"No Irish Need Apply"

The (American) liberal myth of 'No Irish Need Apply'.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, archivist, or museum curator has ever located one; no photograph or drawing exists. No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one. This is especially strange since signs were primarily directed toward these others: the signs said that employment was available here and invited Yankees, French-Canadians, Italians and any other non-Irish to come inside and apply. The business literature, both published and unpublished, never mentions NINA or any policy remotely like it. The newspapers and magazines are silent. The courts are silent. There is no record of an angry youth tossing a brick through the window that held such a sign. Have we not discovered all of the signs of an urban legend?

As every Brit liberal knows, the streets of 1950s London were full of 'No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish' signs. Yet on the Web there's only one photo which looks as if it could be authentic - source unknown to me - and in an admittedly cursory trawl of the web I've not found any contemporary reports of them - just hundreds of "are we returning to the days of" blog posts and dozens of "my father came to London at a time when" pieces. You really would think that it might turn up in Hansard - I must take a look. Maybe it's yet another liberal myth aka libel against the native Brits. Not that there aren't similar signs to be seen in London to this day - only strangely, no one makes a fuss about them. Can't imagine why.



















(cropped photo from ruskin51's photostream)

Now I've got no real problems with an Asian family wishing to share their house with people of their own culture or ethnicity - or even rent it. You want as tenants/lodgers people you can trust, and as the late Emperor Claudius puts it 'the knee is nearer than the shin'. For good reasons, people tend to trust people who are like themselves, and as Robert Putnam points out :

"the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone – from their next-door neighbour to the mayor"

But these signs are presumably illegal under British law. I suppose the reason we're not seeing these cases in the court reports is that the law was designed to stop natives putting up these kinds of advert.

Media 101

He moves to the left.

"On Economy, Voters Move to the Left in Hong Kong"

But they lurch to the right.

"EU Voters Lurch to the Right"

"We Don't Need No Piece of Paper From The City Hall"

Raoul Moate's brother (by a different father) speaks. Nature, nurture, or what ? He's a tax officer with a Masters degree.

The brothers had different fathers, but neither was told who they were. Raoul made it very clear ('I haven't got a Dad' - LT), in his last stand in Rothbury, that this was something he cared a great deal about, and, even though Angus understands that the 70s were different, that there was far more stigma about babies born out of wedlock, his fury at the situation arrives almost on the same breath.

"I feel very strongly that a child has a right to know who his father is. I don't think a selfish woman has a right to have a baby as her own plaything. I think there are massive indications there for somebody's identity in adult life. We weren't given the opportunity, for what I believe to be very selfish reasons." He has since discovered who his own father is, though he has no intention of contacting him; apparently, after all the publicity, someone has turned up claiming to be Raoul's. "I think it's a crying shame he's only turned up now Raoul's dead. It's a bit late in the day."

On Nature vs Nurture, I'm a more-or-less rather than either/or type, as in so many other things. In Steven Pinker's the Blank Slate, he posits a rough guide to how your kids will turn out, given 3 approximately* equal factors - with (I think) upbringing being the least of the three - depressing information for well-meaning daddy :

a) natural inheritance (genes)
b) upbringing
c) post-adolescence peer group

If the third be true, it may be that yet another Sixties liberal myth (albeit one still being pumped out by our educators) is exploded - although there is a difference between childhood and adolescence, maybe being kept away from the rough boys then makes you less likely to hang with them later. Many times I've listened to or read of some successful figure describing his childhood and taking an affectionate but condescending pop at parents who wouldn't let them hang out with the rough boys down the road. Maybe that parental decision is why they're on Desert Island Discs.

When the academic Moat brother was doing politics at Nottingham, the other had discovered the society of the gym and its steroid subculture.

I don't think Raoul's background (more here) fits by any means the classic underclass scenario. But, as study after study shows, fatherless children, even after controlling for the lower income of single parents, do worse on pretty much every measure of human achievement.

As A.H. Halsey puts it in his foreword to "Families Without Fatherhood":

“The children of parents who do not follow the traditional norm (i.e. taking on personal, active and long-term responsibility for the social upbringing of the children they generate) are thereby disadvantaged in many major aspects of their chances of living a successful life. On the evidence available such children tend to die earlier, to have more mental illness, to do less well at school, to exist at a lower level of nutrition, comfort and conviviality, to suffer more unemployment, to be more prone to deviance and crime, and finally to repeat the cycle of unstable parenting from which they themselves have suffered.”

There's nothing we can do about it, though. As Sunny so perceptively pointed out a month or so back, people who have children and don't get married wouldn't be any more likely to stay together if they DID marry each other. His conclusion is that people who don't marry are just the kind of people with low commitment to the relationship, who are more likely to split (aka desert the kids), married or not !




* I think those three factors stand provided the upbringing is not 'extreme' - in which bets may be off. Obviously an infancy or childhood of torture or abuse will have a hefty effect - as will, say, being brought up in a closed religious community, or selected for the Janissaries (in both these instances your peer-group gets chosen for you as well, securing two out of three factors).

All Liberal Life Is There ...

Cheesed off with a world where feral child-torturers get five years and anonymity on release ? From the comments on another Guardian "they're victims too " thread.

"It's Thatcher's Fault"

"It's the legacy of Thatcher and the Tories, their crusade against the primary industry has produced children who have grown up with parents who have never had a job"

"Society was brutalised through industrialization and the aftermath and the denial of "society" by Thatcher, and the complete social-moral disintigration she caused"

"Most torturing of small children takes place within the family"

I think in the media-fuelled moral panic about 'stranger danger', people have ignored the fact that the greatest damage done to children tends to be within their own homes at the hands of their own families.

"You're worse than they are"

"I feel that people who seem to want to inflict punishment on small children are themselves in need of treatment."

"The lynch-mob attitude of some of the comments and the call for throw- away-the- key justice reflects just what a brutal society Britain is"

"Who knew that the true sociopaths dwell in this thread"

The all-purpose Guardian editorial seems to have been a pretty good predictor on this occasion. I see the Indie borrowed from it too :

Laban :

The natural horror felt at (insert appalling crime here) should not blind us to the fact that (crime is actually falling/it is all Thatcher's fault/such crimes have always been with us).

If we surrender to (the tabloid agenda/the Daily Mail hysteria/knee-jerk populism/the politics of the soundbite) and take the easy option of (jailing more of our young people/bringing back the birch/bringing back hanging/walling off the cities then bombing them/demonising our young people) we run the very real risk of (actually achieving something/alienating a generation/an invasion of killer bees).

There is only one answer. An enormous increase in the funding of (Sure Start schemes/outreach workers/emotional intelligence mentors/youth projects/anti-racist 5-a-day smoking cessation co-ordinators).

Indie :

"No cause for moral panic"

In the ongoing dialogue of the deaf which recurs whenever feral youths or children commit dreadful crimes, there are only a few liberal arguments, picked up in criminology class and amplified by the Guardian/Indie/BBC, and they come out every time.

a) 'it's always been like this' - aka 'moral panic'.

b) "one case doesn't tell us anything about British society" (except the Stephen Lawrence murder)

c) "it's Thatcher's fault"

d) "crime is actually going down" (having risen by 1,000% since 1950, it started to decline when we locked more people up)

e) "anyway, most torturing of small children takes place within the family" - not the married one it don't.

f) "you're worse than they are" - if you call for evil criminals to be punished, you're even more evil yourself !


