Murderer ? Martyr ?



Foetus ? Baby ?

How the State Can Mend Damaged Kids

Polly Toynbee at her considerable worst.

As for the moral panickers, if they want to avoid future generations of scary youth, they should urge higher taxes to pay the state to become the best possible nanny to all babies.

And she sincerely believes every word.

Forget High Crime Rates - What About Stressed Lawyers ?

The Independent on the duties of a Director of Public Prosecutions.

The article responds to criticism of old Blair chum Ken Macdonald's appointment coming from - among others - Michael Howard, the Mail, and the Telegraph.

Some are concerned about his dope-posting past (is the Sunday Times photo of his Oxford class available on the Web ?), others by his career defending various terrorists and murderers, others by the fact that he's never conducted a prosecution in his life.

But the Indie knows whats important. Never mind 15 million crimes a year (BCS figures) - what about the poor lawyers, struggling under the twin burdens of stress and racism ?

"The past few years have shown that the job of DPP is one of the toughest in public service. Macdonald will not only have to contend with criticism for the handling of thousands of cases each year but also for the conduct and well-being of all his staff.

An independent investigation recently found the CPS to be institutionally racist, while an internal report has shown that a high number of lawyers have suffered from stress. These are the real issues facing the DPP - and the ones on which he will be judged."

Democracy = State-Controlled Media

Three wrong-headed Guardian specials today - and that doesn't include Roy Hattersley

Bea Campbell takes time out from telling lies about families and abuse to tell lies about why Tyneside council estates aren't nice places to live. Apparently if the council stumped up for some decent doors and coloured kitchen tiles, people wouldn't fire shots through her windows. But the council are tight fisted - so poor Bea has had to move. What's a renowned author, journalist and academic doing in a council house anyway - aren't there people on the list in greater need ?

Darcus Howe bemoans the fall in attendance at Notting Hill Carnival. Apparently if the council stumped up more cash ... and also the stuffy, conservative organisers aren't keen on getting those rough hip-hop and garage boys involved. Darcus rightly points out that that's where the musical action is - those happy days of One Love (for I and I) seem to have gone, and F*** You Bitch has taken its place.
Not sure I'd want to be hanging round the So Solid Crew sound system though. Maybe the Carnival could move to Shooters Hill.

"And Finally ...." Andrew Graham - Master of Balliol College, Oxford, non-executive director of Channel 4 and author with BBC chairman (and Labour donor) Gavyn Davies of "Broadcasting, Society and Policy in the Multimedia Age" says the taxpayer must continue to stump up more cash ......

"Citizens are entitled to core information about their society, much of which now comes from broadcasting. Citizens are also entitled to participate fully in society; and democratic discussion, much of which takes place via television and radio, is an essential part of such participation.

The delivery of these rights is not the purpose of the market. To be met, they require the existence of broadcasters - public service broadcasters."

There is a case to be made for a state broadcaster, and two dozen cases against Mr Murdoch. Unfortunately Mr Graham isn't going to make it. Anyone who thinks 'rights' are to be 'delivered to', rather than possessed by, citizens is off to a bad start. Anyone who thinks that the discussions we hear on BBC are 'democratic' has just made his case worse - isn't this the organisation where 'populist' is a term of abuse ?

And this destroys his piece. "Notwithstanding the friction between the government and the BBC on the particulars of Gilligan's report, no one has cast any serious doubt on the much more important question of whether, overall, the BBC reported on the arguments about the war in an objective manner." There we hear the authentic voice of the liberal - 'no one I know thinks the BBC is left wing, so it can't be'.

Try this site for starters.

The same cannot be said of Fox Television in the US (owned by News Corporation). Indeed, Page reports that the consistency of view across all the News Corporation outlets in favour of the war displayed a unanimity of view greater even than the Pentagon. When, at the same time, a large proportion of Americans are reputed to believe that Saddam Hussein was implicated in al-Qaida terrorism, a belief for which there is not a shred of credible evidence, one wonders if the world's largest democracy is being well served by its media.

Well, up to a point. Fox make no secret of their support for US troops and aren't ashamed of calling them 'our boys'. But it's not the only channel in the USA. Murdoch didn't BUY his Fox audience - he built it, taking market share from other more liberal channels, just has he turned the UK Sun from a pale left-of-centre paper to the big and profitable beast it is now. And for a Master of Balliol to connect that with an instance of American ignorance makes you wonder when they stopped logic classes at Oxford. British kids are notoriously ignorant - is that down to the BBC ?

