Vast Religious Conspiracy

It looks as if the BBC line on Canon Jeffrey John will follow yesterdays 'hijack' line - if this report (RealAudio link) on the Today programme is anything to go by.

Though to be fair the Bishop who spoke pointed out that the opposition To Canon John's appointment had been expressed by people from all sections of the Church. It was the BBCs Robert Pigott who was the conspiracy theorist.

Apparently a tightly knit group of religiously motivated men are organising to take over the church and change it. Of course this is the reverse (inverse ?) of the truth. The Church has dispproved of adultery in all its many and varied forms for quite a long time now, and it's the 'liberals' who are bent on change. Those who resist change have in some dioceses been expelled from the Church.

But I imagine the BBC will be able to run with this for quite a while. Organisations like Reform will be presented as the Militant Tendency and the cry will go up for a Neil Kinnock. Already Libby Purves in yesterdays Times has decided Rowan Williams is more of a Michael Foot.

"It would have been possible for him to tell the narrow-hearted evangelical rebels (in a kindly, humble and caring way) to go and boil their heads.

I have to say, I thought he might just do that. Rowan Williams seemed like a wild card, an inspirer, a holy man from the West come to revive the faith. Alas, the dreadful suspicion grows that he is just another Archbishop of Canterbury. "

I would imagine Peter Tatchell and friends are planning some kind of spectacular for the General Synod.

Church Hijacked Again

Remarkable BBC R4 'Thought For The Day' this mornng by one Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture in Manchester, where BBC Religious Affairs are also based.

Apparently the Church has been hijacked again - by people who believe in good and evil.

After two thousand years of 'what's right for me' Christianity, evidenced by a mosaic featuring Jesus alongside Greek mythological figures, suddenly people are getting hung up about sin. A Nigerian Bishop even talked about 'Satan'.

Sometimes 'Thought For The Day' goes beyond parody.

Motorway Madness

One of the many things I hoped my Labour vote would get me in 1997 was an end to what Mrs Thatcher called 'the great car economy'. Labour had denounced the ever-increasing volume of vehicles and the ever-increasing roadbuilding programme. They stated categorically, for example that the Birmingham Northern Relief scheme would be abandoned.

In office it went ahead, as have many other schemes. So much more greenery is now under concrete. I particularly mourn the A465 from Glynneath to Neath, a magnficent valley now disfigured by four concrete lanes exactly in its centre. Work continues on making the entire length from Abergavenny to Swansea dual carriageway. Alright, so we might be in Gower 35 minutes earlier - but at what cost ?

Now look at this. If Swampy were alive he'd be turning in his grave as a 'massive' road building programme is announced.

And for what ? I guess the answer is 'to put off charging 'til after the next election'.

But why has Labour's public transport strategy failed ?

One issue consistently ignored by this joined-up government is the impact of crime and disorder on transport. Start with the no-brainer - that despite road accidents people feel safer in their cars than on public transport. There can be few Londoners who haven't had an unpleasant experience on the Tube or a bus. So people use their cars even when public transport is available. I still remember Steve 'Five Mistresses' Norris, then Tory transport minister, making disparaging remarks on the personal qualities of public transport users. More car use.

This factor extends much further.

You end up taking the kids to the edge-of-town MacDonalds on a Saturday, rather then the yob-infested town centre branch. More car use.

You drop the town centre shops for Cribbs Causeway (our nearest equivalent to that massive Essex shoperama) or Merry Hill. More car use.

You move (if you have the money) to some greenfield development or village, where you might still be burgled but neighbours from hell are much less likely. It's almost a badge of middle management where I work. More car use.

But don't worry, crime is sure to drop as our caring government teach citizenship and 'respect' to all children. I found this story particularly pathetic - and I generally admire the NAS/UWT.

And once the NSPCC get their way and disciplining children by smacking is abolished, then behaviour is sure to improve, just as it has in Scotland since the law there was changed.

A Few More Website Rankings

Traffic Rank for jewishworldreview.com (US): 4,203
Traffic Rank for frontpagemag.com (US): 4,720
Traffic Rank for spectator.co.uk: 14,248
Traffic Rank for spiked-online.com: 47,991
Traffic Rank for urban75.com: 50,971
Traffic Rank for viz.co.uk: 90,481
Traffic Rank for stopwar.org.uk: 144,890
Traffic Rank for newstatesman.co.uk: 237,244
Traffic Rank for redpepper.org.uk: 275,420
Traffic Rank for Weekly worker (cpgb.org.uk): 558,972
Traffic Rank for right-now.org: 825,900

Hillary .....

I completely forgot to mention yesterday's Hillary Clinton Interview on R4's Today programme (she's also been reading her book on R4). She ran through the traditional story - vast right-wing conspiracy .... wealthy neo-conservatives .... 'the politics of personal destruction (copyright Neil Hamilton ?)' ... and only once did the interviewer sound a critical note, after she'd said that those who live by the sword will die by it.

'But he put the sword in his enemies hands, didn't he ?'. Hillary seemed nonplussed at this.

I'm not sure it was in the hands, actually. I thought it was putting his sword elsewhere that caused all the trouble.

BNP Website Shock Horror

Looking back at the archives I wonder if I haven't got some kind of BNP fixation - I think I probably have. Watching their rise is like witnessing from a high window an accident about to happen - you can't look away but wait with a kind of fascination for the inevitable collision. As I've said before, liberal hegemony (as Gramsci or Ralph Miliband would put it) on race matters is so absolute, and educated white self-hatred so prevalent, that I simply can't see them going away - because, in marketing-speak, they're meeting a need that no other party is attempting to meet.

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

Unexceptional for Iraqis, Palestinians, Irish ('Ourselves Alone'), Scots ('Whae's Like Us ?') or Zimbabweans - but for those who identify as British or English a very thin diet is provided. You should see my son's school history textbooks.

But whether or not you agree with the above, you would probably be surprised, as I was, to learn that the BNP site is the most popular UK political party site by far - twice as popular as the Labour Party, according to Alexa. Indeed, I was so surprised that, just like the BNP webmaster, I had to enter the urls myself and see if it really was true. It was.

But on reflection I could pull some threads together.

I visit the BNP site every week as part of a trawl through political sites like Weekly Worker (see - don't get me wrong - some of my best sites are left-wing), urban75, Fabians and stopwar. And I'd read the New Statesman if they didn't charge.

But I rarely if ever go to the Labour, Tory or LD sites. The difference being that there won't be any news on them. Weekly Worker will tell you who's slagging off whom on the Left, or carry a passionate denunciation of 100,000 anti-war lefties being led by a mullah in cries of 'Allahu Akbar !'. Stopwar has details of the latest actions at the Fairford perimeter fence. U75 has some of the funniest bulletin boards around.

