We Shall Not Look Upon Her Like Again

Ken Livingstone summed her up well, although he had a lot more negative things to say about her :

Ken Livingstone, Labour’s former London Mayor who clashed with Lady Thatcher during his time running the Greater London Council in the 1980s, said her personal “courage and drive” made her “the most admirable prime minister of modern times”.

“She didn’t worry about focus groups, she didn’t read the newspapers,” he said.

“There was real courage.”

However, Mr Livingstone said it had been “a tragedy for Britain” that her policies had been so badly flawed.

The Thatcher years were the start of the world we live in today. Her Premiership saw:

a) The start of the debt-fuelled culture which crashed in 2008 - remember "takes the waiting out of wanting" ?
b) The rise of the UK underclass, bastardy and drug use
c) The rise of the deregulated financial “economy” and decline of manufacturing
d) The rise in house prices
e) a collapse in the birth rate as
f) more women participated in the workforce (so they could afford a house!)
g) a dramatic rise in crime – linked to b)
h) the sell-off of vital infrastructure – power generation and distribution being the most important

While winning her economic wars, she was defeated in the culture wars – I’m not sure she even realised she was fighting one, let alone that she was losing. At any event, the Britain of 1990 was a lot further from Alderman Roberts’ Grantham than the Britain of 1979.

But the thing is – every government since has overseen the continuation and perhaps intensification of all the baleful trends above – with the one glorious exception of the Blessed Michael Howard’s noble reversal of the previous 50 years penal policy.

And, of course, Blair added a few more baleful trends all of his very own - including massive immigration and stopping all nuclear development in 1998.

We see in the Thatcher years yet again the contrast between the post-68 left's total dominance of the social agenda and their defeats on the economic agenda. A former girlfriend was a trainee social worker in 1980 - those girls hated Thatcher, more for her conservative social beliefs and her personal style than her economics. Such a straight !

Thatcher’s small-town conservative social values were almost redundant by the end of her reign, with rocketing rates of crime, bastardy, drug use, STIs.

The 80s were when the 60s went mainstream – I can still remember finding a bunch of lager-drinking ‘lads’ from my local picking magic mushrooms one September – their counterparts of ten or fifteen years before would have avoided such things like the plague.

So why did Mrs Thatcher’s social agenda fail so dismally while her economic agenda – at least as regards crippling union power – succeed?

Because individual capitalists – especially in the financial sector – found that none of that made much difference to their profits. Some things, like the influx of women into the labour market, and a move from manufacturing to services, were a positive boon as far as reducing militancy and strikes were concerned. The destruction of the existing cultural landscape was no problem to people who didn’t particularly identify with it – like Rupert Murdoch.

Bastardy, crime and the underclass were much more of a problem for working class people than the elite, who didn’t have to live with it or send their kids to school with it. Not much anti-social behaviour in Roy Jenkins’ Oxfordshire village – plenty in the Valleys where he was born.

Sure, taxes were quite high to pay the benefits bill – but they were coming down, and compared to the 1960s they were massively reduced. And North Sea oil paid the bills and enabled us to keep the balance of payments deficit getting too outrageous – while the City tax take climbed ever higher. You can only take one step at a time – IIRC Mrs Thatcher’s share of state spending was around the same when she left as when she arrived – remarkable when you think what the state no longer did – steel, coal, gas, water, power.

It's arguable (I tend to agnosticism) that Mrs Thatcher's curbing of the unions may have been a good thing in a relatively closed society. But when that was combined with immigration on the scale of the Blair years, it was an invitation to capitalists to fill their boots, then grind them in the faces of the poor. The toxic synergy of capitalist economic ideas (up to a point - would Adam Smith have bailed out the banks?) and post-68 left social ideas have between them created the Britain we see today - and it's not a pretty sight.    

Some Start To Get It ...

Well, it only took between 400 and 1,200 deaths at a single hospital, but it's starting to get through :

"When I asked people who worked, or had worked, in the NHS what they thought had caused the biggest changes in nursing care, nearly all of them mentioned something called Project 2000. This was a new system introduced in the early 1990s, which moved the training of nurses out of hospitals and into universities."

I blogged the remarkable change to nursing training in 2003, having seen the results first-hand when the caring nurses on my dying mother's ward made it plain that they didn't want to have to take her to the toilet, and having seen the set texts when my wife took a 'back to nursing' university course after a career break.

"... until relatively recently many nurses believed that nursing is best carried out when based on instinct, intuition and empathy, elements that make up 'the calling' ... such an approach ...has since come in for considerable criticism."

Thus 'Nursing Models and Nursing Practice' by Peter Aggleton and Helen Chalmers, recommended by university lecturers throughout the land . You can't say that criticism's not been taken to heart.

"This is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe"

Former life assurance salesman turned Tory A-lister Ivan Massow on the Tory Taliban (© Alan Duncan):

“Those same shire people didn’t agree that a man and a man should live together. They are always one step behind the curve unfortunately. But there aren’t many more reforms for them to tolerate. There’s just nothing left after this. When we can get this last thing through the gate I can’t see anything else, any other slights on their lifestyle or their beliefs that they have to tolerate.” 

Also in today's Telegraph :

"The idea that mothers rather than fathers should take charge of raising children needs to be "shattered", a minister said today."

