Carina Saunders

Here.

She was murdered in the States, but it's another Mary-Anne Leneghan-style killing - they killed her in front of another girl as a demonstration of the penalties for disobedience.

R.I.P. Richard Mannington Bowes

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and ruthlessly acquisitive society has turned into a mildly distributive society; general corruption in government has been replaced by an extraordinarily high level of honesty...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.

"Geoff was the epitome of the London man"

So sayeth Met Inspector Richard Beadle of the killing of 90 year old war veteran Geoffrey Bacon in Camberwell.

Geoffrey certainly epitomised one class of Londoner - the murdered elderly native.

The moment I saw the headline, I was reminded of a piece I blogged about six years back, which appeared in the now-defunct online magazine Right Now. It was about the killing of elderly white people by young black men in South London, and while I disagreed with the author's thesis that the Stephen Lawrence killing and the Brixton nail bomb were some kind of unconscious, inchoate 'resistance movement', he wrote it as he saw it - and it wasn't outside my old primary school that people were being killed.

The link and site has long gone - but the magic of the Wayback Machine has brought J F Cronin's 'The Forgotten Victims' back to life - the victims being Constance Brown, 72, of Streatham, Elizabeth Pinhom, 96, of Herne Hill, Thomas Kidd, 61, of Tulse Hill, Ted Howell, 75, of Lewisham, Leslie Watkinson, 66, of Peckham, and Frank Dempsey, 56, of Clapham.

"I wouldn’t like to be an old person living in Bethnal Green" said musician Jah Wobble when he moved to leafy Cheshire. For Bethnal Green, read 'most of London outside the leafy south west postcodes'.



(UPDATE - at the opposite end of the age spectrum, while she's not a native, the treatment Michele Kirsch's kids received on a Stoke Newington estate is also relevant. The truism that racism isn't only restricted to white people is one that Guardianistas are happy to accept in theory. It's just giving chapter and verse they're uncomfortable with.)

Non-racist racist murders ?

I noted this Bradford murder last year.

Police who were called to the incident in Gaythorne Road, West Bowling, yesterday found three men with stab wounds – three other people, including a woman, have now been arrested on suspicion of murder. The injured, a 17-year-old, 22-year-old and 24-year-old, all from Bradford were taken to Bradford Royal Infirmary. Surgeons battled to save the 22-year-old but he died shortly before 3am today... Initial reports from bystanders suggest there had been fighting for about 20 minutes between rival black and Asian gangs.

There's been a trial, verdict and sentence :

A teenager who murdered a man in a revenge attack has been branded a remorseless killer and locked up for at least 12 years. A judge yesterday told Guyan Guthrie, 18, he had shown no regret over the death of Rashid Elahi. “You are not in the least bit concerned about what happened,” Mr Justice Griffith Williams said. He ordered Guthrie, 17 at the time of the murder, to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. He will not be able to apply for parole for 12 years.

Guthrie, of Canterbury Avenue, Bradford, was convicted by a jury at Bradford Crown Court on Monday of murdering Mr Elahi, 21, of Ryan Street, West Bowling, Bradford, on July 25 last year. He was also found guilty of wounding Tajambal Salim, of West Bowling, with intent to cause him grievous bodily harm. Anasta Decosta, 26, also of Canterbury Avenue, was jailed for 15 months for unlawfully wounding Shahid Iqbal. All three victims were attacked in daylight in Gaythorne Road, West Bowling. The judge said Guthrie and Decosta were armed with knives for a revenge mission after Guthrie was attacked near Newby School.

Just another knife murder - nothing to see here ...

Guthrie, looking for a lone Asian to attack, stabbed Mr Salim in the back, inflicting a life-threatening wound.

Guthrie then went for Mr Elahi, who was posing no threat. He stabbed him downwards with such force that the knife cut through two bones and went into his lung.

If that court report is correct, wasn't that a racist attack ?

Here's another knife murder :

Abdinasir Hassan, 21, from Southwark, started a fight in an internet cafe in June last year but he was overpowered by a group of Algerian men. He took revenge by fatally stabbing Algerian waiter Hamouda Bessaad, 34, in the back in Old Kent Road. Mr Bessaad was not involved in the earlier fight.

Mr Bessaad was walking home from work when Hassan ran up to him from behind and stabbed him in the back "with such force that the blade snapped off".