One commenter links to this piece, about a classic Guardianista - a woman with empathy for everyone except her neighbours. Kind of reverse-Christianity.

"Who is my neighbour ?"

"The outcast, the rapist, the criminal, the thug"

"And what about your ...er.. neighbours ?"

"Those straights ?"

I had been a foster carer for just over a year when James came to us, and had worked for the council's mental health service for 10 years before that. But I wanted to help the teenagers who had been in the care system for a long time and had suffered serious trauma.

I did every training course on offer. Central Bedfordshire council was brilliant: I studied attachment theory, behaviour management, the problems caused by drug and alcohol abuse, and how to work with sexually abused children. I even did a BTec in advanced fostering.

No problem, then - all boxes ticked.

I was realistic enough to recognise that he was a danger to himself and to everyone he came into contact with, and so I was nervous about the young children who lived around us, but because I knew what a hurt, vulnerable side James possessed I wanted to believe that, deep down, he was a good lad.

We soldiered on. I refused to reject James like everyone else in his life had done, but 10 months after he had come to live with us my neighbour of more than 20 years sold her house and moved away. She told me she couldn't live near him a day longer.

Then, last July, James was accused of raping an 11-year-old local girl and forcing her to perform a sexual act on him.

So a woman is forced from her home of 20 years and an innocent child is raped - and all because "I wanted to believe".

That's religion we're seeing.

Even More Eurabian Fantasies

I mentioned yesterday that the Quilliam Foundation ("the tax-funded Muslim group set up to (correct me if I'm wrong) put forward the moderate face of Islam and lead the youth along the paths of righteousness") had produced their own contribution (pdf) to the Great Eurabia Debate, mostly aimed at the BNP's flavour of the Eurabia thesis.

Pickled Politics gave it a plug, pointing out that "such arguments are easily undermined using proper statistics".

Alas, the pdf, by one Lucy James, contains one statistical howler - on the 2009 BNP Euro-vote :

These were seats that were gained on the basis of nearly one million votes from the British public— 6.2% of the entire votes cast. Although the figures were actually down on 2004 (the slump in Labour party support meant the BNP’s proportion of the vote increased), the BNP have now gained official recognition in European politics.

In fact, the total BNP vote increased from 808,000 votes in 2004 to 943,000 in 2009.

Why the error on something so easily checked ? The original source seems to be this BBC report on Nick Griffin's win in the North West.

"Mr Griffin was elected to Brussels even though the BNP polled fewer votes in the region than it had in 2004 - the slump in Labour support meant its share of the vote increased."

The same thing happened in the Yorkshire constituency - a fall in the actual vote but a rise in the vote share. But the BBC report got picked up, misinterpreted (probably by people searching for aid and comfort) as applying to the whole poll, and was repeated all over left blogs and the Guardian until it was just one of those things that 'everybody knew'.

Poor girl. It wouldn't matter so much were it not that one of her criticisms of BNP literature is "some statistics appear to be just wrongly cited".

The rest of the pdf isn't bad stuff, quite interesting on the theology and the history with no obvious falsehoods. Trouble is, a lot just has to be taken on trust - for the very reason that Islam is a broad(ish) church. Yes, the Prophet did say 'no compulsion in religion'. He said a few other things too. You have to hope that the youths down the road aren't reading 'fight and slay the unbelievers wherever you find them'.

She takes issue with gross BNP generalisations about 'Muslims' and 'Islam' by pointing out the diversity of same. And that's all very true. Trouble is, her attacks on the BNP seem identical, in form if not in content, to the BNPs attacks on Islam. The BNP is seen as one monolithic entity, and outliers are taken as representative of the whole, pretty much a mirror image of what she says the BNP are doing with Islam. Not just outliers - convicted bomb-maker Martyn Gilleard, cited as a 'similar incident' to Islamist terror (I know, I must have missed the Tube and airport attacks and the dozens of deaths), was a member of a different party, (I think) to the right of the BNP, the British People's Party. She also quotes a lot from William Underhill. Hmmph.

Not a bad read. Whether it'll convince anyone one way or the other I'm not sure. And I'm even less sure if my taxes should be subsidising such political campaigning. But our rulers have long stopped worrying about little things like that.

More Liberal "Myths of the Myth of ..."

Diane Abbott in the Indie (on the anti-Trevor Phillips campaign - I blogged it here) :

Black people have watched with mounting dismay as he made a series of interventions on race which were at best silly and at worst revealed no grasp of the facts and figures. First came his attack on multiculturalism. This baffled and upset very many ordinary people, both black and white, who had spent a lifetime fighting racism in their communities. Then there was his claim that we were "sleepwalking to segregation". Manchester University academics had to point out that there was no statistical evidence of "white flight" from inner-city areas with high numbers of minority ethnic residents.

The 'Manchester University academics' being of course Steven 'Ludi' Simpson and perhaps the lovely Dr Nissa. I took a look at his idiosyncratic definition of integration in the first link. But the "myth of the myth of white flight" seems to have at last taken off.

Pity about this comment, by one john b ellis :

Of course some native Brits live pretty much unperturbed alongside new immigrants, and the children and grandchildren of earlier immigrants. The philosophy of "live and let live" and "take as you find" runs reasonably deep in the national psyche, and lots of folk find no reason to take flight.

But there's another side. My other half and I visited some of her vast array of relatives last week, and particularly an eighty-four year old step-aunt in Wolverhampton. That lady and her sister, neither of whom had married, continued to live for very many years, long after the death of their parents, in the council house in which they had been brought up in the Black Country town of Tipton.

They moved, rather against the grain, because of the effects of immigration. Gradually, most of the council houses around them had come to be occupied by families of new Commonwealth origin. One day, one of the sisters observed a neighbouring family carefully spreading one of their carpets down the middle of the street, and proceeding to wash it. Presumably traffic had to take a detour while the operation was in progress! They decided, quite quietly and without any conflict, that it was time to move house, and did so.

It wasn't a move spurred by hatred, or even dislike, much less fanatical racist ideology. They just felt uncomfortable. The customs were different. They no longer felt at home.

Another liberal myth. Remember a couple of years back, Margaret Hodge and her worries about the allocation of council and housing association ('social housing") properties ?

We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants.

We should also look at drawing up different rules based on, for instance, length of residence, citizenship or national insurance contributions which carry more weight ... most new migrant families are economic migrants who choose to come to live and work here. If you choose to come to Britain, should you presume the right to access social housing?

Need is an important factor, but it's not the only factor. This is about a rebalancing; listening and responding to a strongly felt sense of unfairness in the allocation of public resources.

It caused a bit of a media firestorm, she was accused of giving aid and comfort to the wrong sort of people, of feeding the myths peddled by the likes of the BNP - that 'they' get all the houses - and generally of letting the side down. When the BNP won nearly half the council seats in her constituency she was blamed.