And the BNP site gives news. The last time I read any political theory on the BNP site was when the Weekly Worker linked to it. And I hated it. But when the riots broke out in Wrexham the BBC was almost useless as a news source in terms of what had taken place and in what order.

When you find your children scrapping your first questions are 'What actually happened ? Who started it ?'. You try getting that data from this, entitled 'Complex Truth Behind Wrexham Riots'.

You could, if you checked several different pages on the BBC and Guardian sites, put together a story. The first day's trouble - an isolated incident followed by the trashing of a pub. You could read between the lines - would it be the locals trashing the Red Dragon ? And the second day - presumably the locals didn't take too kindly to their pub being trashed. Or you could go here (Parental Advisory - possible neo-Nazi content).

It's a shameful thing when national news organisations report news as some kind of morality play rather than telling us what happened. The coverage of this incident on the BBC was basically 'There's been a lot of trouble. The trouble was between locals and asylum seekers. Racism is bad.' That may all be true, but it ain't news coverage worthy of the name.

Similarly when the Oldham riots broke out only the BNP and the Guardian carried what now appears to be accepted as the truth about their genesis - that they were sparked by Stoke City thugs who acted most unpleasantly as they walked to Boundary Park on their way to a football match.

Just as the main political parties have aided the BNP by bequeathing them a swathe of political territory, so the mainstream media, in their desire not to report anything which may reflect badly on multiculturalism, are creating an alternative news source - the only news source which is a wholly owned subsdiary of a political party.

Bloggers, Web nerds and others like epolitix are keen to see the Web as a means of creating alternative political structures - but this may be a bit too alternative for them. What will they make of it ? Harry - what do you think ?

Church Sacrifices Gay Bishop

What a headline. I couldn't work out whether we were looking at an Abraham/Isaac scenario or a report of an ecclesiastical chess tournament.

The BBC Today programme, as ever, was quickest off the blocks in condemnation of this hideous act of homophobia. The interviewer actually seemed convinced that a small minority of anti-gay 'bigots' had moved the Church away from its historic acceptance of homosexuality in a sudden 'lurch to the right' - whereas this seems to me to be the opposite of the truth.

The Very Reverend Colin Slee of Southwark said on the programme "I think it is a catastrophe for the Church, mainly because there are many people who look at the Christian church and they see the extreme Evangelical churches and think that is certainly not for me, thank you very much.

"The people talk about empty churches. Empty churches may well be empty because of the image that we are presenting of narrowness and bigotry and prejudice. ".

Now that's possible - but the strange thing is that the Evangelical, Bible-based churches are the only part of the C of E with increasing congregations. It seems improbable that if the Evangelicals are driving good folk away their churches should be full. And I haven't heard of lockouts every time Richard Harries or Peter Selby (to name two of the Bishops most exercised by the oppression of gay clergy) get up to preach.

Perhaps St John The Divine is right - and this quote was also a favourite of Jerry Lee Lewis :

Rev. 3:15-16, "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth."

The Guardian and Independent are predictably outraged - and find it a great deal easier to abuse UK churchmen who hold to Biblical teaching than to probe too much into the real reason for Rasputin's about-turn - the threat of secession by overseas Anglicans - particularly Nigeria. I think Dr. Williams and his colleagues in Oxford, Southwark and Worcester would have been happy to split the Church in the UK - they just didn't fancy losing all those Asians and Africans.

Being Archbishop of Lagos must be a bugger of a job - le mot juste in this case. Your main competitors in the ecclesiastical market place are the radical Islamists - the sort of people who like nothing better than to kill a few hundred Christians in protest against Miss World - i.e. thirty women in bikinis. If the head of your 'corporation' is quite happy to state in public that uphill gardening is an acceptable hobby for a Bishop of the Church I can quite see this could present you with a marketing issue - perhaps even an issue of life or death for some of your flock.

So it wasn't surprising that the leader of 17 million Nigerian Anglicans was definitely not lukewarm on this one.

"The Most Rev Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, said of his schism warnings: “I wasn’t making threats, it was a statement of fact. We aren’t a Church of ‘anything goes’. We believe in the Scriptures, we believe there are boundaries. We believe that there are ‘don’ts’ and there are ‘dos’. "

But to Andrew Brown of the Times "it cannot be an entirely pleasant experience to find yourself in bed with the Archbishop of Lagos, even metaphorically". And for the Guardian it was an outrage that these uppity Nigerians should forget who pays the bills.

"While Africa has burgeoning numbers, it is the church in the west's money which has helped to support them. Liberals are exasperated that their churches should defer to bishops operating in vastly different societies." complained the Guardian's Religious Affairs Correspondent, Stephen Bates.

Strange then that Colin Slee should complain that Evangelicals "use monetary wealth as a tool ", and that the Times should report that "Church leaders’ fears about the appointment had grown when it became clear that threats from wealthy evangelical parishes to divert funds away from the diocese were real. Had parishes in other dioceses followed suit, the Church’s financial problems would have become crippling."

I think I've got that. Nigerians are obliged to obey their paymasters. UK liberals are not obliged to obey theirs.

Peter Cuthbertson considers the outcome 'a victory for the Church', but barring a miracle I think it's a rearguard action (le mot juste again) in a long and losing struggle. And I'm presuming he won't be at Holy Trinity Darlington this Sunday !

He said 'Jehovah' !

The Berslusconi 'controversy' is being plugged by the BBC and others for all it's worth - about 5p in my opinion. I know comparing a political opponent to the Nazis is a 'debating' tool copyrighted by the liberal left, but surely what's sauce for the Green Party goose, who started the handbagging by comparing one of Berlusconi's supporters to a Nazi, is also sauce for the Forza Italia gander ?

But Berlusconi is a BBC target only bettered by GWB and Georg Haider (who once said that Hitler built a lot of autobahns or something equally outrageous). A year or so ago the R4 current affairs series 'Crossing Continents' devoted a sympathetic programme to the 'radical left' in Italy, and how they were reacting to the Berlusconi administration.

OK, put aside the fact that a sympathetic Radio 4 programme about how the 'radical right' were responding to Schroder in Germany or Blair in Britain is about as likely as a Woman's Hour feature entitled 'Back In The Kitchen Bitch'. What was amazing was the omission of perhaps the most noteworthy response of the 'radical left' - the shooting dead by the Red Brigades of two advisers involved in drafting employment legislation with which the left disagreed.

Imagine (without smiling please) that Combat 18 had shot dead Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens. Could you really see any news organisation worth its salt discussing the response of the 'radical right' to Blair's government and not even mentioning it in passing ?


Straight Outta Compton (Warning - Link is Parental Advisory)

Serena beats Venus.