Putting the same point another way, should the UK not fear for its democracy if public service broadcasting were to be squeezed into the ghetto-like position occupied by the PSBs in the US (where they are constantly under-funded, plead for contributions and hold only around 5% of the market)?

So America is not a democracy. And without the BBC we might not be one either. But presumably Egypt, Saddam's Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with their dominant state-controlled media, are OK. Oxford seem to have stopped teaching politics and history as well as logic. Is that what Fukuyama meant ?

An Utter B****** ?

From the Hutton Enquiry site.

7 Q. Did he discuss any of the questioning?
8 A. I got the impression that the questioning had been quite
9 tough. He did make a particular comment about one man,
10 about the strength of his questioning.
11 Q. What was his particular comment?
12 A. I must admit I was surprised he said it. He said it
13 very quietly, with some feeling, and that was that this
14 man was an utter bastard, because of the nature -- not
15 the questions he asked but because of the manner in
16 which he asked them, I think. I hate to say that
17 because I am very conscious that this gentleman has
18 perhaps had some adverse publicity since, and I would
19 hate to inflict any more on him. But Dad did not name
20 the person and by this time we had got home.

Dr Kelly's daughter seems a very forgiving lady. In fact she's shamed me into removing the link to said MP from this story.

Diana ! Diana !

Lo, all our media pomp of yesterday
Is one with Ninevah and Tyre !

On the sixth anniversary of Diana's death there is no BBC Online story, and an admittedly cursory trawl through the Sundays only finds this from Mary Riddell in the Observer.

And pretty dreadful it is too - taking several hundred words of not-very-much to conclude that "personal tragedy is too frail a foundation to bear the weight of public recrimination. That was the lesson of Diana's death. Britain has failed to learn it." What ? Eh ? Come again ? Pardon ? Me no understand.

Let us go back in time. It's almost impossible to overstate the hysteria that gripped a fair proportion of the population and the entire mass media after Di's crash. The Today programme's Sue MacGregor trawling the crowds outside Buckingham Palace for mourners willing to attack the Queen on air. The wailing and cries of 'Diana ! Diana!' as her coffin was taken out. I remember wondering if I was living in Buenos Aires or Tel Aviv – we English just don't (or didn't) go in for that sort of thing. Weren't there some suicides ?

A shameful anecdote follows.

On the funeral morning my children were due in the nearest (small) town for their swimming lessons. It had been announced in the local paper that all leisure facilities in the large town some thirty miles away would be closed that day, out of respect to the deceased. And already there had been criticism on local radio levelled at institutions staying open. The funeral was starting to take on some of the attributes of a high-profile funeral in the West Bank or the Falls Road - staying open was potentially bad for your health.

Now Daddy wanted to stay in and watch the funeral that morning, anticipating a spectacle - but he didn't want the kids to miss a lesson.

Pick up the phone to the local council's Leisure Department.
"Will you be cancelling and rescheduling swimming due to the funeral ?".
"No".
"Are you sure ? Bigtown have cancelled theirs."
"No, we'll be opening as usual".
"Who took that decision - can I have his name ?"
"Well xxxx is Head of Leisure Services - here's his number."

Phone to the paper.
"Evening Gazette ? - do you know Smalltown council are keeping all their leisure facilities open on Saturday ? Bigtown have shut all theirs. I think it's shameful. No respect at all."
"Have you got the name of someone there we could speak to ?"
"Well xxxx is Head of Leisure Services - here's his number."

The council rang back within an hour to tell me all the swimming pools would be closing and the lessons rescheduled.

Daily Mail Watch

Was it au currant or Natalie Solent who blogged recently abut DM-abuse coming from the usual suspects ?

Here's two examples from today .....

one from Moan Smith in the Indie (surprise) ...

"... Daily Mail, which would no doubt be mortified to learn that somewhere on the planet a woman has managed to be rich, famous, single, successful and happy."

and one from Carol Sarler in an otherwise top-notch, spiked-style Observer piece. Probably wouldn't have been published without it, as it attacks the counselling culture beloved of Guardianistas. "Come on, Carol - think of your audience. Can't you just sex it up a little ? Tell you what - how about a go at the Daily Mail - that always gets the juices flowing ?"

"How about this, then ?"