Was he stabbed for looking Algerian ?

"The defendant must have thought that he was one of that earlier group of Algerian men," Mr Denison said.

Ah yes. They all look the same, don't they ? Mr Denison is prosecuting, not defending. You'd rather hope the prosecution would like to find out what actually happened, instead of pasting his suppositions onto the defendant.

I don't know. I just get the feeling in both these cases that, had the perpetrator been white, we'd be reading about them for the next six months.

He said "Jehovah" !

(Hastily edited after a correspondent informed me that council firewalls were classifying the post as 'hate speech' !)

I was hoping to ignore the Prince Harry brouhaha, but as it was the main story on BBC news yesterday, occupied most of John Pienaar's 2 hr R5 'politics' programme and was the phone-in topic on R5 this morning ... a few points :

a) this was another Murdoch press-sourced story. The Dirty Digger, now a Dirty Yank, has never got over his lack of honours and social acceptance for his services to soft porn and the general coarsening (parental advisory) of British life over the last 30 years. His papers are as a result republican. If Prince Philip really had the power that Al Fayed thinks he has, Murdoch would long ago have been at the bottom of Sydney Harbour in a concrete overcoat.

b) '****' is about as racist as 'Brit'. It's a nickname, a diminutive. A year or so back my daughter and I were looking at a globe, and I was showing her all those fascinating countries northwest of Tibet and west of China.

"All the countries round there end in -stan, because that means country in Persian, which is what their languages are based on. There's Uzbekistan, the country of the Uzbeks, where the Uzbeks live, Turkmenistan, where the Turkmen live, Kirghistan, where the Kirghiz live, Kazakhstan, where the Kazakhs live, Tajikistan, where the Tajiks live, Afghanistan, where the Afghans live - and Pakistan, where the Pakistanis live !"

It's true that, unlike the preceding countries, Pakistan isn't named for one ethnic group but (by this guy) for many geographical regions (Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, Turkharistan, Afghanistan, BaluchistaN) - but I bet the BBC don't know that - I'm sure I didn't.

"It means the land of the Paks- the spiritually pure and clean. It symbolizes the religious beliefs and ethnical stocks of our people; and it stands for all the territorial constituents of our original Fatherland. It has no other origin and no other meaning; and it does not admit of any other interpretation"

c) why's it considered to be racist, then ? Because white people use it. Given that any nicknames /diminutives for ethnic minorities will at some time be used by some bad white chap in an assault - and at that point will be used to classify the assault as a hate crime (aren't ALL assaults hate crimes ?), it therefore follows that white people who do not wish to be considered racist can have no nicknames or diminutives for people of another race. Not allowed.

Indeed, it's best if they allow others to tell them what the acceptable form of words is. Remember that the use of 'coloured', fifty years ago considered more genteel and polite than 'black', was presented at the Lawrence tribunal as evidence pointing towards an officer's racism. The poor chap just hadn't kept up. Didn't read the Guardian or New Society.

So - no nicknames, no diminutives, no spontaneous descriptive creation - all things the Brits are rather partial to. Instead, use the words you're told to - and when they change, you change your language.

This only applies to whites addressing non-whites or possibly Jews. A google of "Welsh Windbag" produces 4,000 references, nearly all to Neil Kinnock - but nobody is likely to be prosecuted for incitement to racial hatred. Laban calls Charles Kennedy the Great Chieftain of the Pudding Race - an obviously disparaging reference to his ethnic origins (as well as his resemblance to a pudding that's been well laced with Glenlivet) yet the post survives. No, it's a non-white - or at least non-British thing.

It works inversely too. Kanye West can rap about the n-word as much as he likes, but the BBC don't mind. The killers of Christopher Yates can shout "We have killed the white man. That will teach an Englishman to interfere in P*** business" but the judge doesn't call them racist.

d) I forget which linguist, probably all of them, said that you can control thought by controlling language, and make some ideas literally unthinkable for lack of words. Let's just ask the question - what are the equivalent words, nicknames, diminutives that an Asian or Afro-Caribbean would use to describe whites ? Gora ? Cracker ? I don't know, the BBC and Guardian certainly won't tell us. Anyone out there know ? As we've seen, they don't in themselves have to be insulting. What are the magical words which make an attack a racist one ? The ones that the courts and BBC will present as indubitable proof of anti-white racism ?

