UK Commentators

Limeslade Bay

2012-01-07T22:14:00.009Z

If you want snaps of punky herons, Harpy is your only (wo)man.

Her views of the turbulent sea off Mumbles inspired me to take the camera when I was down there today.

It was pretty grey and getting dark, so it looks black and white. But Laban's no Ansel Adams, that's for sure.

The magic of digital effects turns a slightly blurry shot :

Into something a bit more more pointilliste :

(I know it's all going to hell in a handcart ... but I'm too tired to blog political and cultural reality. Harpy and I look at the world from very different angles, but she blogs herons for the same reason I'm blogging Mumbles. At this moment I agree with Molesworth 2 :)

'How beautiful,' sa your mum to your pater. 'If only you could be noble like that ocasionaly.'

'It is only a world of makebelieve,' he repli. 'You must face up to reality.'

'Reality,' sa molesworth 2, 'is so unspeakably sordid it make me shudder.'

They've Come Over Here ...

2012-01-05T21:06:00.002Z

To do the torturing of children to death that the natives just won't do !

(You try getting a local exorcist these days when witchcraft's a problem)

January 1, 1917

2012-01-01T18:36:00.003Z

Telegraph - "A soldier has been killed in an explosion in Afghanistan in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand Province."

It was New Year's morning, and I lay thinking of my boy, and wondering what this year would bring him. It was early in the morning before I slept. And it seemed to me that I had scarce been asleep at all when there came a pounding at the door, loud enough to rouse the heaviest sleeper there ever was.

My heart almost stopped. There must be something serious indeed for them to be rousing me so early. I rushed to the door, and there was a porter, holding out a telegram. I took it and tore it open. And I knew why I had felt as I had the day before. I shall never forget what I read :

"Captain John Lauder killed in action, December 28. Official. War Office."

It had gone to Mrs. Lauder at Dunoon first, and she had sent it on to me. That was all it said. I knew nothing of how my boy had died, or where - save that it was for his country. But later I learned that when Sir Thomas Lipton had rung me up the previous night he had intended to condole with me. He had heard on Saturday of my boy's death. But when he spoke to me, and understood at once, from the tone of my voice, that I did not know, he had not been able to go on. His heart was too tender to make it possible for him to be the one to give me that blow - the heaviest that ever befell me.

It was on Monday morning, January the first, 1917, that I learned of my boy's death. And he had been killed the Thursday before ! He had been dead four days before I knew it ! And yet I had known. Let no one ever again tell me that there is nothing in presentiment. Why else had I been so sad and uneasy in my mind ? Why else, all through that Sunday, had it been so impossible for me to take comfort in what was said to cheer me ? Some warning had come to me, some sense that all was not well.

Realization came to me slowly. I sat and stared at that slip of paper, that had come to me like the breath of doom. Dead! Dead these four days ! I was never to see the light of his eyes again. I was never to hear that laugh of his. I had looked on my boy for the last time. Could it be true ? Ah, I knew it was. And it was for this moment that I had been waiting, that we had all been waiting, ever since we had sent John away to fight for his country and do his part. I think we had all felt that it must come. We had all known that it was too much to hope that he should be one of those to be spared.

The black despair that had been hovering over me for hours closed down now and enveloped all my senses. Everything was unreal. For a time I was quite numb. But then, as I began to realize and to visualize what it was to mean in my life that my boy was dead, there came a great pain. The iron of realization slowly seared every word of that curt telegram upon my heart. I said it to myself, over and over again. And I whispered to myself, as my thoughts took form, over and over, the one terrible word : " Dead ! '. I felt that for me everything had come to an end with the reading of that dire message. It seemed to me that for me the board of life was black and blank. For me there was no past and there could be no future. Everything had been swept away, erased, by one sweep of the hand of a cruel fate.

Oh, there was a past, though ! And it was in that past that I began to delve. It was made up of every memory I had of my boy. I fell at once to remembering him. I clutched at every memory, as if I must grasp them and make sure of them; lest they be taken from me as well as the hope of seeing him again that the telegram had for ever snatched away. I would have been destitute indeed in that event. It was as if I must fix in my mind the way he had been wont to look, and recall to my ears every tone of his voice, every trick of his speech. There was something left of him that I must keep, I realized, even then, at all costs, if I was to be able to bear his loss at all. There was a vision of him before my eyes. My bonnie Highland laddie, brave and strong, in his kilt and the uniform of his country, going out to his death with a smile on his face.

And there was another vision that came up now, unbidden. It was a vision of him lying stark and cold upon the battlefield, the mud on his uniform. And when I saw that vision I was like a man gone mad and possessed of devils who had stolen away his faculties. I cursed war as I saw that vision, and the men who caused war. And when I thought of the Germans who had killed my boy, a terrible and savage hatred swept me, and I longed to go out there and kill with my bare hands, until I had avenged him or they had killed me too.

But then I was a little softened. I thought of his mother back in our wee hoose at Dunoon. And the thought of her, bereft even as I was, sorrowing, even as I was, and lost in her frightful loneliness, was pitiful, so that I had but the one desire and wish-to go to her, and join my tears with hers, that we who were left alone to bear our grief, might bear it together and give one to the other such comfort as there might be in life for us. And so I fell upon my knees and prayed, there in my lonely room in the hotel. I prayed to God that He might give us both, John's mother and myself, strength to bear the blow that had been dealt us, and to endure the sacrifice that He and our country had demanded of us.

Sir Harry Lauder, "A Minstrel In France". Captain John Lauder was their only son.

Venite Adoremus

2011-12-24T13:01:00.004Z

Apologies for the light to non-existent blogging, as things in the UK continue to get more pearshaped.

12 hour working days are taking their toll - and now there are a million things to do ... but tonight let's just give thanks and praise (i.e. Laban's all packed for once). A happy and a peaceful Christmas to all of you out there ...

I just love the singing on this - those Italian tenors ... Pope John Paul II live at the Vatican one Christmas in the late 70s - I think his first as Pope.

It's Tommy Farr All Over Again

2011-12-11T20:20:00.004Z

Every Welshman (and woman) over 80 knows that Tommy Farr beat Joe Louis in the Yankee Stadium in 1937. Hadn't they heard the fight on the radio, and the American crowd booing the fixed result ?

I'm no great fan of the boy racer, cyclist clipper and swiper of pedestrians on pelican crossings, but it does sound as if Amir Khan got handed a similar verdict.

Storm Clouds ...

2011-12-10T15:58:00.004Z

It could just be a bit of blustering gesture politics, but ...

"Argentina has launched a naval campaign to isolate the Falkland Islands that has seen it detain Spanish fishing vessels on suspicion of breaking the country’s “blockade” of the seas around the British territories."

Given we have binned our aircraft carriers and our Harriers, in one of Mr Cameron's less inspired moves, and just given Mr Sarkozy's blood pressure a shoeing, we'd be in a right pickle if the Miss Havisham-lookalike who runs Argentina decided to send a few thousand more conscripts to get killed. Once the airfields were occupied we'd be in trubs.

I'd resurrect the Harriers, and there was at least one small carrier still left in Portsmouth this summer. A 5% cut in public sector salaries over £50K should raise some cash - oh, and a performance-related tax on executive pay over, say, £1m or £2m pa.

There seems to be a fair bit of oil down there which is legally ours, and which others would doubtless like to get their mitts on. How exactly does Cameron think he's going to protect it? He seems to find the money and the kit when the oil ISN'T ours.

UPDATE - fair play to those Galician skippers. The Falklands is a long trip. I suppose they've emptied UK waters of everything more than an inch long, and are now looking to do the same to the South Atlantic.

Pity The Poor Employer ...

2011-12-04T10:53:00.000Z

The standard of school-leavers is so poor that one supermarket has sent back three-quarters of its recruits for "remedial pre-job training" before they start work. Morrisons, Britain's fourth-biggest supermarket with 135,000 employees, found that many of its applicants in Salford, Greater Manchester, lacked even the basic skills needed to stack shelves and serve customers. While some had a poor grasp of maths and English, others lacked simple skills such as turning up on time and making eye contact.

Well - it is Salford. But it was this gloss that struck me.

The warning will fuel concerns that schools are failing to teach the skills necessary for young Britons to find jobs, forcing firms to recruit migrant workers instead.

Now there's no doubt that our education system's been wrecked over the last 40 years, even as exam passes hit record levels. But I seem to recall that in the days before mass immigration, if you wanted to find a better candidate for a post you offered a higher wage - and that usually seemed to work.

My business contacts inform me that this business model is no longer in vogue for jobs at the lower end of the wage scale. Instead the "import someone better and cheaper" model reigns supreme.

But at the top end - say at board level - offering more money - lots and lots more money, the more the better - is still seen as the best way to attract a high-quality candidate. No UK or US bankers seem to think it's a good idea to get in, say, a Chinese CEO, despite the fact that they run the world's largest banks for salaries between 2% and 10% of US levels. Odd, that.

UPDATE - I disagree with young clever-clogs and Grabber look-alike Daniel Knowles when he says that "there are no jobs left for the dim" - there are plenty of them and they're all being done by immigrants. The thing is, no matter what the level of job - even shelf-stacker - the cleverer person's likely to do it better than the not so bright. Only in 'pure' manual jobs like fruit or vegetable picking does the intellectually-challenged employee get a level playing field - and that arduous work is done, if the fields around Bromsgrove and the gangmaster's white vans plying up and down the M5 from Brum are any guide, by an eclectic assortment of third-world chaps - beards and pugris at one end of the field, mustachios and bare heads at the other.

Of course, UK average intelligence would be higher if we hadn't been running a vast scheme, not of eugenics, but of dysgenics, for the last fifty years. Bright and conscientious women have been encouraged to go out and work, the not so bright and feckless have been encouraged with hard cash to stay at home and have lots of babies.

Ray Fisher 1940-2011

2011-11-30T23:23:00.003Z

One of my great musical loves is gone.

MudCat obit thread; Telegraph obit.

Aiieee !!

2011-11-30T23:01:00.003Z

My daughter (14) was shopping in the big city with her friends on her day off school. There was a demo on ...

Came back festooned in Unison sashes and waving an NUT flag ...

"Dad - it was great ! We wore the sashes as headbands and loads of people photographed us ! We were interviewed twice ! What do we want ? Fair Pensions ! When do we want them ! Now !"

Oh dear oh dear ...

Change For Change's Sake

2011-11-27T21:48:00.004Z

(non-Catholics may skip this post if they wish)

Since the summer we've had the new super-duper revised version of the English Catholic liturgy - and, if a Baptist who married in is allowed a say - it's a change for the worse. The Catholic Church managed to survive for the last 500 years with one rite worldwide - before the 1960s arrived and Latin went out of the window (I think I'd have liked that, although brought up on King James, seeing it not only as a religious rite but as an introduction to a great language - not to mention the convenience of the same service wherever in the world you were - but parishioners tell me that many Catholics didn't actually understand what most of the words meant).

Now, nearly fifty years on, it's being changed to apparently bring it closer in translation to the old Latin Mass.

Trouble is,

a) much of the new stuff is infelicitous - from "Through him, with him, in him", which can be sung or chanted, to "Through him, and with him, and in him" which is the kind of English you'd get chalked off for at A-level, let alone creative writing classs. Or "it is right to give him thanks and praise" to "it is right and just" - too terse and staccato. How about "of all that is, seen and unseen" to "of all that is, visible and invisible"? Don't know about you, but I understood it perfectly well as it was.

b) some is a total waste of time. How about from

"He suffered death and was buried
On the third day he rose again,
in accordance with the Scriptures"

to

"He suffered death and was buried
and rose again on the third day,
in accordance with the Scriptures"

I ask you, what was the point of that change ? Or changing "this is the Word of the Lord" to "the Word of the Lord", and "let us proclaim the mystery of faith" to "the mystery of faith" ? No change in meaning, some loss in euphony and poetic power.

c) changes which are frankly painful. From "begotten not made, of one being with the Father" to "begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father" ! Who uses 'consubstantial' in their conversation? Stupid word. I always detested those hymns which chucked in stuff like "consubstantial, co-eternal".

While I take the point that there could be a shade of meaning twixt one and the other, no one surely would take "of one being" to mean "absolutely 100% identical" ?

And as for the change from "when supper was ended, he took the cup - again he gave you thanks and praise" to "in a similar way ...." - what, did he use the same arm movements ? That is just awful.

I suppose it's better for the Catholic Bishops Conference* to be tinkering with the liturgy instead of campaigning for all the murderers and thieves to be let out. But it does strike me that they have too many people with too much time on their hands. Change for the sake of change. In that sense the English Catholic Church is indeed a twenty-first century organisation.

"Change and decay in all around I see
Oh Thou who changeth not, abide with me"

* does not apply to Scottish Catholic bishops, who seem to be made of sterner stuff.

Eurogeddon or Wishful Thinking ?

2011-11-25T07:37:00.003Z

Telegraph :

"Suddenly, no-one wants to hold euro denominated assets of any variety, and that includes what had previously been thought the eurozone safe haven of German bunds... All of a sudden, the pound is the European default asset of choice. "

Ah yes. That must be why the Euro's collapsing against sterling. Not.

A Few Thoughts On The Euro Crisis

2011-11-21T21:09:00.008Z

Just as a communist might argue that "true communism" has never been tried, dismissing the Soviet Union, China et al as flawed implementations that don't invalidate the basic model, you could argue that there's never been such a thing as "true capitalism" or "free market" outside of say the local car boot sale. To a greater or lesser degree governments have always put their oars in, special interests wielded their baleful influence - and individual capitalists done their best to establish monopolies or cartels, destroying the market.

But, at least as far as the post-war period's concerned, all that pales into insignificance compared to today's interventions. For at least the last four years, all investment decisions have turned on what governments will do. As Jonathan Weil put it three years back :

"... the clearest path to making money in the public markets is to know in advance what the government plans to do next ... and when - and then trade on it. Let there be no doubt: Plenty of people with access to such inside information are enriching themselves this way now."

Prime example in the UK - the Bank of England Pension Fund, who moved the bulk of their assets into inflation-proofed securities when they started printing money.

Today's big question - will Germany either

a) print ?
b) bail out Southern Europe ?
c) neither - at which point defaults start, absent
d) Euro-area fiscal union - with Germany running the show hands-on, because while they may trust the Irish, Dutch and Finns, they can't trust the Greeks or the Italians, and maybe even the French ?

Now either a) or b) will see a surge in global stock prices - even though it won't actually address the "structural imbalances" - a PC way of saying that the Germans are German and the Greeks are Greek. It's just kicking the can down the road for another few years - but when have the markets worried about the long term ?

c) will see a collapse of prices, the break up of the eurozone and perhaps 2008 all over again, until the realisation dawns that the sky hasn't actually fallen and that Spain, Italy and Greece are better off with their own currencies (though leaving would be seen in all of those as a national humiliation). But the "imbalances" would at least be fixed.

d) - "now this is the d you can't see, said the cat" - can you really see German civil servants and Bundesbank officials sitting in Greek government offices and out enforcing tax collection ? Not at all sure I can. If anything was likely to cause major friction 'twould be that - and I don't think the Germans want to be Europe's police and civil service. They'd just like the Greeks and Italians - well, to be more like Germans. We can all dream.

And, talking of major friction, I'm yet again impressed by the UK left - for the last 20 years we've been hearing from them how much more sensible and better-organised the Europeans are, and how the awful little Englanders just don't appreciate how much better off we'd be in a closer European embrace.

But now they're warning that if the Euro breaks up, the continent faces descent into war. I heard Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet (of "Everyone Dead in Iraq" fame) on Any Questions (in Ely) a few weeks ago. Asked about the possibility of the Greeks leaving the Euro, he launched a hysterical rant on the subject of 50,000 Jews being deported from Greece during WW2 and implied that a replay was on the cards in the event of a Greek exit. Apparently the lovely Europeans, who we should all strive to emulate, are only restrained by the EU from slaughtering each other ... looks like a late conversion to the Peter Hitchens thesis (written, admittedly, before Britannia went on crack and started working the streets) that "Britain is the only virgin in a continent of rape victims".

To be fair, the left is being given ammunition by a host of Eurocrats fearful for their jobs. I'm not at all surprised that Herman van Rumpy-Pumpy waves the grisly spectre. Where else would he get so much money and power ? But I think the Polish Finance Minister needs to take an aspirin and have a lie-down, rather than warning, as he did last Monday, that Euro breakup would lead to a European war.