My thoughts at the time were to the effect that as long as the system of allocating housing was needs-based rather than entitlement-based it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that incomers would get a disproportionate share of what housing was available. Read this pdf - from the BBC, of all people. No conspiracy necessary. Sure, you might get a few corrupt types or white idealists (after all, no one ever got fired from a council job for discrimination against white people, whereas even an unproven accusation of discrimination in their favour would impact negatively on a career) tilting the balance a tad against the natives - but apart from the strange concept of the Black and Minority Ethnic Housing Association it really did seem unlikely that there was much overt, direct discrimination. The discrimination was indirect - natives being likely to have fewer dependants and higher incomes than incomers - and indirect discrimination is not a concept I'm terribly happy with. As the Guardian put it :

It is true that many immigrant families have larger families and can benefit from the points system but the system itself is racially neutral.

The great and the good leapt into the breach against Ms Hodge. The Guardian in May 2007 was chocker with HYS pieces deploring her 'dog-whistle', unsubstantiated myths. Jon Cruddas was in the forefront - but the interesting stuff was in the comments. This one was from IShouldApologise, a paid-up Guardianista :

I am sorry, but I have to agree with Margaret Hodge.

When we arrived back in the UK four years ago my wife had a small job and so did I and the only house we could afford was a small cramped second story flat. My children had to share one small loft together with barely enough room to stand up in. Furthemore, it was a firetrap.

One of my students was a Sri Lankhan refugee: a very nice man. He was not allowed to work, but I think he did anyway; in one of the network of Sri Lankhan shops in our area. At the same time the government had given him and his family, with two children, a perfectly fine three bedroomed house to live in rent free. I saw it.

It seemed rather unfair to me.

We couldn't find anyone to help us. We were earning just too much to deserve help from the government, but not enough to rent a decent place to live in. My children suffered. Perhaps if my wife had been a single mother the council would have given us priority on a housing list. Perhaps if we didn't both work, then the government would have come to our aid. Perhaps.

But they didn't. Bitter irony. I didn't resent it overmuch, that my student had been helped, I resented, and resent, that we hadn't been helped. We were left to suffer by the politically correct.

There is definitely something very wrong in the system. It shouldn't stop helping refugee Sri Lankhans, but it should think about helping working people with British Nationality more than it does at present.

One contribution by a housing officer was mysteriously deleted, but rescued by another commenter :

"What many of them do is, get a 3 month visa, register to vote using their passport, get a bank account using the confirmation of residence letter from the electoral registration office, then get a national insurance number from the job centre and a job 'fixing' the underground at night (ie putting their feet up). Then they can take those documents to the housing office and go straight on to the list. If they've got a big family (often the case) they get higher up the list. And there you have it." ..
"these people then apply for an 'indefinite leave to remain', then they get their families over here, then they are the priority list because their house is overcrowded. They're playing it according to the rules, there's nothing we can do."

While another housing officer's remarks survived :

As a Housing Officer I have worked in five different organisations, with five different waiting lists (including areas in Manchester and Blackburn - both areas with a strong ethnic mix) and newcomers are not the problem. Its the lazy-born and bred brits whose parent and grandparents have lived in council housing and who now know the system so well they can play it, and play it well. They're on every benefit going, have no intention of ever getting a job and are breeding like rabbits. They also know how to play the system. They apply for housing before they actually need it and they play the waiting game. Once in the system, you need never leave.

You can't imagine that a housing officer who talked about their minority clients like that would last very long in post, can you ? I think it's a pretty honest description of the UK underclass. On another thread she'd have been a hideous right-winger, blaming the victims of capitalism, the poorest and most vulnerable etc etc - here she was a heroine sticking up for the New Brits against the disgusting Old Brits.

"Any road up" ... with immaculate timing, even Gordon Brown managed to imply this year that he would "change the current rules for allocating council and other social housing, enabling local authorities to give more priority to local people and those who have spent a long time on a waiting list" - much to the horror of lefties everywhere. Shades of 'British Jobs For British Workers'.

And then at last over the hill came the cavalry - in the form of Trevor Phillips' shiny new Equality and Human Rights Commission.

The allegation that new migrants are jumping the queue for council housing and housing association homes was nailed as a myth by research recently published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Phew ! That's sorted that one. From now on, anyone raising the issue can be slapped with the research. Only trouble is, their stats are crap.

… The claim of a report published 7th July by the Equality & Human Rights Commission (EHRC) - to have demonstrated that there is ‘no bias in allocation of social housing to immigrants’ - has been shown to be baseless by independent academic analysis.

According to a leading statistical analyst, Professor Mervyn Stone of University College London, the figures that EHRC has disseminated as if they were evidence for the claim are of zero inferential value.

The report therefore constitutes a serious betrayal of the public interest that whatever is the truth of the matter should be established scientifically. In consequence, Civitas has made a formal complaint to the UK Statistics Authority asking it to appraise the reliability of the statistical methods used by the report and the statistical reasoning that underlies its claims.

As Civitas put it :

“A democracy relies on the honesty of official statistics so that our differences can be settled by peaceful debate, but the EHRC report on social housing fails the most fundamental tests”

The report, by Professor Mervyn Stone, is here (pdf).

So we're paying to be lied to - the lies being in the service of a greater good - maintaining social cohesion and combatting the far-right. Admittedly that's the kind of thing we also get from, say, 'Manchester academics', who are also tax-funded, but the EHRC are far more directly an organ of government.

Sadly, this kind of tax-funded distortion may depress, but no longer shocks - which is in one sense the most worrying thing of all.

Another Liberal Myth Bites The Dust

Laban, 2004.

"Yes, Victorian Values. They covered their piano legs !"

Jonathan Calder channels clinical psychologist Professor Strange :

"The truth – and I am indebted to Matthew Sweet’s 2001 book Inventing the Victorians for what follows – is that the Victorians did not cover the legs of their pianos at all, unless it was to keep off the dust or children’s boot.

The idea that anyone would worry about the eroticism of furniture first surfaced in Captain Marryat’s A Diary in America, published in 1839. He reported that the word ‘leg’ was not used in polite society across the Atlantic, and that when he visited a ladies’ seminary his guide informed him that the mistress of the establishment, in order to demonstrate her ‘care to preserve in their utmost purity the ideas of the young ladies under her charge had dressed all these four limbs in modest little trousers, with frills at the bottom of them!’

No doubt the guide was making fun of Marryat’s credulity, but the story soon caught on in nineteenth century Britain. How those Victorians enjoyed poking fun at the straitlaced Americans! Nothing so absurd would ever be seen over here.

Somehow the story remained in circulation, and when the publication of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians made it fashionable to scoff it was recycled to make fun of the people who had originally found it so funny."

Mr Calder seems a thoughtful chap :

Just as the Bloomsbury lens distorts our picture of the Victorians, so the Swinging 60s have given us a false view of the 1950s. But they want to close the College Library and there are macaroons for tea, so that story will have to wait for another day.

The Swinging Sixties only happened in the 1970s. Look at the Kop or the World Cup Final crowd to see how swinging they were back then. Most people wore ties to the match.

Frozen Washing on the Curate's Line

The Martyrdom of St Yazza :

"tell me you aren't ashamed at what our country has become when a middle aged muslim woman of Asian descent can be treated like this. She was questioned at length by plain clothes police officers who never once told her who they were or why she was being questioned."

I listened to the video, most of which was a moan about how "I love this country but ...", then we got to the facts. She was taking an internal flight, there was a mix-up and her tickets weren't kosher for the flight she was trying to board, so she was taken aside and asked a few questions. No abuse, no threats, no shouting.