It'll end in tears before bedtime, mark my words. But it all makes a kind of sense from one perspective. It all depends on whether you think that being a Master Of The Universe, high above a shattered, atomised and poverty-stricken mass of competing and variegated cultures, is better than being a more-than-comfortable member of a civil, ordered, prosperous and relatively homogenous society. You and I may go for the latter option. But that's not necessarily what an elite will want*.


(In other news, "a widow has died after being left to starve for nine days as her care agency was closed and the council forgot about her.")





* Laban - "It's true that in a rational economic world, a high-earning working class might be considered a good thing for a nation - and that therefore it's not in our rulers' interest to take us back a hundred years - but that would also have applied for the several hundred years prior to, say, 1860-1960. The post-1945 settlement is not the natural order of things. Before that it was the plebs and the rest - and the will to power, even constrained by Christianity, was strong. Unconstrained, what limits are there?"

Universal Tribulation

One of my hobby-horses (see here, here, here, and here) is the apparent belief among our rulers that allowing mass immigration, from countries where corruption is endemic and a State job is an opportunity for self-enrichment, will have no effect on the culture of the UK.

That was always unlikely - and even more unlikely with a relatively generous welfare state and a default assumption of honesty in claimants. True in 1948 but not true now. The benefits system is open to looting on a grand scale, especially by those with access to forged ID - which means not many Brits but an awful lot of Londoners.

Another hobby-horse is that the law-abiding are penalised for the sins of the lawless. Some hapless electrician with a Stanley knife in his pocket is pulled in because of youths being stabbed on London streets, children can no longer (as I did in youth on a classmate's farm) use an air-rifle unsupervised, I can't buy sodium chlorate weedkiller any more because someone might use it to blow things up.

Which brings me, by a roundabout route, to Ian Duncan Smith's Universal Credit, slated for implementation next year, and replacing Child Tax Credit, Working Families Tax Credit (which people with an income of over 50K could get - thank you Gordon Brown for this last-ditch attempt to encourage welfare dependency) and a number of other benefits.

"When implemented, Universal Credit will drastically affect the low-paid self-employed as well as anyone who makes a tax loss. It is proposed that Universal Credits, like the current Working Tax Credits, will be "limited to those who exceed the 'floor of assumed income'" based on the National Minimum Wage."

What this means is that a host of small businesses - often the "single mum selling her handmade stationery" type, which might make no profit or small profits, will be assumed for benefit purposes to be doing a 40 hour week for £6 an hour - whether they are or not. If you recall, the number of self-employed has mushroomed during this recession .

“A rise in self-employment may, in itself, be a good thing, however previous analysis from the CIPD found that the recent rise was less a sign of a resurgent enterprise culture, and more evidence of a growing army of part-time ‘odd jobbers’ desperate to avoid unemployment.”

Alas, come next summer this is going to go into reverse as large numbers of self-employed close their business down and sign on again. So why is this entrepreneur-friendly (well, wealthy entrepreneurs, anyway) administration stamping on what could be the next Laura Ashley or Party Planners ?

"I think it will cut out a lot of fraud, i am a housing benefit processor and the amount of self employed taxi drivers working 40 hours a week and declare £50 a week earnings is beyond a joke, however i do feel for the genuine people who are struggling, who will be hit by this i think it is unfair. if your not earning this money then your claim should not be based on this amount."

My HMRC spies (aka the DWP website) are quite open about it. Reducing fraud, along with "making work pay" (but not low paid self employed work) is what it's all about. The good guys (and gals) are suffering for the sins of the bad guys.

"Universal Credit will make it much easier to catch fraudsters as it will calculate benefit levels using real-time information linked to the PAYE system. By picking up financial irregularities, such as earnings whilst claiming unemployment benefits, it will remove the main opportunities for fraud and error in the system."

Well, it might, if there weren't 83 million National Insurance numbers in the UK for a working population of 30-million odd. Fraudsters are very resourceful people.

So while I have small sympathy for this self-employed, low income person :

"I am a seriously talented artist but no-one wants to buy art at the moment"

You can't but feel for this couple :

"I am employed 25 hours i have asked my boss to increase my hours but there are no available hours?? we have 2 children under 16,
when my husband lost his job 4yrs ago down to the company going into liquidation etc,etc, he was forced into claiming benefits because after months of looking for work nothing was available, he signed on for jsa but didnt receive any money because of what i earn…. a job was going at a local bus firm term time only, which he applied and got and is still currently there… NOW this is the confusing bit…….. my husband is classed as Self-employed ?? He works for the local company and gets a weekly wage… BUT because the company dont deduct tax and insurance from this wage he is classed as Sub-Contracred-Self employed ... because his work is Term-time this means he only works for approximatly 38 weeks of the year, thus leaving our household with only my income for the other 14 weeks, we do rely on tax credit as a safety net during these 14 weeks, we have both and still are looking for more full-time work but its easier said than done and with 2 small dependant it is difficult….. so how is universal credits going to help my situation if we dont meet there criteria???"

I think the answer is - "it isn't going to help" - and that's a great pity.

It's Just Like The Crucible, Isn't It ?

The BBC (and Newsnight**) are in the doo-doo because of Jimmy Saville*.

It's getting out of control, everyone saying that everyone else should be investigated, so they turn round and point the finger elsewhere.