Now all the way along Germany's been saying "we will do what we have to do to support the Euro" at the same time as saying "we won't print or bail out". Does not compute.

The conventional wisdom is that the Germans won't print because they're scarred by the memory of Weimar and wheelbarrows, although that took place nearly 90 years ago. Not so, according to a commenter at FT Alphaville.

"the Weimar hyperinflation is often cited as the main reason for Germany's 'obsession' with sound money. But visiting Germany frequently on business and speaking to Germans I doubt that. Most people alive today did not live through that period.

The real reason is that post WW II-Germans got used to their DM as a reliable store of value and kept on doing that with the Euro. Only 40% of Germans are home-owners, as indeed, under a stable currency renting often makes more financial sense. Germans don't invest in the stock market but prudently put their money in cash in a savings account.

Hence, the typical German family is completely unhedged against inflation, and is therefore worried about it.

For the average German who has worked and saved 20 to 30 years, it is actually a better prospect to live through a deflationary depression and have a 30% chance of being out of work as opposed to seeing his life's savings wiped out through currency debasement. That's what's driving German politics, not the Weimar memory."

In the buy now, pay never UK the chancellor can take a political decision to bail out borrowers by printing, to the detriment of savers - because borrowers massively outnumber savers. In Germany the prudent ARE the electorate.

So will Merkel print ? IMHO yes - once a big enough disaster has happened - maybe a Greek default or euro-exit. She'll remember all the promises that were made to the electorate when they lost their beloved DM - then she'll break them.

But that's predicated on the guess that she won't want to be the one bringing the Euro down. And I might be wrong (to be honest, I think that massively ripping off the responsible and sober German electorate is far more dangerous than Greece or Italy defaulting).

Any ideas ?

The Fall Of The Sparrow

2011-11-20T17:26:00.006Z

I used to cross metaphorical swords with this chap some eleven years back, and noted his subsequent rise in the criminal-charitable complex.

While we disagreed vehemently, he was (for a pro-criminal lefty) mostly civil in debate.

I'm sorry to see that he seems to be in trouble for the same kind of thing that got him into trouble a dozen years ago. I guess he'd just say that society was to blame.

Cameron vs Merkel

2011-11-18T07:54:00.002Z

We've seen an interesting spectacle - Chancellor Merkel of Germany lambasting the Greeks and Italians for borrowing and spending too much, and preaching austerity to them.

But now come the French, US and UK, lambasting the Germans for not printing Euros the way the US and UK printed dollars and pounds.

Cameron, representing a highly indebted country with a dreadful balance of payments and a riotous immigrant and underclass population, whose prime export is intelligent natives, will today preach profligacy to the leader of Germany, a nation with none of these problems.

"You want more IMF cash, because you're too squeamish to print? We debauched our currencies - you can damn well debauch yours! And if you don't, there'll be a global depression - and it'll all be Germany's fault!"

Numbers ...

2011-11-16T20:27:00.003Z

Telegraph :

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that unemployment was 2.62 million in the three months to September.
The number of non-UK nationals in British employment was 2.56 million, up 147,000 from the same period year earlier.

(That's legal employment of foreign nationals. God knows what the illegal numbers are like ...)

Racist Stereotyping

2011-11-12T14:34:00.002Z

Andrew Gilligan (along with every other financial commentator in the world) :

For all its pretensions of unity, Europe is made up of two very different kinds of country whose economies are not really compatible and which were never ready to share a currency at all. Greece is the most extreme example of the first kind – profligate Mediterranean places where productivity is low and inefficiency rife. Germany is the opposite – northern, thrifty and responsible, the EU’s cash cow.

Isn't all this stuff about the hardy Northerners and the lazy, corrupt Southerners just the worst sort of racist stereotyping?

Mr Gilligan, I thought you'd worked for the BBC. Surely they must have taught you that we are all exactly the same, and that's why we should celebrate our difference?

Economic Illiteracy - Media Edition

2011-11-12T13:32:00.002Z

Great news !

"British retail sales grew more than expected in September after a surprise increase in sales of laptops and video games, the Office for National Statistics said on Thursday."

By strange chance, Laban bought a new laptop in September - and his youngest son also got a new games console as a reward for better-than-expected GCSE results, after a paternal promise the previous autumn which at the time seemed unlikely to ever need redeeming. Fair play though - he got the grades. Perhaps that made the sales difference ...

How good that must have been for British laptop and video console manufacturers !

Terrible news !

"In a blow to the government's aspirations for exports to lead a recovery, the trade gap – the difference between imports and exports – widened to almost £10bn in September, prompting warnings that already lacklustre economic growth for the third quarter will be downgraded."

Perhaps one day someone will put two and two together and recognise that, for as long as we continue not to make anything, strong retail sales are part of the problem, not part of a solution.

A Dangerous County

2011-10-29T20:29:00.004Z

Guardian obituary (via PA) of Jimmy Savile :

"His success was founded on a totally overweening belief in his own abilities and a tremendous energy, which took him from the Yorkshire minefields to radio and TV stardom."

Change For Change's Sake

2011-10-27T21:11:00.002Z

They've trashed Google News. Now those clever-clogs at Mountain View seem to have removed the cache results from Google search.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Perhaps they'll notice the increased number of hits here.

Google Search was an order of magnitude better than the competition around the late 1990s - I remember moving from Altavista. They got big as the punter looked and liked. But, as they came to dominate, the competition vanished. And now the punter's going to get what Google like. Where's the 'Classic Search' option in Preferences ? There ain't one.

UPDATE - you have to follow the arrow on the RHS of each result, which gives a preview of the page. There's a cache link there. As I said, where's the Classic Search option ? It was fine as it was.

Now That's What I Call A Vision Statement

2011-10-26T20:21:00.002Z

New CEO of Orange Broadband :

"Our objective is to get to a point where we are no longer ashamed of what we are doing to our customers"

Guardian Cognitive Dissonance Alert

2011-10-19T20:28:00.002Z

Why it is wrong to make these people leave their illegally-occupied homes.

Why it is right to make these people leave their legally-occupied homes.

Mervflation

2011-10-18T21:20:00.002Z

RPI inflation hits 5.6%.

And the Bank of England, whose mandate is to keep inflation at no more than 2%, are printing money - because otherwise inflation will be really really low ! But don't worry - it'll be back to 2% soon - Mervyn King says so.

Economist Shaun Richards :

I have looked back at the Bank of England’s past inflation forecasts for today to see how they compare with a level of CPI inflation of 5.2%.

November 2009 1.8%

February 2010 1%

May 2010 1.5%

August 2010 1.5%

February 2011 2%

These are estimates from the mid-range of its fan charts but as you can see any minor error in staring at the chart is dwarfed by the scale of the forecasting incompetence exhibited by the Bank of England. Apparently we are supposed to believe yet again that inflation will fall below target and only this month we required a further £75 billion of Quantitative Easing to stop a deflationary nightmare!

He must be really intelligent

2011-10-17T22:05:00.002Z

"Liam Fox broke ministerial code"

To be able to do that AND run a major department is truly impressive. The people at Bletchley Park in the war were brilliant, but they were usually full time codebreakers. Fair play to him.

France Deserved It

2011-10-15T10:10:00.004Z

They scored more points ... still, our loss is great and our grief cannot be mended.

Laban, 2 days ago :

My worry is the kicking. We have no Jenkins or Thorburn, Parks or Paterson - Leigh Halfpenny's the nearest we've got and I wish he'd take more kicks. When Wales beat France in the U20 quarter finals two years ago his kicking was excellent.

Say what you like about Henson - arrogant and unpleasant is what I say - he seems nerveless when faced with a pressure kick.

Poor Hook. Like Gavin Hastings, those kicks will hang round the neck like the proverbial albatross. And Hastings only missed one ! It must feel even worse when you know that the rest of your colleagues stepped up to the plate magnificently after the sending off. Mind, Phillips could have tried to get under the posts a bit more - shades of Martyn Williams against Fiji four years back. Why didn't he devote a bit of energy to getting a yard further in, instead of waving in celebration? He knew what our kicking was like!

A great shame, especially as Wales are probably one of the top two teams of the tournament. For a team that would have graced the final to miss out like that is a real pity. But they had it in their own hands to win - even with 14 men.

Good luck to the French - they'll need it. I bet the Aussies and All Blacks are breathing a sigh of relief - and rubbing their hands.

They'll Be After Revenge ...

2011-10-12T21:59:00.003Z

Wales v France in the U20 World Championship 2008 (they were beaten 31-6 by the Baby Blacks in the semis) ... in a remarkable finish they keep the ball alive to win the game on 86 minutes after being awarded a penalty try with a few minutes left. The French aren't too pleased... lots of now-familiar faces on the field.

Sock Puppets

2011-10-09T20:28:00.007Z

Surely the Guardian sub-editors were taking the mick when they fronted a Cif piece by republican sympathiser Ronan Bennett with this headline :

All of Ireland could use what Martin McGuinness gave the North

As someone commented - "what, bullets ?".

I was struck, I know not why, by this comment, from "josephv1", who'd soon followed up with several more comments :

As a Northern Irish Presbyterian, I have no problem with Mr McGuinness as President. He rules us here in the North already. Increasing numbers of my community are OK with the man - he's good in government and times have moved on. We've moved on in Ulster. Time you guys did as well across the water ..

Seemed too good to be true - this Prod who was not swallowing the bitter pill of shared republican government but positively rejoicing in it. A quick look at the posting history of this Presbyterian named Joseph (not, unless I mistake, a very popular name among Ulster Protestants) produced this mild comment from Laban :

"Josephv1 should really expand his posting interests. A self-declared Ulster Presbyterian whose entire Guardian posting history consists of comments on the evil of the British state is a curiously unconvincing online persona."

It was deleted (Ronan Bennett's paramour is Georgina Henry, editor of Guardian Online).

Laban, nothing loth :

Indeed, the more I look at joseph's entire output ...
18th June - "being from an army family myself", 9 comments on Bloody Sunday.
20th of June - "There was huge support for Irish Repubicanism across Northern Ireland, and beyond" - 3 posts on the Saville Inquiry
The guy who opened his account with 9 comments on Bloody Sunday has a 5-week hiatus, then on August 2 "And before any of the bitter old tub thumpers, armchair generals and twisted moralisers on here accuse me of being some kind of ungrateful leftist traitor, giving succour to the enemy, I'll have you know I come from a long military lineage ...The plantation of Ulster served as a blueprint for later colonial expansion in the W Indies ... the British establishment, and much of the population, cannot see that it's wrong to kill civilians.." - 16 comments on "Wikileaks and British Lies in Ireland" - the guy's on fire. Odd then, that such an enthusiastic commenter has nothing to say for 9 more weeks... before unleashing a barrage of posts on this thread. Most odd.
I've been hearing for years about the sophistication of the Republican political wing, and I guess the Guardian's giving space to Ronan Bennett testifies to that. But this is a very poor standard of sock-puppetry.

Deleted.

"josephv1" really is a remarkable poster - an Ulster Presbyterian "from a long military lineage" who only wakes up to post on CiF when the evils of the Brits or the goodness of Sinn Fein are being discussed, who posts furiously on the subject, regurgitating republican mantras, (13 posts so far on the Bennett thread) then goes back to sleep for weeks or months until another suitable thread arrives, and he wakes once more like Drake in his hammock. And he only posts on the evils of the Brits. There's a couple of other "as a xxxx, I love Martin McGuinness" posters, one "RobinPercival" and one "Phud", but a look at their posting histories suggests that they at least have opinions on subjects outside of the evil Brits and their usurpation of the Four Green Fields. If they're sock puppets, someone's at least making an attempt to give them what Smiley would call a "legend". Not so for our joe. He's only got one specialist subject.

Keeping to character, joe defends himself against Laban's innuendo, Laban fires back between deletions :

"I come from an army family and grandfather was a lecturer at Sandhurst. Or do you demand blind allegiance at all times?"
Ah. I think we call this "the Johann Hari Technique".

I'm sorry, "joseph" - I would like to debate the issue with you, but as you may have noticed, my posts are being removed as fast as they go up. Sock-puppetry, in the Guardian world, is something those evil American Republicans do, not noble Irish ones.
Maybe we can cross keyboards again - in a couple of months, when you next post.

Mind, he may well come "from an army family". I'm just not at all sure that it's the British Army.

UPDATE - Interesting. The moderators have deleted all the most-approved comments, which unsurprisingly weren't mine but were of the "Martin McGuinness ran an organisation responsible for murdering thousands of people" variety. Apparently that's a 'hate fact' and an unacceptable statement to air in the Guardian.

I Prophesy ...

2011-10-08T14:41:00.006Z

Laban, last night :

I don't know why anyone's discussing this game, which pales beside the titanic encounter some two hours earlier.
Game 1 - two teams in great form and closely matched. Frightens me to think about it. A tragedy that one team must lose.
Game 2 - one team that's "good enough", one team having a 'mare of a tournament. Unless the frogs can come out of the blocks and get ten points up very early, England should win and a couple of French be sent off. A tragedy that one team must win.

Well, the Frogs did come out of the blocks - although if England had scored just before half time, rather than dropping the ball twice, I still think they'd have won. As for the Welsh - well, the first-half pace of that game was unbelievable. Ireland believed they could break them as they'd broken Australia, choosing to go for the corner with kickable penalties. A reasonable call but as it turned out a wrong one. But few teams could have survived that Irish first-half onslaught and only conceded three points - that half was scary to watch in its pace and intensity. Along with Shaun Edwards, whose work on the defence has worked wonders, the Welsh fitness coaches deserve great credit. The missed Irish tackles when Jonathan Davies scored looked like the work of tired men, magnificent though Ireland were. Wales were still putting in a huge workrate up to the whistle.

Well, what a game. Now glory awaits.

On current form, Wales must be favourites. But you can never write off the French in a World Cup. Ask New Zealand. Ask them again.

UPDATE - I really ought to mention Scotland. Best World Cup performances I've seen from them since when - 1991 ? Should have beaten both Argentina and England, played some fine rugby. Just needed a line-breaker or two - without tries a team won't go that far.

Wales have the other problem - they've not had a truly reliable kicker since the days of Thorburn and Jenkins. A Chris Paterson or a Dan Parks - Scotland are well off in that department. If the Welsh defence continues to prove robust, it could be that kicks would decide.

And the form man there is New Zealand's Piri Wipu. 7 out of 8 today ain't bad.

There's always a chance on current form that the cup could be decided by the ref. Bryce Lawrence was not very good today - it takes a lot to get Laban supporting SA, but right up to the end, when he ignored Aussie tackling round the neck right in front of him (and in front of the posts) a lot of Oz transgression went unpunished. I hope Wales have studied all the refs well - there seems to be a big difference in interpretation between Southern and Northern refs regarding when the tackler should release, and when the tacklee should release the ball. Fair play to the Aussies though - 17% possession and they won ! Almost unheard of.

Shameless

2011-10-07T21:29:00.002Z

"The deterioration in the outlook has made it more likely that inflation will undershoot the 2% target in the medium term"

Mervyn King is shameless. Absolutely shameless. But only someone sure of his political backing could come out with such barefaced lies. He knows George "printing money is the last resort of desperate governments" Osborne is on board.

So the moral hazard of bailing out the banks - not once, but soon twice - is paralleled by the moral hazard of robbing the prudent and pensioners. It's a good job I had no illusions to lose about the Tories - and, as I feared, George Osborne's few sensible ideas before the election were soon forgotten after it.

Labour, 2008. QE1 announced. Mervyn King says there won’t be inflation because of the ‘output gap’ – all those factories running two shifts when they could be running three. BoE Pension Fund moves all its assets into inflation-proofed bonds.

Sterling devalues by getting on for 30% (and the printed money goes into share and commodity prices). This raises inflation dramatically, because most of what we consume, especially commodities, is imported – those factories were non-existent divisions on the BoE map board. Wages are static, because mass immigration means it’s a buyers market for labour*.

With prices rising and wages static, the only way to keep household consumption up is to send the wife out to work or spend on credit. But the wife’s been at work since 1989 – it was the only way you could afford the mortgage – and who’s going to increase their personal debts in this economic climate ?

So consumption falls. Working people are getting poorer at around 5% a year. There’s a small increase in manufacturing for export, but the balance of payments is still massively negative. Retailers suffer, the economy flat-lines.