"an abandoned young mother, eking out meagre benefit payments, alone with two small children at the very top of an inner-city high rise, able to descend in the urine-fragranced lift only on the alternate Wednesdays when it actually works, and all the while knowing that the Daily Mail lurks to scream its particular abuse at her when she fails to cope."

"Love it."

Campbell Quits

And the far left celebrates !

"Those ... who had been so insane as to rejoice over that defeat were like children who thoughtlessly delight in being ill, because it means they may not have to do something unpleasant or eat something they dislike today, without realising that the disease may cripple them for life." - Solzhenitzyn, August 1914.

The beginning of the end for Blair and this Labour government.

Matthew Turner strangely blames his 'non-existent commitment to democracy' to the environment in which he worked - the 'Tory tabloid press'. Funny - pre-Blair he was the industrial correspondent for the Daily Mirror.

Wilfred Thesiger

Born Addis Ababa, 1910. Died Coulsdon, Surrey, 2003.



BBC Obituary. 2002 Spectator Interview. Telegraph tribute.

Discipline in British Education

I can't work out if this response by a teacher to a student with a samurai sword is pathetic or noble ... or both.

Describing the brutal gang battle, which happened on 19 November last year, Ms Brown told the jury: "Three or four Afro- Caribbean youths were being chased. They were absolutely fearful and tired and panting. Not one was carrying a weapon.

"The Asians I recognised - I had seen them a number of times around the campus. I saw one was hitting a youth with a wooden cosh. Another was in the vicinity, egging him on with shouts. He was the leader of the group, but without delivering the hits.

"I saw Amar Kayani waving a samurai sword. He was screaming obscenities as he came towards me.

"I said to him 'That's it Kayani, you're excluded.'

Anti-US Bile in the guise of 'Science' .....

Written in July 2002, after an Independent article by a so-called 'Science Correspondent'.

The Independent and its columnists often rail against the practitioners of ‘hate speech’ - usually meaning those who make any negative remarks about ethnic minorities or homosexuals. Yet the Indie, a significant minority of its columnists and a large proportion of its shrinking readership are happy to incite hatred of one particular national group - Americans. From columnists such as Robert Fisk and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, through the letters page and the bulletin board postings, anti-US vitriol has been dripping ever since those long-ago days when the Indie stopped being a serious newspaper and repositioned itself in that fertile readership territory between the Guardian and Socialist Worker. (You certainly couldn’t call the Indie a socialist paper though - nationalisation is seen more as a way of upsetting capitalists than of building a New Jerusalem, and the political attitudes have more in common with Kevin the Teenager than Karl Marx.)

If only I’d been given a fiver for every time the word ‘redneck’ or ‘cowboy’ has been used in a debate about US policy !

A paper which seems to be terribly against the stereotyping of its favoured sub-groups is happy to caricature a nation which is far more free and democratic than we are, where ethnic minorities rise to high office without the aid of quotas, and whose economy is the envy of the world, as a nation of brain-dead ‘good old boys’, forever driving their gas-guzzling autos, six-pack wedged on the shotgun rack, down an endless highway, through a landscape littered with burning crosses and lynch-mob victims, past prisons full of innocent death-row inmates (all of whom have low mental ages and blood-sugar disorders), and churches packed with hypocritical scoundrels just itching to chain women back to the sink and shoot an abortionist or three.

This tendency seems to have spread to their science ‘correspondent’, one Charles Arthur. Thursday’s Indie features a headline which ‘were it true, would indeed be sad’, to quote William McGonagall.

“REVEALED: HOW THE SMOKE STACKS OF AMERICA HAVE BROUGHT THE WORLD'S WORST DROUGHT TO AFRICA”

The first three paragraphs are, if you like, the point of the article - the reader can know all he needs to know from them

Para 1 - ‘to those who live there, it is as if the rich have stolen the rain. For more than 30 years, the Sahel region of Africa has suffered the longest sustained droughts in the world’. So we know who to blame - ‘the rich’. I can just hear them now in Mali - ‘the rich have stolen the rain !’

Para 2 - crops are failing (between 1972 and 1975, and 1984 and 1985) and a million people have starved to death. You haven’t forgotten who to blame, have you now ?

Para 3 - George Bush doesn’t like the idea that the developed world might be to blame. At last - evil has a face and a name !

