A Few Moorhens In The Curate's Paddock

"The slippery slope gets steeper and more slippery by the day"

The Magistrate on Labour's new Domestic Violence legislation, where "Under the new rules an order can be made following conviction for any offence and even where someone is acquitted in order to better protect victims. Breaking the terms of a restraining order is a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison."

"Of the utility and entertainment to be derived from Biography in general, not a word need be said - more especially from the Lives of those military men who have acted upon Christian principles, and while fighting under the banners of an earthly sovereign, have not forgotten that they were soldiers of the Cross"

from The life and diary of Lieut. Col. J. Blackader of the Cameronian regiment, and deputy governor of Sterling Castle, who served with distinguished honour in the wars under King William and the Duke of Marlborough, and afterwards in the rebellion of 1715 in Scotland.


A Stoke City fan, Neil Warburton, is fighting for his life after being attacked in Birmingham last weekend - a story which seems to have escaped the major media (via PragueTory)

Historian Andrew Roberts points out that the late Teddy Kennedy suggested "repatriating" Ulster Protestants to the UK mainland.



Religious faith declines :

Methodist churches, down from 14,000 in 1932 to 6,000, and closing at the rate of 100 a year ...

But not all faith :

A generation ago the churches in Britain seemed unassailable. The first mosques in Britain opened at the end of the 19th century but by 1961 there were just seven mosques, three Sikh temples and one Hindu temple in England and Wales, compared with nearly 55,000 Christian Churches... By 2005 the number of churches had fallen to 47,600. According to the organisation Christian Research, another 4,000 are likely to go in the next 15 years. In the Church of England alone, which still has 16,000 churches, 1,700 have been made redundant since 1969. Over the same period, the number of mosques in Britain has grown to almost the number of Anglian churches that have closed. The Islamic website Salaam records a total of 1,689 mosques.

Ceri Peach, of Oxford University, said in The Geographical Review: “The new cultural landscape of English cities has arrived. The homogenised, Christian landscape of state religion is in retreat.”

Christians burned to death in Pakistan by mobs :

At least six Christians were killed in religious unrest in Punjab during the weekend, after days of tension sparked by the rumoured desecration of a Koran. Officials said the rumours which led to the unrest were false.

Saturday's attack happened in a neighbourhood in Gojra town in Punjab when six Christians were burnt to death and scores of houses were set on fire by a Muslim mob.

Attacks against minority religious groups in Muslim-majority Pakistan have been common and have often gone unpunished, says the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad.

While we're on the subject of burning religious opponents, was Mary Tudor all that bad ? David Womersley at the SAU blog reviews Eamon Duffy's revisionist Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor. His earlier The Stripping of the Altars is a fine book.

More Catholicism : Damian Thompson wonders when a bishop who values the Latin Mass will be appointed.





"Hello, Emergency, which service please ?"

"Police"

"What religion ?"

Sikh victims of crime in London are to be given the option of asking for a police officer of their own faith to work on their case. This new service from the Metropolitan Police (Met) aims to make use of the officers' specialist knowledge of Punjabi culture to help with cases like forced marriage and so-called honour crime. Officers within the Met have told the BBC Asian Network that crimes in the community have gone unsolved and unreported because of a lack of understanding of the culture by officers from a "white" background. Palbinder Singh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Sikh Association (MPSA) said: "It's about understanding and appreciating difference. "I don't believe a white officer is ever going to be fully conversant with a Sikh for example. "We have got evidence in the most serious type of crimes where Punjabi culture itself is the issue, that they haven't been properly investigated."

It is obvious that when policing in any society, knowledge of the particular culture or subculture you're dealing with is an asset. But it should be the knowledge that's important, not the officer's race or religion. You can just imagine what would happen to a native police officer who stated publicly that black officers couldn't deal with white issues.



British engineering may no longer be the envy of the world, but British social engineering is thriving. You get what you ask for - as Labour attempt to use higher education as a weapon of 'social justice', so do the punters give them what they want.

Sixth formers are lying about their family backgrounds to meet university "social engineering" admissions criteria, it can be revealed.

More social engineering - just as in Burnley, in Oldham.

Five of Oldham’s 15 schools are to be shut by 2011 and replaced by two academies. In the process, the segregated communities will be thrown together. Critics call it social engineering – and so do supporters, who say we have no alternative... Altogether, twenty urban areas have been identified that could benefit from “forced mixing”.