"If I'm bad, look at him!"













* FWIW, back in the 70s, a nurse at St James's in Leeds told me "all the nurses know not to let him get you alone in a stock cupboard". But there are a fair few blokes like that in the world.


** Were the BBC right to pull the Saville prog after all ? The magnificent Anna Raccoon rips the story open - better than anything you'll read in the press or see on TV. Turns out she was a resident at one of the children's homes where JS allegedly did dirty deeds. Seven posts - "Past Lives and Present Misgivings" - exhausting/riveting to read, what must they have been like to write? And I note that a 14 year old Anna was quite a character then, too.

More Thoughts On The End Of The Journey

From todays news :

"UK Border Agency working on plans for priority passport lanes for rich travellers at Heathrow and other British airports"

"Heh heh heh ... I told you those Zil lanes would be useful"

"Ms Miller, who is also the Culture Secretary, argues that extending marriage to same-sex couples will ensure that the institution retains its importance and relevance in modern Britain, and that its introduction is a milestone in Britain’s heritage “of freedom and fairness”."

"The new definition of domestic violence and abuse now states:
Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality. This can encompass but is not limited to the following types of abuse:
* psychological
* physical
* sexual
* financial
* emotional **"

"George Osborne wants two-year freeze in state benefits"

"Heh heh heh ... you get gay marriage, and we get a "flexible labour market" .. heh heh heh .." 

So the journey continues - there's been for quite a while now an acceleration of the "left" social agenda in tandem with the "right" (read "rich") economic one - and did I mention that the pressing problem of racism in football's still not solved?

John Whittingdale MP, chair of the inquiry, said: "Recent incidents of racist abuse in the UK highlight that there remain significant problems." MPs also said homophobia may now be the most prevalent form of discrimination.

Steve Rotheram MP, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport committee, said a lack of ethnic diversity in management and boardroom positions at many English clubs was holding back the fight against racism.

A couple of points. While the plan may indeed be working, there's no need to invoke a conscious conspiracy. I had a couple of long debates (and a monologue) on this subject a few years back, before the economic poo hit the fan. Capitalists will just take advantage, if the culture lets them. It's what they do. Mass immigration may be a necessary condition for the impoverishment of the UK working class, but not a sufficient one.

While it's not a cheerful thought (especially in finding yourself alongside, for example, George Galloway), I have to surmise that the collapse of Soviet Communism may also have played its part in what we see now. While there was an alternative model, no matter how evil and corrupt (as it was in many respects) it may have been, Western capitalists couldn't take the **** too much. Now anything is possible.

It's true that in a rational economic world, a high-earning working class might be considered a good thing for a nation - and that therefore it's not in our rulers' interest to take us back a hundred years - but that would also have applied for the several hundred years prior to, say, 1860-1960. The post-1945 settlement is not the natural order of things. Before that it was the plebs and the rest* - and the will to power, even constrained by Christianity, was strong. Unconstrained, what limits are there?    





* read a couple of Jane Austens over the last week. Ordinary people just do not feature. Reminds me of "Friends" or "Four Weddings And A Funeral", where making a living is the least of any of the characters concerns and everyone, while always appreciating more, has enough money. Still, Lizzie Bennet's dad is a hoot, although while Lizzie's wonderfully witty and self-assured, I prefer an Ethelberta - or still more, her sister.


** financial abuse can apparently consist of not giving someone enough of the family income - by which measure EVERYONE in my family, myself included, is a self-declared victim. If that's the case, do you think sexual abuse might consist of not giving someone enough sex? I look forward to some brave lawyer arguing that in court...

The End Of The Journey Will Soon Be In Sight...

Mass immigration doesn't "just" depress wages and reduce the power of working people vis a vis employers.

I haven't blogged much over the last year due to long hours, but still sniped over at CiF - and this comment sums my emerging view :

The greatest prize for the very rich would be the total dismantling of the welfare state and the removal of its consequent tax burden (although venture capitalists, on 10% tax - "entrepreneurs relief", do pretty well already).

It's a lot easier to justify a welfare state when the recipients are "people like us" and therefore easier to identify with and to think "there but for the grace of God". Social solidarity among working people, whether it be support for a welfare state or a trades union, will always be stronger in the absence of cultural, religious or racial divisions. Social scientists like Robert Putnam have noted how diversity weakens a sense of community.

So were I an evil capitalist billionaire looking to reduce the power of trades unions and destroy the welfare state, I'd start by funding Left groups supporting mass immigration.

I'd encourage such groups, and left-wing lawyers too, to support the most outrageous abuses of the welfare system, knowing that it would discredit welfare in the eyes of ordinary working people - and I'd chuckle to see Telegraph and Mail readers - and BBC commenters, too - getting angry when benefits rise, as they should do, with inflation.

"The plan is working ... heh heh heh ..."

I'd suggest, with all its faults, that the Welfare State is the most outstanding instance of UK social solidarity - started in Edwardian times by Lloyd George and nailed down in the aftermath of WW2 by a strong people, annealed in the fire of two world wars and quenched in the depression years of the 1930s.

I'd also suggest that the plan is continuing to work :

Despite the tough economic climate, the study by independent social research agency NatCen reveals attitudes towards welfare and welfare claimants have toughened. Only 28% of those asked wanted to see more spending on welfare - down from 35% at the beginning of the recession in 2008, and from 58% in 1991.

