Whaaat ?

Spiked seem to be trialling an open, inclusive contributions policy. In other words, any old rubbish will do.

"Preoccupations with personal behaviour, uptight morality and social status were once the hallmark of the small-minded shopkeeper. Now they are the values to which everyone is expected to adhere."

Has Neil Davenport ever been in his nearest town centre on a Friday night ?

Or is he in fact an alien from the planet Zog ?

I think we need to be told.

Two Kurds Called Karim

Kalan Karim, an Iraqi Kurdish refugee who lost had his leg below the knee to a landmine, made the mistake of being in Swansea's binge-drink zone, Kingsway, in the early hours of the morning in September 2004. A drunken local attacked him without warning and he died the following day in hospital.

The police immediately pronounced the attack to be a racist murder. The attack was given wide publicity. A thousand people, including the Swansea Council leader and two Welsh Assembly members, marched through the town. The BBC devoted 17 stories to the case and the killing was reported on national TV and radio news.

A tattooed 27 year old underclass type was sentenced to five years for manslaughter. Given that you only actually do half the time, he'll be out in about 20 months.



On Friday 13th February 2004, another Kurdish asylum seeker, Ali Mohammed Karim, also an Iraqi Kurd, stabbed 21 year old Anthony Farrell to death in Glasgow.

The story never made BBC TV or radio news - or indeed any of the national papers. There were no marches or memorials. You have to piece together the story from scraps and Google's cache. Here's a one line report of the killing. Here's the cached list of cases for trial in which we see that Ali Mohammed Karim is charged with murder.

The BBC news website shows no result for a search on Anthony Farrell. But a search for Ali Karim returns one story - of the court conviction.

Ali Karim was a refugee and murderer who lived in the Sighthill district of Glasgow. The minimal publicity given to his case contrasts sharply with the case of another Sighthill resident, Firsat Dag, a refugee and murder victim.

I think there's some kind of a pattern here. I just can't quite see what it is.

Bus Conductors

They've just scrapped the London Routemasters - the greatest buses to travel on - if only because you can hop off and on. They also had conductors - useful things, especially in the current climate.

Kuldip Singh, 28, was driving a packed bus when his conductor noticed a passenger abandoning a bag. They immediately stopped the bus and shepherded passengers off the vehicle. Then Mr Singh picked up the bag, saw the wires sticking out of it and realised that it was a bomb. He hurled it away just as it detonated and took the force of the blast in his face.

Singh and his conductor probably saved twenty or more lives - their bomb was the only one in Delhi last Saturday with no fatalities. They're being awarded £2,500 each. If anyone knows how to contribute please let me know.

Aux Armes, Citoyens !

Six nights of rioting in Paris - and it's spreading.

At least one part of the story will be familiar to a Brit. Apparently the 'root cause' of the trouble is high unemployment and poor public transport (that well known cause of riots).

I don't understand. If immigration, as we're so often told, is essential to the economy why is there high unemployment ?

Decline Of British Industry

The way we were :

“Leicester Square at night is the resort of the worst type of women and girls consorting with men of the British and American Forces, in which the latter seem to predominate,” he said. “Of course the American soldiers are encouraged by these young sluts, many of whom should be serving in the Forces. At night the Square is apparently given over to a vicious debauchery.”

Now, tragically, the needs of Londoners are serviced by an army of girls from Eastern Europe and South America, taking the work out of our girls' mouths. The native Britons no longer have the skills needed to compete in this most competitive of service industries.


Meanwhile Rasputin has ignored the beheading of Christian schoolgirls in Indonesia to tackle a more pressing concern - the evil way in which the Empire exported Hymns Ancient And Modern. Notice the side-swipe at the Great Satan :

He said: “In all sorts of ways the Church over the centuries has lent itself to the error, indeed the sin of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the mission field . . . the shadow of the British Empire that hangs over our own Communion or the export of American values and styles to the whole world.”

And in Gay Paree the riots continue. The BBC explains how the rioters are 'shackled' by living in a poor place.

We've been here before. There are plenty of poor places which nonetheless are not "ghettos".

No Offence, But ...

I've been saying this for a long time. Can I have a nice job at the Home Office or Kent University please ?

Marian FitzGerald, a senior researcher on race issues for the Home Office for 11 years, said Labour chose to bury mounting concern over the inter-ethnic tension building in UK cities.

Instead, the government adopted the Seventies model of racist behaviour, which meant all racism involved the white community and that which did not was 'taboo'. In doing so, claimed FitzGerald, the government missed an opportunity to tackle racial tension between black and Asian communities.