I had a similar interview leaving Heathrow for NY on Pan-Am, a year after Lockerbie. I'm presuming the Libyan visa in my passport was the catalyst. They were perfectly polite, I answered their (reasonable) questions and away I went.

This really is a tsumami in some Earl Grey - and Iain Dale, what's all this about "we should be ashamed" ? Are you arguing that middle-aged, middle class Muslim women should be exempt from the (tedious but probably necessary) airline security checks the rest of us go through ?

I love Yazza like I love Melanie Phillips, but both can on occasions see "oppression" when it's not there.

There's enough of the real thing about without nonsense like this.

What a strange way to spin a story.

The UK’s official statistician weighed into the debate about foreign workers yesterday by highlighting the growing numbers of immigrants getting jobs while the British workforce declines.

On the day that figures showed the number of people unemployed at a 12-year high, the Office for National Statistics chose to reveal that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year while the number of British workers fell by 234,000 to 27 million.

Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician, sought to focus public attention on the contrasting fortunes of foreign and British workers as the country slipped into recession. Her intervention came as construction workers took part in wildcat strikes at power stations in Nottinghamshire and Kent, angry about jobs going to foreigners.

I see. The figures aren't the important thing, it's that they were released. Que ? I think FWIW that it's 'deeply unhelpful' to characterise telling the truth as a move in some political game. Obviously that's the way Sam Coates, Richard Ford and David Brown see it.


There is no end to Labour sleaze.

LORD TRUSCOTT, one of four peers named in the “lords for hire” scandal, has taken at least £70,000 in allowances for overnight accommodation in London while staying at his home in the capital.

Truscott, 49, now receives £28,000-a-year tax free by telling House of Lords’ authorities that his main residence is a modest flat in Bath, Somerset.

He uses the allowance to maintain a £700,000 flat he owns in Mayfair, central London, with his Russian wife, Svetlana. He bought the property in Bath months after becoming eligible to claim the allowance.

Lord Paul of Marylebone, the billionaire steel magnate and Labour donor who is nondomiciled, is one of a number of other peers who take advantage of the perk.

The deafening silence on the issue at PMQs yesterday seems to be confirmation that they're all at it.

THE financier who has been appointed to protect taxpayers’ money in Britain’s bailed-out banks is a former trustee of a secretive Liechtenstein bank accused of facilitating massive tax evasion.

Glen Moreno, who chairs the powerful body that oversees the government’s £37 billion shareholding in the banks, was paid hundreds of thousands of pounds during a nine-year association with Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank based in the tax haven.

The disclosures are an embarrassment for Gordon Brown, who last week criticised offshore tax havens and called for international action to stamp out tax evasion.

What with James Crosby, Gordon seems to be an expert at hiring foxes as poultry management consultants. But it's this that really bothers me :

The SNP has demanded an inquiry after it emerged that a record of everyone who voted in last year's contest in Glenrothes has gone missing.

All of the major parties, including Labour on election night itself, had predicted that the Nationalists would win the seat, which borders Gordon's Brown's constituency.

Instead Lindsay Roy, Labour's candidate, swept to victory and dealt a stunning blow to Alex Salmond, the First Minister and SNP leader, who had confidently predicted victory.

The result was a huge fillip to the Prime Minister, who broke with convention and risked his political credibility by joining the campaign trail with his wife, Sarah.

Thus far UK electoral fraud has been confined to Ulster Republicans and other minority communities with a tradition of same, although I wouldn't put it past some well-meaning liberal types to lose a few boxes of BNP votes and think they were protecting democracy - after all, we've all been taught what happened in Germany. The worst the Labour leadership (as opposed to their local party machines) have done is to turn a blind eye. This would be different, and a very worrrying sign for our democracy. I hope and pray that Mr Cock-up is responsible here - but it's not good that we can even entertain the idea of Scottish Labour taking the Mugabe route to electoral success. Not so long ago it would have been unthinkable. It isn't now.


Oh, forgot to say. Remember the liberal myth of Superbowl violence, which inspired our PC police into campaigns against World Cup Domestic Violence ?

Meet the rugby equivalent - Six Nations Domestic Violence 2008. And Rugby World Cup 2007.

Police are launching patrols in the south Wales valleys during the Rugby World Cup to allow them to respond quickly to domestic violence.

Reality trumps satire yet again.

Great Depression

Everybody knows that it was protectionism which turned the Great Crash of 1929 into the Great Depression of the 1930s. All three main parties follow this line - how depressing it was to hear Cameron attacking Brown at PMQs yesterday by accusing him of encouraging (self-evidently bad) protectionism with his 'British Jobs For British Workers' speech.

Not so, according to BBC economics correspondent, promoter of bastardy (and daughter of a great man), Stephanie Flanders.

The depression certainly did see a collapse in global trade and capital flows, and a descent into protectionist tariffs and laws. But a fair reading of the evidence suggests these were more the result of the global downturn than the cause.

According to Peter Temin, a distinguished economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exports were 7% of American GDP in 1929. They fell by 1.5 percentage points in the next two years.

Given the fall in world demand in those years, not all of that fall can be attributed to other countries' retaliation against the US tariffs. And even if it were - overall, GNP over the same period fell by 15%.

So, on any reasonable assumptions, Temin says "the fall in export demand can only be a small part of the story." And, as he points out, even that loss in foreign demand from the tariff would have been partly offset by the fact that the tariff diverted demand from foreign to home-made goods.

His conclusion? "Any net contractionary effect of the tariff was small."

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Even the greatest fans of free trade would admit that the benefits of lower tariffs - or costs of higher ones - are fairly small beer when compared to the kind of collapse in incomes and employment we saw during the depression.

To repeat, I'm not endorsing protectionism, or a policy of "national self-sufficiency" (though intriguingly for his modern admirers, that's what Keynes supported in 1933).

The Keynes piece is fascinating - well worth a read.

Laban's reading a lot of economics blogs at the moment, City Unslicker, Alphaville, Peston. Laban thinks it'll get worse before it gets better - but then he thinks that about everything else !

Quote Of The Day

"On the plus side, this does mean the week after the death of Princess Di is no longer the stupidest moment in modern pop culture"

"Is Britain Civilised ?"

On 9/1/2003, Neil Clark wrote the following in the Telegraph, but the link no longer works. If anyone can find a link I'll link to the post - in the absence of which here's the whole thing.

Roy Jenkins made Britain a far less civilised country


By Neil Clark


Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 09/01/2003



In his Guardian obituary of Lord Jenkins, David Marquand listed four "achievements" of his hero on which, to him, "the verdict of history seems plain". As Home Secretary, "Jenkins did more than any other person to make Britain a more civilised country to live in". As leader of the Labour Europeans, he played an "indispensable part" in taking Britain into what is now the European Union; and, as president of the European Commission, he played an "equally indispensable part' in paving the way for the single currency. Finally, by forming the SDP, and "breaking the mould" of British politics, Jenkins created New Labour.


As an Old Labour Euro-sceptic, I believe the last three "achievements" that Marquand lists were ones we could have well done without. But what of Marquand's first claim: that Jenkins made Britain a more civilised country to live in?