Report author and NatCen chief executive, Penny Young, said the study showed the public's view on welfare was "in tune... with the coalition's policies".She said: "The recession doesn't seem to be changing things; attitudes continue to harden. One thing that we've seen is that even where groups are seen as perhaps more deserving - so retired people, disabled people - again for the first time since 2008 we've seen that the number of people who are prepared to see more money go on disability benefits has actually fallen."

 "Heh heh heh ...." - the BBC Today programme this morning couldn't get over it - in the early 90s recession 58% thought we should increase welfare spending, now it's down to 28%. What could possibly have changed since the early 90s? They just couldn't understand such a dramatic shift in attitude.

"You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come,
Knock as you please, there's nobody at home"

In various posts over the last year, I've aired the fancy that in ten, fifteen years, the Guardian will be simultaneously

a) bemoaning the end of the welfare state and the new poverty of the working class
b) celebrating our ever-greater diversity

and I've pointed out that

Western welfare states carry a high tax burden, which makes life uncomfortable for the mega-rich. It would be a lot easier for them if social solidarity was destroyed to the extent that the welfare state no longer existed and their taxes could come down. A good way to do that is to create atomised societies of competing ethnicities.

Mass immigration will IMHO mean the end of the Welfare State, probably in the next thirty years. A pity. It was a good concept - for 1948 Brits and their descendants. And as an ageing boomer, I don't want the NHS to turn into any more of a death factory for the old than it currently is.

But at least we'll all be equal in our barrios, looking up at the gated communities on the hills.







UPDATE - "The government is considering ending the automatic annual increase in benefits in line with inflation, sources have told BBC Newsnight.

The whole point of benefits is that they're meant to be a liveable minimum amount.So if inflation rises, so should that amount. But there'll be little sympathy for that view from those whose expenses are rising but whose wages are static - and that means most of us. 

"Heh heh heh ..."

UPDATE2 - "To promote prudence and responsibility, rather than the dependency and waste of the welfare system, we should return to mutual aid societies

"Heh heh heh ..."

Shulamith Firestone 1945-2012

Radical feminist and author of "The Dialectic of Sex" Shulamith Firestone has died aged 67.

"Firestone wanted to eliminate the following things: sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, monogamy, mothering, the family unit, capitalism, the government, and especially the physiological phenomena of pregnancy and childbirth. She wanted to mechanize reproduction -- gestating fetuses in artificial wombs -- and raise the offspring communally, treating them no differently from adults at the earliest possible age."

In my teens I was a big fan. I thought I couldn't love, wasn't happy about it, and she said "men can't love". At 17 you are the world, so I swallowed her ideas whole. After all, a sample of one proved her right.

In hindsight (although I still have the book, long time no read - it's somewhere in the loft with Marx's complete works), her ideas were mostly idiotic - although she was right about the massive link between "the female condition" and childrearing - which isn't exactly an original insight. Her solution was to abolish the link entirely - she was a follower of Mustapha Mond :

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. "Just try to realize it," he said, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. "Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother."
That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.
"Try to imagine what 'living with one's family' meant."
They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.
"And do you know what a 'home' was?"
They shook their heads.

The Atlantic obituarist notes the contrast between the success of the late Helen Gurley Brown and the obscurity of Ms Firestone, who died alone and remained alone for the next week until a neighbour alerted the landlord (how's that childlessness thing working out for you?).
  
The Laban take is that, while the HGB brand of Bridget Jones feminism is in many ways as toxic as Ms Firestone's, it at least is grounded in biological and evolutionary reality.

Remember this post ?

If I understand these evolutionary biologist chappies aright, before the Great Cultural (and contraceptive) Revolution women really really wanted two things (from an evolutionary biology perspective ... remember we've only just come out of the trees ...)

a) a chap with top genes to father her children - a real alpha male to produce alpha babies

b) a chap who'd provide for said children and stick around to help raise them, or at a minimum to facilitate her raising them

and from the same evolutionary biology perspective men wanted

a) only one thing

the point of both approaches being to maximise the survival of your genes

Now you might have noticed a potential issue with the female strategy - that Mr Alpha and Mr Provider may not necessarily be the same chap.

While your mileage may vary, it's safe to say that most women don't want to be celibate or to raise children in glass bottles. On the other hand, they do want to have the good things in life, including the attentions (however defined) of high-status (however defined - may be different on the estate to in the boardroom) males. Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmopolitan was one of the first  "how-to" guides for hypergamy - aka mating upwards. HGB got famous (and rich) by giving women what they really want, because it addressed real women's desires.

Firestone's feminism was not grounded in most people's reality. Which is why she was, in Andrea Dworkin's view : "poor and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk."

Whatever the intentions of its original visionaries, feminism in practice has had the effect of reducing the costs of hypergamy to a woman, and transferring those costs to men in particular/society in general*. As the feminists would say, "it is no coincidence".