If people who talk about 'the cycle of deprivation' were right, that the poor will inevitably stay poor and those born in the ghetto are destined never to escape, we'd still be living in caves and banging rocks to make fire. After all that's what our relatives were doing a few millennia back.

Comtpton's more famous for rappers like Dr. Dre and Ice T. and for its industrial-scale violence and drug abuse than for tennis, yet these girls learned on public courts - though they did have to sweep the glass off first. Obviously they must have talent - but how many other talented kids stay in the ghetto ?

"His wife Oracene said tennis and other matters ranked a distant third on the Williams' list of priorities -- behind religion and family".


The Walrus Of Love - R.I.P.

Harry Hatchet says it all - Respect. That man had Luuuurrrrvvv enough and to spare. As a BBC correspondent said 'Heaven has gained a rather large angel'.

We're All Doomed !

Fascinating Spectator article by Steven Nixon on the forthcoming energy crisis, as the oil and gas run out and the nuclear power stations age and are not replaced.

Energy policy has been strange ever since Mrs Thatcher closed pits and coal-fired stations in order to meet emission targets on CO2 and sulphur dioxide. I can't understand why she's not a Green heroine .....

Nixon writes

"Not only is the government failing to address the problem, however; it is actually making it worse — by reducing our energy diversity. Coal, which used to deliver 80 per cent of our electricity, is virtually obsolete, a victim of strict new environmental laws. Now the government is determined to run down the nuclear industry, which produces 23 per cent of our power. All but one of our nuclear power stations are to be decommissioned by 2010 and no new ones will be built. Instead, the government says that we will make up the difference from renewable sources — primarily wind. By 2010, it wants 10 per cent of our electricity to come from renewables, rising to 20 per cent by 2020, up from less than 1 per cent today.

These are preposterous targets. Professor Ian Fells, a supporter of wind power, reckons we’ll be lucky to get 7 per cent of our electricity from wind by the end of the decade, and 10 per cent by 2020. To meet the government’s target, we need to install 20 2MW windmills every week from now until 2020. Yet no one knows where these windmills will go, let alone what they will cost to install. Most will have to be located offshore and new transmission lines will have to be built to bring the electricity to the national grid. Indeed, the grid itself will have to be substantially reconfigured. It is designed to transport power from large central power stations to the periphery; wind power will require it to do exactly the opposite. What’s more, windmills run at optimal capacity for only a few weeks every year. This means that 100 per cent back-up is needed. But where will this back-up come from? The government hasn’t a clue. "

It could of course be a cunning plot to tie us to Europe. We are I believe connected to the French system - but the link at 2000MW is only to help cope with peaks in demand. No, it's cockup not conspiracy. Just as with their inability to build prisons, our Government is looking the other way and hoping that the laws of physics and economics will be suspended just for them.

A few weks ago we took the kids to Big Pit, a day out I'd thoroughly recommend. Blaenavon is set in magnificent country - the back road over the hill from Abergavenny is wonderful, and the National Mining Museum of Wales is free. At last a use for my taxes I can approve of. And the children, who hadn't been keen, loved it when they got underground.

There is only one other deep mine left in Wales, Tower Colliery.

If this article is correct we need to start building nuclear stations and re-opening mines now. There is no chance at all of this government doing anything of the sort.

While successive New Labour Home Secretaries have continued the policy of increasing use of imprisonment begun by Michael Howard, they (or the Chancellor) have resolutely refused to fund the building of new prisons, with the exception of a few privately funded ones (of which by the way I completely disapprove. Prisons, like police and defence, should not be privatised).

Yet the population is remorselessly increasing - if the American experience is anything to go by, our prison population will probably have to double to 150,000 or so before crime is reduced to U.S. levels (did I really write that ? What have we come to when the U.S. is a low-crime paradise by comparison ?).

But the countryside is still relatively low-crime, although increasingly targeted by town-based or travelling thieves, as well as our own local smackheads (yesterday our neighbours had their trailer stolen, and a 90 year old woman in the next village found a burglar in her house). Certainly a police presence is non-existent - the village bobby went 30 years ago. The only advantage being that our local can 'lock-in' with impunity on a Friday night.

So the decision to ban hunting should pose an interesting policing problem. ACPO, the Association of Chief Police Officers, is one of the more politically correct bodies in Britain, as Chief Constables are increasingly recruited from fast-tracked sociology graduates, rather than hard-nosed guys who've come up the hard way. But its Rural Affairs spokesman is screaming about the issues which will be created by mass civil disobedience in the countryside.

It's pretty obvious. If all hunts go out simultaneously on a Saturday and mobilise their supporters - say one, two or three hundred thousand people - there won't be enough room in all the cells of the UK for us. And the towns will be empty of police. The young lads will enjoy blocking off the lanes with bales or trailers to stop them getting through - and if they do, even a 4x4 isn't much use for catching someone on a horse in woodland.

I suppose they could always arrest the hunt followers - who round our way are lovely old boys in battered vehicles .....

As behaviour and civility has declined over the last 50 years, the countryside has remained on the whole courteous and law abiding. Goodbye to all that ?

The Church May have Nothing to Say To Marxists, But Marxists Certainly Have Nothing to Say to The Church

A hilarious article by Michael Malkin at the Weekly Worker on the 'gay bishop' saga - enjoyed it immensely. It's impossible to say which was the best bit - probably the bit about Carlisle being 'a third-rate see if ever there was one' - surely Trollope himself speaking. I had no idea the CPGB was so au fait with the Church.

Or perhaps the 'loaded language' of which Malkin (not alas the wonderful Michelle Malkin ) complains, just after describing the traditionalist bishops as a 'coterie'.

The punctuation's interesting too - especially for a writer who criticises the Church's 'genuflection in the direction of political correctness' - god and bible are lowercase, King James, Saint and Torah uppercase, the j/Jews both. Perhaps Marxists should respect royalty but not divinity.

It's always entertaining to see a Marxist, dedicated to driving out primitive superstition with the light of reason and science, debating theological points. Malkin mentions Aquinas, Aristotle and St Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the African saints - but you can't help feeling he's more comfortable when assailing 'ecclesiastical dinosaurs'.

He's a historian and anthropologist too. 'It is surely the case that in the period covered by the Torah, there was no concept of ‘sexual orientation’ .... and their procreative function was self-evidently determined - sexual preference was never an issue.'

Really ? What were all those prohibitions in Leviticus for then ? And what did those bad boys in Sodom want to do to Lot's guest ? I don't pretend to be a historian, but surely homosexuality has been with us from earliest times.

And last of all we're told that in contrast to the Church, 'for us Marxists, sexuality in all its diversity and complexity, rooted in the materiality of the human condition as it exists, is an intrinsic part of what it means to be a human being'.