As an up-and-coming Labour backbencher, Jenkins had written, in the late 1950s, a tract entitled Is Britain Civilised?, in which he attacked Britain's "archaic" laws on censorship, homosexuality, divorce and abortion, as well as arguing for the abolition of capital punishment and changes to the country's "Victorian" criminal justice system.


At that time, Jenkins's "progressive" views on social reform were still in the minority in the Labour Party, dominated as it was by its socially conservative, working-class ethos. But by 1964, when Labour eventually regained power, much had changed. A group of middle-class, mainly Oxbridge-educated "intellectuals" had risen to prominence in the party and, for these "modernisers", led by Jenkins and his Oxford friend Tony Crosland, the main aim was the social, rather than the economic, transformation of Britain.


Although their views had little support among the British public at large, this group was able to push through its liberalising agenda when Jenkins became Home Secretary in 1965. Already, earlier that year, the death penalty had been suspended. Now it was full steam ahead to give support to private members' Bills to decriminalise abortion and homosexuality, relax censorship and make divorce easier.


Jenkins's impact at the Home Office did not end there. He also embarked on the most radical programme of penal reform since the Second World War. His Criminal Justice Act of 1967 said very little about the victims of crime, but plenty about the perpetrators. The Act introduced the parole system of early release of offenders serving sentences of three years or more, established the Parole Board and introduced the system of suspended sentences.


In two years, Jenkins had succeeded in transforming the criminal justice system from one whose raison d'etre had been to deter wrong-doing to one designed to be as "civilised" as possible to the criminal.


Jenkins was of course convinced that the "permissive society" was the "civilised society". In this, he - alas - got it all terribly wrong. What underpins civilised society is not permissiveness, but self-restraint, a phrase detested by libertines of both Left and Right. What Jenkins failed to see was how the freedoms he espoused would lead to the degeneration of British society and the selfish, me-first libertinism of today.


Jenkins was never a socialist, but in my view he was not much of a liberal either. Classical liberalism always understood that liberal freedom is dependent on moral self-restraint. Without it, freedom becomes licence - which itself is a threat to freedom, as it acknowledges no obligation to others. Before the Jenkins-sponsored social reforms made their impact, Britain was a country famous for the self-restraint of its people. "Letting it all out", extreme displays of emotion, and shouting and swearing in the street were all considered unacceptable. For Jenkins, the taboos that existed in 1950s Britain were intolerable. But the net result was a society remarkable for its civility.


More than 30 years on, the damaging impact of Jenkins's reforms on the society we live in is all too clear to see. One marriage in three now ends in divorce. Almost 40 per cent of children are now born out of wedlock, the highest figure in Europe. Since the 1967 Abortion Act, more than six million unborn children have been aborted.


The legalisation of homosexuality has not been the end of the chapter, but merely the beginning, with an aggressive "gay rights" lobby demanding more and more concessions. The policy of early release of prisoners has had a catastrophic effect on the safety of the general public: 14 per cent of violent criminals freed early are convicted of fresh violence within two years of their release.


As The Sunday Telegraph's Alasdair Palmer states: "Scores of men, women and children have been assaulted, raped and murdered as a result of the policy of releasing dangerous criminals before their sentences are completed" - a policy initiated and endorsed by Jenkins.


In addition to this tally, we must add the hundreds of innocent lives lost as a result of the abolition of capital punishment, which Jenkins zealously campaigned for and whose reintroduction he so resolutely opposed as Home Secretary in 1974.


Dividing his time between the palaces of Westminster, the delightful Oxfordshire village of East Hendred and the high table of the Oxford colleges, Jenkins did not, of course, see too much of the social debris that his "civilising" reforms had caused. Had he seen at first hand what the "permissive society" amounts to in practice on a "sink" council estate, he might have modified his views.


It is, though, unfair to blame one man for all of Britain's modern ills. Others, too, must take their share of responsibility for the nation we have become, not least the economic freedom junkies of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the Britain of 2003 is very much the Britain that Jenkins always wanted. The self-restraint and taboos of the 1950s have all gone. The "archaic" laws against which Jenkins railed have been abolished.


On the day of Jenkins's death, I looked at the other stories listed on the Teletext index. They were: "Man accused of bodies-in-bin probe", "Gun killers will be caught, pledge police", "Man faces charges over abbey axe attack", "Man charged with taxi driver murder" and "Freedom for hostage in 11-day siege".


If David Marquand believes the Britain of 2003 to be a "civilised country", it would be interesting to hear his definition of an uncivilised one.

What's German For "Schadenfreude" Again ?

Rowan Williams complaining about people not liking Britain is like Schopenhauer moaning about pessimists.

The Archbishop of Canterbury told shoppers yesterday that Britain was a country that was “unhappy” and “didn’t seem to like itself”.

Speaking in a city centre pub in Cardiff, Dr Rowan Williams told his informal congregation after a presentation on social problems that the nation seemed ill at ease with itself and was in urgent need of some help.

“What we saw was a picture of a country and society that doesn’t seem to like itself very much,” he said. “We are not very happy, we look around for people to blame . . . When society is that unhappy then society has a problem.

I can't understand it. After all, apart from a few surviving traces of sexism, racism and homophobia, Roy Jenkins' "Civilised Society" is pretty much with us today. That bad old Britain of the 1950s, when innocent murderers were hung, innocent criminals and innocent homosexuals were sent to prison, and the streets ran red with the blood of the victims of domestic violence and back street abortion (the victims of the latter being the mothers, of course, not the babies), classrooms rang to the screams of the victims of corporal punishment - and worst of all to the Archbish, the Church of England was a strong supporting pillar of such evil - is now history.

Only a few elderly bigots cling to the hideous morality of our wicked past - and they'll soon be dealt with.

Too Many Books ...

Laban is reading ...

Toynbee's A Study of History, in DC Somervell's two-volume abridgement.

Trouble is I'm reading several other books at the same time, all shorter and more digestible than this magnum opus. I think I'll need to read it end to end at least twice before a verdict emerges. Expect one about Christmas.

You have to be impressed with Somervell though. Do English schools stil have such teachers ? It's WWII, and for your own amusement you devote the evenings to condensing the first six volumes of Toynbee's 12 volume work. After the war you send the great man a copy - and he loves it, and asks you to do the rest.

Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate - pretty digestible - although like Toynbee, his whirlwind, one-chapter tours round some subjects - like sociology and philosophy - leave you taking a lot on trust. Nonetheless, terrific stuff with highly political implications - as well as a valuable update on what current science tells us about the nature-nurture debate.

"Why is the author's name bigger than the book title ?" said my 11-year old daughter - and yes, he is a bit of a clever-clogs and a good mate of Richard Dorkins. Read it regardless.

His juxtaposition of two opposed views of humanity in his chapter on politics, the Tragic Vision to which Laban is now signed up after years of subscription to its opposite, the Utopian vision, sent me to the source of this idea (to which Pinker gives full credit), Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed. The most readable of the three and absolutely cracking stuff. Get it from Amazon.