OMG. The economy is not recovering ! Inexplicable !

Conservative, 2011. QE2 announced. King, abandoning reality completely, says it’s because his magic crystal ball says inflation is going to fall dramatically. Sterling devalues (it’s dropped 10c against the dollar in a couple of days). This raises inflation again, because most of what we consume, especially commodities, is imported.

Wages are still static, because mass immigration is still at near-record levels despite the crisis.

So consumption falls again, as it must.

OMG. The economy is not recovering ! Inexplicable ! Time for QE3 !

Rinse and repeat until UK real wages are at Chinese levels and pensioners are self-immolating in Parliament Square. Where's Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle when we need him ?

* Marx - "The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it"

Potemkin School

2011-10-05T20:45:00.004Z

History teaching has moved on from all those Kings and Queens, battles and dates, rote learning* etc. Now, as somebody said, learning is skills-based, not facts-based - students are 'taught to learn' and become self-powered, self-motivated learners, 'accessing and evaluating a range of sources' etc etc.

One of the ways in which they play at being historians is the page of sources - where children are given half a dozen carefully selected paragraphs from half a dozen carefully selected sources, and invited on the basis of same to pronounce on whether the Tommies of World War One really were lions led by donkeys.

My daughter was presented last week with a photograph of a dingy nineteenth-century street in Liverpool (or London - I forget)** , and asked for homework to pronounce on what it told her about poverty in Victorian Britain. A long and hopefully not unfruitful debate followed - during which she suggested that the photographer may have been looking for the worst street, to make a political point, and Laban pointed out that it could also work the other way round. A Government photographer, for example, may be looking for the best working class housing and the rosiest children to snap. I mentioned the idea of the Potemkin village, where artifice may produce a misleading impression.

Now in my daughter's school, there's a special programme for the bad and the unfortunate - the disruptive and nasty kids as well as those with learning difficulties (I fail to see why the latter should be lumped with the former, but it seems to be the way in "special schools" as well). It's called something like the K2 Programme, and the kids are 'the K2 kids'.

Back to Potemkin.

"Just consider", I said, "when the OFSTED inspectors are in your class, whose workbooks are out on display, and who does the teacher ask questions of ? Your bunch, or one of the K2 kids?"

"They can't ask them. When the inspectors come, all the K2 kids get sent on coach trips !"

* (except it hasn't - because the exams are now marked by temporary staff, rather than by people who know the subject. These temps don't have the knowledge to review all-round competence in a subject - instead they look for the "key phrases" which earn the marks. A semi-literate answer with the key words or phrases will earn more marks than a great sentence or paragraph which doesn't include the key words. Now the children HAVE to rote-learn these key words, and we've got the worst of both worlds).

** it bore a remarkable resemblance to the street in The King's Speech which was supposedly the 1930s home of the Aussie speech therapist, but looked straight out of Dickens.

The Spirit of Prophecy

2011-10-05T06:34:00.004Z

Commenter Ando at FT Alphaville, 20 months back, after QE1 :

Dodge | February 18 1:09pm |
| Options

The BofE will surely have to come up with a better excuse for another dose of QE. They can't say "we're doing more QE because the Government has to borrow so much money", although perhaps that might be more honest...

Ando | February 18 1:18pm
| Options

No, they'll say "the recovery is faltering and the economic situation worse than we thought, so more QE is required to safeguard recovery".

What they won't say is "we used QE to defer enormous amounts of economic pain and it also helpfully assisted the government in financing the deficit, but the trade-off is that all that deferred pain will descend like the wrath of god if we stop, because none of our structural problems, such as an unaffordable public sector and levels of household leverage, have been tackled, so we'll keep trying to defer the pain in the hope things get better on their own somehow. But they won't."

At least Japan had/has household savings to finance themselves, even if it is horrendously circular, and an export-led economy. We're stuffed.

The economy's been fuelled for the last 30 years by easy credit and the associated debt, plus the mass transfer of women into the labour force (as shown in this graphic - I have no doubt the US and British experiences are similar). We're running out of women to transfer (and those we import prefer raising children), and the debt expansion, shock horror, couldn't be sustained indefinitely. Sterling's devalued 30% and wages are static.

Yet apparently it's an absolute disaster that there's no growth. Why aren't we getting "back to normal" ?

Because the "normal" of the last 30 years = debt-fuelled ? And the only people interested in taking on more debt are those who can borrow at 0.5% from the BoE (i.e not me or thee ?).

The crunch could have been very deep, unpleasant, and short - as in Iceland. Instead, it's going to be drawn out over a decade or more, inflationary, and living standards will be continually squeezed.

What Have Those Idiots Done To Google News ?

2011-09-29T21:50:00.002Z

The new keep-on-scrolling-down-the-page-and-hope-you-see-something-interesting-before-you-die-of-boredom layout is useless. You used to be able to take in a lot of information from the old multi-column layout. I've only used the single-column version for five minutes and I'm hating it already.

Friday Night Music - Six Days On The Road

2011-09-23T20:51:00.003Z

Not exactly six days, but a week of 9-hour-plus days (plus three hours drive - 700 miles of commuting) might have something to do with my sparse blogging... nice to be home.

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

2011-09-23T06:14:00.002Z

There is a wee post at Biased-BBC.

The Golden Age That Never Was ...

2011-09-19T06:54:00.005Z

(right-click to open image in separate window)

And the Plastic Age of the last 30 years.

Note that the great "prosperity" of the Reagan and Clinton years was produced by

a) debt

b) women joining the workforce

I'd hazard a guess that the Thatcher, Major and Blair years would have paralleled this pretty closely.

Anything Going On In NY ?

2011-09-18T12:50:00.004Z

My son reports that (a/c/t Twitter) there are protests outside the New York Stock Exchange which are not being reported in mainstream media.

Any truth in this?

UPDATE - well, Businessweek seems pretty mainstream to me. Maybe Twitter is just ahead of the MSM - as you'd expect real-time media to be.

Dubbed “#OccupyWallStreet,” the goal of the protest is to get President Barack Obama to establish a commission to end “the influence money has over our representatives in Washington,” according to the website of Adbusters, a group promoting the demonstration. Organizers want participants to “occupy” the area for “a few months,” according to the website.

“People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sept. 15 at a press conference. “As long as they do it where other people’s rights are respected, this is the place where people can speak their minds, and that’s what makes New York, New York.”

As the demonstration began this afternoon, as many as 1,000 people congregated in the Chase Manhattan Plaza area and, after speakers with a bullhorn rallied the crowd, broke into groups to discuss the event’s goals. Some participants circulated trays of sliced white and wheat bread while others passed out jars of creamy Skippy peanut butter, and distributed apples, bananas and oranges from shopping carts.

Protesters waved red flags and toted cardboard signs with statements such as “represent the 99%.” Others donned white, mustachioed masks of the anti-authoritarian protagonist from the graphic novel and film “V for Vendetta.”

Sounds pretty much like the usual suspects to me - in the UK there'd probably be more drummers and fewer ukeleles. But I'm not saying they're wrong to protest - a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Atkinson Grimshaw Exhibition

2011-09-16T21:16:00.002Z

It should really be in Leeds, but anywhere is good news. London Guildhall from Monday :

Over the last forty years, Atkinson Grimshaw's beautiful and evocative paintings of moonlit suburban lanes, gas lit city streets and docksides have emerged as some of the most popular works of the Victorian age. This touring exhibition is the first major show of Grimshaw's work for over thirty years. It includes more than 60 paintings from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite inspired landscapes to the Impressionist style seascapes of his last years. The show also includes drawings, manuscripts and photographs on loan from public and private collections and descendants of the artist.

The Grimshaw site is excellent :

Do You Remember The Days of Slavery

2011-09-11T14:23:00.003Z

I commented a while back on the radical new "welfare to work" strategies allegedly being pioneered by the travelling community in Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Derby, which were reportedly capable of transforming homeless alcoholics, one of the more intractable and challenging groups for any social worker, into dedicated Stakhanovite block-paving operatives working up to 14 hours a day.

It looks as though transformative work therapy is being more widely practiced than thought - and with characteristic modesty, the liberal mouthpieces of said community are neglecting the opportunity to more widely publicise alleged achievements which the publicly funded welfare to work agencies such as Atos could only dream about.

I must say this BBC report is very mean-spirited, and seems to show little understanding of modern labour market conditions and radical management styles :

"Twenty-four men suspected of being held against their will have been found during a raid at a travellers' site. Four men and a woman were arrested on suspicion of committing slavery offences in the raid at Greenacre travellers' site, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, on Sunday. The men, who are English, Polish and Romanian, were found in "filthy and cramped" conditions, police said. Detectives believe some may have been there for up to 15 years.

Those arrested are being held on suspicion of committing offences under the Slavery and Servitude Act 2010. They are being held at police stations across Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Weapons, drugs and money were also found at the site, police said."

I don't know. There's always someone waiting to trumpet an anti-business agenda - and more often than not it's the BBC.

Class hatred

2011-09-10T11:21:00.004Z

It's odd. For the last 50 years the middle-class Left has bemoaned the absence of spontaneous working-class political self-organisation.

But when it happens, they suddenly discover how much they hate the working class. The people who get all hot and bothered about people being called "chavs" are the same people who in online debate will mock the grammar, spelling and logic of EDL contributors or interviewees. Say what you like about the publicans who put together this (IMHO amusing) video, they don't pretend to be defenders of working people.

But on the "left" ... from Harpy's "ugly and vile" faces, to the bright boys in the video below, they all seem to be piling in. Can't understand it ... can you ?

(hat-tip - Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph)

Any Techies Out There ?

2011-09-09T21:24:00.002Z

Apologies for the lack of posts - 12 hour days still taking their toll, and last weekend I did a rare thing for a man of advanced years, lobbed a sleeping bag in the boot and took off for a party in the wilds of Wales, hosted by an old friend from way, way back.

It's all still going to hell in a handcart quite nicely without my running commentary, so what I really want to ask is - any of you built a fanless PC ? In my old age I'm beginning to resent the noise, especially as most of the PCs around the house are basically Web clients, music players and word processors - only a couple do serious work.

Ideally I'd like a fanless motherboard and PSU that can still cope with decent graphics, maybe a TV card, and a couple of full-size hard disks. What I see out there are devices designed to be crammed into as small a footprint as possible, whereas I'm happy for the box to be a decent size - indeed, it should allow for a more powerful processor and motherboard if you have big fat passive coolers and a passively cooled power supply.

Does such a thing exist ?

Wife Imitating Tart, or Tart Imitating Wife ?

2011-08-28T13:53:00.003Z

I actually think Sally Bercow adds to the gaiety of nations* (and, hopefully, the gaiety of Mr John Bercow), but this one-liner by GeorgeJ in the Telegraph comments shows pretty wit :

"Sally Bercow - a case of tart imitating wife."

* and she has three children.

Quote Of The Day

2011-08-27T21:36:00.004Z

In a comment on this Damian Thompson piece (discussing the fact that 25% of babies born in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers) :

If Notting Hill produces its normal quota of stabbings, muggings, drug arrests etc, and not a huge riot, the liberal regime will be like a cock crowing on its pile.

But they won't be emphasising that this wondrous display of diversity needed to be policed by 16,400 officers.

This is about twice the number of British troops in Helmand. It is about half the number of the security forces deployed at the height of the Troubles. It is less than half of the current size of the PSNI, with all the sectarianism that continues there.

It is about the same number of British soldiers deployed in England, Scotland and Wales at any one time during the 18th century; when there was no police force to speak of - and we are told that England was a very riotous place indeed.

If there is no riot then what a triumph of multi-culturalism it will have been.

Now my info is that "only" 10,000-plus officers are being deployed. But I take the general point.

UPDATE - he's got the PSNI bit wrong way round. The PSNI is less than half the size of the force deployed for Notting Hill.

Friday Night Music - "Cold Be My Days In Shipston On Stour"

2011-08-26T19:39:00.002Z

In 1969, the Bee Gees had split up, and Robin Gibb had retreated to the Warwickshire countryside to get his head together, producing some decidedly "interesting" music.

The LP, "Sing Slowly Sisters" was never released - and these lo-fi cuts seem to be all that I can find - sounding as if it was recorded in a tin can that was simultaneously being whirled round someone's head. A pity, as the title track is really rather lovely.

The Erne From The Coast

2011-08-24T00:01:00.003Z

The Very Rev Hunter Farquharson, who breeds and shows birds as a hobby, returned to his cottage to find his prize-winning goose Beatrice dead, and a white-tailed sea eagle perched on a fence post nearby. The giant raptor, with a wingspan of up to 8ft, was one of 16 released recently in the east of Scotland as part of a controversial reintroduction programme.

Mr Farquharson, Provost of St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth, said he was "horrified" to find the goose, worth about £300, "ripped to shreds". He went inside to phone the RSPB, a partner in the reintroduction project, but then heard a "terrible noise" as the eagle chased his champion gander Bertie. When he tried to intervene the raptor jumped on his back, tearing his shirt, leaving a 4in wound below his shoulder and cutting his head.

My kids were up on the west coast of Scotland last week and saw a couple of sea eagles. Reminds me of this - T.O. Beachcroft's The Erne From The Coast - a rite-of-passage favourite of school short story anthologies "in elder days before the Fall".

When they saw Harry come towards them they waited, unmoving. They could hardly see at first who or what it was. Harry came up and dropped the bird at his father's feet. His coat was gone. His shirt hung in bloodstained rags about him; one arm was caked in blood; his right eyebrow hung in a loose flap, with the blood still oozing stickily down his cheek.

“Good God!” said Thorburn, catching him by the arm as he reeled.

He led the boy into the kitchen. There they gave him a glass of brandy and sponged him with warm water. There was a deep long wound in his left forearm. His chest was crisscrossed with cuts. The flesh was torn away from his neck where the talons had sunk in. The doctor came. Harry's wounds began to hurt like fire, but he talked excitedly. He was happier than he had ever been in his life. Everybody on the farm came in to see him and to see the eagle's body.

All day his father hung about him, looking into the kitchen every half hour. He said very little, but asked Harry several times how he felt. “Are you aw reet?” he kept saying. Once he took a cup of tea from his wife and carried it across the kitchen in order to give it to Harry with his own hands.

Later in the day old Michael came back, and Harry told him the whole story. Michael turned the bird over. He said it was an erne, a white-tailed sea eagle from the coast.

A Fly On The Wall ....

2011-08-23T22:47:00.004Z

... passed me the transcript of a conversation between an unnamed UK media consultant and spin-doctor, and an internationally famous financier who's not been getting too good a press lately. I cannot vouch for its authenticity, but make it available, for what it's worth, in the public interest :

"Sir, what can I do to salvage my reputation with the liberal classes ? A bit of fun - I swear she consented - and the Guardian have published 348 articles attacking me! Even after charges are dropped they're still at it, with innuendo about class justice and the rich getting the pleasure while the poor get the blame.

It's getting my wife down - and it's doing my reputation as a Socialist no good either. Some people just don't understand the concept of 'from each according to her abilities, to one according to his needs!'"

"It's 351 articles, actually - another three this morning. Now I can help you - but you may not like what I'm going to suggest."

"Please speak - I will be forever in your debt"

"Unlikely, even with my fees. You want to continue your amours, your peccadillos, your ... er ... bunga-bunga - with whoever takes your fancy and whenever ?"

"Mais oui !"

"Even when the object of your desires is ... shall we say ... a little backward in her response to ... your ardent advances ?"

"We understand each other, m'sieu"

"And you want the Guardian to look steadfastly in the other direction and write nothing, perhaps with the occasional piece accusing your critics of being motivated by racism ?"

"As you say in your country, m'sieu - that will do nicely"

"If you can follow my advice you will never be troubled by the Guardian again. You will be able to do what you like, to whom you like, and they will write nothing. But the course I suggest involves, for you, great personal sacrifice."

"What is it, man - for pity's sake tell me what I should do !"

"You must change your name to something like Youssiff Ibrahim, and move to Greater Manchester"

"Mon Dieu !"

Welcome To England

2011-08-19T07:00:00.003Z

Comment on this Ed West piece (on moral panic - thanks for the hat-tip, Ed) at the Telegraph :

"From time to time I fly to Stockholm from Manchester. On arriving at Arlanda, I'm greeted by giant posters of Stockholmers saying (in English), "Welcome to my town!" On return to Ringway, I'm greeted by posters warning me not to assault airport staff.