Pity that if rumour is correct, in 1975 he was dancing naked on Mexican bar tables, off his head on coke, as many of us might have been tempted to do had we millionaire fathers. And in 1985 he was in front of a telly watching Live Aid - as most of us did.

And the headline - how does Charles Arthur know that either the drought in Southern Africa (which will create interesting dilemmas as we’re asked to send money to Zimbabwe) or the previous droughts of 72-75 and 84-85 are ‘the world’s worst’ ?

I’d have thought the ongoing situation in the Sahara, Gobi or Atacama deserts (where in some areas it rains every 300 years or so) might potentially be worse. The dry valleys of Antarctica don’t get much rain or snow either. This ‘world’s worst’ tag has just been invented to highlight the evil being wrought by the US.

You have to read further to find out that

a) two people have created a computer model which suggests that sulphur dioxide emissions are moving the sub-Saharan rain belt south, and that this effect caused the famines in Ethiopia and Mali which some of us will remember. Of course there have been many computer models of climate created by scientists - all of which have so far proved hopeless when it comes to predicting the future.

b) ‘Researchers have little doubt that the two are connected’ says the article.

But the only scientist they quote says he is "cautious" about taking the interpretation of the link between aerosols in the northern hemisphere and the weather in the Sahel as gospel.

c) “According to the researchers themselves, droughts have become less severe over the last few years”.

But Mr. Arthur, advancing no evidence, then says that the current food crisis in, not Sub-Saharan, but SOUTHERN Africa is caused by the effect ! So apparently the Saharan rain-belt has moved south of Zimbabwe ! I suppose en-route it caused the floods in Mozambique a year or two back. Stand by for Cape Town to be washed away.

d) The researchers actually blame pollution from power stations and factories in Europe and America.

So the headline should also castigate Europeans - like Indie readers. And presumably Mrs. Thatcher, who closed so many sulphur-dioxide producing coal-fired stations (quoting environmental reasons - no, I didn’t believe her either) and shut down so much of British industry, must be hailed as a far-sighted environmental heroine. Perhaps the headline could have read “Thatcher Was Right, Say Climate Researchers”. But that wouldn’t have fitted the story the Indie wanted to tell. Easier to blame the Toxic Texan.


The whole article is a remarkable mix of anti-US bile and bad science. Of course, the Saharan rain-belt has moved south before with no help from the US. Thousands of years ago the desert bloomed - it wasn’t always a sandy waste.

Perhaps next week Charles Arthur will show how George Bush’s distant forebears, on the first stage of the long voyage from the Kenyan Rift Valley, cradle of mankind, to Midland, Texas, chopped down every tree in the Sahara to make a fleet of ocean-going rafts !

The same Indie issue contains a leader attacking New Labour for its obsession with presentation and spin at the expense of truth and honesty. Yet the whole point of Charles Arthur’s article is not to tell the truth, but to spin the facts in order to smear a nation and its leader.

Black American Conservative Writers

Well, OK - they're not all black - Michelle Malkin is Filipina - and they may not all be conservative. I'm not either. But what they have in common is a belief in personal responsibility, and an absence of the view that it's all whitey's fault. And they can write. A prize for anyone who ever gets to hear one of them on the BBC.

Larry Elder - provocative talk-show firebrand and author.

Michelle Malkin

Thomas Sowell. My favourite. Great writer, great site. I'd never heard of Eric Hoffer before.

Robert George

Charles Ellison

Mark Goldblatt

Deroy Murdock. Also writes for the Independent Gay Forum.

John H. McWhorter. Another fine writer whose position on black street culture is close to the UK's Tony Sewell.

Walter Williams. As already noted, a writer with a sense of humour. Read him at JWR.

Guilt-stricken white liberal ?

Walter Williams offers absolution.

"From this day forward Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry."

Discrimination is Alive and Well

Natalie Solent and Peter Cuthbertson mark the 40th anniversary of MLK's great 'I have a dream' speech by mourning the inverted racism of 'affirmative action' and white liberal guilt, and contrasting this with the vision of a society where people are judged not 'by the color of their skin but by the content of their character'.

Of course great strides have been made since then. Segregation, a real example of 'institutionalised racism' has been abolished. Black people can vote wherever they live in the US - even Florida. (And nobody seems too fussed about the absence of democracy in most of Africa).

But there's one area in which open racism flourishes, and is widely accepted - the area of personal, or more precisely sexual, relationships. But this tells us more about the change in attitudes to sexuality than it does about racism.