I remember Engels in particular had a lot to say about 'sexuality in all its diversity and complexity', particularly in relation to Lancashire mill-girls.

Not to mention Lenin in his great works 'One Step Forward. Two Steps Back. Withdraw Nearly All The Way, Then Put It Back In' (Progress Publishers 1972 edition), and 'Left-Handed Masturbation - an Infantile Disorder'.

And as a Marxist with an interest in bestiality, necrophilia and flagellation, am I flogging a dead horse ?

So Much Things To Say .....

Normal service resumes - and where to start ?

I guess the Labour constitutional shamble reshuffle thingy is as good a place as any - and what a mixture it was too.

Two particular appointments struck me - Margaret Hodge as 'Children's Minister' - I guess as a stopgap while Ian Huntley is indisposed and geneticists work on cloning Gilles de Rais - and Chris Mullin, an appointment welcomed by Tom Watson and British Spin, but queried by an angry correspondent.

The Bush Bashing Corporation declared a special 'Hate America Day', ironically titled 'What Does The World Think Of America ?'. Driving to work Radio 4 offered me Georgeous George having his boots oiled with brandy by John Humphries. I listened to ' ... thousands of Iraqi children killed by .....' - and R5 was on, Fi Glover featuring a self-hating American and some chap who really hated America - the author of 'Why The World Hates America'. Five minutes of him (typical sample - that failing to ratify the Kyoto treaty was 'a slap in the face for the world' - I bet in Mali, the South Moluccas and Vladivostok they talk of little else) and it was back to local FM with its tedious 50/50 mix of rap and boy bands.

Labour's inevitable doom .....

It's not just the polls - this government is doomed by the fact that its policies simply won't work. The schools and the NHS are not getting better, don't mention transport, and the crime and asylum issues are being tackled in the traditional New Labour style by eye-catching initiatives and announcements, none of which will actually be implemented.

The economy is slowly worsening as more and more burdens are piled onto business, we become less competitive, and manufacturing jobs head off to Eastern Europe or the Far East. The increase in claims fostered by ambulance chasing solicitors has lead to huge insurance increases. Many small manufacturing companies are now operating illegally without insurance.

And much bigger than a man's hand is the pensions crisis, of which more later, and which will make the mis-selling scandals under the Tories look tiny by comparison.

A pity for Gordon Brown really. For two years he followed Ken Clarke's policies - remember the Prudent Chancellor ? Then the internet bubble-boom was on and he could undo the purse-strings a little. Then Labour won that all-important second term - and Prudence was put onto crack cocaine and made to work the streets. Suddenly all spending records were being broken and the Guardian's jobs pages were two feet thick - just as the stock market was halving its value.

In the Thatcher years the orthodoxy was that service industry jobs would replace manufacturing. But without a manufacturing base the service sector will inevitably move away in time. After all, what's it going to service ? No problem, says Randeep Ranesh in a Pollyanna-ish Guardian article, we'll just have to move on to the 'next wave of technology', aided by our 'superior infrastructure', education system, and 'technical know-how'. Well, none out of three ain't bad.

Just as many of Mrs Thatchers educational and economic reforms seemed designed to create a nation of Tesco shelf-stackers, so Mr Blair's fetish with information technology and the internet (about which he admitted he was almost totally ignorant - shades of Harold Wilson and the white heat of the technological revolution) brought the nation of call-centre operatives ever nearer.

Alas this was even less viable a long-term strategy than Mrs Thatcher's. You can't move the baked bean tins to Uttar Pradesh but you can move the call centre to Bombay or Delhi. Why pay a young school-leaver with her devalued GCSEs (and whose main life-motives are to get smashed and laid as frequently as possible) £10,000 when you can pay an Indian national, better educated and far better motivated, £3,000 to do a better job. Globalisation in the information age also means that many IT jobs will move to whereever the educated people are. The overall failure of "education, education and education" implies that this is unlikely to be Britain.

Stand by for a flood of outsourcing to India over the next few years. The only service industries to remain onshore will be those where the servicer has to be physically close to the consumer. Cleaners, masseurs and lawyers will be OK, but I.T. professionals will be hard hit. Pity - that's what I do for a living. Why can't I get the sidebars and links (or even the fonts) right on this site then ?

In future posts I'll look at crime, education, transport and asylum - but a word more about the pensions crisis. For years Britain's occupational pensions were the envy of Europe, but they have been made uneconomic by Brown's tax, increased longevity and the stock market collapse. The pensions holidays taken by employers, many of whom are still not contributing even now, haven't helped either. (Of course they should have built up surpluses to protect funds against a rainy day - but a bit of Tory legislative wizardry in the 1980s made it uneconomical to do so. Thanks, Nige.)

So what is the Government's response ? In case funds go broke, they'll set up a special pot of cash which can bail out the poor pensioners. Brilliant idea ! And where will the cash come from ? From a charge on the pension funds ! And if more funds fail as a result of the charge ? - presumably increase the levy on the funds which still have cash !

It's possible to imagine a pyramid-style scenario in which one fund after another collapses, increasing the levy on those left, until at last the best-run and most prudent funds, milked by levies to compensate other pensioners, finally go under - leaving their pensioners uncompensated.

Labour have added one more little straw to the pensions camel - the recently announced 'gay partnership' legislation, by which couples who bowl round the wicket will enjoy the taxation, inheritance and pensions benefits of married couples. Alright, ignore the tax benefits (there aren't any). If you believe biologists and sociologists, somewhere between three and five percent of the population take the other bus. If you believe gay campaigners like Stonewall or the NSPCC, the figure is more like twenty percent.

Either way, a largeish number of people who previously didn't qualify for a cut of the pensions cake will now do so, imposing a further burden on the funds. Of course, Jacqui Smith, bringing the same sure touch to Equality that she brought to Education, consulted widely with the pensions industry before the legislation, didn't she ? In your dreams.

But I look forward to the reaction of the delightful elderly couple featured prominently on the BBC, when they find out that the pensioners Minimum Income Guarantee, previously set at £98 for each of them, will now be £158 for a 'married couple' !

Of course there is one class of people whose pension provisions have never been better. Non-contributory, index-linked, not taxed by Gordon Brown, and best of all unaffected by stock market collapse, Robert Maxwells or anything short of World War III. Not only that, but the job itself is usually pretty secure. And it's all paid for by taxation - perhaps by that very taxation that is closing non-state schemes down across the country.

Step forward, Mr. Guardian-reading state employee ! Step forward, Lord Irvine of Lairgs !

Labour's Final Days ?

I'm not sure I completely believe the polls, but if true they are tremendous news. Their glory is that electorally Tony Blair has always been Labour's greatest asset. I can't see any successor having half his appeal, certainly not Brown or Blunkett. Of course a good section of the 'Labour movement' have always hated him - and if they think he's a liability he'll be out the door quicker than you can say 'Margaret Thatcher'. Yet during the Gulf War Labour looked into the abyss of life without Blair and said 'no thanks'. Can things really have changed that much since then ?