"The crucial role of vision," Sowell argues, "is that it enables a vast range of beliefs to be regarded as presumptively true until definitively disproved by unchallengeable evidence." Liberals --or, to use Sowell's disparaging label, "the anointed" -- view the world as "a very tidy place," where "prescient politicians can 'invest' tax dollars in 'the industries of the future,' where criminals can be 'rehabilitated,' irresponsible mothers taught 'parenting skills,' and where all sorts of other social problems can be 'solved."' All this is possible, as liberals see things, because human nature, as a "social construct," is far more malleable than most people imagine. Thus, in the vision of the anointed, "there is obviously a very expansive role for government and for the anointed in prescribing what government should do."



Sowell contrasts the vision of the anointed with "the tragic vision" of conservatives. What is "tragic" about this vision is that it assumes that problems such as crime, poverty, and irresponsibility cannot finally be "solved." Conservatives, recognizing that "there are no solutions, only trade-offs," do not go in for grand schemes to put an end to poverty, for example, or make health care a fundamental right, or pursue what Sowell derisively calls "cosmic justice." It is not that conservatives are happy that some people are poor, or without health insurance, or whatever. Nor, for that matter, are they complacent about it. Rather, they realize that liberal schemes to eradicate these evils a) never work, and b) inevitably impose huge social costs of their own.

Which is why, after thirty years of ever increasing sex education in British schools, and thirty years of increasing sexual activity and sexually transmitted disease among schoolchildren, sex education will soon be compulsory in English schools. It's already compulsory in the Land of My Absent Fathers.

"Whatever you did before that didn't work, do more of it"

Agreed !

Timothy Garton Ash - he say "don't decide on historical truth in a court of law".

Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are.

Agreed, agreed, agreed.

My kids are taught in school that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent (they were guilty).

My council tells me that one woman in four is a victim of domestic violence and that a third of our food is thrown away.

CiF posters tell me that when the BNP vote goes up, racial attacks increase, or that thousands of British women were dying in back-street abortions before 1967.

For years I carried with me the tragic story of poor Hyacinth's lynching, so brilliantly described by Martha Gellhorn in "Justice At Night". She made it up.

An amateur historian, Jerry Brotton, claims that the Ottoman Empire was decisive in defeating the Armada.

All of these things I believe to be untrue. But I don't want people banged up for saying them (although I don't want my taxes to fund their propagation, either). Let us play the light of reason and historical enquiry upon such claims, as a high-pressure hose is turned upon anti-globalisation protesters.

Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend, as a famous mass-murdering dictator once said. Or was he the greatest revolutionary leader of the twentieth century ?

You decide. Not a court.

Abortion Deaths Pre-Legalisation

I posted on the Ann Furedi thread: "Oh, that question. These untold thousands who died from back-street abortions in the bad old days. Is there any factual evidence for this, or numbers of any kind, or is it just another left-wing myth ?"


ChooChoo answered as follows :

@LabanTell:

I'd hesitate to say 'myth'. But there are problems with some figures and, of course, this is further problematised by the polemical contexts of inveterate debates. The US is interesting because abortion remains a livewire political debate: not just because of social dynamics, but also because of the legal context there. Unlike here, the (from one view) judicial fiat by which abortion was legalised in the states generates tensions beyond the usual ones in this debate.

In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (Bob, a lifelong Democrat incidentally), the figure of 5,000-10,000 pre-legalisation deaths was mentioned. This figure, a common one in the US context, goes back to attempted extrapolations from studies from the 1930s, for instance, by one Frederick Taussig (published in '36). He used figures for the abortion rate (not the abortion mortality rate) from NY and Iowa birth control clinics, combined with his own estimates for the mortality rate to come up with the figures. (There were others which used similar techniques).

In reality, these figures are dubious and not least because of their use in polemical contexts. In 'Induced termination of pregnancy before and after Roe v. Wade', in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 208.22 (1992) pp.3231-3239, the authors use pre-legalisation figures for abortion mortality from National Center [sic] for Health Statistics:

1940 - c.1400

1945 - c.750

1950 - c.250

1955 - c.225

1960 - c.250

1970 - c.125

(The exact figure for pre-legalisation 1972 is 39. Abortion mortality figures still do exist post-legalisation, and the figure hovered around c.20 post-legalisation before dropping further in the 80s or 90s, I forget which).

These figures can hardly settle the question. First, they don't show how many total abortions there were. Second, they do not, in themselves, get into the difficulty of arriving at such figures. This difficulty, incidentally, is not just for finding reliable pre-legalisation figures, but also reliable post-legalisation figures. (Assigning abortion as cause of death is not as simple as it may sound). Third, these do not get into all sorts of social factors (was there a change in the public acceptability of treating women who had had abortions?). (These figures, per se, are far more reliable than, say, Taussig's).

Fundamentally, however, and this occurs in other contexts too, the large reduction in abortion mortality correlates to (and is no doubt caused by) medical provisions: most importantly, the diffusion of antibiotics. Medical provisions are more important in bringing down abortion mortality than legality. (This is not to deny that legality cannot or does not have an effect of safety: it does, but this relation is heightened where the safety, even where legal, would not be so good. Conversely, where medical provisions are good - not just supplies, but access - legality cannot have a strong effect on abortion mortality). In a first-world context, the notion that illegality will result in the death of scores of women is not tenable. (Another important aspect to this is that pre-legality abortion, certainly in the states, was largely - c.90% - carried out by physicians: this is what emerges from works on the reality of abortion by the likes of Mary Claderone - erstwhile medical director of Planned Parenthood - in the 60s). This is not to deny the total legitimacy of being worried about this, or of valuing women's lives. (Of course not). I'm just trying to write a little about the figures for abortion mortality.

I'm most grateful to him or her for this - the only information I've ever seen on the subject. If anyone's got any info on Britain I'd be interested.

Your Liberal Myths Tonight

The Myth of the Myth of the Golden Age, in full effect at Hopi Sen.

Management summary - there were cases of bastardy and bad parenting in the 1990s, 1970s, Mayhew's London (note the strange omission of the 130 years between that and the 1970s) and Hogarth's Gin Lane. Therefore the Matthews family (of Shannon infamy) don't tell us anything about family breakdown or lack of moral restraint and Alison Pearson (writing in the Mail) is talking through her peach-like bottom.

Now that's not an indefensible position. To really know what's going on we'd need some stats, wouldn't we ? Individual cases may illuminate and exemplify a trend, but first we have to establish that one exists. Let's ask the experts who wrote "An Economic History of Bastardy in England and Wales".

"A remarkable feature of English demographic history is the explosion in childbearing outside marriage during the last quarter of the twentieth century, after 400 years of relative stability. Over the period 1845-1960, the percentage of births outside marriage moved within a small range, averaging about 5% ... After 1960, when the contraceptive pill was introduced, childbearing outside marriage began to climb slowly, and it exploded after 1980, reaching 42% in 2004."

From 5% in 1960 to 42% in 2004. I guess there's no way Alison Pearson could have noticed that change herself, is there ?

Or we could ask Gordon Brown's fave rave Gertrude Himmelfarb :

In Victorian England, the illegitimacy ratio--the proportion of illegitimate births to total births--fell from 7 percent in 1845 to less than 4 percent by the end of the century. In East London, the poorest section of the city, it was less than that: 4.5 percent in midcentury and 3 percent by the end of the century. Apart from a temporary increase during both world wars, the ratio continued to hover around 5 percent until well into the middle of the twentieth century. In 1960 it began to rise, to 12 percent by 1980, and to 32 percent by the end of 1992--a two-and-a-half times increase in the last decade alone and a sixfold rise in three decades.