In Victorian times a person could dispose of property more or less as he wished, whereas sexuality was subject to many legal and social restrictions. Now the situation's been more or less reversed.

Back before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, sexuality was a public, not a private affair. Marriage was a public ceremony, the only socially approved expression of sexual desire was within marriage, and married couples held a privileged position in law, some vestiges of which still remain. It was also a time when employers could operate a colour bar, hotels or guest houses could display 'no coloureds' notices, and a private citizen was free to discriminate or not as he chose on any grounds in any area of life.

The Old Labour sociologist Norman Dennis, in his 'Families Without Fatherhood', commented on the cultural change which elevated the freedom to have relationships as and when you chose, regardless of the damage to third parties (for example children or an abandoned spouse) to an absolute right. Already, he wrote, the the classic phrases of rampant capitalism come to mind as the number of fatherless families mount - "Cannot a man do what he likes with his own ? As for the other party, caveat emptor - let her take the consequences of her bad bargain !"

The only difference, he continued, was that now the State, through taxation, would take the consequences of a wrong choice of partner - ' ...in sexual conduct the cast of mind is that I please myself, but if anything goes wrong, you must be responsible that my children come to no harm. In effect such a biological father is saying, "You must be a socialist so that I can be an egoist. My baby is the hostage through which I, who will not do my duty, will hold you to your duty."

In 1976 a Mr Robert Relf was jailed for displaying a 'for sale' sign outside his Leamington Spa home which stated that the purchaser must be white. (Mr Relf was recently jailed again for refusing to fill in the census as there was no ethnicity box for 'English'.)

Yet if you're looking for a partner you can specify their race with no problems. Try ukmatch.com, where you can choose from 10 different preferred 'ethnicities'. Lonelyhearts classifieds in every local freesheet specify the race of the potential partner. You can also discriminate on grounds of religion, disability, age, gender and sexual orientation. Not to mention grey hair, height (from 3 feet 1 inch to 8 feet 11 inches), occupation, income and body type (I liked 'other', also 'a few extra pounds').

Sex is the last area where discrimination is not only allowed but is almost mandatory.

August 14-15, 1947

Tom Watson blogs on Indian Independence Day (but strangely ignores Pakistan Independence Day), quoting Jawaharlal Nehru - "A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance."

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. There's no doubt of the magnitude of the Indian achievement in sustaining a democracy over the last 50 years, and in doing so sustaining the conditions for an ever-increasing standard of living and of education. Many Indians are far better educated than their British counterparts.

Working in IT I see more and more business heading offshore to India. I have no problem with that - a people who value education will inevitably come to dominate an industry where what you know is more important than where you are. And in the UK the children of Indian immigrants do far better than the Native Brits in school (and the Chinese, whose kids do best of all, are coming up fast on the rails in the global IT industry).

The contrast between the continuing progress of India and the stagnation if not regression of Africa is remarkable.

But we should perhaps remember another quote. "As the British authority passes ... the old hatreds between Moslem and Hindu revive and acquire new life and malignancy. We cannot easily conceive what these hatreds are." Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1931.

He added in the late 1940s - 'we have reached our horrible consummation in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of poor people who only sought to earn their living under conditions of peace and justice".

Betwen 400,000 and a million people died in rioting and massacre between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh after independence and the partition of the Raj into India and Pakistan.

William Dalrymple (no relation) writes of the still vivid remembrance of the massacres in Lahore, where trains from India would arrive completely full of dead bodies, while a small UK based site offers a neat potted history of the birth of Pakistan.

And 'for amusement only' Socialist Worker blames the massacres on the wicked colonialists, who 'encouraged partition'. The fact that partition was seen as the only way to prevent even worse massacres is apparently irrelevant.

In India the Prime Minister has marked Independence Day by calling upon the two old enemies to unite against poverty.

A Cautionary Tale of Gullibility and Hypocrisy

"Hi" - says the mail, from 'Leanne', "I was checking your profile on the Web and you sounded kinda interesting. Would you like to chat with me ? I'm 23 and blonde with green eyes, really enjoy sex and I have a webcam. I'm on cam most days 8-10 p.m. at ....".