The Tories are playing very sensibly. The Left, including the BBC, are attacking the 'dossier' as a way of attacking the war, which the Tories fully supported, but they are happy to watch Blair and Campbell swing in the wind for a while. The Labour Left don't realise how much they owe to Alistair Campbell - his departure would indeed be a godsend to the Left, but a much bigger one to the Tories. It would certainly be fun to have him and Fiona Millar all over the media like Amanda Platell for a few years, always good for a negative quote. There is a chance of course that he'll do the decent thing and keep shtum until the Memoirs.
You can tell the Tories are recovering somewhat - I hven't heard Kenneth Clarke or Lord (John) Taylor on the BBC for months !

Blame The Jews Says David Duke - Sorry, That's Tam Dalyell

Well, well - it's Jewish conspiracy time. I would never have thought Tam Dalyell would come out with this stuff. His pronouncements on the war were increasingly wild - will he next accuse the Queen, the Freemasons and the Bilderberg Group of being the secret government of the world ? A pity as I admire him immensely, even when I disagree with him.

Harry Hatchet is depressed by the BNP's gains - saying that 'the BNP vote is a racist vote, pure and simple' and that the Labour Party must 'confront racism head-on'. I think he's wrong on the first and Nick Griffin must be hoping and praying that Labour follow Harry's advice on the second.

If you take Harry's view that the vast majority of BNP voters are 'racists' (not defined) then either

a) somewhere between 20-30% of the English population are 'racist' and just haven't got round to a BNP vote yet OR

b) for some undefined reason 20-30% of the people of Burnley and a few other small areas are 'racist', but not in the rest of England (e.g. Bristol where I believe BNP came last wherever they stood)

c) the Burnley people used not to be 'racist', but the BNP by campaigning have turned them into 'racists'

I don't think any of these alternatives stand up to scrutiny. But in the end I guess it all depends on what you mean by 'racist'. Apologies for the scare quotes, but reading interviews with BNP voters, one recurring theme seems to be 'x happens, y happens, but if you say anything you're called a racist'.

The racist tag has been used and mis-used so often over the last 35 years that there's a danger of a 'so what ?' factor.

If you dig inside the BNP site you can certainly find genuine it's-all-in-the-genes racism - have a look at this for example. But I doubt if one in a thousand BNP voters know or care about that kind of idiocy. What they know is that Labour, the party which used to stand for 'people like us', no longer does so. They aren't going to vote Tory either (though there's a different phenomenon going on in the leafy semi-rural borders) - so where can they go ? Lib Dems - the anti-war, let the burglars out, porn at 16 party ? I'm talking the remnants of the respectable working class here, people who did not particularly care about Clause Four but whose attachment to Labour was tribal and absolute. Just say you're a Burnley voter who takes the same view of the Native British as Yasmin Alibhai Brown does of Asian businessmen - to wit 'these are my people, and I care about them'. You see a Labour party more and more identified with people who, whatever their valuable qualities, are not 'your people'.

Is Harry confusing racism with a preference for 'people like us' ? Such preferences are common to all people across all races and cultures. If you doubt that go for a few beers with half a dozen social workers then say that the Sun and Mail are brilliant newspapers.

There is an underlying assumption among the educated white English that all whites are racist (especially straight male ones), that we all share responsibility for the sins of our forefathers, and that the standards of behaviour and language which we would apply to ourselves do not apply to others - that they need to be cut a bit of slack because of the dreadful things that happened to THEIR forefathers. I find this an appalling viewpoint, racist in itself, and a million miles away from H.I.M's vision that the colour of a man's skin should be of no more significance than the colour of his eyes.

Imagine if after Sept 11 the leaders of the Anglican and Catholic churches had declared it 'an attack on Christianity' and called for united action by Christian nations against the 'Saracens', or Tony Blair had appealed for 'the White nations' to help attack Iraq. I like to think people, especially on the Left, would have been upset - I know I would.

Yet most of Britain's Imams called the action against Afghanistan and Iraq an attack on Islam, and not only British Arabs and Muslims, but even George Galloway, called for the 'Arab nations' to defend Iraq - and not a dog barked. (of course plenty of dogs are snapping at George - but for other reasons than his racism).

Until white self-loathing is extinguished in educated Britons I can see the BNP remaining a factor in English politics. And given the current curriculum in state schools and universities that could be for some time to come. Watch for the next Euro elections, where PR will give the BNP a chance to pick up the votes which gave the UKIP three seats last time round.

As for Harry's suggestion that Labour confront racism head-on ? Well again it all depends what you mean by racism. If anyone who is concerned about large-scale immigration or the abuse of the asylum system is considered a racist, then such a campaign would be electoral suicide for Labour. Even on far-left discussion boards like www.urban75.com there seems a consensus that 'Asylum Seekers Are Welcome Here' is not a slogan which will stop the BNP in its tracks.

Perhaps the way forward for Labour is to talk one way and act the other on issues like asylum - oh no, they do that already, with Blunkett's tough soundbites and the odd Afghan bundled into a plane while on the ground it's business as usual. Perhaps they should take a leaf from the Lib Dem handbook. Nationally the LDs have always been liberal and caring on race and asylum - that 'great chieftain of the pudding race' Charles Kennedy gathered buckets of Brownie points by accusing William Hague of encouraging racist attacks every time Hague opened his mouth on asylum.

Yet when an asylum camp was proposed in the next county to me, who led the campaign against it ? That's right, the caring Lib Dems. And very professionally they did it too, getting 1,500 marchers, all local, on the streets of a town with a population of 6,000. Of course they weren't objecting to the asylum seekers themselves - oh no. The camp was in the wrong place, there weren't facilities, the Refugee Council disapproved - anything other than the plain unvarnished truth that locals, many of whom were themselves 'incomers' fleeing Birmingham, didn't want 750 young Afghan and Albanian men hanging on the streets of their pretty Georgian town. You can debate whether the objectors were 'racist' - the point is the Lib Dems were happy to lead them.

Brit Bombers ....

The Israelis say that the suicide bomber who killed three people in Tel Aviv was British - and they're looking for another Brit who may have been his accomplice. Is Jeremy Hardy still in the country ? Hardy was the subject of a sycophantic BBC R5 Simon Mayo interview last week, in which he said that the Palestinians didn't really want to drive the Jews into the sea. OK, he admitted, they talk about it, they sing and write poems about it, they teach the children about it, but 'it's really just hot air'. Simon gave him a typically easy ride - introducing him as 'the man who stood up to the Israeli Army'.