You see. The words (officially) do not exist. It's easy to 'prove' a racist element to an assault or murder by whites. Evidence that any one of a few words was used is sufficient. The prosecutor seeking to prove a racist asaault ON a white person has no such handy shortcut (btw, I'd be interested to know what Christopher Yates killers actually said - and in what language). No wonder non-white racism has such a low profile - there are no words to describe it or identify it, so how can it exist ?

As I've said before, I'm extremely uneasy about the whole hate crimes concept. But given where we are, I'd like some racial equality when it comes to the definition of such. Give me.

A Dhobi-Wallah's Daughter

Times :

An Indian teenager who dared to write a love letter to a sweetheart from a higher caste was beaten and paraded through the streets before being thrown under a train and killed.

Manish Kumar, 15, a member of India’s Dalit, or “Untouchable”, community, was seized by a gang of men as he went to his village school.

He was beaten and his head was shaved before he was thrown on to the tracks, as his mother begged for mercy, witnesses said. It was alleged that police looked on as the incident took place.

A teenager has since been arrested and a policeman has been suspended. Five other men were detained.

Three months ago the boy sent a letter “expressing his interest” in a girl from the Dhobi community, another Dalit sub-caste, which has traditionally washed clothes for a living – but is fractionally above the Ravidas in the Hindu hierarchy. The note was discovered by the girl’s parents.

Hmm. I don't know why, but I've got this story in the back of my mind :

Urgent action is needed to boost the number of Muslim officers in counter-terrorism units, the National Association of Muslim Police has said. A survey carried out by the association and think tank Demos suggests Muslims remain under-represented in the police. Half of the 51 UK forces took part. There are 27 Muslim counter-terrorism officers out of a total of 2,300, and few officers overall in high ranks.

The association said progress on diversity was "painfully slow".

I think the idea that to police Community A you need officers from Community A, with its implication that Community B officers just can't cut it (for reasons of racism if B = white) is an extremely dangerous one. What you need are officers who'll enforce the law impartially among all communities. Otherwise, what happens when Community A come into conflict with Community B ?

Well, we see what happens when those officers have more loyalty to "their" community than to the law. I'm presuming the officers in India who watched the killing of Manish Kumar weren't Chamar (ac/t the Times, "another term by which the group is known, chamar, is considered a grave insult"), any more than the officers watching/encouraging/participating in the 1984 killings of Sikhs were Sikh, or than the officers who told the killers of Ehsan Jafri and others that they had three or four hours to work in were Muslim.

Up to now, the vast majority of officers in the UK have been natives, something that causes our rulers no end of breast-beating and soul-searching. Although I'm informed that officers did not intervene during the 1919 Liverpool riots, when natives were doing the attacking, they certainly intervened in 1958 in Notting Hill, probably the last UK 'race riot' when the attackers were natives. They also famously guarded mosques all over the UK following the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks.

If the police and firemen who turned up at Manningham Labour Club had been more representative of the the local community, would those elderly Yorkshiremen and women still have been rescued from immolation ? It's a question worth asking - because one day, perhaps not so very far away, they will be (this report says that Muslims will be 15% of the workforce by 2017).

It's not Muslims in particular - all the Indian examples of partiality above featured Hindu officers. But the question still stands - it's one I've asked before. Import people from countries where there is a higher incidence of corruption or partiality among State functionaries than there is in the UK. What exactly is the mechanism by which the lower levels of corruption and partiality in the UK are transmitted to its new citizens ?

The "Big Man" Steps Down

Some called him a saviour, a man sent by God to succour his people and defend them from a murderous and merciless enemy. Others called him a bigoted rabble-rouser and declared that his fiery oratory gave rise to bloody deeds on the streets.

But love him or loathe him - and there were plenty who did one or the other - he bestrode the political scene of his native land like some Titan of elder days. Whatever you thought, he was not a man you could ignore.

Yes, Lee Jasper has resigned.


Mr Gilligan's homework has been richly rewarded. Standard editor Veronica Wadley will be cracking open the Lidl Prosecco tonight.

His approach has been that of a chess player, planning several steps ahead and trying to anticipate the responses of the Mayor to the Evening Standard's stories. So after spending more than four weeks investigating a network of 11 companies and organisations, linked to Livingstone's race adviser Lee Jasper, that were in receipt of around £2.5m in public money but allegedly did little for it, Gilligan deliberately held back large amounts of material from his initial report.