Most people who've built a website with an email address on it will have received mail like that. Every day, robotic programs trawl the Web, automatically grabbing the address from sites and building vast mailing databases which are available for sale. I get fifteen or twenty unsolicited mails a day, currently mainly for online pharmacies ('Fentamine, Viagra, Valium'), Human Growth Hormone ('Look Younger Feel Younger') and drugs to enlarge the penis ('She Will Love You For It' is one of the printable sales pitches). But there are usually a few porn site mails as well as 'Leanne's' more sophisticated approach.

I don't ever click the links or go to the site. You know that there is no 'Leanne', lonely sex goddess with a webcam, surfing for her dream cyberlover, who just happens to be lucky old overweight fortysomething you.

Instead there's an operation to relieve you of your money, perhaps with a girl and webcam involved somewhere along the line. And anyway, there are a host of sites (many of them French, for some reason) where girls, often of a certain age, webcams and chat are free. For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.

But then I'm a cynical old Hector. When (according to the BBC News site – from which the story has now disappeared, some time between 5 and 10.30 p.m. on 8th August) a Tory councillor received an unsolicited email from a 'Julie Masters', stating that she was looking for an older man for some online rudity, no alarm bells rang. And he was right, there was no commercial rip-off. It was much, much, worse.

He replied. ‘She’ replied. The mails became more explicit over a period of months, ending in the sending of photographs of the councillor in suspenders and little else.

Next thing was that copies of the mails and photographs arrived in the inbox of every council member ….. it appeared the councillor had been set up – and stitched up.

We are told how to guide our children, to lessen the ‘stranger danger’ of the chatroom. Perhaps grown-ups need lessons, too.

Now for the hypocrisy. While it may be distressing to inadvertantly, through the action of a third party, be exposed to the sexual fantasies of a colleague, you’d think a Labour council would be a little more grown up about such things. After all, we’ve left that kind of Victorian reticence way behind. Labour-controlled health authorities encourage children to role-play a married man caught ‘cottaging’, or to discuss "dressing and tying up", use of "sexual toys" and "multiple partners". Not like those buttoned-up Tories. Labour are cool and open about sex.

Not in Bracknell they’re not. Councillor Anne Shillcock in particular takes the biscuit.

“Labour borough councillors have written about Cllr Grayson's behaviour to the Standards Board of England and have called for his resignation from the council.

They also issued a press release which said: "The charge is that Cllr Grayson has brought the council and council members into disrepute. This follows information which has recently been brought to the attention of fellow councillors and several members of the public by the publication of sexually explicit material."
Labour leader Cllr Anne Shilcock said: "The Labour Group calls upon Cllr Grayson to formally apologise to all members and members of the public who have received this disgusting material."”

Why on earth should he apologise ? He didn't disseminate this material. If only the councillor had been a self-professed member of some deviant minority these left-wing hypocrites wouldn't have uttered a word, other than to sympathise with him as the victim of a 'whatever'-phobic campaign.

The best bet for the Tory councillor is to say he’s at the start of his transgender journey and sue for harassment !

Welcome Back ....

To revolutionary socialist blogger Dave Dudley, late of Sectarian Worker and Dave's Dialectical Diary, now at Harry's Place and on cracking form discussing the difficulties of choosing a politically correct holiday.

His blogging will bring the memories flooding back to anyone who has spent time on the far left .

How he combined his revolutionary activity with his career in Country'n'Western I don't know. But songs like Truck Drivin' Man or Six Days On The Road show the working-class ethic at its finest. I can't wait for his rumoured 9/11 album to be released.

Aaronovitch is at it again ...

Thanks to Ian Murray for spotting David Aaronovitch's latest attack, ostensibly on Liam Fox, but actually on Migrationwatch and Anthony Browne, Times Environment correspondent.

His attack is two-pronged, like the Green Manalishi's crown. First, Browne supports the Migrationwatch view, and his 'big mate' Professor David Coleman is a member of a society called the Galton Society. Four years ago the society was addressed by a speaker who has written a preface to a book by American (very) far-right-winger David Duke.

As Telemachus writes, 'degrees of separation'. I'm pretty sure someone playing the same game with David Aaronovitch could come up with some pretty nasty people too.

The other thing he's got against Migrationwatch is the
"melange of questionable statistics, assertions dressed as facts and straightforward scapegoating cranked out by Migration Watch UK and its main scribbler, Anthony Browne. You know the sort of thing. Housing shortages are caused by immigrants (and not by long-term changes in British family structures), Britain is twice as crowded as France, the British people don't like multi-culturalism ...."