Pundits - and politicians - attitudes to the BNP fall into two categories. One - the 'they're trying to tell us something' school - say that voters concerns are valid and must be addressed. David Blunkett is the exemplar of this view - though his idea of addressing voter concerns is the soundbite and the 'initiative' - which will either quietly be forgotten or overturned in the courts. The second is the 'no platform for fascists' view, held by most on the Left - that addressing voter concern is 'playing the BNPs game' and 'pandering to racism'.

Johann Hari falls well into the left category in yesterday's Indie, judging by the first paragraph - does anyone know what the rest of the argument is ?

Between the Tory party, so guilt-stricken that they disowned John Townsend for unexceptional (if not terribly historically accurate) remarks, and the BNP is a vast swathe of political territory which the Tories have abandoned and which the new friendly BNP is colonising fast. If PR was introduced tomorrow I think they'd get 20% of the vote - because people reason that if the main parties all hate them, they MUST be doing something right. And for the white working class a BNP vote wouldn't stick in the craw as a Tory vote would. But I'm grateful to the Weekly Worker for a link to a truly creepy BNP document buried in their site. As someone who loves the Brits (and particularly the English) for their culture, or what remains of it, rather than their genes, I find their argument that with the wrong stock you can NEVER be a Brit quite dreadful. I know children with one foreign-born parent who are more British than most natives, and have been brought up in the culture. And my own father was not born British. To quote Churchill 'what is the use of being against a man simply because of his birth ? How can any man help how he is born ?'

Of course Churchill had a foreign parent !

I don't believe the British people would actually follow a race-based programme ....

Update - Jeremy Hardy appears to be innocent on this one .....

St. George - the Struggle Continues .

The BBC have more or less ignored St.George this year, with the exception of the 'Today' programme, which has an item every day on who should be his replacement (today's candidate 'that holy blisful martyr' Thomas a Becket). After all 'he wasn't even English'. Funny - what happened to diversity ? I think it unlikely we'll see similar BBC campaigns against non-Brits like Peter Hain and Dr. Beverley Malone.

And James Naughtie welcomed the gun amnesty, with '20,000 guns taken off the streets'. Like the old lady with 72 of her late husband's rifles in the attic. Thank heavens that thanks to the amnesty she'll no longer be renting them out to armed robbers.

Sorry, even R5 have a succession of people pointing out that only a fraction of these guns were ever on the streets in the beginning. I would lay odds that gun crime will continue to increase, and that it'll continue to become more difficult for a law-abiding citizen to own one.

Indie - the crisis deepens .....

Oh dear ..... David ('the BBC is not biased so please give me that job - school fees are going up next year') Aaronovitch is presenting 'Pick of the Week' on R4. Opening with doggerel poet Benjamin Zephaniah's Bob Marley biography prog (which I listened to and which was actually rather good), he tells us how he loved 'No Woman No Cry' as a student - then blows it by describing the song as 'a kind of 'I Will Survive' for lads'. Come on, David. It doesn't mean 'don't cry if you haven't got a woman', it means 'turn off the waterworks darlin' !' as any fule kno.

Wasn't the flip side 'Kinky Reggae' ?

The Indie is now at water level, the scuppers are awash and they've introduced charging for the website. Even the Times gives you all todays issue online - you don't even get the day's leaders on the Indie ! I guess with sales at their current levels they hope people will pay up for their fix of anti-U.S. bile. No chance at a quid a throw. And to my horror they've infected my PC with some cookie which means that all the Yazza articles in my Internet cache are suddenly unavailable.

Looks like Guardian Online will have more clout than ever. Times is pay-for, only Telegraph is free and it's so slow and cumbersome that I rarely use it.

I agree with Peter Briffa, if one more writer jumped ship it should have been Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, or the Yazzmonster as he affectionately calls her. Natasha Walter is just a less bitter (and why not ?) Joan Smith - let alone not having to read their articles, you could write them as well. A typical article might be headed 'Women Are The Losers In These War-Games' or 'Forget Private Jessica, Why Are Women's Wages In The U.S. Only 71% Of Men's ?'. Reminds me of the spoof New York Times headline 'End of World Announced - Women, Minorities Will Be Hardest Hit'.

Last week saw two anniversaries of crime victims who didn't get justice, the 10th anniversary of Stephen Lawrence's death and the third anniversary of Tony Martin's imprisonment. The first attended by newpaper articles, TV and radio specials, the second unobserved. I listened to a R5 Simon Mayo interview with Duwayne Brooks, the young man who was with Stephen Lawrence when he was attacked and murdered. He’s written a book on the affair (with, inevitably, a Guardian journalist) and was plugging it (he actually answered one question ‘if you want to know you’ve got to buy the book - available at all bookshops’ – you could hear Simon Mayo’s eyebrows being raised and his next question was ‘are you doing this for the money ?’).

It was a sad interview in all sorts of ways, from Stephen Lawrence being ‘different from the normal black school kids – there’s a lot of single parents and he stood out ‘cos at parents evenings he had a mum and dad come’, to the revelation that a psychiatrist had recommended he not be called as a witness in the private prosecution brought against the alleged killers, but the Lawrence team under Imran Khan continued the case ‘for political reasons’.

I am amazed at the English liberal guilt and hysteria which surrounded (and still surrounds) this case. I remember particularly an edition of the R4 show 'Any Questions' soon after the publication of the McPherson report. In my student days we called the programme 'Any Fascists'. How times have changed. Jonathan Dimbleby asked the audience (from a country town - I think in Somerset) if they thought Britain was a racist society. Every hand went up. 'OK', said Dimbleby, 'how many of you would consider yourselves racist ?' Not a hand raised.

At this point I remember thinking there was something wrong with educated English society. Apparently racism was everywhere (but not in this room). There was no reason to think this audience unrepresentative of middle-class England. I thought of Salem and witches. And this feeling was reinforced when Lord Williams of Mostyn said in the Lords a few days later that 'the most dangerous person is the one who says he hasn't got a racist bone in his body. Because he doesn't know what he doesn't know.'(this last line appears to have been dropped from the Hansard record) When the Labour academic Norman Dennis called the McPherson enquiry 'a Stalinist show-trial' I think he was spot-on - in that the enquiry, like the show trials, was a piece of political theatre where the foregone conclusions were reached in spite of, not because of, the evidence.

But the atmosphere around the enquiry, which made the travesty possible, the belief that racism is everywhere (though no racism was ever found by McPherson, hence his invention of 'unconscious or unwitting' racism) - was straight from seventeenth century New England. Think of John Grieve at Scotland Yard, a brave and dedicated man, confessing his racism ('I am a racist. I must be because Sir William Macpherson of Cluny said that I am; the Home Secretary said that I am; countless members of the public at the inquiry hear-ings said that I am ...') like one of those brainwashed U.S. captives in Vietnam.