A few months ago I flew to Munich for the first time. On arrival I was greeted by a Bluetooth message from BMW, promoting their cars. Returning to Manchester, I was greeted at luggage reclaim by a giant poster offering me a test for chlamydia."

Breivik Massacre - The Hidden Hand

2011-08-18T22:05:00.006Z

I'm not a terribly frequent visitor to Lenin's Tomb - the author, unable to emulate his murderous namesake in the real world, compensates by getting very abusive with commenters who stray from the Party line - and, like Neville Chamberlain, I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul.

But, as chance would have it, I was over there a week or two ago, in that short period between the Norway massacre and the UK riots, and was idly browsing his visitor stats - he's obviously a cheapskate like me who won't pay for the full, private version. What sort of people, I wondered, read this stuff - he gets between 3 and 4 thousand hits a day ? A lot of Septics, I noted - getting on for 50% of the traffic and seemingly somewhat biased towards the great universities of the West and East coasts. It figures.

Anyway, I idly followed a link to a site that seemed to be providing a fair few readers to the Tomb on that 6th August. In fairness to him, we can't control who links to us - and as I say when I reciprocate a link, that doesn't constitute an endorsement.

Hmm.

"It appears that Breivik was led on his way by, and probably financed by, that mysterious group that met in London in 2002. He would have been one of a number of 'sleepers' whose legend was prepared for when they were needed (they would also have set up the complicated legal structure to hide the source of financing). That is what authorities should be looking at (but of course won't, as they tend to shy away from real power).

Once you get over the 'lone nut' lie, anybody could have been using Breivik to accomplish their wicked ends. That's when we start to look at motive, and ask the very reasonable question of which group which tends to use covert means and false flag attacks had a big motive to send a violent message to the Norwegian political class at this time. "

Who could these mysterious, wealthy backers be, who might want to send a message to the Norwegians* ?

The commenters are in no doubt at all.

(Top rated) "9/11 and oslo/2011 came out of the same shop"

"There are few readers in the States who will make the connection between Oslo Accords, the assassination of Rabin and the emergence of this Breivik character, who attacks the very capital where it happened, from where the Peace Prize is given, and where the kids on the island were calling for boycott. This looks like an attack on the former broker of a peace process which conceded that Palestinians had rights."

"in all these attacks, there is never a single dead jew" (really ? LT)

"breivik thoroughly zionized. it would be mossad or some other part of jewry."

There's no doubt that if you go far enough round to the left, you end up coming back from the right. On the dark side they're pretty close.

"The point, like the point of the conspiracy behind the fertilizer bombing of the Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City, is to terminate anti-immigration, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic right wing nationalism"

Well, if Mossad really did set up the massacre for their own nefarious ends, they've improved their organisation since their last outing to Norway, when they shot dead a perfectly inoffensive Moroccan waiter under the impression that he was the Chief of Operations for the Black September terrorist group.

Still, call me old fashioned or lacking in imagination, but I still can't quite picture Israel setting up the slaughter of scores of kids, and car-bombing the Norwegian PM, in order either to give the UAF a stick to beat the EDL with, to teach those uppity Norwegians which side their bagels are buttered, or to discredit the (generally sober and reasoned) Gates of Vienna website. The means seems wholly disproportionate to the end, for starters - quite apart from the whole 'morality' bit.

But some people obviously can ...

* It transpires that the Norwegians were withdrawing their air contribution from the NATO force in Afghanistan, and that the Labour Party youth section had passed pro-Palestinian resolutions. You learn something new every day.

UPDATE - from one of the comments it seems that gentle irony goes straight past some people...

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man

2011-08-15T21:36:00.003Z

I've been a fan of the educationist Tony Sewell for quite a long time - ever since he whupped Lee Jasper* in a Guardian education debate back in 2003. He's that rare thing, a black activist who believes that not every problem in the community is caused by racist whitey - that maybe, inter alia, black street and rap culture has a teensy influence on the youth, too - a bit of a UK John McWhorter, in fact.

I was pleased to hear him on R5 this morning, dismissing David Starkey's discussion of Great Enoch as irrelevant but focusing on, and agreeing with, Starkey's claim that white urban youth are taking up (as best they may) the black gangsta culture which has left so many dead on London's streets.

He's in the Mail, too :

"Despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.

That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.

What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions... young white and Asian, often middle-class, Britons — anxious for a bit of street cred — adopted the language and clothes of the culture, as Sacha Baron Cohen so mercilessly parodied in his comic creation Ali G, a white teenager from Staines who is desperate to be seen as black. And here, I think, we are getting at what David Starkey wanted to convey.

So prevalent is this ‘gangsta’ culture that, if you get on a bus in London and shut your eyes, you will often not be able to tell the ethnicity of the young people who are speaking, since they all use the tone, phraseology and language patterns of black youths."

Though like everyone else, he gets Starkey base-over-apex about Enoch. What Starkey said was that Enoch was wrong, in that the rivers of blood aren't one race fighting another, but :

"Black and white, unite and loot,
Smash the phone-shop front !"

* Jasper is, according to the now defunct BlacksandJews site "a Jewish-Zionist agent working in the Black Community, a man without honour, morals or common decency". I can't answer for the first part, but as for the second, even a stopped clock ...

BBC Presenters Against The Toffs

2011-08-15T06:00:00.005Z

Kaye Adams, the BBC broadcaster, has been accused of being unfit to present a top current affairs programme after she tweeted in response to Boris Johnson's suggestion that rioters should face tough punishments, "P*** off back to boarding school, Boris".

Hmm. Obviously a toilet-mouthed working class girl supporting her fellow workers/rioters against the assaults of the fascist state.

The former presenter of Loose Women, the ITV talk show, who presents a popular Radio Scotland show, was on holiday in Tuscany when she made a series of expletive-filled Tweets about London's mayor.

UPDATE - Adams attended St. George's School for Girls in Edinburgh - boarding £5,800 a term! Oh, the hypocrisy!

Hitch Nails It ...

2011-08-14T20:27:00.002Z

Say to David Cameron that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.

Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.

Yet he is ready to authorise the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on our streets (quite useless, as it happens, against this sort of outbreak) as if we were a Third World despotism.
Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance.
Here is an example of how little Cameron knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance.

The loping, smirking, shuffling creeps who eventually appeared before the courts were the ultimate losers – the ones who came late to the looting and who were too slow or too stupid to run before they were put in the bag.

A good point about the arrests. The vanguard of the working class movement aka the first guys to actually smash the shutters down at PC World or Carphone Warehouse, were doing their deeds when the police had lost control of many streets early on Monday evening. I'd imagine the vast majority of these 'early adopters' got away with it (although CCTV may well nail some). An awful lot of arrests seem to have been of stragglers, people late to the party. And Little Miss Perfect, allegedly driving the getaway car with two other persons of pallor, was a lot safer stop-n-search for a couple of lone officers than a car full of Man Dem Crew. Say what you like about grammar schools, but we were taught not to shank the Feds.

Who's "we", Paleface ?

2011-08-14T10:51:00.006Z

Henry Porter in the Guardian :

'We will wear the great shame of these riots for a very long time. A great shock has been delivered to England's sense of identity blah blah blah wibble ...'

It was interesting to see how quickly the BBC responded to Alex Salmond's taunting and changed the "UK Riots" heading into "English Riots".

I'm not sure the BBC will want to take that laudable principle of localisation too far, though - are you ?

I just get a feeling from today's Guardian and BBC that it's back to normal as far as our rulers are concerned.They're all going to try and understand a little more and condemn a little less, having used up about five years worth of condemnation over the last week. Business As Usual ? We shall see.

UPDATE - a comment :

I am a teacher of English and taught in England for 15 years before emigrating to Australia in 1987.
In 2000, 2006 and 2009, I returned to the U.K. and did Supply Teaching at five secondary schools, two in London, three in towns a few miles outside.
All five had many moments redolent of 'Lord Of The Flies' , but the saddest and most revealing experience occurred at a school in Essex in 2000, as I'd taught at that school for 8 years when I still lived in England, leaving there in 1983. Thus I had not set foot in that school for 17 years and, amazingly, two teachers were still there. Both, so sadly, and independently of each other, while over-joyed to see me, said don't let what you see spoil your happy and positive memories of the school.
I'm not being alarmist - it hadn't just declined, it had plummeted.
I still vividly remember voicing my first concern with a Deputy as when we approached the entrance, which I'd so many times gone through, it was now necessary to enter a code in order to get in. When I said that was worrying, the Deputy disagreed, saying you couldn't have parents just being allowed to enter the school and assault staff. I looked sharply at him when he said this but he didn't notice. It is so obviously nothing more than a short-term, band-aid solution that clearly reveals far more worrying, serious, disturbing and underlying issues, concerns and realities that long-term just simply have to be addressed.
To be honest here, while looking at the scenes with incredulity, especially those from Tottenham and Enfield because these areas are where I was born, raised and still stay in when over over there, I just could not separate what was happening with what I'd experienced and witnessed in those five schools.
In a way, as unbelievable as it all seemed, none were that surprising.

R.I.P. Richard Mannington Bowes

2011-08-13T20:19:00.005Z

When Richard Mannington Bowes was born in 1943, the ethnic minority population of Britain was a few thousand people.

When he was eight years old, in 1951, Churchill's cabinet debated immigration into the UK.

David Maxwell-Fyfe, the home secretary, reported that the total of "coloured people" in Britain had risen from 7,000 before the second world war to 40,000 at the time of writing, with 3,666 of those unemployed, and 1,870 on national assistance, or benefits.

It's almost impossible for anyone growing up today to imagine what a peaceful and orderly (and staid) place post-war Britain was. The American anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, in his 1955 "Exploring English Character", compared the post-war English with their early Victorian forebears of 120 years previously* :

"One of the most lawless populations in the world has turned into one of the most law-abiding; ...a fiercely and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty... in public life today the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen. ... you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or in the U.S.A.)... football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.."

If you had told Mr Mannington-Bowes' parents that, sixty years later, their child would be beaten to death, in Ealing, by a mob of strangers bent on looting and arson, they would have thought you were mad.

They'd have thought you were mad if you predicted that he'd be fined in the local magistrates court - "for confronting youths for urinating outside his home".

This was England. The law was on the side of the law-abiding, and people were killed in riots in far-away countries, not here.

UPDATE - I would be interested to see a report of his trial and conviction, and who the magistrate was. I trust it wasn't this one. I don't want to come over all Polly Toynbee, and the people who beat him to death ARE savages, but the wholesale criminality (mixed with plenty of assaults just for the fun of it) is a product of an assault on the principles of criminal justice that's been going on for fifty years. Fifty years of mass immigration may arguably have been a necessary condition for his murder, but certainly not a sufficient one - and as I've said many a time and oft, there are plenty of native youth who'll beat a man to death for being a good citizen.

As I argued here and here, something in the water of post-Cultural Revolution UK seems to turn the children and grandchildren of previously law-abiding people into bad boys and girls. What could it be ? This Polly Toynbee column - or a read of the Magistrate's blog - may hold an answer.

* to be fair, the peacefulness of the English puzzled him greatly, John Bull being traditionally a pugnacious sort of chap, always ready to scrap when offended by a foreigner of any description.

Friday Night Music

2011-08-12T23:12:00.002Z

It's a repost, but seems apposite :

Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers

2011-08-12T22:39:00.004Z

Michael Meacher at Left Futures (he's aged 72 - I don't think they do irony at LF) :

"The lesson surely is that a quarter century after the Broadwater Farm riot in 1985 the community in Tottenham still remains so disadvantaged and broken that a significant group feels no local pride, has no real deep sense of local identity, and has no instinct to safeguard what they do not see as their own. The explosion of rage and anger which was directed inwardly into inter-gang warfare on the streets of London has now erupted outwardly with terrible destructiveness. But it will not be fully quelled until all the underlying causes are acknowledged, faced up to and redressed."

Laban responds (I doubt it'll pass moderation, mind - diversity of everything except opinion) :

“it will not be fully quelled until all the underlying causes are acknowledged, faced up to and redressed”

Absolutely. But there is disagreement about the underlying causes. The dominant narrative of the last 40 years is that the underlying causes lie without, and must be addressed from without – more youth clubs/arts centres/social workers/5-a-day anti-racist smoking cessation co-ordinators, lots of diversity training for public servants, more social housing, lots of money to buy off agitators and turn them into responsible ‘community spokespeople’.

This dominant narrative has been reinforced with vast quantities of taxpayer cash, and has produced the situation we see today. It was described pretty accurately forty years ago by Tom Wolfe, in an essay called “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” – worth a read.

Tom Wolfe's 1970 essay (or a hefty chunk of it) is here. Here he describes the dilemma of a white establishment in a post-black-riot world, and incidentally explains why all the black 'community workers' interviewed by the BBC since Monday (and that's quite a few) have a shared rhetoric and a shared belief that the answers lie, inter alia, in more funding for more community workers.

Whites were still in the dark about the ghettos. They had been studying the "urban Negro" in every way they could think of for fifteen years, but they found out they didn't know any more about the ghettos than when they started. Every time there was a riot, whites would call on "Negro leaders" to try to cool it, only to find out that the Negro leaders didn't have any followers. They sent Martin Luther King into Chicago and the people ignored him. They sent Dick Gregory into Watts and the people hooted at him and threw beer cans. During the riot in Hunters Point, the mayor of San Francsco, John Shelley, went into Hunters Point with the only black member of the Board of Supervisors, and the brothers threw rocks at both of them. They sent in the middle-class black members of the Human Rights Commission, and the brothers laughed at them and called them Toms. Then they figured the leadership of the riot was "the gangs," so they went in the "ex-gang leaders" from groups like Youth for Service to make a "liaison with the key gang leaders." What they didn't know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren't even any "key gangs," much less "key gang leaders," in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.

But the idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs hung on with the poverty-youth-welfare establishment. It was considered a very sophisticated insight. The youth gangs weren't petty criminals ... there were "social bandits," primitive revolutionaries ... Of course, they were hidden from public view. That was why the true nature of ghetto leadership had eluded everyone for so long ... So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the "real leaders," the "natural leaders," the "charismatic figures" in the ghetto jungle. These were the kind of people the social-welfare professionals in the Kennedy Administration had in mind when they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything, they would encourage the people in the ghettos to organize. They would help them become powerful enough to force the Establishment to give them what they needed. From the beginning the poverty program was aimed at helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. It was a scene in which the federal government came into the ghetto and said, "Here is some money and some field advisors. Now you organize your own pressure groups." It was no accident that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drew up the ten-point program of the Black Panther Party one night in the offices of the North Oakland Poverty Center.

To sell the poverty program, its backers had to give it the protective coloration of "jobs" and "education," the Job Corps and Operation Head Start, things like that, things the country as a whole could accept. "Jobs" and "education" were things everybody could agree on. They were part of the free-enterprise ethic. They weren't uncomfortable subjects like racism and the class structure--and giving the poor the money and the tools to fight City Hall. But from the first that was what the lion's share of the poverty budget went into. It went into "community organizing," which was the bureaucratic term for "power to the people," the term for finding the real leaders of the ghetto and helping them organize the poor.

And how could they find out the identity of these leaders of the people? Simple. In their righteous wrath they would rise up and confront you. It was a beautiful piece of circular reasoning. The real leaders of the ghetto will rise up and confront you ... Therefore, when somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you, then you know he's a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing, it practically demanded it. Subconsciously, for administrators in the poverty establishment, public and private, confrontations became a ritual. That was the way the system worked. By 1968 it was standard operating procedure. To get a job in the post office, you filled out forms and took the civil-service exam. To get into the poverty scene, you did some mau-mauing. If you could make the flak catchers lose control of the muscles around their mouths, if you could bring fear into their faces, your application was approved.

"“People need to ask, why are they not in school?"

2011-08-12T06:33:00.002Z

Hazel Blears is childless.

Bad Journalism

2011-08-11T00:03:00.000Z

"The historic Roman city of Gloucester, on the edge of the Cotswolds, was turned into a “war zone” on Tuesday night as rioters launched copycat attacks on shops and cars."

The headline on their front page is "Mobs on Rampage In Cotswolds" ! The Telegraph sub-editors are bigger morons than the rioters, and that's saying something.