An interesting take on the current political scene and 'how to stop the BNP' at a new socialist blog, Meanwhile At The Bar :

Labour is undergoing a catastrophic haemorrhage in its former heartlands. The wider left is in as bad a state, if not worse. This is evident not just in Labour by-election defeats in places like Crewe and Glasgow East, but perhaps more importantly in the long term in party membership. To take one example in Cumbria, membership of Workington Constituency Labour Party, was around 860 in the late 1990’s but is now approximately 140. That is a lot of canvassers to lose.

Putting aside the new Labour careerists, if you consider the core of the trades union movement and ‘old’ Labour, it is clearly ageing. This is particularly true of groups closest to the revolutionary left such as Durham Miners Association. Anyone hanging their hat on an old Labour/trades union revival to see off the BNP is certainly taking a gamble. There is not a 50 year old version of Dave Douglass out there, or a 40 year old version, nor a 30 year old version and there sure as hell is not a 20 year old version. That world has gone, and it is not coming back.

It is also the case that some of the ‘old Labour’ heartlands targeted by the BNP lack the sort of multi-cultural social scene that so undermined the National Front in the late 70s and early 80s. Instead of an easy interaction of young black and white people around music and football, many such towns either have tiny ethnic populations, or Asian communities with far lower degrees of integration, interaction and inter-marriage than we saw between white and West Indian communities thirty years ago. What will undermine the BNP culturally in old Labour heartlands?

As I've said before, we're at the start of the final section of the yet-to-be-written classic, The Breaking of the English Working Class.

"You walk around, and you want to help them. You want an economic and a social and a cultural revolution. You want to remember them as they were, full of pride and hope for the future. You want them strong, and confident. Knowing that their day is to come, but come it will, as they used to believe. But you know it isn't and you know that you cant really do anything about it.....

It is a spirit, a culture, a world that has passed. It was a fleeting moment in political history ; a moment in which it was thought that the collective could achieve more than the individual. It will never happen again. All that is believed in the 1990’s by ‘Labour’ and Conservative is that the successful entrepreneur is the ‘key player’ in the economy. There's nothing else. There are no grand ideas anymore. Nothing we can strive for, and be proud to call our own."

The above quote from Dave Douglass' site is from a review of 'Coal Was Our Life', a 90s revisitation of the classic 'Coal Is Our Life', written in the 50s by my hero Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and well known Trotsyist and WRP member Cliff Slaughter.

That's more or less what I was saying six years ago :

I simply can't see them (the BNP - LT) going away - because, in marketing-speak, they're meeting a need that no other party is attempting to meet.

Not a need to be racist (I'm sure that's met too, but I don't think that has a wide appeal), but a need to be proud of one's nation, to feel that you belong, have a culture, a history and a homeland.

Pupils with English as a first language are now a minority in inner London schools.

Catholic schools in the inner cities are running out of Catholics :

The Tablet, a weekly Catholic magazine, found that in Oldham, Blackburn, Wolverhampton and Birmingham there has been a sharp decline in the proportion of Catholics being educated in local faith schools. At English Martyrs in Sparkhill, Birmingham, just 36 of the 410 pupils are Catholic while the vast majority are Muslim. Most of the non-Catholic parents let their children attend assemblies although a church visit led to “friction”.

Belgian policeman are no longer allowed to check the identity of a woman wearing a burka.

But how do they know if it's a woman ?

The offenders involved in the armed robbery were described as Asian in appearance and two were wearing dark clothing and had their faces covered. The third person was dressed in a burka.

We can thank the British police and social services for the court order against 13-year old Laura Dekker, who wanted, with her parents' blessing, to sail round the world single-handed - but is now in the care of the Dutch authorities.

It emerged during the legal proceedings that the teenage girl had been placed in foster care by British police after she sailed single-handed from Holland to Britain in May. Police in Lowestoft and social workers decided that the return journey was too dangerous and placed Miss Dekker in a home until her father came to collect her. Dick Dekker, Laura's father who at the age of 12 sailed from Ijmuiden harbour across the North Sea, collected her from the home and defied the authorities by letting her make the sea crossing alone. The British police then contacted their Dutch counterparts who alerted the Utrecht social services, leading to Friday's custody decision.