"One of the most important things in this is to plan for the counterattack, because this is an extremely damaging story to Livingstone. We knew he would say it was all lies and there would be the inevitable dash of Lord Hutton thrown in. We held quite a lot of our evidence back. He's not a cautious politician, and we knew he would shoot his mouth off straight away. And then we rolled out more of our other evidence. He fell right into the trap in an absolutely amazing way."

The Mayor responded to the Standard's accusations by quoting Hutton's comment that "I have considerable doubt as to how reliable Gilligan's evidence really is" and insinuating that the stories were politically motivated and racist.

Apparently Boris gave him a job on the Speccie when his credit was low following the Hutton Report. He's certainly grateful.

So, whither Lee Jasper ? At Harry's Place they're saying he'll be back the day after Ken wins - if he wins.

He's been around a long time - I first heard him on a Five Live phone-in - one of those "how racist are we ?" discussions - when he was apparently a social worker from Bradford. There's some interesting background on the various three-men-and-a-fax anti-racist organisations with which he's been involved, as well as the politics and personalities, in this pdf - Black Politics and the web of Joined-Up Governance.

Lee's USP was for years, like Arthur Lisch, the "riot-on-the-street-unless" approach. And he seemed to be able to deliver - even when being paid £500 a day (in 1995 - you can see how the Lawrence report a few years later was kicking at an open door) to lecture the Met on diversity, he found time to make a "hardline speech which inflamed the crowd" preceding the 1995 Brixon riots.

Ken Livingstone stopped his radical mouth with taxpayer gold - and to be fair, Lee delivered on his side of the bargain. Black Britain, unlike brown Britain, has been remarkably riot-free in the last dozen years (there is a debate as to whether, post-Scarman, the police just left the criminals to get on with it, but that's too big a subject for this post). You could just imagine Lee outside a police station after the Menezes shootings, but he's been quiet as a mouse. And the Met's Trident operation IS actually reducing gun deaths - admittedly stabbings are up, but the once customary background anti-police chorus from black "community leaders" is absent nowadays. Some people would say he was cheap at the price.

If Ken falls at the last, and Lee decides that it's time to put the radical tam back on, he'll find a different scene. The Afro-Caribbean population is pretty static (this doc suggests that Afro-Caribbeans were 0.9% of the youth population but had 2.7% of the abortions among that age group) while the Asian population is growing. Power relations on the streets are changing - in the 1980s Birmingham riots Asian shopkeepers died, but in their 2005 counterpart the only fatalities were black. Nonetheless there is potential for trouble - particularly in North and South London.

We shall see. One other possibility is joining the lovely Karen in forming some kind of UK counterpart to Jesse Jackson's US shakedown operations. After all, what Jesse does isn't so far away from what we've seen over here.

Media Blackout Over Racist Attack

There's an ongoing Old Bailey trial, but try finding anything in the MSM about the people who left John Payne paralysed and brain-damaged.

"This is their land first and they've come to take it back"

Face Right on the ongoing trouble in LA, where demographic change is being accelerated as Latino gangs are drive out black Angelenos.

Just imagine if the Latino gangs were white. We'd hear all about it in the UK, via the BBC and Guardian. LaShawn Barber notes the non-response of the usual suspects.

"As I’ve said time and time again on this blog, raising a ruckus over hispanic-on-black and black-on-black violence is not lucrative to the professional civil rights establishment, not soul-satisfying to blacks who see white racism in every corner, and not sexy enough for jaded liberal journalists to bother covering.

Those fools are too busy fixating on white-on-black violence, or even the mere suggestion of white-on-black violence, as relatively rare as it is. Where are the Jacksons, Sharptons, and so-called black community leaders? "

Muslims "Very Angry", Fear Backlash Part 4621

As ever, the BBC are foremost with the least predictable stories :

Mohammad Sarwar told BBC Scotland that he had received calls from people who had been threatened or targeted by abusive graffiti.

"I have spoken to a number of people from the Muslim community and the Asian community who feel very angry," he said.

"They're concerned about a backlash and that's why the emergency meeting has been called."

I feel we (and the BBC) need to keep a sense of proportion here. When Islamic terrorists killed 52 people on London trains and buses, what was the backlash ?