UPDATE - comment on the Villager :

"I was the neighbor who alerted the landlord; there were no neighbors-- plural -- who did so, There was no strong odor which alerted me; only a rent check that hadn't left the crack in the door since August 1. Despite the lack of odor in the hallway, she had been dead for well longer than a week . I saw the body and she didn't die peacefully in her bed. (I mention this only because the article is graphic, and false). No one, no friend, had been around - I don't know this Lopez woman, nor did I ever meet any of her family. I did talk with her network of feminist friends, two of whom came to the building (I called one) on Tuesday night and paid their respects as the body was taken away. They were, are, good women. Bob Perl I won't comment on. Shulamith was a tormented woman living with severe mental illness, and I lived with her screams and pain for years."







(*It's exemplified on a micro scale by a friend of mine, whose wife left him and got the house and child custody. He now lives in a one-bedroomed flat - but he still gets to have the kids - whenever she's jetting off for a weekend in St Petersburg or Prague with her new boyfriend. I know another guy, a great father to his kids - at 47 he's in a council flat in the worst part of town while new man is in his old house, bed, and ex-wife - and he's just lost his job when it was outsourced. Great.) 

Wife Imitating Tart, or Tart Imitating Wife ?

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

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

* and she has three children.

Welcome To England

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

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

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

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.

Scarborough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A great article from Dalrymple. No one with any self-respect or decency would live in Scarborough. The inhabitants are dirty, dishonest, gap-toothed swine.

My family left Scarborough when I was five, to seek a better life in the Gaza Strip. My parents were aid workers, and I spent my childhood in Palestine, Somalia, Yorkshire and the Congo. I met some rough diamonds in Mogadishu, let me tell you, but I never truly saw a society in collapse, where savages have the upper hand, until I returned to Scarborough. I was beaten and robbed by the villainous local peasants within an hour of getting off the train, then they tied me to a mule and I was dragged through a turnip field.

You simply can't treat people like that and expect to have a thriving tourist trade. Not for nothing did King John describe the town as "a weeping pustule'' on his realm."

'KeyWalk' marches sparked by Toronto officer's remarks

A new protest movement sparked by a policeman's ill-judged advice to motorists "not to leave their keys in the dash" has taken root in the US and Canada.

Thousands of people are arriving at car parks, some leaving their cars unlocked, others leaving the key in the dash provocatively - and then taking part in marches round the car park, or "KeyWalks".

The aim, say organisers, is to highlight a culture in which the victim rather than the car thief is blamed.

About 2,000 people took part in a "KeyWalk" in Boston on Saturday.

Boston organiser Siobhan Connors explained: "The event is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to car theft and break-ins.

"It's to bring awareness to the shame and abuse car owners still face for expressing their ownership of their own cars... essentially for behaving in a healthy and non-paranoid way" the 20-year-old told the Associated Press (AP) news agency.


Police Constable Michael Sanguinetti had been giving a talk on health and safety to a group of students at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto when he made the now infamous remarks.

"You know, I think we're beating around the bush here," he reportedly told them. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this - however, car owners should avoid leaving the vehicle unlocked, or the keys in the dash, in order not to be a victim of car crime."

He has since apologised for his remarks and has been disciplined by the Toronto police, but remains on duty.

Some 3,000 people took part in the first "Keywalk" in Toronto last month. The Keywalk Toronto website said the aim of the movement is to "re-appropriate" the phrase "perhaps not the wisest thing to do".

"Ownership of a motor vehicle should not mean that we are opening ourselves to an expectation of theft of property or of the vehicle, regardless if it is locked or unlocked," it says.

"KeyWalks" have now been held in Dallas, Asheville in North Carolina, and in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, and are planned for Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia, Reno and Austin.

Everybody, from singles, couples, parents, sisters, brothers, children and friends, are encouraged to join in.

The rallies typically end with speakers and workshops on stopping car crime and calling on law enforcement agencies not to blame victims after break-ins or thefts, AP says.

In a similarly-inspired protest, thousands of demonstrators failed to turn up at the first 'MoWalk' planned for Bethnal Green, London yesterday. The protest, where marchers were to wear T-shirts showing cartoons of Mohammed, was planned after a senior Metropolitan police officer said that anyone planning to wear a T-shirt bearing an image of the Prophet Mohammed in East London "needs their head examining", "must be tired of life" and would be "arrested for their own safety".

The aim, said organisers, was to highlight a culture in which the victim of an assault rather than the assailant is blamed. But they were disappointed with the turnout, as no marchers turned up. It is believed a mass outbreak of a little-known disease called timor mortis caused the no-show. Other "MoWalks" planned for Bradford, Burnley and Balsall Heath have been cancelled.

Of course the protesters are right. If you drive to New York City, and leave your keys on the hood, it is never, ever your fault if the car or its contents are stolen. The fault lies fairly and squarely with the thief. Nonetheless, the fact is that there are car thieves in the world. The cultural history of the twentieth century tells us that cars are very desireable objects, the subject of thousands of pieces of verse, art, literature and music. As Steven Pinker, in his review of Randy Thornhill's controversial "A Natural History of Car Theft" puts it :

"Men will spend huge amounts of money on cars; will spend hundreds of hours underneath them, repairing, restoring or enhancing them; will devote their leisure time to studying them. Many people desire cars that they do not own, cannot afford and never will be able to afford. It would run contrary to everything we know about human beings if they were NOT prepared to steal them."