The legacy ? Apart from the surge in street crime ? Well, if you can call yourself a 'diversity consultant' there are plenty of opportunities.

I was in a Government legal department a day or two ago. The walls and stairs were covered with anti-racist and 'diversity' posters, and as I awaited my appointment I could read the rules against discrimination of any kind on grounds of sex (sorry, gender), race, disability or sexual orientation.

During my interview I noticed a Bible on a shelf, used for swearing affidavits. 'Do you have a Koran ?' I asked. 'Oh yes', said the woman behind the desk, 'but women aren't allowed to touch that - I have to ask a man to get it.'

St George And The BBC

this was sent to BBC online in 2002 in response to the essay by the BBC's Voice Of England - Billy Bragg. I wonder how they will celebrate today ?)


'Twas the feast of St George, 2001, 10.30 at night, and in my country hovel life was good. Some red wine and garlic bread (traditional English fayre), a good book, Radio 4 murmuring gently. "And for St George's Day, a special guest talks about England and what it means to be English".

Who could it be, I wondered - Peter Hitchens perhaps, or Simon Heffer of the Daily Mail who has advocated English self-rule - maybe Sir Patrick Moore, whose knighthood was long delayed because of his English nationalism (he was I believe a member of the English National Party during the 1970s/80s).

"And here in the studio we have Billy Bragg !"

I almost fell off my chair (may have been the wine) as the Bard of Barking held forth, turning out to be so proud of his Englishness that he felt English about once every three days, otherwise feeling European or a citizen of the world.

(For foreign surfers, Billy Bragg is a singer and poet of far-left views - not perhaps the first name that would spring to mind when the words 'English patriot' are pronounced. Some of his songs are quite memorable but George Brassens or Jacques Brel he ain't - nor Tom Waits or Randy Newman neither. Like many anti-racists who've made some money, he has left the multicultural city and chosen to live in a leafy, white and conservative area - in his case Dorset).

I did wonder as this year's St George's approached how the BBC could top that this year. Tariq Ali perhaps, or Peter Tatchell ?

And as the day approaches, a sighting shot on St George - the BBC News site announces "St George comes under fire". A Simon Pipe recorded that 'some critics say St George's Day is best ignored.' Well, one critic to be precise - the historian Professor Ronald Hutton, who believes that "It would be a sure sign of a loss of nerve" if we celebrated St George's day. An alternative voice (you know how keen the BBC are on diversity) comes from Chris Doyle, of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, who says toasting St George is "deeply insensitive" - after all, the Crusades were only seven hundred years ago. (note : why is it that 'harking back to the past' is obnoxious to liberals when we praise the glories and great deeds of the British, but such a good thing when we berate ourselves for (perceived) past sins ?)

And this year ? He's back ! The voice of England has an essay on the BBC website, looking to a future 'where anyone, of any race, will be happy to call themselves English'. What, even passing tourists ? Even the French ? The Scots ? Martin McGuinness ? If everyone can be English, then why should anyone wish to be ?

The site says "Billy Bragg is proud to be English, but not everyone who lives in England feels the same way. For millions of his fellow countrymen and women, English patriotism reeks of racism."


That's bad news - the BBCs chief political correspondent Andrew Marr helped draw up the notorious "British=racist" Runnymede Trust report a couple of years ago, now English=racist as well !

And what does Billy Bragg think are the defining characteristics of Englishness ? He thinks we need a debate, and only then can we see "the common elements that give us, the English, a sense of belonging". This contradicts his earlier assertion that "everyone has their own, personal definition". His definition includes the writing of William Blake and George Orwell.


In 1941, when my parents generation - the last heroic generation of Britons, the generation described by Peter Mandelson and Clive Soley in a Labour Party document as 'racist and xenophobic' - while this generation was fighting Hitler prior to electing Labour in the 1945 landslide, George Orwell wrote his essay "The Lion and the Unicorn".

In it he wrote of the English left-wing intelligentsia as follows :

"In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to sneer at every English institution ....It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God Save The King' than of stealing from a poor-box."


Times have moved on, and the ideas of this 'island of dissident thought' are now those of our ruling elite.

And the BBCs negative, carping coverage of the feast of St George, patron Saint of England, shows only too well that Orwell spoke truth.

The Essay

St George in the 21st Century

The death of the Queen Mother marks the beginning of the end of the British monarchy as we have known it all our lives. Crowned Queen Empress in 1937, she was our last surviving link with imperial Britain and her death heralds the passing of the generation that fought valiantly and suffered greatly during the Second World War.

What she and the King represented in those dark years was a sense of Britishness born out of the stark reality that, in the face of Nazi invasion, the fates of England, Scotland and Wales were the same.

What ? So there was no sense of Britishness before 1940 ? When was "Rule Britannia" written ? Where did Victorian imperialism come from ? Linda Colley asserted in her book "Britons" that the idea of Britishness was an eighteenth century invention, now BB moves its genesis to 1940. A ridiculous assertion.


It's no coincidence that the arch Euro-sceptic Margaret Thatcher is so fond of harking back to the 1940s (is she ? I thought she liked the Victorians), for it was then that the contemporary British identity was forged (Does he really believe this ?). We emerged a mono-cultural people who identified strongly with the monarchy, the Union Jack and the Empire. See above - what nonsense ! We 'emerged' monocultural, did we ? What did we enter WWII as ?

However, the notion of three countries with one united destiny no longer rings true. The Scots, in voting recently for their own parliament, made a psychological break with the British Empire and set their sights on the future (why the future ? Scots and Welsh independence is looking to the past), daring the Welsh to follow and leaving the English to scratch their heads in puzzlement.

Have you ever wondered what will happen if Scotland decides to become independent someday? Well, England will be independent too. How true. Specialist subject - the bleeding obvious.

Like it or not, these issues of identity will come to the fore in the inevitable euro referendum. Those in England who believe that there are votes to be won in stirring up xenophobia (ah ! the evil forces of the Right) will exploit the ambiguity that exists between being British and being English in the hope of generating a mood of English nationalism that can be converted into votes at the following general election. I'm not sure what this sentence means. But presumably English nationalist votes are a Bad Thing - unlike Scottish, Welsh and (especially) Irish nationalist votes.

For those of us on the progressive side of the political spectrum, this will present a new challenge. In the past we have favoured an internationalist, multi-cultural approach to identity. In other words, we have continually denigrated the idea of Englishness. Yet, by refusing to put forward any alternative notions of what it can mean to be English, we have made it easy for the racists to claim Englishness as their own. A bit of a travesty of truth, this. How about 'hitherto, we on the left have considered all manifestations of Englishness to be racist - now that Englishness shows signs of revival, we wish to get back on (and be in control of) the bandwagon. Hence this essay.'