Someone said something nasty on a bus to a mate of Yasmin Alibhai Brownes, or was that after 9/11 ? A school dinner lady made an inappropriate remark to a Muslim child. An Afghan taxi-driver was badly beaten up in Kingston on Thames (I don't know if its ever been established if 7/7 was the motive). And an idiot in Edinburgh tried and failed to set alight to a mosque.

Perhaps before we beat ourselves up we should consider the deaths of 50-odd people killed by Islamic 'militants' on a train at Godhra, India in 2002, and the "backlash" of the non-Muslim population of Gujarat to that atrocity.

Kinda puts graffiti, even unpleaasant graffiti, into perspective. There are by the way, according to the BBC, some 500,000 Gujaratis living in the UK.

Wikipedia - The Memory Hole

Gone - Gavin Hopley, Christopher Yates, Charlene Downes, Mary-Ann Leneghan, Richard Whelan. Was Ross Parker there before ?

Charlene Downes entry was deleted by a chap called Srikeit, an Indian national who discovered Wikipedia in January and became an administrator in July. I have to admire his self-confidence in feeling able to chop an item on an English murder - I'm sure I wouldn't feel myself competent to pronounce on murder cases in India.

How long can Kriss Donald's entry survive ? Or Isiah Young-Sam's ?

I don't think we have to worry yet about Anthony Walker. But don't tell them about the Zebra Killings.




(Hat-tip and stolen logo - the Dumb One)

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ?

It's an article of faith on the political Left that saying bad things about asylum-seekers or immigrants will lead to racist attacks and murders. Yet the corollary to this theorem, that saying bad things about the natives will lead to attacks on them, is never put forward, despite the fact that saying bad things about the natives is more common, perfectly socially acceptable and actually state-sponsored. If you have a child in secondary school, take a look at their history texts. It's not getting better, either.

Brutal aspects of British rule in India during the 20th century will feature in a syllabus approved for secondary schools in England today.

Pupils aged 11 to 14 will study events like the Amritsar massacre when hundreds of protesters were killed by British troops.

I don't imagine Cawnpore, when hundreds of British women and children, prisoners of Nana Sahib, were butchered in cold blood, will feature highly on the curriculum.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority denied any anti-British bias and said that the optional unit for Key Stage 3 would foster understanding between the mix of nationalities in England.

Looks like the news of the death of multiculturalism hasn't reached the QCA yet. The 'mix of nationalities in England', eh ? I thought we were all British citizens and subjects of Her Majesty, united under Gordon Brown's Union Jack. You can see how telling the natives how bad they were and those 'of subcontinental heritage' how badly their forebears were treated will 'foster understanding', can't you ? As long as that understanding is that the natives are evil racists, of course.

The trouble is ideas have consequences. The fact that for every member of the minority population of England and Wales killed by a native, two natives are killed by a member of a minority community may at least in part be a result of thirty years of propaganda by self-loathing white liberals - for example the BBCs coverage of racist murder. That great iconoclast Yasmin Alibhai Brown addressed this issue in an Evening Standard piece a while back, which Edwin Greenwood has kindly made available.

I have talked to some black and Asian inmates serving time in prison for such (racist) crimes: most justify their actions as collective retribution for attacks on "their people". A knife for a knife, they think, will make for a better world.

As I've posted before , the current demography of the elderly patient population in our hospitals is very different from that of the medical workforce. As Trevor Phillips proudly proclaimed : "The National Health Service, the most British of institutions, was launched by a Welshman, built by Irish labour, sustained by Caribbean nurses and now held together by Indian and other foreign doctors with Filipino nurses, and Somali cleaners. That is modern Britain." I see no reason to imagine that this demography is different in the private care and nursing home sectors, although there'll be an extra dimension in the ownership of such institutions.

Demographics mean that, especially in our great cities, the elderly - who are overwhelmingly natives - will find that their carers and medical staff are more and more likely to be non-natives. Who, as noted above, have been brought up on stories about the evil natives - stories usually amplified and promoted by middle-class white liberals.


'Collective retribution for attacks on "their people"'. Call me old-fashioned, Yasmin - but isn't that called racism ?

'And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge ?'

"A care home boss whose staff goaded disabled patients into attacking each other was warned she faces jail yesterday.

Diane Butler, 47, was in charge of carers who hurled racist and cruel taunts at defenceless residents with physical and mental difficulties.