The fact of leaving keys in your car, or doors unlocked, can be interpreted by unscrupulous and unethical people as an invitation to steal your goods or your vehicle, despite the fact that you have every right not to be violated in this way. I can see the unfortunate police officer's point - it's probably true that fewer cars would be stolen were their owners to lock them up and not leave the keys on show.

But that, in the end, is not what this issue and these demonstrations are about. They are about the absolute and unfettered right of car owners to conduct themselves (within the law) in any and every way they wish, with no limits or restrictions.

Grooming Goes Mainstream

There's a meme (hate that word) about ideas whose time has come - something like the five stages of grief but different - to the effect that first they ignore it, then deny it, then say it's wicked, and a stage or two more before it moves to general acceptance. Anybody know how it goes?

The issue of 'grooming' of under age girls by predominantly Asian gangs, covered on this blog here, here and here, seems to have gone mainstream, following the publication of a UCL report which, while widely publicised, seems impossible to actually find on the Web.

Now it's even the top story on Woman Sour. Far away are the days, seven years ago, when a Channel Four documentary on the subject was pulled, after pressure from West Yorkshire Police, because it might increase support for the BNP (aka 'increase community tensions'). What was once ignored by polite society, and only spoken of by racist knuckledraggers, is now almost prime-time, earnestly discussed by the great and the good. And now, when arrests are made, even the BBC no longer looks the other way.

But there was a price to pay for all those liberal blind eyes over so many years. It was paid by working-class Yorkshire and Lancashire girls like Emma, interviewed here. The Labour MP Ann Cryer, who's been a long-time campaigner on this issue, getting stick "from leading figures within her own party, not least from the former Labour leadership contender Diane Abbott", said 'Emma's description of her situation is pretty well identical to the situation of girls in Keighley whose mothers came to see me out of desperation, because they just couldn't get any action from West Yorkshire Police or Bradford Social Services'. The same West Yorkshire Police that was suppressing the evidence for political reasons, under its Chief Constable the late Colin Cramphorn, 'a man of liberal sympathies and a Guardian reader for many years'.

Just as 52 people had to die in London before the Labour Party started putting the lives of UK citizens ahead of not being like Norman Tebbit, girls have been raped and abused over a decade* while police, media and social services looked the other way.

On-street Grooming

Recent news reports have highlighted the prosecution of a gangs (sic) of predominantly Pakistani men for the grooming and sexual exploitation of young girls. What's the best way to tackle this appauling (sic) crime without stereotyping and dividing communitites (sic)? We hear again from a young woman groomed by Pakistani teenagers from the age of 12 and then repeatedly raped. Ann Cryer, the former MP for Keighley, who's been speaking out on this issue for many years, and Yusuf Tai from Forward Thinking a group working with varied Muslim communities discuss possible ways to prevent crimes like this happening again.

* maybe a lot longer, if former Detective Superintendent Mick Gradwell is right :

When I came to Blackburn in the 1970s, one of my main issues was the gangs of Asian men outside the old nightclub on top of the shopping centre who were picking up drunk white girls, specifically to abuse them. These were cars full of Asian lads in BMWs and Mercedes, offering lifts home to these young women, leading to incidents of rape and sexual assaults. From the first time I was posted to East Lancashire it has been a problem.

What Jack Straw has said so carefully is true: There is a problem with some members of the Pakistani community targeting young women in this way. In recent years we have seen it specifically with victims aged just 14, 15 or 16-years-old who are out on the streets at night and groomed by predatory gangs. For people to just come out and call Mr Straw racist is wrong.

During the past decade there has been Operation Engage in Blackburn and Operation Awaken in Blackpool as the police has been able to feel more open about the situation. In the past there have been major fears of being seen as racist, especially after the Stephen Lawrence inquiry at the Met police said the force was institutionally racist.

FaceBook Friends

When a (tad mentally fragile is the impression I get) sensible shoe wearing 42-year old (from Brighton, natch), miffed at her significant other's infidelity, announced on Facebook that she'd taken an overdose, none of her 1,000-plus 'friends' called an ambulance.

Tangentially, I see that Facebook has 550 million users and is valued at 50 billion dollars.

We seem to be reliving the dot-com boom. Anyone remember Freeserve, Dixon's free (well, local-call-cost) ISP from pre-broadband days ?

Freeserve floated on the stock market in July 1999 (as Freeserve.com plc), at which point they had approximately 1.5 million subscribers and were valued at between £1.31bn and £1.51bn ($2.02bn and $2.34bn). By September 2000, Freeserve had more than 2 million active subscribers. This was vastly more than the incumbent telephone provider BT, something that was unique for a European ISP. Freeserve was bought by the France Télécom-owned company Wanadoo in 2000 for £1.65bn ($2.37bn).

I remember around float time thinking - "£1,000 per subscriber - and no subscription fee! How in heaven's name can they be worth even a tenth of that ?". I was an early adopter, getting Web access in the early 90s (when there was no local number to dial!), but even I was only spending a few hundred pounds a year online, and I just couldn't see how Freeserve were ever going to make hundreds, let alone thousands, out of each customer. They never did.

Facebook are valued at getting on for $100 per subscriber - which subscribers include my wife and four children. No way are they currently anywhere near making that sort of money out of them. The valuation is an order of magnitude lower than 12 years back, but it's still much too high.