How about

"The formerly historic city (until the 60s redevelopment**) of Gloucester, fifteen-odd miles from the edge of the Cotswolds, had some arson attacks on Tuesday night as a mixture of the Tredworth 'youth'* and a few local wannabes launched copycat attacks on shops and cars."

I can't wait for their next headlines.

Trouble in Southampton - "New Forest Burns"
More trouble in Brum - "Avon Runs With Blood As Shakespeare's County Ignites"
Leeds - "Yorkshire Dales Torched"

* Gloucester has an Afro-Caribbean community - big enough to have had a reggae programme on Severn Sound - presented by the late and much lamented Ivanhoe Campbell (not forgetting the sister Evadne with the Jamaican recipes).

** Dalrymple :

"Gloucester is a small cathedral city of about 100,000, where the city council has conclusively demonstrated that with the right combination of 1960s urban planning and an undiscriminating welfare policy, the degraded inner city conditions of much larger conurbations may be successfully reproduced in small country towns."

The Death of the Moledias

2011-08-09T21:55:00.003Z

In March last year I finally found the names of the two people killed in the Handsworth riots ('uprising' if you're from the BBC) of 1985 - Kassamali Moledia, 38, and his brother Amir, 44 - subsequently airbrushed from history (someone finally updated Wikipedia about three weeks ago).

If they'd been killed by white people half of Handsworth would have been named after them by now. Instead they were forgotten.

In September last year the Birmingham Post finally told the story. Not pretty. When people like Harpy celebrate the riots they should know what arson and looting means.

Months after the tragedy, transcripts of the brothers’ calls for help were released.

At 8.58pm on September 9, the first dramatic plea was heard: “They are smashing their way in – they are going to kill us.”

Then at 9.36pm the final call came through: “Please come now, they are in the shop trying to kill us. Please...”

And 'they' did kill them - 'they' being young black men. The dynamic of the Handsworth looting was Asian shopkeepers being targeted by black attackers.

Madan Lal, 55, who runs Annu Fashions, was in his shop on the night of the siege, but he found a way of keeping his business safe – by paying off the looters.

“I was with my two brothers at the shop when it all kicked off. We saw the other businesses getting looted, so we stood at the door handing out £50, £20 and £10 notes to the ringleaders so they wouldn’t damage our shop. I think we ended up paying out at least £700 to protect our business. It worked and no one took anything from us.”

But the demographics and street powers have changed in Brum. When Handsworth 2.0 was attempted in Lozells in 2005, it was innocent black people who ended up getting murdered.

While some opportunist whites and Asians have joined the looting and general mayhem, these riots have been driven by black youth. Bradford, Oldham, Blackburn, Burnley, Tower Hamlets are the dogs that haven't barked, if I can use what's probably an inappropriate phrase. Instead Muslims of varying ethnicity have defended 'their' turf in Bethnal Green, Finsbury Park and Stoke Newington. Sikhs in Southall did likewise - I'm pretty sure a white crowd with those weapons would find the police after them, riot or no. Even whites in Enfield and Eltham have done the same (and the pro-riot left blogs as one cry "EDL!").

But it's not 1985 any more. I'm not sure that the deaths of three Muslims in Winson Green last night, killed by a car deliberately driven at them, will be forgotten like the Moledias. Anyone wanting to riot in that neck of the woods tonight will need their head examining - in every sense.

UPDATE - had to go to Brum today, stayed there late. As quiet as can be. Surprise surprise. There are a lot of very cross people just itching for someone to start something.

I keep hearing from the BBC and Guardian that repressive violence won't work, it only provokes the bad boys to worse deeds. It all seems to depend on the degree of repressive violence - faced with the prospect of Met Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin asking their parent(s? perhaps) to keep an eye on them, the London "community" went on a massive orgy of looting and arson. Faced with the prospect of being chased down by a crowd and beaten or stabbed to death, the yout' of Lozells, Handsworth and points east seem to have decided that a quiet night in front of the telly is better than a trip down the Soho Road this evening. As Machiavelli put it : "Men avenge slight injuries, not grave ones".

Beautiful

2011-08-09T20:45:00.002Z

Theresa May, 15 September 2010 :

"We can cut police budget without risking violent unrest"

UPDATE - Laban, back in December, on our "Justice" Secretary, Ken Clarke - a man conspicuously absent at present :

He's been given a job to do - to cut the cost of the Prison Service and the criminal justice system - and by God he's going to do it. That's what makes him the reliable chap that he is, and such a useful man to have in Government. A lesser - or shall we say less useful - man might have argued the toss, pointed out that defending the lives, property and liberty of the citizens is the primary duty of any state, reminded Cameron of the association (however undeserved, if we look at the 1980s) in the public mind of the Conservative Party with a robust attitude to crime and criminals, dug in his toes and defended his budget. Not Ken. It doesn't matter that

a) the costs will be transferred from the State to individuals - in the form of burglaries and assaults for many, rape, bodily harm and homicides for the unfortunate, insurance premiums for householders, quality of life for everyone.

b) these costs will in total be much greater than the amount saved.

c) they will fall most heavily upon the poor and vulnerable. I doubt Ken will be troubled by too much anti-social behaviour in whichever expensive village his mansion is located.

This Just In From The BBC

2011-08-09T07:00:00.000Z

In a series of incidents last night, a drawing room was severely damaged.

Our reporter at the scene :

"Well, I can tell you this morning that this drawing room has been almost totally destroyed. The china cabinet has been destroyed and its contents smashed, all the furniture looks as if it's been sat on by something heavy - even the doors are smashed off their hinges. Witnesses have spoken of scenes of mindless violence. It almost looks as if some large animal had been in here wrecking everything ..." (noises of trumpeting and cries of 'it's coming!') ... "I'm afraid I have to go now because the situation looks dangerous."

Still Feeling Comfortable, Dave ?

2011-08-08T22:57:00.006Z

We have to change and modernise our culture and attitudes and identity.
When I say change, I’m not talking about some slick re-branding exercise.
What I’m talking about is fundamental change, so that when we fight the next election street by street, house by house, flat by flat…
…we have a message that is relevant to people’s lives today, that shows we’re comfortable with modern Britain, and that we believe our best days lie ahead.

Our best days lie ahead, do they ?

At this rate it won't be the next election that's being fought street by street and house by house.

UPDATE - via Gadget's comments :

"This is ***** terrifying me now. Looters now targetting HOMES in Ealing. That’s some escalation."

The good news is that you can always shoot people who break into your home ... oh, sorry. Wrong country. This is the one where you call the police - who can't help you 'cos they're engaged in pitched battles on Haven Green and Ealing Broadway...

Police living quarters at Stavely house, Whitmore Reans in Wolverhampton attacked by IC3 mob ( … hmmmm now theres a shock!) windows put in, officers personal motorvehicles attacked and a large fire has been started outside the building …. Trumpton have just turned up put it out .

Youths massing in other areas of Wolverhampton.

Officers just told over the air ‘do not wind anyone up or antagonise youths’

…. You honestly couln’t ******* make it up!!

Trouble in Chapeltown, Brum, Scallyland (Toxteth - I was only hearing this morn some yoof worker all over the BBC, explaining why Toxteth wouldn't go up), and large areas of what used, only 50 years ago, to be the capital of England. Croydon. Bromley. Places that within living memory were shorthand for respectable suburbia - as was Ealing.

It looks as if the demographic tipping point may have been reached in London. England was a famously peaceful place mostly because it was full of English/British people with an English/British culture. Cultural integration is impossible now in the capital - there just aren't enough English left to integrate with - and the night's events will trigger another exodus. London is now a third world city with great but increasingly isolated chunks of what was a mighty first world capital - the City and Whitehall, Buck House and St Paul's, Kensington and Chelsea, Fulham - left behind.

In Third World cities this sort of thing is prevented by Third World law and order, lethal, capricious, corrupt and not given to apologies.

Nonetheless, in some areas London's citizens are defending their lives and property - apparently Turks and Kurds are defending the kebab houses of Green Lane, and Muslim men are guarding Finsbury Park mosque. So let's not say the capital's totally lawless - alternative structures are arising.

I wonder how this will play out for the future of London as a financial centre ? And I was reading just the other day about how Central London property prices are soaring as homes in the capital's richest areas are increasingly seen as a 'safe haven' for capital.

Now the financial centres and the central luxury belt are full of rich people who can buy their way out of a lot of London's nastinesses - the schools, public transport. But as the safer areas become fewer, they'll start to feel increasingly like islands of wealth marooned in a resentful and lawless sea. I'd feel happier with my millions in Wiltshire farmland than in London terraces, no matter what the postcode.

Lazy B***ers

2011-08-07T10:53:00.004Z

Indie :

Others arrived on foot and piled shopping trolleys high with looted televisions and other electronic goods, a woman who has lived locally for 10 years but did not want to be named said.

A member of staff at The Carphone Warehouse next door said every phone in the shop had been stolen.

The contents of the stock room were spilled across the pavement outside from the smashed in door.
Outside JD sport shop, broken mannequins lay on the ground, plastic legs and torsos scattered here and there.
The front window of Currys electrical store was smashed and smithereens of glass covered the ground outside.

Next door, Argos's door had been smashed in and broken glass covered the floor inside and out after looters apparently raided the stock room.
Discarded flat screen television boxes and other unwanted packaging covered paved areas outside the electronic goods stores.
The looters had evidently removed the products from their boxes to create more space in their shopping trolleys and cars, which were said to number up to 100.

Fragments of glass from the smashed in door of PC World littered the ground.

The scene outside Comet was similar and outside B&Q - one of the few stores that did not appear to have been looted - staff stood uncertainly, waiting to hear from head office whether they would be working today.

If employed white men had been rioting B&Q's power tool section would have been the first to go.

It's 1981 All Over Again

2011-08-06T22:21:00.003Z

First rioting in Bristol. Now, a tad delayed, North London. It all feels terribly familiar ...

It's obviously a terrible thing that a man has been shot by police. While in modern Britain there can never be such a thing as a cast-iron guarantee against being shot by the police (ask the late Harry Stanley), and I don't know the facts of this particular case, a useful general rule is not to shoot at them first.

Even the mildest of men resents being shot at. If that man is a trained marksman, who just happens to have a loaded weapon on him and several similarly armed mates in attendance, then you're really pushing your luck.

A family friend of Mr Duggan, who gave her name only as Nikki, 53, said the man's friends and relatives had organised the protest because "something has to be done" and the marchers wanted "justice for the family."
"They're making their presence known because people are not happy," she added. "This guy was not violent. Yes, he was involved in things but he was not an aggressive person. He had never hurt anyone."

Hmm.

"shops had been broken into"

I'm shocked, shocked.

"This said, I’ve nothing against telling lies for political purposes"

2011-08-05T22:15:00.003Z

Thus Chris Dillow.

A pity. I hoped to learn from his undoubted knowledge, but now I'm unsure if I can trust anything he writes, including "and" and "the".

There are altogether too many people in the UK who think it's OK to use their intelligence and knowledge to exploit (usually financially, but the principle's the same) the unintelligent and ignorant. From the supermarket price-setters (bargain ! Tropicana only £1 ! And we hope you won't notice the carton's 25% smaller !) to the people who work out the bewildering arrays of price options for electricity and phones, modern UK capitalism seems to have given up on the search for a better mousetrap and is devoted to maximising the take from mousetrap rental plans.

Sorry to see him join them.

Once upon a time that was the sort of thing the Labour Party were against. Still, all in a good cause, end justifies the means and all that.

Anyway, if Chris wants to exercise his talents for telling lies for political purposes, he's certainly posting in the appropriate place.

"demand for artificial knees"

2011-08-03T23:06:00.000Z

Telegraph :

"Smith & Nephew said performance was boosted by a weaker dollar and increased demand for artificial knees, an area in which the group has averted controversy over metal-on-metal technology by offering a 30-year guarantee on its products."

I haven't looked at that market for what must be 15 years, but I'm very surprised S&N can turn a profit on artificial knees, given what was the extremely low cost of a knee transplant from a primate donor.

I wonder if the animal rights campaigners have stopped the trade, because certainly in those days you could get two ape-knees for a penny.

Spanish Libido Falls

2011-08-03T21:48:00.005Z

70% off condoms. Times may be hard but ... yet the seaside bars and restaurants were crowded, and if the young men dining their senoritas at harbourside tables were boiling with righteous rage, they kept it to themselves.

"City of Langreo - City without employment". A bit harsh - there are still plenty of hefty industrial plants about. Great pipework.

I think this is a Bayer plant, but I may be wrong.

They're two cheeks of the same fascist backside, I tell you! Some child in Gijon thinks there's not much between the socialist PSOE and the conservative PP. In Oviedo I saw graffiti supporting the Falangists.

Enough said.

There was a lot of graffiti directed at the housing boom/bust. Lots of half-finished and abandoned developments which obviously stopped when the bottom dropped out of housing. Still a fair bit of development going on though.

Bulnes

2011-08-01T21:54:00.009Z

The path is steep and stony. It's blazing hot - every 20 minutes you stop and slather on more factor 50. You've been going an hour and two-thirds of the water's been drunk.

It's also rather dangerous. Unbeknownst to you, when you were stuffing your daughter's jacket into your rucksack, wife and child have taken 'what looked like a shortcut' - concentrating on fitting everything back into the bag, you blindly follow, not noticing that the main path goes up and to the left. You're now close to the edge of a big drop and the path seems a lot smaller than it was.

Ten minutes later ...

"I can't believe the authorities signpost this path as a suitable route. You'd never be allowed to do that in England. Do people really take small children up here ?"

Fifteen minutes later ... the path is between a foot and eighteen inches wide. We've climbed enough to make going back probably more hazardous than going on. To the right, at the edge of the path, a drop to the river several hundred feet below.

"Walk carefully - stay as close into the hill as you can. This is dangerous. They must be crazy to designate this as a route"

"I wonder if we should have gone left instead of straight on when the path split"

"WHAT !"

We had to keep going. About another half mile and maybe thirty minutes on, our tiny path zig-zagged up to join the broad main path, which we'd been following a couple of hundred feet lower down the ravine. We'd added a somewhat twitchy hour to the walk time. And I swore never again to just follow without keeping my eyes open.

Walking on, the ravine opens out - higher up you can fill your bottles with clear, cold river water.

And then you come to what seems like a mirage - an oasis for hot, sweaty walkers, a dream of paradise, a beer advert come to life.

There's a fountain of cool drinking water, shady trees about a river, a small bridge. And about six bars and restaurants! Bulnes was presumably once a very cut-off village - but a funicular railway cut through the mountain (and free to locals) now means that all the wants of the climber or tourist can be brought up.

After a walk like ours, to sit under a sunshade and sip a chilled beer feels very good. And the descent is a great improvement on the ascent - even the heat's less, with the ravine now in shadow. Lovely place - I can see why people rave about the Picos de Europa. Will come again.

The Spanish Are Bastards, Too

2011-08-01T20:30:00.004Z

El Pais :

One out of every three babies in Spain is born to unwed parents, twice as many as 10 years ago. The decline in marriages, the rise in single mothers, immigration and a more secular society have all contributed to this trend, which brings Spain more in line with the European Union average.

Not quite up there with the Welsh or Scots (or Geordies), but well on the way.

Since 1981, when the law eliminated differences between children born in and out of wedlock, the proportion of the latter has risen steadily. If it was 4.4 percent that year, by 2000 it was 17.7 percent, and in 2009 — the last year for which the statistics office holds data — that rate had grown to 34.5 percent, or 170,604 babies.

That's nothing. We abort more babies than that each year in England and Wales alone ! But I suppose the low numbers reflect the ongoing demographic disaster.

"These are astounding figures," said Constanza Tobío, a professor of sociology at Madrid's Carlos III University. "Couples have become more modern, and Spanish mothers have quickly become almost like Swedish or British mothers on that front. This change is the result of the secularization of society, of tolerance, of mothers' autonomy — they no longer need the safety of marriage to procreate — and of legal equality for children regardless of their parents' civil status."

Does "autonomy" = Daddy State, as in the UK ?

I mustn't get too apocalyptic. On the evidence of a week trying to cram in everything from the dockside quarter of Bilbao and the industrial valleys of Asturias (puzzling Susan with my requests, as I drove, for her to take photos of 'that big chemical works' or 'the graffiti on that bridge') to the touristy beaches and the mountains, Northern Spain is not only a great deal more civilised than the UK - so many people, drinking so much, so late into the evening, and so little trouble - but they still actually seem to make things there. As you drive up the AS117 through Langreo to San Martin, you could be in the Swansea Valley or Vale of Neath - in the days when the factories were still open.