We've been here before. In a January 2003 Observer article he attacked the 'lies, damned lies' over asylum and immigration, and asked to see us 'equipping ourselves with argument and standing to the defences of the country we also love'.

All good stuff. Only one problem. In neither article does he actually equip himself with any arguments other than the cry of 'racist !'.

Perhaps Britain is not twice as densely populated than France (though surely England is, and that is what's important as few migrants or asylum seekers go anywhere else). Perhaps no asylum seekers have any relation to terrorist activities. I'm sure there must be research in the public domain on the question of family breakdown vs immigration as a driver of housing shortage.

Perhaps ... come on, David. Everything you argue for may be true. Why are you so leery of actually producing evidence in support of it ?

Disappearing Scots

The Scottish population is declining, while England grows more crowded each year.

Magnus Linklater in the Times notes the decline in the Scottish population compared to its southern neighbour, but fails to point out that but for immigration, England would be in the same situation. Only the influx of migrants, and their generally higher birth-rate once arrived, keeps the population rising, keeps pressure on house prices, and keeps the Native Brits fleeing to the suburbs and country towns.

The English, left to their own devices, would also be in numerical decline. And no bad thing either, say the newly-formed Optimum Population Trust.

"In countries where there is only one race," said Churchill, "broad and lofty views are taken of the colour problem". He was speaking of 1940s England, where the locals were shocked by the segregation of the U.S. armed forces, but the same could be said of Scotland today, where views on race and immigration can be as broad as the Silvery Tay - because few immigrants or asylum seekers venture outside England.

If you were an asylum seeker headed for the UK, where would you like to go ? To Scotland or Wales, with their strong Nationalist parties ? To Ulster, where Sinn Fein/IRA are still killing people because their forebears were immigrants four hundred years ago ? Or to a country whose national flag should really be emblazoned with the word 'Sorry !'. No choice, really, is it ?

None take a more broad and lofty view than Charles Kennedy. He attacked William Hague every time the latter opened his mouth on asylum.

On one occasion he implied in Parliament that Hague's rhetoric on asylum was encouraging racist attacks, and cited an incident where a young black man was set on fire.
To the best of my knowledge he didn't retract this when it emerged that the man in question had suffered burns while setting a car ablaze.

Charles Kennedy, a crofter's son, comes from the Highlands and is MP for Ross, Cromarty and Skye.

A couple of years ago, staying on Speyside, I wondered idly about the ethnic diversity of the area, and picked up the phone book, which covers everywhere north of Aviemore as far as Shetland. Patels ? None. Singhs ? Two - both doctors. The famous Mohammed clan of Lewis, there for over forty years and subjects of a fascinating Radio 4 documentary a few years back.

And that's about it. Different world. Easy to forget, if you represent Slough, for example, that the 1st Battalion, Scots Guards are likely to be as monocultural a bunch as ever Trooped the Colour.

How BBC 'Impartiality' Operates

Two stories on immigration and asylum.

One - the Tory proposal that all immigrants to the UK should be screened for infectious diseases.

Two - an Industrial Society proposal that it should be made easier for asylum seekers to find work in the UK, as they are "skilled, willing and keen to work".

Both of these stories could be seen as controversial. Pro-refugee and asylum groups would consider the first a disgraceful proposal. Organisations like Migrationwatch or journalists like Anthony Browne would take issue with the second.

But on the BBC, one story is considered so controversial that the reaction to it is played more prominently than the proposal itself. On Radio 4 the story is trailed - "the Conservatives have been defending their proposals". On the BBC News web page there are four different reactions - all critical. I'm particularly impressed with the way Evan Harris remarks are inserted into a description of the report - as below.

Immigrants would have to pay for the tests and asylum seekers would be detained until it was clear the tests had been met, it said.

" This is an unnecessary, extremist, unethical and unworkable policy "
Evan Harris
Liberal Democrat health spokesman

The document said more than 50% of TB in the UK now occurs in people born abroad, the majority of whom arrived in Britain within the last 10 years.

The other proposal ? Obviously entirely uncontroversial - no critical voices are present. And no mention of the fact that the report's author, one Gill Sargeant, is a Labour councillor (in Barnet), nor that the Industrial Society, now rebranded as the Workplace Foundation, is headed up by one Will Hutton, Guardian journalist and New Labour guru.