Mr Sen also quotes - without references - a figure of about 1.8 million 'paupers' - without definition - in the mid-19th century. One in ten of the population on the parish ? In the workhouse ? Alas, he don't say. These figures seem vary high.

I can't work Mr Sen out. Is he just filling in a wet Friday with a poke at the Daily Mail, and who cares about the evidence ? Is he deliberately putting forward this hopeless argument-by-anecdote because he knows what the stats on bastardy and the effects of the fatherless family are, and prefers to fight on safer ground ? Or does he genuinely not have a clue ? Is his bookshelf burdened by books like these ?

Another Liberal Myth Bites The Dust

The action moved fast, with precision. A sedan drove up and stopped under the tree. A man climbed on to the top quickly. Another. They stood black against the sky. From beneath, a group of men, shoving and pushing, got Hyacinth's limp thin body up to them. Hyacinth half lay, half squatted on the roof. From the ground a length of rope sailed up, hung in the air, curved and fell. A man tried again and the rope caught and hung down from a limb. The noosed end was thrown to one of the men standing on the car-roof.

The noosed end was thrown to one of the men standing on the car-roof. He held it and shook Hyacinth. There were no words now, only vague instructions, half-spoken. The crowd stood still; you could hear the mosquitoes whining. The other man held something in his hand it; looked like a great jug. He held it over Hyacinth, who shivered suddenly, and came to life. His voice rose out of him like something apart, and it hurt one's ears to listen to it; it was higher than a voice can be, not human.

"Boss," he said, "Boss I didn't do nuthin, don't burn me, Boss, Boss . . ." The crowd had trembled now, stirred by his voice, and there were orders to hurry, to kill the bastard, what the hell were they waiting for. The two men held him up and put the noose around his neck, and now he was making a terrible sound, like a dog whimpering. The minute they let go, he slacked into a kneeling position and his whole body seemed to shrink and dwindle and there was this noise he made. The two men jumped down from the roof; the rope was taut now. The car started and the silly sound of the starter failing to work, then the hesitant acceleration of the motor were so important that nothing else was heard; there were no other sounds anywhere; just these, and a moment's waiting.

The car moved forward, fast. Hyacinth skidded and fought an instant - less than an instant - to keep his footing or some hold, some safety. He snapped from the back of the car, hung suspended, twirling a little on the rope, with his head fallen sideways. I did not know whether he was dead. There was a choked sound beside me and it was Joe, crying, sitting there crying, with fury, with helplessness, and I kept looking at Hyacinth and thinking: 'It can't have happened.' There had been a noise, a sudden gutteral sound as of people breathing out a deep breath, when the rope carried Hyacinth twisting into the air.

Now a man came forward with a torch made of newspaper, burning. He reached up and the flames licked at Hyacinth's feet.

Even knowing what I know now, it's difficult stuff to read. Martha Gellhorn's description of a lynching in the southern United States, "Justice At Night", first published in the (London) Spectator in August 1936, was in Reader's Digest by March 1937 - and that meant it was in millions of American homes.

It's considered (admittedly by the cheap'n'cheerful "Mammoth Book of ..." series) to be one of the Top 100 pieces of journalism.

You can buy a (bloody awful - cheating students should pinch Camilla Wright's excellent Normblog piece) student essay on it - which means that it's still being taught in schools and colleges, like the poor innocents Sacco and Vanzetti, as fact.

Camilla Wright's fine Normblog essay, while a tad over-influenced by more modern cinematic echoes (the whole Deliverance/Texas Chainsaw narrative didn't exist in 1936) sums up the impact perfectly.

Originally published in The Spectator in 1936, 'Justice At Night' is perhaps the most perfect piece of eyewitness journalism. History, politics, human interest and gut-wrenching emotion are all mixed in together. It's unashamedly biased - there's no disengaged, disinterested reporter here. It's straight from the heart. But these short paragraphs tell so much more than a personal anecdote. In this micro-story, the macro-narrative of 20th Century American history is imparted: north v south, urban v country, black v white, the civil war and the civil rights movement.

It's not only true, it illustrates a wider truth ! And it's brilliantly written.

Every time I read this I feel the same shock as reading it the first time. Like I've been a first-hand witness to a truly inhuman event. I don't think there is better praise a writer could get.

It's still a perfect piece of writing. But eyewitness journalism ?

Gellhorn was writing a novel herself ... the book caught the attention of Harry Hopkins in the Roosevelt administration, who was assembling a team of young reporters to fan out across the Depression-ravaged country and document the lives of ordinary people ... two episodes stand out from Gellhorn's modest contribution to this worthy effort: she made up a story about a lynching in the South and published it as fact, and she encouraged laborers in North Carolina to break factory windows to protest their working conditions.

Eleanor Roosevelt, a college friend of Gellhorn's mother, admired the lynching article, and Martha explained, giddily and lamely, that she was "getting a little mixed-up around now and apparently I am a very realistic writer (or liar), because everyone assumed I'd been an eye-witness to a lynching whereas I just made it up." Her fake story dogged her for the rest of her life. And her incitement to riot got her fired by Hopkins.

Did the fakeness "dog her" ? Eleanor Roosevelt may have known about it, but it was still presented as fact when I read it as a teenager. No-one told Camilla Wright, either.

Caroline Moorehead, Gellhorn's biographer and editrix of her letters, to whom this revelation is due, doesn't seem like a member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy to me. Indeed her Wikipedia entry is stamped 'paid-up liberal'. And she's the daughter of the great Alan Moorehead, so I believe everything she writes.

Only one thing bothers me, as I post in haste. Could Christopher Benfey, author of the book review from which I've taken the 'I just made it up' quote and professor of English at "a liberal arts womens college" in Massachusetts, be a secret member of the VRWC ? Is the quote real ? Time for Laban to find the library website and read both books for himself.






(I shouldn't have to write this, but the fact that this writing turns out to be fiction doesn't mean that nobody ever got lynched in America. Hell, it's still happening now.)

Grooming (on a Sunday afternoon)

I put together a few posts a year or so back on the 'grooming' of under-age girls, often leading to prostitution, by young Asian (mostly Muslim) men in Northern cities.

It was the subject of last night's Panorama. It'll be up for a week - does anyone know how to capture BBC video ?

One Muslim from Lancashire is speaking out. Mohammed Shafiq, director of the Ramadhan Foundation, said "I think the police are overcautious on dealing with this issue openly because they fear being branded racist and I think that is wrong".

We're seeing the effects of thirty years of well-meant, middle-class anti-racism here. Put that together with a culture where the school nurse is handing out contraception to children while the parent (often) or parents remain in blissful ignorance and you get our old friend unforeseen consequence.

Mind, it's not little Phillippa from Boltburn Girls Grammar, with her magistrate mum, who's being enticed by a pimped-up Corsa, a trip to McDonalds and a tasteful selection of Elizabeth Duke jewellery. It'll be poor Chavaunne from Retchworth Community College who gets the come-on in the shopping mall. But for most white liberals race trumps class in the hierarchy of victimhood, hence the pulling of the Channel Four film on the same subject four years back. If the predators were wealthy, privately educated white boys who just got a kick out of conning and abusing barely-pubescent chavettes, you wouldn't be able to pick up a paper or turn on the radio without tripping over it.