And that's not to mention the greatest natural resource of Spain - rock, the quarrying and crushing of which, despite its grand scale, makes nary a dent in the stony peninsula. I presume a lot of it ends up on their excellent and spectacularly engineered roads - the steep left hand curve and drop as you approach Laredo from Bilbao is enough to give you vertigo, as you realise that beyond the barriers* the city (and beach) are several hundred feet below.

* which flash on and off, warning you NOT to go straight on and pointing you left, adding to the computer-game feel of the drive. Could have done without them.

Hola!

2011-07-27T07:52:00.003Z

Laban is in Asturias - a lovely place where non-Spanish tourists are rare and they take their cider very seriously - sidrerias (cider bars) everywhere. Villaviciosa is a pretty town with some beautiful buildings, but I write this from a cafe in Lastres, a town clinging to a cliffside, with a harbour at the bottom, beaches and spectacular views.

Back next week ... alas. I could stay here longer.

Britain - Terror Spreads Following Reports of "Failed Coup"

2011-07-18T22:08:00.004Z

Sud-Deutscher Zeitung, London : There are reports from London tonight of increasing repression, following what has been described in ruling circles as a 'failed coup' by Ruprecht von Murdoch and Obergruppenfuhrer Brooks, the rabble-rousing, charismatic leader of the feared "red-tops", paramilitary wing of Murdoch's 'Neues Internazionale' (NI) organisation.

Brooks' 'red-tops' muster several million fanatical working-class readers, and have increasingly been seen as a revolutionary threat to the aristocratic ruling elite, who have held power behind the scenes through different political administrations. It is believed that Brooks was shot this afternoon after her arrest yesterday, but this is not confirmed. What is known is that mass arrests continue, and that the bodies of a number of senior NI personnel have been discovered.

In an increasingly violent and hysterical speech this evening, a haggard but triumphant HochGuardianista Reichsgräfin von Toynbee, propaganda chief of the ruling elite, called for further action against enemies in the press. "Murdoch - kaput ! Brooks - tot ! Jetzt muss der Daily Mail auch kaput werden !" The whereabouts of the leader of the 'TagesPost' or Daily Mail faction, Paul Dacre, is giving increasing cause for concern - he has not been seen since he was bundled into a car by unknown assailants as he left work yesterday. The newspapers premises were cordoned off by armed police yesterday, following the replacement of the capital's Chief of Police by a nominee of the ruling party, and journalists are said to be 'too frightened' to attempt to enter their former workplace.

As reprisals become more indiscriminate, it appears that elements in the ruling faction are taking the opportunity to pay off old scores. It was reported this afternoon that the body of Margaret Thatcher, who as Premier suppressed the so-called "Scargill putsch" in 1985, has been found in woodland near Beaconsfield.

Queen Abdicates As Crisis Spreads

2011-07-18T21:11:00.003Z

LONDON, July 18 - The Queen of England and the United Kingdom today announced her decision to abdicate, following the 'Millygate' phone hacking scandal which has seen a number of prominent individuals step down from their posts.

In a short statement released by the Palace today, the Queen said : "The recent revelations have saddened me more than I can say. I have always tried to do my duty by this country, but on this occasion I have fallen short of the high standards the country rightly expects. It would be wrong to hide behind the fact that I did not know - I ought to have known. It happened on my watch, and the buck stops here - at Buckingham Palace".

Earlier in the day the governing body of English cricket, the MCC, announced that they were to disband themselves - a spokesman saying that "In the current climate, when such appalling disclosures have been made, it is unthinkable that we should continue to devote ourselves to what is in the end only a game. As token of our most earnest and sincere contrition, Lords is to be demolished and the outfield sown with salt."

Curses ...

2011-07-16T07:53:00.002Z

It's grey and somewhat mizzly. Not great weather for watching big boys toys. But isn't that beautiful.

Still, it's forecast to clear up later. Decisions, decisions.

What Do You Call A Trustafarian In A Suit ?

2011-07-16T06:31:00.000Z

Remarkably - nay, amazingly sensible chap is Judge Nicholas Price. I'm just not used to judges wth judgement :

Gilmour, who apologised afterwards for his behaviour, had claimed he had not realised the significance of the Cenotaph - an excuse the judge scoffed at.

"For a young man of your intelligence and education and background to profess to not know what the Cenotaph represents defies belief," he said.

That's a call any reasonably educated Brit could make. Say what you like about Oxbridge, their intake are neither dim nor ignorant. But judges these days seem to be chosen for their gullibility towards the defending counsel and scepticism towards the prosecution.

Remarkable sartorial transformation the law induces. From the tracksuited scally redeemed by a Burtons suit, to the twisted firestarter turned into what looks like an actuarial student.

As the prison gates clang shut, we should draw a veil over this lamentable and amazing episode*.

Fair play to Mr Gilmour Sr. though, standing by his adopted son as a father should. If people were unloved on the grounds that they were self-centred idiots, what a cold world this would be.

* at any rate until the stories of drunken parties and hot and cold running women start emerging from whichever open prison he's in - which will be a few months yet.

Peter King - "Contemptible"

2011-07-15T06:06:00.002Z

No one's less of a Rupert Murdoch fan than I, but believe it or not, there are actually worse people in the world - and when they slither out to join in the kick-fest the harsh light of publicity should be shone on them. When it comes to casting truckloads of stone on the Dirty Digger, let he who has the fewest sins chuck the first barrowful - and let he who is weighed down by sin keep his ugly, bloodstained mouth shut.

"Republican Congressman Peter King - who is chairman of the House homeland security committee and represents a constituency in New York that lost more then 150 people in the 9/11 attacks - called on Wednesday for an FBI inquiry.

"The thought that anyone would have hacked into the phones of either those who were killed, those who were missing, the family members, during that tragic time... is contemptible," he told the BBC on Thursday."

He thinks hacking into phones is bad, but blowing up Brits is cool :

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it."

There's loads more on Wiki - he seems to have been in up to his neck :

King did not meet Gerry Adams until 1984, four years after his dalliance with the IRA began. At this time he was friendly with Michael McKevitt, the common law partner of Bernadette Sands, sister of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. McKevitt was at the time a senior leader of the IRA and was its Quartermaster-General, in charge of arms acquisition. McKevitt planned a massive series of arms smuggling operations of weapons provided to the IRA by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi during the mid-1980s. During this time, King would stay in their home in Co. Louth while visiting Ireland and was also very close to the IRA's former Operations Officer in Belfast, Anto Murray, who was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping a suspected British spy. As Belfast Operations Officer, Murray planned or authorised every IRA bombing, shooting and killing in the city. King would stay with Murray and his wife Lucy during visits to Belfast and after Anto Murray was imprisoned, he hosted Lucy Murray on a tour of the Capitol when she visited the United States.

Nice ...

"He stopped supporting the IRA after being offended by Irish public opposition to the invasion of Iraq"

And I'm not sure why that makes him look like an idiot, but it does.

(He's all over the BBC. They'll use any stick to beat Murdoch - even one with blood all over it.)

Another World

2011-07-13T22:21:00.007Z

Who says we didn't have diversity in the UK long before the Windrush docked?

Oft have I reflected on the differences, say, twixt the Central Belt of Scotland and a Banffshire or Aberdeenshire village.

I was in Manchester in 1974 on the day Glasgow Rangers played United in a friendly. At Victoria Station, I saw a strange sight - all the United fans, as they got off the trains, took off their scarves and put them in their pockets, or zipped their jackets up to the neck to conceal their United allegiance.

This should have been posted last night really, for the 12th. A small fraction of the Rangers support make their way past (I think) the Arndale Centre in Manchester, taking the pretty route to Old Trafford for the 2008 UEFA Cup final (what a pity Tommy Ducks is no more - I think they'd have liked it). Now there are some pretty wild boys in that city - but this is something else :

Admit it, for good or ill, you don't see a sight like that every day in an English city.

The tune is the mid-70s Fields of Athenry*, the words I think are a Loyalist song called "A Father's Advice", accompanied by disparaging references to the late Bobby Sands. Great drumming. It may be an optical illusion or a piece of dust in my eye, but I could have sworn I saw someone with a "**** Catholic Schools" banner...

* composer Pete St John is also responsible for another instant classic - The Rare Old Times, perhaps the only Irish political song that isn't about the English. You really would think there'd be more, given recent events.

The End Times Are Upon Us

2011-07-12T22:46:00.004Z

The Church of England faces being wiped out as a significant national force without an "urgent" campaign to recruit more believers, a report warns. In the last 40 years the number of adult churchgoers has fallen by half while the number of children regularly worshipping in public declined by 80 per cent, the study says.

The Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, the Rt Rev Paul Butler, will present findings to the Church's national assembly, the General Synod, in York on Saturday. Synod members will be urged to vote for a new national drive to recruit more members.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has acknowledged that the Church must devote more energy to increasing the number of regular worshippers over the next five years.

In other news :

"Church of England report calls for affirmative action on race"

"Affirmative action" = the practice formerly known as "racial discrimination".

"The Church of England is to give the go-ahead for the appointment of openly homosexual bishops."

It's one of those strange historical oddities, like Britain being invaded and conquered every thousand years, that the Church of England was born of the adulterous desires of one prince, and on its sick bed condoned the adultery of another.

But the (IMHO terminal) sickness of the Church of England is no cause for rejoicing. It was great once, a noble Church of a kind that we should not dare to raise our voice against. It is fallen, and its cure is beyond us; but I would that it lived, in the hope that it may find one.

UPDATE - the great and good Rev. Peter Mullen :

"Frankly, much of the Church has been mad for decades."

You Couldn't Make It Up ...

2011-07-10T21:43:00.003Z

One of the results of mass low-skilled immigration into both the UK and US economies has been to depress wages, by the simple mechanism of supply and demand. As Marx put it :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

So far so bad for those at the sharp end, so far so good for the people who employ them.

But why stop there ? As long as your income's safe - and let's theorise that you're one of the elite - why not expose a few people higher up the economic food chain to the bracing discipline of "if you don't want to do it, there are plenty of other people ...". After all, you don't pay anywhere near as much for cleaners and clerks as you used to. Why can't you cut the cost of your accountants and engineers?

But how do you do lobby for this without saying why? In the case of the low-skilled imported worker, it was easy - they were "doing the jobs the natives just didn't want to do for £5 an hour", but you needn't mention that last bit. They were doing us a favour by coming here at all - we should be grateful - how would the NHS run or City offices get cleaned otherwise?

So what's the narrative to be?

"Tell you what - and this'll kill you - how about social justice?"

"What ?"

"Well, you know how the incomes of the wealthiest have spiralled away while incomes at the bottom stagnated or declined?"

"Do I ! Great, isn't it !"

"Well, lots of people think it's very bad that we're stonkingly rich while some chav serving in Maccies is a tad penurious. There's something called the Gini coefficient ... but I had this thought. All we have to do is deflect attention down a bit - let's say onto something called 'high-income people' - you know - accountants, engineers, IT, scientists, the analysts and bean-counters - we can define who qualifies - and we can argue that their wages - and hence inequality ratios - are kept artificially high by lack of global competition - no, they're "subsidised by their protection" - no one likes a subsidy - "

"I do - I love 'em. Where would we have been without the bailout? "

"Will you let me finish? - and so we should allow far more high-skilled immigration, because that means greater equality - and that means we can do to their terms and conditions what we've already done at the bottom!"

"You, my son, are a ******* genius"

"But it doesn't stop there. You know how mass immigration's depressed wages in lower-paid jobs - the sort young people often do"

"I might have heard something to that effect ... nonsense of course (cough)"

"Well, we can also argue that their lower incomes indicate lower productivity - and that therefore we really need more high-skill immigrants to provide the productivity the natives just don't want to provide"

"Brilliant"

"And there might even be some truth in the bit about productivity. Between ourselves, you know and I know that some of the people who've come over aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer (anyone who says that is a racist, of course, and we'll say it's down to bad teachers) - so it's possible that the 20-somethings really aren't as productive. Either way, it just means we need more high-skill immigrants."

"Awesome. All we have to do is get the ball rolling."

Obviously, the above is just complete fantasy.

At The Globalist, an interview with former Fed chief Alan Greenspan :

Q. How could immigration reform reduce income inequality?

A. “Most of the debate on income inequality correctly focuses on raising the level of low-income individuals. However, it also works by lowering top-level incomes via more competitive immigration. There is much academic research demonstrating that it is the relative position of people in society that fosters views of ‘fairness,’ not one’s absolute status.”

Q. Turning back to the United States, what demographic shift will have major economic implications?

A. “In the United States, we are in the process of seeing the baby boomers — the most productive, highly skilled, educated part of our labor force — retire. They are being replaced by groups of young workers who have regrettably scored rather poorly in international educational match-ups over the last two decades.”

Q. What else points to the inability of young workers to compete?

A. “Most disturbing is that the average income of U.S. households headed by 25-year-olds and younger has been declining relative to the average income of the baby boomer population. This is a reasonably good indication that the productivity of the younger part of our workforce is declining relative to the level of productivity achieved by the retiring baby boomers. This raises some major concerns about the productive skills of our future U.S. labor force.”

Q. Can the U.S. government counter this trend?

A.“Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow.”

Q. What needs to change with respect to U.S. immigration?

A. “My view is that we should give a green card to every immigrant who gets an advanced degree in the United States. The proportion of those people who will be terrorists is miniscule. That would have a major positive economic impact.”

Attock Fort

2011-07-10T07:03:00.000Z

The gateway to the Khyber road, the fort at Attock on the Indus. Formerly spanned by a bridge of boats, the river is now crossed by the Peshawar-Kabul road.

View Larger Map

It's an impressive structure, in an impressive setting.

A marble slab inscription set above the inner north gateway of Attock Fort bears the completion date 991 AH (1583 AD). The work was supervised by Shamsuddin Khawafi. The fort is purely a military post designed to hold the river crossing and guard the bridge of boats. The fortifications are built mostly of local shady rock set in thick lime mortar. For arches, vaulting, domes, and the external string-course, small lakhauri brick has been used. The original gateways are of sandstone resembling that found at Taraki in Jhelum District. An interesting feature of the fortifications is a narrow gallery contrived high up in the wall to give the defenders head and back cover. The greater part of the gallery has a vaulted roof, but in one stretch, thick, flat roofing slabs replace the brick vaulting. The battlements, loop-holes and machicolations bear evidence of changes to meet new needs arising from changing armaments.

Akbar not only built the fort, but also established a ferry and a mint and settled a colony of boatsmen from Hindustan, the descendants of whom still live in Mallahitola. The place soon became important for transit trade. To meet the needs of the traders, a serai (inn) was also built. On the road side and up on the hill near a spring there developed several places for ziarat (pilgrimage). Mosques and temples were established up to meet the religious demands of the people. All these buildings have deteriorated.

Picture and info via the excellent and informative urbanpk.com.

Saturday Night Music - Two Weeks Last Summer

2011-07-09T22:42:00.003Z

Way back - and in the context of Rugby Union anthems, I noted that in music form can be as important as content.

An illustration follows.

I can't remember if this version of Dave Cousins' song "Two Weeks Last Summer" was recorded in a two-track studio in Tivoli in August 1967, or whether it was done in one of those "make your own record" booths, like the one in 'Brighton Rock' where Pinky records a tender message for his soon to be ex-girlfriend. The speed certainly sounds a little odd. But the whole thing sounds throwaway, a play around, not at all memorable. In fact if you play it, you might spoil the second version.

Three years on, a certain Mr Joe Boyd is in charge of production. What an incredible transformation. Every gabbled phrase from the first version is considered, deliberate - the simple accompaniment is just right, neither understated nor intruding on the wonderful vocals - the whole thing's beautiful. And this wasn't released for 25 years !

You can get the 3-CD box set from whence this comes for only £146 on Amazon. Naturlich, my Youtube version is lowish-fi, that her daughter and grandchildren may benefit. But it's still gorgeous.

While we're on the Divine Ms Denny, here's a little something showing the baleful effects of the cultural revolution on spoken English. Nowt wrong with the London accent, whether Norf or Sarf - and it's sad to see it being replaced by twatois among the young. But why adopt it if it ain't yours? Following the example set by middle-class LSE business studies student Mick Jagger, Sandy goes Mockney.