Consequently, when the subject of English identity comes up, it is the violent, swaggering football hooligan who first comes to mind and the flag of St George, most often seen, not flying from a flag pole but stuck to the back of a white mini-van, becomes a symbol of intimidation.

The death of the Queen Mum, Scotland's new aspirations and the debate over the euro all give us the opportunity to ask who we are, now, rather than continually hark back to who we were.

The England that most of us live in is a diverse society that cannot simply be shoe-horned into one mono-cultural pigeonhole. Furthermore, jumping to a conclusion on the definition of Englishness is pointless as inevitably it will be narrow and many will feel excluded.

Surely what we need to do is each re-evaluate what it is to be English in the 21st Century and so establish the foundations of a collective sense of Englishness. Only then can we take a step back from this big picture and see the common elements that give us, the English, a sense of belonging. The second true statement in the 'essay'.

However, this cannot be achieved simply by promoting multi-culturalism at the expense of the host culture (what perception ! Who exactly thought it could ? Mr Bragg seems to be having a private argument with some other far-left group here). Multi-culturalism can be used as a get-out clause by politicians who are only prepared to pay lip service to notions such as equality and diversity. If chicken tikka marsala really is the most popular dish in the country then multi-culturalism is Englishness and vice versa. A remarkable theory - and marsala is a heavy Sicilian wine. The polka was all the rage in the early nineteenth century but I'm not sure that made us particularly Polish.

This is not to say that England is a country without racial prejudices (don't worry, I'm sure none of us could ever get that idea from your writings). Black football players still have to suffer shameful abuse from racist fans. But ask yourself this - does Emile Heskey only become an Englishman when he pulls on his England shirt or is he still an Englishman when he goes home to his family after the game?

If you believe the latter, then the implication is that Englishness is less about ethnicity and more to do with the space we occupy together today; that where you are is more important than were you are from. So anyone physically situated in England is English ! Tell that to a Scot ! No more St Patrick's celebrations for Ken Livingstone to subsidise, no more India Day ceremony, no Burns Night or St. David's south or east of the border.

This doesn't mean that we all have to celebrate St George's Day with a rose in our lapel (I understand that, but could you tell us what it DOES mean ?), but at a time when the sun is setting on the mono-cultural British identity, it does offer us a basis on which to construct an inclusive English identity for the third millennium.

On Looting ....

Well, my fears seem to have been realised up to a point. One of the advantages of a world-view encompassing imperfectibility and Original Sin is that you're not quite as horrified when people behave badly.

Reminds me of P.J. O'Rourke on the looting of Albania in his brilliant economics text Eat The Rich ......

Elmaz was studying to be a veterinarian. Everything had been stolen from his school:books, drugs, lab equipment, even parts of the buildings themselves. 'We are without windows, without doors' said Elmaz. 'We study with only desks and walls.' The desks had been stolen too, but the faculty found them in local flea markets and bought them back. 'All the horses we have were shot.' said Elmaz.

Across the road from the school was a collective farm which once had 5,000 cattle. 'They stole 5,000 cows !' I said ....'No, No, No,' said Elmaz. 'They could never steal so many cows in 1997.' 'How come?' 'Because they were all stolen in 1992 when Communism ended.'

Elmaz said the looting had pretty much stopped, at least in the thirty or forty kilometers around Tirana. 'Then what stopped the looting?' I said. 'They were finished' said Elmaz.

 

Democracy Or Martyrdom Operations ?

In politics there always seem to be two views of 'the Other' - the Other in this case being the people of Iraq. One side says 'they're just people like us - they want the things we want', the other says 'these people are not at all like us - beware'. Historically the former view was held by the Left - think of the idealism with which the African colonies were liberated (or abandoned), or the argument that asylum-seekers will in no time be helping with the PTA and sending the kids to medical school, compared with the traditional 'right' view of peoples 'half devil and half child' or (circa African independence) 'they're just not ready for it'.

But these days its a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world. The repentant Trotskyites who make up America's neocons seem confident that the whole Middle East can be 'liberated' from feudalism or theocracy, and it's the Left who are suddenly saying 'don't kid yourself - these guys are very different to you and me. Here's a more traditional 'right' view from Stanley Kurtz - and here's an interesting Guardian piece by the travel writer Jonathan Raban. It would sit well in a right-wing site - just change the title from 'The Greatest Gulf' to 'Yes, It IS A Clash Of Civilisations'. According to Jonathan, to Muslims - any Muslims, not only those of Iraq, 'who you are is: who you know, who depends on you, and to whom you owe allegiance - a visible web of relationships that can be mapped and enumerated'. Sounds like 13th century Europe to me all right - or the eighteenth-century Highlands of Scotland - a place where the first question to a stranger is 'whose man are you ?'. 'We've utterly failed to comprehend the character of the people whose lands we have invaded' he writes, followed by 'Beware of the Ummah (world-wide body of Islam comprising all its believers)'. The rhetoric of Abu Hamza and Bin Laden, he warns, is now that of mainstream Islam, and Mubarak's forecast of a hundred Bin Ladens could turn out to be a serious underestimate'. Will the Iraq conflict 'open the gates of hell ? We shall soon find out'.

Now if Jonathan's essay were to be taken seriously, Tony Blair should be very worried, much more so than George Bush. There are around two million British Muslims, quite a few of whom are Iraqis (who, remember, we don't understand), concentrated in London and some midland and northern cities. In the pre-September 11 past they have taken part in large scale rioting in Oldham, Blackburn, Bradford and Leeds. In the post-Sept 11 world more than a hundred have been arrested on terrorism-related charges. British Muslims are captives of the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay. Do you see 'Rivers of Blood', Jonathan ?

Fortunately there seems to be one facet of the feudal mindset that makes these predictions unlikely - the fact that, as Raban says, 'the individual strong man is compatible with strict Islamist teaching in a way that a strong state is definitely not'. Blimey, Jon - so it's because of Islam that there are no democratic Arab states ? Islam's incompatible with pluralist democracy, then ? Seems so. 'The typical Arab ruler is likely to echo Louis XIV: the state, such as it is, is him - a warlord-like figure on a grand scale, with an army and a secret police at his disposal, like Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, King Saud, or Saddam Hussein.' 'The unwieldy assemblage of Iraq needed not a government but a ruler'. Gosh. And I bet Pat Buchanan agrees with you 100%.

Thank heavens for Emperor GWB, then, and Viceroy Jay Gardner. For despite GWBs refusal to fight a duel with Saddam, there's no doubt that he disposes of enormous strength and that he's prepared to use it. The 'Arab street' was subdued after Afghanistan. What can it do now ? Was it Caligula who said 'let them hate me - as long as they fear me' ?