Does anyone know what the theory behind this valuation is ? OK, there's advertising - but IMHO that's not going to be anything like $10 p.a. per user in post-cost profit - $5 billion a year. And if that were possible, what's the likelihood that it will stay the course and not go the way of MySpace? Up to now - admittedly a short history - Internet social network sites have been popular for a few years then the buzz wears off as something new arrives. Unless Facebook can somehow capture the 'something new' - i.e. make it more likely that new entrants to social networking will choose to implement inside rather than outside Facebook (e.g. Farmville, which my daughter and her friends all played last year but have now stopped), there's a risk that it'll in its turn suffer the fate of Bebo, worth $850 million only a couple of years ago and now worth $10 million as users moved to Facebook.

Let's assume it survives, and Mark Zuckerberg becomes the Bill Gates of social networking. I still can't see it as worth $50 billion - unless they can find a way of sucking in shopping sites, like some black hole of the Web. In which case Google vs Facebook will be a battle to behold.

BTW, is it just me, or has Google become a worse search engine lately ? It doesn't seem to pick up those obscure pages that perfectly match the search criterion any more. Instead you wade through pages of link-farming guff and big commercial sites before finding what you want on page 7.

Quote of the Day

"For in all countries, in proportion as the love of virtue diminishes, we find the love of talents to increase."

(the anonymous 1841 author of Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World, discussing the women of Ancient Rome - "During upwards of six hundred years, the virtues had been found sufficient to please. They now found it necessary to call in the accomplishments.")


UPDATE - I forgot Glubb Pasha :

"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. "

What's The Story Here ?

Two Asian guys, one unknown, the other Amir Ali from Ridge Road in Crouch End, firebomb with comic ineptitude a pub in West Sussex - the Imperial, in Crawley, in the early hours. While the video is highly entertaining, what are they doing so far from home and who's paying them ?



a/c/t Mail :

Recorder John Hardy QC told Ali his offence was at the top end of the scale, despite the fact his ineptitude had thankfully meant it was doomed to failure.

He said: 'On that day, for whatever reason, you became embroiled in a planned and calculated attack which was part of a campaign of violence and intimidation by the local drug lords in Crawley against the licensees of this pub.'

I know Crawley has quite a considerable Asian population, and I'd hazard a guess that the people who hired Ali come from the same community. Is this a case of heroic landlord keeping the dealers out and being attacked for it, is it a turf war or what ? I'm afraid I'm hopelessly out of touch with the Crawley drugs scene, not to mention the bewildering ethnic patchwork of a town that 40 years ago was almost a byword for boring English respectability.

It was firebombed again last month with little damage. It's a modern (1978) pub on a modern shopping parade (described as 'run-down') on a modern estate. I get the impression there's a lot of social housing and some of the usual issues associated therewith (you're unusually mealy-mouthed tonight, Laban).

The Knowhere Guide is instructive - the Imperial seems to be, at least by comparison, not a bad place to drink in - and I get the impression from a local blogger that the landlord and customers are OK, despite the pub apparently having a 'bad press'.

"If you want a good night out and your staying quit far from the town centre, you can go and visit The Imperial (at the broadfield shops) It is a good place to chat and drink away together with the good old broadfield people. As many people know broadfield is quit voilent, but visiting The Imperial does not get you involved, because most of the trouble-makers are under age and are not allowed in the pub (so they just stand on the street having noting else to do, but causing trouble) The people working in the Imperial and visiting the pub always look after everyone in the pub. They accept you for who you are and where your from."

"the imperial has a bad reputation but it is a lovely place in the summer, where people from all ethnic backgrounds get together. "

Street Life

Mail :

A club promoter threw himself under a train on the London Underground after missing out on a chance to appear on Big Brother, an inquest heard today.

Allister Logue, 55, made it to the final 80 hopefuls in contention for a place on Channel 4's 11th and final series of the reality show but was not picked as one of the 14 housemates.

And just a month after he appeared as on the launch show of Big Brother on June 9, Mr Logue leapt to his death beneath the wheels of an oncoming Northern line train at Charing Cross underground station.

He had worked as a hair and make-up artists alongside renowned photograher David Bailey in the 1970s and later moved to Ibiza where he became well known as a club promoter and DJ.

Balearics: Allister Logue was a renowned club promoter in Ibiza

But he had returned to the UK from the Balearics last year and moved to the Lancashire village of Crawshawbooth, where was described as 'down on his luck'.

An inquest at Westminster Coroner's Court heard that on the before his death on July 24, Mr Logue had stayed at a Salvation Army hostel in Trafalgar Square.

The following morning at around 8.45am he hurled himself into the path of a tube train at Charing Cross.

It seems - and is - a long time ago that Laban was out clubbing five or six nights a week. This song struck me then, as now.

"Street life - but you'd better not get old,
Street life - or you're gonna feel the cold"

Landlord Laments

I think it was the previous Conservative administration that changed the rules (with the best of intentions) so that housing benefit was paid direct to the landlord :

Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back.

And I'm presuming that it was Labour who changed them back again, doubtless with the best of intentions, and with results like this :

A north west London landlord was asked to house a single mum arriving from Nigeria and was told it would be her, plus one child, although it was later established that there were four children in the property. The tenant started off well and passed over the rent for a couple of months - then it stopped, building up arrears of around £3,000 which is where it stood when we were contacted by the landlord to evict her as he wanted her out to get a more reliable tenant. She was successfully evicted and, in this case, the money was eventually paid back although it did take a very long time and, unsurprisingly, it put the landlord off letting to housing benefit tenants again. The tenant in question? Well she went on to be re-housed by her local council!

