing quite how patronising, quite how sanctimonious, and, for all their talk of being open-minded, quite how convinced of the indisputability of their own beliefs, the average liberal is. Do you know, I even think that Ms Snell might be the new Thick Lizzy?

ATW Post on Academia

At ATW, I've written a short post on the unutterable pretentiousness and political liberalism now dominating and corrupting British academia.

"We are in moral anarchy"

Her bizarre habit of supporting the odious Ken Clarke for Tory leader notwithstanding, Ann Widdecombe has always struck me as one of the few decent people left in parliament. And this view was not undermined by her comments in an interview in today's Daily Mail:

"It is the liberal dictatorship," says Widdecombe angrily. "Most of our social ills are down to loss of authority; in schools, by the police, in the home, in organised religion.

"There is a slow descent into anarchy. We are in moral anarchy. In some estates it is already there. To change things, you must start to restore authority to the police."

She says that the force should introduce "proportionality" - not sending six officers to arrest someone for making a politically incorrect comment, but instead targeting muggers.

She believes we live in an age in which the liberal tyranny cows people into silence. "People need to be free to say what we think.

"We must not accept this liberal tyranny which says that if you go against the orthodoxy, you will not only be ostracised but criminalised as well.

"We have to take on the three ugly sisters: the rights culture, the compensation culture and political correctness.

"We now have something we have never before had in this country, but is what the Soviets had - which is, that you can be punished by the law for disagreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy."

[...]

One reason that Widdecombe is at ease with herself, whatever her public image, is that she is true to her conscience.

She is at a loss to see how other Catholics, such as Cabinet minister Ruth Kelly and the soon-to-be-converted Tony Blair, can square their actions with their consciences.

"If I had been Ruth, I would have resigned over the Catholic gay adoption issue. And I don't understand Blair's actions and his faith," she says.

"There is no doubt he was a huge Catholic sympathiser. But he never once took a pro-life line on abortion.

"He also voted against exempting Christmas Day and Easter Day from Sunday trading regulations.

"And then his government introduced civil partnerships and forbade Catholic adoption agencies from making their own choices over gay adoption.

"If you are being received as a Catholic, as I was, you have to say that all the Church teaches is revealed truth. It is not a pick and mix religion."

She also accuses Blair of weakening Christianity in this country and thus allowing predatory fundamentalist faiths to enter. "The loss of Christian faith has coincided with the growth of a more predatory faith. We should stop confusing respecting the faith of others with surrendering our own."

I don't think there's a word she says here that I don't agree with, although I would say that if the police are to regain their lost authority, then they will have to work hard for it. The loss of trust in, and respect for, the police is something that has been brought about, not just by the incompetence of politicians, but by the actions of officers themselves, many of whom seem only too keen to side with criminals against the law-abiding public.

Miss Widdecombe's comments about Islam (at least, I assume that her talk of "a more predatory faith" was not an effort to expose the hitherto unknown threat posed by hardline Buddhists!) were also encouraging. Even if she did not go as far as I or many of the readers of this site would go in her condemnation of that religion, it is still nice to hear a politician from one of the big three parties come out with something that goes beyond "Islam is a wonderful Religion of Peace".

Of course, the real problem is that Ann Widdecombe is approaching sixty, and will be standing down from parliament at the next election, whereupon she will no doubt be replaced with some liberal Cameronite yes-man. It seems to me that almost all the members of the political elite who sometimes or often speak words of sense are of Miss Widdecombe's generation, or older (two examples that come to mind are Lord Tebbit (76) and Frank Field (65)), while the younger generations of politicians and commentators are almost all tied up in politically-correct liberalism. As the country continues to meander up a certain creek devoid of a paddle, the political elite looks set to move further and further into a liberal dreamworld.