A year-long reign of terror included one disabled woman being urged to kick and beat a Down’s Syndrome sufferer.

Margaret Burdfield, 49, was also called a ‘white bitch’ and ‘ugly bitch’ at Craegmoor Residential Care Home, North London.

The three abusive staff were shopped to police by carer Basil Hanson who secretly filmed their taunts on a mobile phone.

London’s Snaresbrook Crown Court heard staff warned Butler to take action against the abuse.

Butler had denied knowledge of the incidents and said she was in the West Indies at the time. She was convicted of one count of wilful neglect but cleared of another. One count was put on court file. Judge Alan Pardoe told her: “The possibility of a custodial sentence is real.”

Islington Council shut the home last September.

Detective Sgt Paul Kingdon said afterwards: “It is abhorrent that they sought to humiliate residents. This appears to have been done purely for their own amusement.”

Carers Noelin Bailey, 31, Eulalee Hall, 51, both of North London, and Glendeen Nedd, 35, of East London, will be sentenced at a later date."

The BBC, Islington Tribune and Scotsman also have reports.

"Despite Islington Council regularly inspecting private care home, Craegmoor, in Holloway, and having “no cause for concern” over care standards, police were dramatically enlisted to shut it down last September amid claims of psychological and racial abuse.

The incident was described by adult social services chief, Cllr John Gilbert as “disturbing but rare”. He said: “Our three residents were quickly moved to an alternative home and have since settled well.”

“It (the home) was registered with the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) and subject to its robust inspection regime. Our officers also visited regularly to check on the standard of care as well as to assess and review the level of care needed by our residents."

You know what happens next. What always happens when an organisation fails. "Review the procedures !"

“In (the) light of what happened, we carried out a review of our procedures for appointing care providers. We are confident our vetting procedures were followed and all the necessary checks into Craegmoor’s affairs were made before appointing them.”

The unpleasantnesses in Islington are not a one-off. I'm thinking of the innovative feeding regime which 89 year old Lucy Neal was subjected to in Handsworth.

Good News

The Anthony Walker murder suspects are in custody. If guilty, I predict a 20-year minumum sentence and no talk about 'root causes'. So, at minimum, should all murderers be treated.

The trial of the (alleged) twisted firestarter commences.

Tory MP Gerald Howarth doesn't seem to want to find out why they hate us.

"If they don't like our way of life, there is a simple remedy: go to another country, get out," Mr Howarth said. Asked what if these people were born in Britain, he replied: "Tough. If you don't give allegiance to this country, then leave."


The (allegedly) toddler-shooting toerag is facing his trial. If guilty, he'll probably get a year or two, rather than the being dismembered and stuck on a spike which was once such a salient feature of Scottish law.

You may remember the case of Carol McMillan, who kicked a grandmother to death in an argument over a parking space, and was punished with the full severity of Scots law - 250 hours community service.

The Scottish Lord Advocate is appealing against the sentence on the grounds of leniency. So she'll probably end up doing six months.



Remember how the appalling wave of Islamophobia (a school dinner lady said something nasty to a Muslim pupil, someone was rude to one of Yasmin Alibhai Brown's mates) that engulfed Britain after 9/11, so distracting the BBC that they missed reporting the racist murder of Ross Parker on TV or radio news ?

It seems to be happening again. While the BBC reports a wave of verbal abuse and headscarf-pulling by the racist, Islamophobic Native Brits, the killing of a Native Brit by a Muslim, two days after the 21/7 bomb attempts, seems to have passed them by. The BBC website has a report (avoiding the nationality of the attacker - who is an Afghan)

"Nowbahar Bahar, 21, of no fixed address, appeared before Medway magistrates on Saturday morning after police had charged him late on Friday night.

The man who died was 32-year-old David Henkel, from Chatham, pictured, who was taken to hospital after an incident in Bank Street, Luton on Saturday, July 23. He died of head injuries on Tuesday.

Bahar, who moved to England from Afghanistan, was flanked by an interpreter and two guards.

He spoke only once to give his name and sat silently for the rest of the 10-minute court hearing.

He was remanded in custody and will appear before Maidstone Crown Court on Friday."

UPDATE - Expat Yank points out - and rightly so - that 52 people were killed and 700 injured in religiously motivated hate crimes last month.