Quote Of The Day

2011-07-09T10:32:00.004Z

Ross in the comments :

"I was so disgusted at the NOTW's behaviour that I rang them to complain but couldn't get through- so I just left a message on my voicemail instead."

(my son says "that's been around for ages, Dad" - well I hadn't heard it!)

The Wisdom of the Brits

2011-07-08T20:44:00.007Z

Let's face it. No one cared two hoots about someone picking up Burnt Umber's (or was it Raw Sienna's ?) or Andy Gray's voicemail, or getting Max Mosley's ersatz wardress to give an interview about his outre sexual tastes.

Yet the legal system of England and Wales seemed to care a great deal.

By contrast, everyone is rightly outraged at a reporter picking up a missing girl's voicemail - not to mention the voicemails of dead soldiers families. It's true that not one in fifty of us ever changes the default voicemail code - is it '0000' or '1111' ? - so it's not exactly a difficult thing to do - but neither is robbing small children or elderly people - and they're pretty disgusting crimes.

Looks like Murdoch is cynically throwing the NOTW staff to the wolves, while keeping on then-editor Rebekah Wade, who should, along with Andy Coulson be carrying the can - all to keep the bid for full control of Sky alive.

I guess it may not be too bad for some of the staff - if they can take the redundancy and then sign on straight away to work for "Sun-day"(© Laban Tall 2011).

The Guardian and BBC are loving it - loving it. I've had to forget about Radios Four and Five on my current three-hours-plus daily commute - because all I hear is Coulson/Cameron/Coulson/Cameron.

But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and the Guardian and BBC are right for all the wrong reasons. The Dirty Digger may be a great newspaperman. But he's an enemy of Britain who's done great damage to this country's culture (damage, to be fair, only made possible because of the 'creative destruction' of predecessors like BBC boss Hugh Greene) even while his papers have produced some great journalism - including great investigative journalism.

God willing the Sky bid will fail - although I wouldn't put money on it. And ideally a Biblical plague - frogs, boils, blood, whatever - should afflict the UK executives of News International, until all UK operations close and only blue plaques at Wapping and Bouverie Street mark its passing.

Only one cloud no bigger than a man's hand. What if Murdoch's difficulty is Desmond's opportunity?

UPDATE - surely time to impound all the servers and get the IT forensics boys out ?

Police are examining claims that a News International executive may have expunged millions of emails from an archive believed to date back to 2005. The Guardian reported that ‘massive quantities’ of the archive appear to have been deleted on two separate occasions, the most recent in January of this year.

A handy hint for Mr Plod - News International will, like all large organisations dependent on IT, have a DR (disaster recovery) site somewhere - probably run by a third party, usually not directly accessible to most of their IT staff, and where regular backup copies of server data are stored. It may have been overwritten when the copies were refreshed, but one never knows. On the other hand the operative charged with the (at this stage purely theoretical) task may have done a thorough job. But if an executive really did do it, the data may still be recoverable quite easily. There's more to deleting data than hitting 'Delete'.

New Club For Bradford

2011-07-08T20:36:00.003Z

Bradford is to be home to a new high-profile club promoting positive pride among British Pakistanis.

Tonight sees the launch of the Pakistan Club, which already has the backing of big names including cricketing legend Imran Khan, politician Lord Nazir Ahmed, business tycoon Nighat Awan OBE and Bradford’s Lord Mayor, Councillor Naveeda Ikram.

This afternoon, international racing driver Adam Khan will be in Centenary Square signing autographs before the official launch event at City Hall which will be attended by about 130 people from across the UK.

When I looked at the T&A website earlier, the item had 92 comments, but they've all gone now. I wonder what they could have been about ?

Anyone from across the UK can join although it will be based in Bradford and be built in phases which include a restaurant, a private cinema, lounge, separate gyms for men and women – eventually there will also be a banqueting hall and library. The club’s founders are actively looking for a suitable site in the city to either build the club premises from scratch or to re-develop.

Membership is open to all Pakistanis or people of Pakistani origin, says Mr Ahmed - as long as they are aged over 18.

Alas, no one from Bradford English Club was available for comment.

Imaginative Judge

2011-07-07T22:01:00.002Z

David Wood, sitting at Newcastle Crown Court, on the conviction of two men for selling the stolen Sunderland war memorial plaque, which commemorates Sunderland’s Second World War victims who died when the city was bombed, to a scrap merchant.

"I imagine you both are thoroughly ashamed of what you have done."

He's wasted as a judge. With a vivid imagination like that, he should be a sci-fi writer - or a defence solicitor.

Globalisation In One Country

2011-07-05T06:12:00.002Z

"In a blow to the government's plans for Britain to manufacture its way out of recession, Bombardier has placed its UK operations under review after the Department for Transport awarded a contract to make carriages on London's Thameslink rail route to Siemens of Germany, bypassing Britain's last remaining train factory. The company has called an 8am press briefing on Tuesday morning at its Derby headquarters. Senior shop stewards will be briefed on job losses in time for the end of the night shift at 6am."

I have not done the digging, but I would be amazed if the vast majority of French rolling stock was not manufactured in France, and the vast majority of German stock in Germany. (Strangely enough, railway nerdism doesn't translate into Web nerdism very well, although there are sites like this.) Only this morning someone on the Today prog was explaining how European governments can take 'other factors' into account, industrial strategy etc, when State enterprises hand out contracts. Not here.

Labour will doubtless be bashing the Tories over this, but this is just the continuation of existing policy. No government's put the British people first since 1992 (if that) - why expect Cameron to buck the trend ?

Woman Wins Ladies Singles Shock Horror

2011-07-02T14:54:00.005Z

What's women's tennis coming to, when someone who doesn't seem to have spent the last five years on the weights bench (or the steroids), and who doesn't grunt or squeal like a pig on every point, can win a major tournament ?

You never know, she might even be straight as well. I know, I'm expecting too much.

Entitled Thieves of all Countries Unite !

2011-06-23T06:49:00.002Z

from the comments at Steve Sailer's (the riot and looting were because of a lost hockey game):

"steve you may want to take a look at this insane rant, i mean, apology, that one of the asian vancouver rioters who got caught, has posted on her blog. this is the original post she made, before later going back and totally editing out everything because she realized she was a moron.

http://tinyurl.com/4226z6r

and the edited one:

http://tinyurl.com/65jgaw6

we will never really grasp how bonkers her real, original "apology" was. there are so many lines in there that are classic. but note the overwhelming use of modern victimology speak. generic (criminals are the real victims, i'm the hero here), racial (i'm non-white, back off), and sexual (i'm a woman, BACK OFF). "

In the first link, to quote the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers, 'there's enough material for a whole conference'.

A Forgotten Episode

2011-06-22T22:19:00.004Z

Harpymarx was describing Srebrenica as the "worst massacre post-ww2" the other day, and Laban linked to a host of worse massacres, including "10,000 Arabs massacred by black Africans in Zanzibar in 1964".

The highly religious Okello was convinced he had been given orders in his dreams by God to break the powerful position of the Arabs and to found the revolutionary state on Zanzibar and Pemba. On the night before the “revolution”, Okello gave his men the order to kill all Arabs between 18 and 25 years of age, to spare pregnant and elderly women, and not to rape virgins.

The coup led to the poorly-known massacre of between 5,000 and 20,000 Arabs, whose families had been living in Zanzibar for centuries, between January 18 and 20. Footage of the massacre can be seen in Gualtiero Jacopetti's film Africa Addio.

Now of course the Arabs were descendents of slave traders, while the black Africans were descendants of their victims. But isn't there a word for killing people on the grounds of their descent? They can't be blamed for the sins of their forebears.

I'd forgotten that I'd read an eye-witness account of the massacre, in Ranulph Fiennes' excellent "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread".

Fiennes is recruiting in Ziki, Oman, for his 'Recce Patrol' - part of the Sultan's anti-guerilla forces staffed by Brit officers on secondment :

A six-foot Zanzibari with a handshake that crushed my fingers and a head of fine black fuzz wished to join for original reasons. Recce Platoon had more machine guns per man than the Companies. And Mubarreq Obeid - for that was the big negro's name - had been unable to have a machine gun in his Company. With such a weapon, he said, his thick lips compressed in a snarl, he could kill many Chinese shooyooen (communists) in Dhofar and that was his desire. I protested that there were no Chinese communists in Arabia let alone Dhofar, but he was adamant.

"You are wrong, Sahb. They are behind all the troubles everywhere. Soon there will be many like locusts in Dhofar. In Zanzibar they talked to the African how he must throw out the Arab. Then, seven years ago, they rose and murdered all they could catch; slitting their throats by night as they slept. Some of us escaped to the dhows but my parents were chased along the beach by a crowd - although my mother was African. They ran into the sea to swim to the boats but some of the crowd followed, caught them by the hair, and drowned them.

So I, Mubarreq, have no parents because of the Chinese rats."

When he had gone I looked at the others. All nodded their assent.

The book's interesting as showing the 180 degree inversion of the Left in relation to Islam since those early 70s days. The Chinese Maoist and Soviet Communist trainers of the Dhofari guerillas told them that Islam was an invention of the British, a device cooked up between the Brits and their corrupt rulers to confuse their minds and keep them subservient. The guerillas were taught to kill and torture those who put their religion before the needs of the revolution. I'll dig a few other quotes out when time permits.

Apologies

2011-06-22T17:00:00.000Z

For light blogging. New work, steep learning curve, long hours, longish travel.

Inshallah at some stage the learning cliff-face will be conquered and I'll emerge either into a fertile plain of relative competence, or a bleak, windswept plateau of not quite up to it. I reckon either way it'll be another three or four weeks.

One or two things that caught my eye.

Blackburn - twinned with Abbottabad. I thought the point of these school twinning arrangements was for the children to learn about other, unfamiliar cultures - in which case why choose Abbottabad, whose culture will be familiar to the pupils of Daisyfield School, most of whom are of Pakistani heritage? If they wanted to expose the children to an unfamiliar culture, why not a school in, say, Petersfield or Winchester?

The Conservative pledge to cut immigration looks like another one of David Cameron's cast-iron guarantees.

"Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures. "

Three points here. One is that the counting immigration only in net terms is a neat way of ignoring the demographic transformation illustrated in the Blackburn link above. If all the native English were to emigrate and be replaced by incomers, net immigration would be zero and the BBC would doubtless headline that immigration WAS zero. To a large extent headline immigration figures have been reduced by the massive UK brain drain, as young natives with degrees leave to be replaced by young Afghans and Somalis.

Two is that the left and IPPR argument - "they're only here for the booming economy and they'll go home when there's a downturn" doesn't seem to have reflected reality. I'm shocked.

Three is that Cameron is so serious about cutting immigration that 5,000 jobs are going at the UK border agency. While that agency is useless, corrupt and incompetent, I'm not sure increasing its workload and reducing its staffing levels is going to improve it.

The TB jab returns? Only a few short years after declaring victory over tuberculosis, we're importing it at such a rate we've got to start all over again.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "We recognise that tuberculosis is a serious issue in London, particularly in more deprived boroughs and among the migrant community."

"Crucially, both the public and health care professionals need to be aware that TB is back, and growing fast."

26.5% of primary school pupils are now ethnic minority, up from 23% in 2008. The destruction of what was, with all its faults, one of the best places in the world to live continues.

Still, say not the struggle naught availeth, what ?

The Power of the Dog

2011-06-12T19:12:00.001Z

Ross's dog is gravely ill.

I suppose if you don't have a dog it is hard to understand why anyone would be so upset ( that isn't an insult or a judgement just a statement of fact) and if you do there isn't much need to explain.

As so often he's spot-on. I remember in my teens a girlfriend walking through the door one Saturday morning and bursting into floods of tears - and it wasn't the state of my room.

"What's the matter ?"

"They've taken her to the vet to be put down !" - 'her' being the companion of her childhood, a thousand walks and a hundred days out in the country with parents. But I didn't think like that at the time - I was properly sympathetic and held her till my shoulders were soaked in tears - but it was only a dog, a nice enough dog, but still a dog. At this distance memory fails, but I probably assumed it was just a girl thing, what with being more emotionally open and all that.

The same blindness afflicted me with regard to the effect of children, although I think I wasn't alone in this. Our single lives were so endlessly fascinating, what friends were doing, who was with whom, the places to go, the people, the parties, that we looked on people who'd got children slightly pityingly, as if they'd been afflicted with a crippling disease (and it IS crippling to a wild social life, although I know a few exceptional people and couples who have just carried on - I'm just not exceptional) which not only curtailed their social life but made them talk about children an awful lot - as if that topic was of any interest at all compared to the important things.

You live and learn. Hopefully. Now I feel more that becoming a parent is gaining access to the secret heart of life and the long chain of familial links down the generations. Not that it doesn't have its many, many drawbacks. Susan and I looked at each other one day after #2 had arrived and said 'whatever did we do with all that time we had?".

I digress. So I finally learned about why parents are interested in kids, but still didn't get the dog thing. Our neighbours were childless but treated their dogs like their children - they slept upstairs and their doings were part of our everyday chats. Most odd, we thought.

Dog lovers ...

I'd taken my firstborn up to visit his grandpa, and grandpa and I were out walking with grandpa's dog and the pushchair plus baby. I loved that new dad bit, with bonny boy getting cooed over by all and sundry ... the checkout queue turning into a little love fest ... and he WAS a beautiful baby - he's 21 now and six foot.

Lady approaching on the pavement, breaks into happy smile :

"Oh, what a beautiful ..."

(Dad smiles modestly... he's getting used to this ...)

"Dog!"

(Smile vanishes instantly)

Then our youngest went off to Big School, and it left a bit of a gap in Susan's life. Suddenly there were no babies to care for - and she likes caring for things. One day she went off and returned with this chap (and promptly had him snipped, to my horror). Apparently Labradors were very even tempered, good with children and an all round ideal first dog for a family with no dog-owning history on either side, at least since our great-grandparents were on the farm. What's impressive is that AFAIK, apparently all dogs are descended from domesticated wolves. Just shows what breeding will do.

The kids were thrilled, promised to walk him etc etc - didn't last and soon Mum and Dad were doing most of the walks. But the exercise is great - he and we usually get about three miles a day in - it's good for an ageing chap with a desk job. I've learned most of the footpaths and circular routes round the house.

Labradors seem to eat anything - three week old bird carcases, stones, deer poo, sheep poo, horse poo - and they roll in fox poo, which is not a nice smell and means an hour shampooing him in the garden (then a shower and complete change of clothes). On the good side they love apples, blackberries, plums, the farmer's turnips - healthy eaters.

He once found a rotting, rank dead rabbit inside a plastic bag, scoffed it, then sat in his crate in the kitchen and disgorged the lot some hours later. Not a nice clean-up job - the smell at close quarters was truly evil.

They're meant to have more acid in their stomachs than humans to enable digestion of bad food - but ours pushes that way beyond the limits. The Muslims are right enough when they consider dogs unclean. They're filthy dirty creatures.

But they have a way of wrapping themselves round the heart. Always pleased to have human company, playful, cheery. All the family quickly grew to love him - even grandma, very much a non-dog person, has a soft spot.

October last year, grandma is round for Sunday tea/dinner, I'm just out in the garden using the last of the light at ten to six.

"Can he stay out here with you ? "

"OK"

The call for tea. I call him - he's not anywhere in the garden. Round the house - no sign.

"Has he come in ?"

"No"

"He's not in the garden"

Poor grandma. She was left alone in the house while everyone emptied into the darkening garden, calling, then after a quick conference and grabbing of mobiles, two cars head slowly in opposite directions, and the boys are in the local wood with torches. Daughter and I take the car across rough farm tracks, along the routes of his favourite walks, stopping, scanning the gloomy fields, calling him, on again, repeat.

Forty minutes later it's pitch black and the cars are back. The boys have been right through the woods to the fields on the other side, which we've also scanned from the cars as best we could, then back again. Up and down the village - again - half expecting to see a limp form in the headlights. Not a sight or sound.

Tea at seven in almost total silence. The only thing I can compare it with was the first family Christmas without my grandmother.

Eight o'clock. He's been gone two hours. We've been out in the garden and around the house again. Nothing. The feeling that he's gone for good starts to solidify.