How do you just 'arrive from Nigeria' and start claiming benefit ? I digress. But I have a feeling that despite their travails, mass immigration plus UK benefits must have produced many housing benefit millionaires among landlords in London and other large cities.

The law was brought in to empower tenants and make them feel part of the buy to let market place and there are many good tenants, however, there are still a large number that are not so conscientious. I wrote to Tony McNulty MP at the department for work and pensions at the end of 2008, expressing my concerns at the way the system currently works and it took him nearly 3 months just to acknowledge my letter and then his response was to insist that safeguards were in place to ensure it worked properly. I beg to differ.

An Ealing landlord emailed to say her tenant had started to claim housing benefit but had lied about how much she was receiving and when she was being paid so, after a few months of not receiving her rent, she rang Ealing housing benefit direct to find out what was happening. Due to the data protection act, they were unable to pass on any information but, as she was owed the equivalent of 8 weeks rent, she was able to apply to the council to be paid directly which she duly did. However, the tenant used her 30 days to object and, soon after the rent was paid over by the council, she left the flat without notice...

As the landlord in question quite rightly pointed out to Ealing council, her tenant had embezzled £2,600 of tax payers’ money and the tax payer loses out on many counts. Their reaction? They just laughed and said it happens all the time.

A tenant in receipt of housing benefit does not pass it on, waits for the landlord to apply to the council directly, waits 30 days for their objection to be heard and, as soon as the money is paid directly, they leave without notice. The council recognises that their system is being abused and yet it is not regarded as benefit fraud.

This one's impressive :

"Today, a landlord told us a tenant is withholding rent and sending it to Kosovo to fund the building of a house," says Shamplina. It is almost you-couldn't-make-it-up territory.

Mind, some of the tenants who do stump up might present other problems :

"The most common cases appear to be organising gangs looking for an easy money making scam. They take out a tenancy and then sublet to multiple occupants. The worst case we have dealt with was a three bedroom, one bathroom, semi detached house in North London which was found to have had 53 occupants, all illegal immigrants. They were mattresses literally littering the floors from wall to wall in every available space. The sanitation issues were stretched to say the least."

"Another case was of a lady who had a lovely two bedroom flat in Victoria. Her tenant paid six months rent up front but she later discovered that 18 sets of bunk beds had been put into her property and was being used as a youth hostel. A website in China was offering students visiting London accommodation at £20 per night"

Nail Struck On Head

Shuggy :

"What Pastor Jones was intending to do was gratuitously offensive - but what made it potentially insane was the disregard for its consequences. What I find utterly depressing about this whole affair is the extent to which these were taken as a given - a fact of the world to which we have to adjust. In case anyone is unclear about what this is, let me spell it out: the burning of the Koran would have had disastrous consequences because everyone with any sense understands that there are not only people who consider a book to be more more sacred than the lives of their fellow human beings but who are both willing and able to use murderous violence in order to see the incarnation of this belief.

It is the routinization of this - the acceptance of this as a banal fact of life - that I find so absolutely depressing. It shows itself in the comments made by even people who are resolutely opposed to any of the claims made by politicized millienarians. Martin writes, "In their fundamentalism and intolerance, Pastor Jones and the Islamists are mirror images of each other." No, I don't think so. The reason that there was such an intervention over this matter is that everyone understood that if this group of fanatics had burned the Koran, people would have died. But Pastor Jones did not threaten to kill anyone. In contrast, death threats had already been made - not just against Mr Jones, which is in itself insane - but against Americans in general. Because merely being one of the some 330 million citizens of this nation is enough for you to deserve death because of your association with the behaviour of fifty embittered religious eccentrics. "

Absolutely. When some Orthodox Jews burned New Testaments in Israel a couple of years back, as part of their campaign against evangelising by Messianic Jews (who accept Christ as the promised Messiah), then-President Ehud Olmert didn't beg them to desist Obama-style, on the grounds that it would lead to terrorist attacks on Israelis or Jews worldwide. No army chiefs condemned the burnings as putting troops at risk, as General Petraeus did. I didn't see national leaders all over Europe urging Israel to take action. I doubt that anyone from the Israeli Chiefs of Staff got on the phone to the burners.

Because no-one supposed that Christians worldwide would consider that the actions of a few Israeli book-burners was a justification for attacks on any Jew or any Israeli insitution. Had such attacks taken place (there were none AFAIK) they would have been condemned by all - not least by those so vehement against Pastor Jones. No one would have said 'what did they expect if they burn Bibles?'.

But everyone assumes that Muslims worldwide will consider that the actions of a few American book-burners is a justification for attacks on any Westerner or any Western insitution. This view's pretty much internalised by now. While no one would ever say so explicitly, in practice we expect a lower standard of behaviour by Muslims than we expect from Christians - and we adjust our own behaviour accordingly - which is why useful lefty idiots will be demonstrating against the Holy Father who would never dream of demonstrating against Yusuf al Quaradawi.

As Salman Rushdie put it :

"When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable - satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not? But you see it every day, this surrender".