In feminista Julie Bindel's hierarchy, fortunately, gender trumps race.

The pimps are adept at trading on teenage rebellion and use similar methods, according to Crop, of convincing the girls all white people are racist. This is part of the controlling process, to instil guilt in the girls. “Like most teenagers, I was going through a phase of arguing with my mum,” says Gemma. “Amir told me they didn’t understand me and were racist and ignorant. I believed him.” Gemma was given an Asian name by Amir, and told she had to read the Koran, a story support workers tell me is not uncommon. “They erode the girls’ identities,” says Kosaraju, “to make them more compliant and needy.”

Few of the girls know, or are willing to acknowledge, they are being pimped. Because they claim to love the men, and think of them as their boyfriends, police often see that as an admission from the girls of consent. “As far as I was concerned, Amir was my boyfriend,” says Gemma. “When he told me I had to sleep with his friends, I had no idea he was being paid for it. I was on a lot of drugs and he said I had to pay for them.”

"convincing the girls all whites are racist" - well, they've had a lot of help over the last thirty years in that laudable aim.

The stories didn't get told (and are pretty low-key now) because people are more worried about increasing the level of white racism than they are about girls being abused. And they have a point - a wrong one, but a point nonetheless.

Nightjack is a newish police blog, one of a few good-uns that have a raised profile since the Copper gave up on the UK and emigrated.

Take a look at this - the story of a guy who tried to cut a few corners to speed up the grooming process.

Four days after the event, “Melissa” (14yrs) is admitted to A&E with an overdose. It is one of those real I want to end it all overdoses. The sort involving tubes and beeps and lights and readouts. We only find out about it when she recovers. She speaks to Mum, and alleges that her boyfriend got her very drunk, took her to a seaside hotel and raped her whilst she was passed out.

So on day six, the Police are called. Day seven Melissa is sensitively and appropriately interviewed to find out what happened to her. She is not sure of her boyfriends’ name, it might be Bilal (we will learn that this is not the truth) . She is not sure what sort of car he has, just that is “well wicked” and customised. She thinks he is 21 (we will learn in the end that he is well over 30). She does know that she went with her friend “Cara” and her boyfriend Qasim. Melissa thinks hearts and romance. Bilal thinks just another goray.

If you've read the post to the end, you may feel that if a BNP activist wanted to invent a fantasy of the predatory "Other" he couldn't do better than that. Trouble is, the odds are heavily on it being the (suitably anonymised - the guy has a job) truth.

How come ? you may ask. Doesn't Islam prohibit such things ? How does this fit with Laban's generally favourable disposition towards those who are tough on crime, have strong families, value respectability ("honour" in the Muslim context) and fear God ?

There seem to be some conflicting (but probably ultimately reconcilable) currents here. As the Bradford Race Relations Review said :

The third issue relates to the apparent collapse of parental control over their young men. There are significant groups of young men who are heavily involved in drug dealing and abuse, gang activities and crime. They are often abusive and threatening to white people in their areas and appear in significant and intimidating groups in the town centre area. No-one within their own communities seem prepared to challenge them or call them to order. However, these same young men, for the most part, profess their belief in Islam, do not drink alcohol and the vast majority will accept the arranged marriage. Their parents claim to have no control over them yet these young men do not kick against certain fundamentals.

I believe that the parents do have some control, that they have a tacit agreement with their young men which basically requires them to accept the strictures on drinking and the arranged marriage in return for no interference in other aspects of their young men’s lives. This simply reflects their priorities:- the commitment to Islam, the prohibition on drink and the arranged marriage are more important than other aspects. There is a parental fear, no doubt well-founded, that if they exert pressure in other areas then they will lose their sons’ commitments in those three vital areas. It works for them but is a recipe for chaos in the rest of the community.

Or as Dalrymple puts it, speaking of young Muslim prisoners in Winson Green :

"The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll."

While I'm plonking my trainers where angels fear to tread, another not-in-front-of-the-children subject - Tottenham Lad's long and copiously referenced post on gang rape in the UK and elsewhere, which, would you believe, has an ethnic dimension.

Why isn't it all over the media, as it would be if rich white boys were the culprits - or even the (innocent) suspects ?

Because the media have been brought up well. They've listened to Billie Holliday sing "Strange Fruit". In the history curriculum at school my children have been taught about the lynch mobs of Alabama and Mississippi, killing without trial black men, often accused of sexual crime or misdemeanour. Martha Gellhorn's gut-wrenching account of a lynching is still with me thirty years after I've read it - poor Hyacinth pleading "don't let them burn me" - and I'm not the only one. (Alas, like Sacco and Vanzetti, Gellhorn's piece seems to have been a tremendously influential liberal myth - according to Gellhorn's biographer she made the whole thing up. Still, I'm pleased Hyacinth didn't get lynched because of his non-existence).





Comments will be heavily moderated. I just want to know how to download the BBC video.

Oh Dear

"Music is an essential part of Western culture and British music dates back centuries. Pop music in particular has played an important role in British culture and the success of ‘Britpop’, which includes influences from several cultures, is an indicator of the multi-cultural nature of Britain today."

Sport also plays an important role in White British culture with many sports enjoying a rich history in the country. Football is the national sport and immensely popular with all ages. Tennis is also considered a national sport with the oldest and most prestigious competition in the World being held in Wimbledon."

Bury Metropolitan District Council explain "White British Culture" to ... who exactly ?

The British also enjoy home-made desserts such as apple pie, rhubarb crumble and bread and butter pudding. Britain is famous for fish and chips which dominate the take-away food sector with a ‘chippy’ on every corner. British cuisine has also been influenced by multi-cultural diversity and curry has become an integral part of British cuisine, so much so that, since the late 1990s, Chicken Tikka Masala has been commonly referred to as the “British national dish”

I try to avoid using four-letter Anglo-Saxon words. In this case, it's a pity. While I deprecate those commenters whose first reaction is to call for a rope and a lamp post every time they read something they don't like, for the perpetrator of this - probably not the actual writer, some poor ex-local paper journalist now doing council media relations - but the guy who commissioned this - not hanging, not quartering, not even drawing will suffice. Perhaps the treatment handed out by William the Bastard to the leading citizens of Alencon, after they shouted the 11th century equivalent of 'yer Mum!' will do.

"You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk. History," he repeated slowly, "is bunk."

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Wessex, was Londinium, was Halidon Hill, was Agincourt and Crecy; some spider-webs, and they were Lincoln and Hastings and York and Worcester and Flanders and Alamein. Whisk. Whisk–and where was Matilda, where was Harold, where were Edwin and Morcar and Cromwell, Kitchener and Montgomery? Whisk–and those specks of antique dirt called Dalriada and Powys, Iona and the Heptarchy–all were gone. Whisk–the place where Ireland had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, motte and bailey, cruck-frame and shieling, broch and pele tower, whisk, whisk, Beowulf and the Mabinogion. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk …

Flaying would be an acceptable fallback.

Poverty Causes Crime Part 183

A group of teenagers drank champagne before going out and attacking a French schoolboy, a court has heard.