Nine o'clock. My daughter's standing at the back door, calling his name. Nothing. I feel she's wasting her time, but in solidarity I go to the side door to call. Open it - he's standing on the step.

God knows where he'd been. One moment of tremendous pleasure - calling my daughter into the kitchen, without telling her who was there, then watching the ecstatic reunion - the boys hearing the noise and tumbling in, happy uproar. "For he was lost, and is found".

Once again Mr Kipling has the words :

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find - it's your own affair
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone - wherever it goes - for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-term loan is as bad as a long
So why in Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

It's an ill wind ...

2011-06-12T18:09:00.001Z

I took an elderly relative out for the afternoon to Bristol, and on the way in this morning thought I'd call in at the shops in Bath. It was chucking it down.

The centre of town gave the impression that a massive wet t-shirt competition had just finished - most impressive. Turned out to be Race For Life day.

Worth A Read

2011-06-07T20:42:00.003Z

The Far Outliers blog is currently posting lots of excerpts on some of the African unpleasantnesses of the last 20-odd years.

I think I'd take issue with this, though - from Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns (Public Affairs, 2011), Kindle Loc. 130-146:

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a vast country, the size of western Europe and home to sixty million people. For decades it was known for its rich geology, which includes large reserves of cobalt, copper, and diamonds, and for the extravagance of its dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but not for violence or depravity.

As I understood the history, it was only when Mobutu pretty much cornered the market in violence that the Congo was peaceful. In the period between independence and military coup, it was the basket-case it's been ever since.

Sunday Night Music

2011-06-05T22:09:00.004Z

The guitar's got a bit of Tumbler-era John Martyn about it, the vocals are very Bon Iver, the whole effect is not bad at all. Via my son, Bombay Bicycle Club.

Blogging may be light for the next week or so. A pity, as there's a lot to blog about.

Friday Night Music - Ramblin Man

2011-06-03T18:27:00.001Z

Ever since I discovered Hank Williams I've been convinced that no one could top his versions of songs like 'Lost Highway' and 'Ramblin Man'.

I don't think his grandson, tattooed alt.country/psychobilly/punk metallist and all-round rude boy Hank III, quite tops it either - something about Hank I's slow, stately, deliberate delivery. But it's a very fine version in itself. Hank III is supported by veteran grungers The Melvins. (Del Shannon's pretty straight take isn't bad either.)

The Call of the Pipes

2011-06-01T22:45:00.008Z

We're a bit strapped for cash, like so many families, so alas we pulled the mooted summer trip to Iceland, a place I've always wanted to visit and which is still pretty expensive - what must prices have been like before the crisis ? Instead we're going somewhere else I've never been, the Asturias region of northern Spain.

It was Cornwall for the last two years and Gower the year before - Susan insisted we get off the island this year. My suggestion of Arran alas was howled down.

The Spanish probably need what little dosh we have more than the Icelanders anyway. Iceland pulled the plug on its banks, took a big hit on its housing market and currency, but is now recovering rather well. The UK hosed its banks with taxpayer cash, propped up our insane property values, and we're in for a lost decade of stagflation.

Our young people are unemployed or under-employed, graduates are still living at home on £14,000 a year jobs at the age of 28. At the other end of the employment spectrum, fifty-something former project managers have been sat at home for three years, firing off ten CVs a day. Comment in today's Telegraph :

"I don’t know any extended family not supporting a distressed, disillusioned, despairing young person - often with a degree or good qualifications. And maybe sympathising with an older person, desperately jobseeking after redundancy.”

Our children, bar a fortunate few, will not be able to own the roof over their heads, something my and my parents generation could take for granted. We're going back to the days of my grandmother, who lived in rented accommodation all her life.

But compared with the Spanish, we have minor problems. 43% youth unemployment ! When you consider Spain isn't exactly flush with youths since the demographic collapse post-Franco, that's quite an achievement for Mr Zapatero's Socialists aka "the most loathsome government in Europe".

I really am surprised there's not mass civil disobedience. Their 1930s forebears - right or left - wouldn't have stood for it.

Where was I ? Dunno. But in solidarity with the young unemployed of Spain (sort of), we’ve booked a house this summer near the magnificently named Villaviciosa, famed as one of the very last towns to surrender to Franco’s forces, as well as being the birthplace of bagpipe maestro José Ángel Hevia Velasco. Be interesting to test the political waters.

Here's the man himself. Very Celtic - didn't realise the influences in that part of Spain - and it's cider country, too. The massed pipers at the end could be the Men of Lonach. You get a feel for the forebears of the Native Brits, making their way North from the Iberian Refuge as the last Ice Age glaciers retreated before them.

Invincible Ignorance

2011-05-31T16:45:00.002Z

Polly Toynbee on "chavs" :

"Wrapped inside this little word is the quintessence of Britain's great social fracture. Over the last 30 years the public monstering of a huge slice of the population by luckier, better-paid people has become commonplace. This is language from the Edwardian era of unbridled snobbery. When safely reproduced in Downton Abbey, as the lady sneering at the scullery maid or the landowner bullying his workers, we are encouraged to look back smugly as if these shocking class differences were long gone. The form and style may have changed – but the reality of extreme inequality and self-confident class contempt is back...

Chav is used to mix together anyone of low status the speaker wishes to despise - and that includes the entire working class - on matters of taste as well as morals. Just go to the dreadful ChavTowns site and see how the two are elided."

Polly is so far off the truth you wonder if her ignorance is deliberate. She hears some posh person (in this case a Lib Dem politico tweeting unwisely) using the term and conjures up a conspiracy to demonise an entire working class.

The contributors to ChavTowns are overwhelmingly themselves working class people (and by the spelling and grammar, people who have been failed by our comprehensive system).

Working class people detest the chav/underclass far more than middle or upper-middle class people do, because they live among them and are exposed to their behaviour on a daily basis. That's why the contributions to ChavTowns are so bitter, angry and heartfelt.

Scarborough

2011-05-30T17:38:00.004Z

The great Dalrymple has been at it again, taking aim at Scarborough. He should have gone to Whitby - plenty of impoverishment of spirit there, too, but in a more picturesque setting.

But there is no disguising the very considerable impoverishment of the town, an impoverishment that is actually characteristic of a high proportion of the country. This impoverishment is as much of the spirit as economic: nowhere in the world (at least nowhere known to me, including very many poorer places) do you see such a concentration of people who have given up on themselves, or rather, who never had any self-respect to give up on.

What one sees is a purely materialist society that is not even very good materialism, for it does not promote even those mental and moral disciplines that promote material success. A large proportion of the population has been left to the mercies of a popular culture whose main characteristic is the willing suspension of intelligence, and which does not merely fail to inculcate refinement, grace, elegance and the desire for improvement, but actively prevents them and causes them to be feared and despised.

I remember that my first awareness of Dalrymple was outrage in the Wolverhampton Express and Star and Brum Evening Mail at a piece he wrote some ten years back, on the new art gallery in Walsall.

Councillors in Walsall have leapt to the town's defence after a critic writing in an American magazine described it as like "Ceaucescu's Romania with fast food outlets". Walsall council leader Mike Bird dismissed as nonsense claims published on the internet that the Black Country was one of the "most depressing areas of urban devastation" in the world.

If you've been to Walsall lately (I have) you'll know that his description was harsh but fair.

I digress. Among the outraged defenders of Scarborough in the Spectator comments, the dissenting voice of one Harry Hutton.

"A great article from Dalrymple. No one with any self-respect or decency would live in Scarborough. The inhabitants are dirty, dishonest, gap-toothed swine.
My family left Scarborough when I was five, to seek a better life in the Gaza Strip. My parents were aid workers, and I spent my childhood in Palestine, Somalia, Yorkshire and the Congo. I met some rough diamonds in Mogadishu, let me tell you, but I never truly saw a society in collapse, where savages have the upper hand, until I returned to Scarborough. I was beaten and robbed by the villainous local peasants within an hour of getting off the train, then they tied me to a mule and I was dragged through a turnip field.
You simply can't treat people like that and expect to have a thriving tourist trade. Not for nothing did King John describe the town as "a weeping pustule'' on his realm."

Could These Stories By Any Chance Be Related ?

2011-05-27T07:19:00.000Z

Karl Marx, 1847 :

“The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labour as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it”

Story 1:

Net migration in to the UK soared by almost half last year and is now close to the record levels of 2005. It is the fifth quarter in a row that net immigration has risen signalling a worrying upward trend. And two of the main drivers were a slump in emigration and a sharp rise in Eastern Europeans coming to the UK for work – two areas that will not be affected by the Government’s annual cap or other immigration measures.

: The number of foreign workers increased by 1.7 million in the last decade and accounted for all the increase in employment levels over the period.

: Work visas increased by six per cent in the year to March 2011

: Asylum claims increased by 11 per cent

: Migrants granted settlement in the UK increased by four per cent

Strange. I seem to remember being told that it was the booming UK economy which was the lure, that we should think of mass immigration as a tribute to our economic success, and that anyway, they'd all go home if there should be a slowdown. Most odd.

Story 2 :

The average wage taken home by 11 million British workers will remain 'roughly the same' until at least 2015, experts have warned. Think-tank Resolution Foundation said low and middle-income earners were not likely to benefit from the expected economic recovery. It predicted workers' pay in four years time would be the same as in 2001.

The Contradictions Inherent In One Sentence

2011-05-26T18:45:00.000Z

At Comment Is Free :

"The likely indictment of John Edwards for misuse of campaign funds is the final blow for a rare champion of economic justice"

Against The Odds

2011-05-26T18:44:00.001Z

Anna Davis, the Standard's Education correspondent (who describes an undergraduate as a a schoolgirl), reports :

A London schoolgirl praised by Michelle Obama during her visit to Oxford told today of the First Lady's "unbelievable presence". Clarissa Pabi, 20, who grew up in Islington and is now president of the Oxford Poetry Society, was hailed by Mrs Obama for succeeding against the odds.

During her speech at Oxford University, the US President's wife told pupils from Miss Pabi's old school: "If you start to doubt yourselves, I want you to remember Clarissa. Remember her story if mine does not resonate. Success is not about our background - Clarissa knows that."

Miss Pabi, educated at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington and now studying English at Oxford, said: "It was unbelievable being in her presence and hearing her talk."

What an inspiring story. I presume Clarissa's parents, only semi-literate, raised her in dire poverty - but the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School brought out her full potential.

Yes ?

Miss Pabi was inspired to go to university by her mother, who has a doctorate in chemistry. Her father and grandparents were educated at university and her younger brother is at the University of East London.

Hmm. I don't know if Mrs Obama was just badly briefed, but if you could draw any moral at all from the story (to date) of Clarissa Pabi, it would surely be that success is about your background.

Those Dreadful Tory Cuts

2011-05-24T16:31:00.005Z

"Spending in April was 5 per cent higher than a year ago at £54.1 billion. This was mainly caused by a 26 per cent rise in interest payments to £1 billion as the Government services its growing debts and interest rates rise along with inflation.

The Government's deficit reduction plans were dealt a blow today after official figures revealed that last month's borrowing figures were the highest ever recorded for the month of April.
Public borrowing, excluding financial interventions such as bank bail-outs, hit £10 billion, compared with £7.3 billion the previous year, said the Office for National Statistics (ONS)."

I don't understand. Gilt rates don't seem to have risen - where's this extra 5% spending coming from ? And anyway, 'Daily Mail Reporter' can't do maths - if interest payments rose 26% to £1bn that means they rose by £206 million. If spending rose by 5% to £54.1bn then it was £51.5bn a year ago - a rise of £2.6bn, of which less than 10% is attributable to increased interest payments.

So where's the extra spending going ?

Daily Mail really are no good. Page 4 of this pdf shows :

Central government account
April Financial year
2011 2010 2010 /11

Current expenditure
Interest 4.6 3.6 43.2
Net social benefits 14.7 14.0 173.2
Other curr expndture 34.8 34.0 387.1
Total curr expndture 54.1 51.5 603.5

So interest is £1bn more, social benefits £0.7bn more, other £0.8bn more, total £2.5bn extra of which 40% is down to increased interest - presumably not because of increased rates but because of increased gilt issuance.

You expect most journalists, as Arts grads, to be functionally innumerate. But they could have found someone who could add up for this story.

(sorry the formatting's no good. And H/T Brian for the pdf)

More Grooming ... on a Sunday afternoon

2011-05-22T18:17:00.001Z

They had picked up the girl – whom they had never met before – after seeing her in a drunken state outside the care home as they drove around the city.

The girl fell unconscious inside the car due to her intoxicated state, but when she awoke she found herself in a state of undress.

OK, maybe this one shouldn't be under grooming but a more serious offence - although the two are often related.

"Just because a child does not live with their parents, it does not mean no one cares"

Unfortunately it all too often does. Care homes have always been a target-rich environment for predatory males both inside and outside the institutions.

In other Lancastrian news, this week's prize for politically convenient ignorance goes to Detective Inspector Dave Massay of Oldham CID :

A 27-year-old woman was walking along Cooper Street in Oldham when a small white van pulled up. The passenger grabbed her arm and swore at her, telling her to get in the car. The woman managed to escape from his grip and ran off. The incident happened between 10.10pm and 10.20pm on Wednesday, May 18.

Hmm. Two young men attempting to abduct a young woman at ten o'clock at night. What could possibly be their motivation?

Detective Inspector Dave Massay, based at Oldham CID, said: "The intentions of these men are not clear: they might have been playing a prank and trying to frighten people for their amusement and, in this case, they have succeeded in terrifying this woman.

I guess he'd rather be thought stupid than suggest the most likely possibility.

(I wouldn't want to give you the impression that every groomer, abductor or rapist in Greater Manchester is Asian. Far from it. The native Brits have a fair bit of form - especially those evil knife-carriers - what ever happened to the mandatory jail sentence? But there is a tendency, no more than that, although I'm sure a statistically significant one, for the varieties of Mancunian crime to reflect the diversity of the area.)

Up To A Point, Mr Allison

2011-05-22T10:55:00.004Z

Lincoln Allison at the SAU blog is touring that fascinating country, India :

So there are two Indias, as there have always been two versions of Italy. One bristles with enterprise, the other with Soviet stupor. There are the hotels which cannot do enough for you and the tailor who will do a perfect alteration in ten minutes flat. And there is (or was) the guy who sold me my first Indian railway ticket. I slowly and dismally became aware that there was nothing in it for him if I reached Pune, but a certain amount of power, satisfaction and schadenfreude if he could stop me. Of course, he probably just wanted a bribe; the more complicated the form or procedure, the more likely you are to make a mistake which you will have to pay for as atonement or rectification. And seen in its broad context corruption is not a redistributive mechanism because the big guys do it big, the little guys do it little and the poor don't get to do it at all.

I think Indian enterprise will triumph in the end, but I'm an optimist.

He certainly is :

I don't buy the idea that India has put the Raj behind it, an idea which is dutifully trotted out by many western writers... I'd have liked them to sit with me on the Shatabadi Express last week, Delhi to Amritsar, first class compartment, with four English-language newspapers to choose from, all stuffed with IPL cricket reports, all to be digested with the free Indian Railways Morning Tea biscuits as you listen to the English conversations going on between Punjabi and Hindi speakers.
It may not be the India that the post-1858 full imperialists imagined? I don't know. But it is surely a world that more Liberal or earlier, less racist, imperialists would have happily conceived. It involves the greatest cultural exchange in history because they got cricket and we got curry, without any of us losing what we had in the first place. Globalisation at its best and anybody who tells me that curry is un-English should get as short shrift as anyone who says that cricket is un-Indian.

Globalisation at its best, eh ? A 50-50 swap from which we all benefit and no one loses?

Well, none of us have lost what we had in the first place - except the former native inhabitants of large parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester and larger parts of Leicester, Bradford, the Black Country and the former mill towns of the Pennines. Over the last 30 years I've been able to observe first-hand massive demographic change in Bradford and Birmingham.

During the Raj there were doubtless similar demographic changes to a few very small areas of India and Pakistan - I have a 1902 Guide to Simla with maps showing large areas of housing which could, from the names, be in suburban Surrey. But these involved very small numbers of people in a very large country - and were substantially reversed after independence. The demographic changes in England (and a few towns in Wales and Scotland) involve the movement of very large numbers into a very small country, and not only is reversal very unlikely, but the process, with its accompanying loss of native habitat, shows no sign of abating.