Stephen Pollard !

Yo is da man !

Blogging From Bed ...

With a stinking cold and a broadband connection. Hence heavyish posting, fuelled by endless cups of tea.

As the blog gets more links, it's harder to keep up with what people are posting. so I thought I'd set up a Bloglines account. For those as ignorant as I, it's a site which enables you to grab the RSS or Atom feeds from your favourite blogs and see who's posting new stuff.

So yestre'en I put together my bloglist, and discovered to my horror that some of my favourite writers don't have site feeds.

So Peter Cuthbertson, Natalie Solent, John Pierce, Village Hampden, Jim Miller - get those feeds sorted !

Five Days Without Food Or Water

You can't say the US Courts aren't independent. Their latest judgement means that Terry Schiavo will be dead in a day or two, starved to death as Tony Bland was in Britain (four years after Tony Bland was killed, another Hillsborough victim, Andrew Devine, came out of his 8-year coma and, while severely disabled, can communicate with his family).

Her poor parents.

As Dumb Jon points out, over at the BBC 'Have Your Say' page, they're wetting themselves with glee.

We get the 'up yours, Christians' perspective :

If the Lord wants to keep you alive and functioning then he doesn't need any artificial help from mankind. Pull the plug and let's see whether the Lord takes her or raises her up whole. Why would you want to keep her trapped in a vegetative state when heaven is only a breath away?

Michael Hoffman, London


All these right-to-life protestors with their cross-smudged placards should surely have something better to do than interfere in a purely family affair. I am curious as to how some consider it compassion to leave her in this state; a state where she has no idea what is going on, cannot feel pain or pleasure, cannot exercise any form of control. Not to mention that there is no hope in her case for recovery since parts of her brain are irreparably damaged. From a Christian perspective, surely she would be more happy in heaven?

Alex Mangan, 17, Swindon, UK

The 'property of the husband' view :

The right belongs to the husband and nobody else particularly when she is in a permanent vegetative state and there's little or not hope of recovery. It's better to let her die in peace and with dignity.

Catherine, Singapore

And one I was waiting for - ths comparison between a totally innocent woman and a murderer or rapist :

I find it ironic that a president that has supported the death penalty in cases of people deemed by the courts of having educationally sub-normal status yet proposes to stop the natural course for someone whose only crime is having people to care for her. If something like 17 Judges have heard this case and sided with the husband than no one should be above the law - not even a president with a right wing Christian agenda.

Simon, Singapore (any relation to Catherine) ?

Of course there is only one category of brain-damaged person who should be kept alive at all costs. People like Radley-educated Clive Stafford-Smith, and his coterie of well-heeled PR and media types at Reprieve UK fight for the right to life of the Tracy Housels (BBC interview and wall-to-wall coverage here) of this world.

On the evening of 6 April 1985, Ms Drew took a night off from nursing her sick mother, to go ballroom dancing. On her way home she stopped for a cup of coffee at a truckers' lay-by, where she met Housel. She was last seen alive, driving off in her silver Ford Mustang with Housel in the passenger seat. The next day her badly beaten body was found by the side of a road. She had been beaten with a stick and allegedly raped. Her body was so badly disfigured, she could only be identified through dental records.

UPDATE - via Booker Rising, Thomas Sowell on Schiavo.

"What is harder to understand is the fervor and even venom of those liberals who have gone ballistic - ostensibly over state's rights, over the Constitutional separation of powers, and even over the sanctity of family decisions. These are not things that liberals have any track record of caring about. Is what really bothers them the idea of the sanctity of life and what that implies for their abortion issue? Or do they hate any challenge to the supremacy of judges - on which the whole liberal agenda depends - a supremacy that the Constitution never gave the judiciary?”

What A Great Site

And a great title.

The Derby Gripe. Straight to the sidebar under England. Any more like this about ?

Recommended - Mary Hinge's page of wisdom. Samples :

The most painful household incident is wearing socks and stepping on an upturned plug.

In every plate of chips there is a bad chip.

Labour detect more Nazi Jews

Do we see a pattern here ?

First a brave pioneer - Tam Dalyell and his Jewish cabal.

Flying pigs. Fagin.

Ken Livingstone calls a Jewish reporter a 'concentration camp guard'.

Now Kevin McNamara, Labour MP for Hull North, has attacked Michael Howard's racist suggestion that travellers should be expected to obey the same planning laws as ordinary people, saying the policy had 'the whiff of the gas chambers'.


How long before Labour MPs start hissing at Howard, as if he's a Spurs supporter at Stamford Bridge ?

Oops !

The theory :

Home Office Minister Hazel Blears on internet grooming by paedophiles :

'As part of our commitment to protecting children on the internet we have introduced a new grooming offence in the Sex Offences Bill and made the maximum penalty for possession of child pornography five years. At the same time a Home Office task force has produced guidance for web, chat and messaging services and run public awareness campaigns to inform parents and children of the risks posed by child internet crime.'

The practice :

'A Labour Party official has resigned after being arrested on suspicion of "grooming" a schoolboy on the internet. Peter Tuffley, 27, was arrested after a 13-year-old boy failed to return to his home in Bolton, Greater Manchester, on Saturday 12 March.

The teenager went home the following day but inquiries by police later revealed he had spent the night at a man's flat in Liverpool.

Mr Tuffley worked as a Labour Party regional organiser in Warrington.

He had previously worked in the Salford constituency office of Police Minister Hazel Blears.'

Not the first time Ms Blears has been long on rhetoric and short on reality.

Happy Birthday To Me !

Two years old yesterday. First ever post is here.

Looking back my worries about looting and law and order were pretty accurate, too.

Vote Fraud Update

Fair play, now - I'd have thought the Indie would have thoroughly approved of postal vote fraud which benefited the Labour party. You live and learn.

In a long list of allegations, including claims that "threats of deportation were made to first-generation migrants if they did not sign postal vote papers to vote Labour", it contends that blank ballot papers were "completed by Labour candidates and activists rather than voters", and that "postal votes were collected in a completed form by Labour party agents, opened, the vote changed and resealed". Here, too, the three winning Labour councillors - Mohammed Islam, Muhammad Afzal and Mohammed Kazi - deny any wrongdoing. All six Labour councillors in Bordesley Green and Aston strenuously deny they had any knowledge of, or consented to, any corrupt practice in the course of their campaigns.

But the fact that these cases are being heard raises huge issues. They coincide with a third case: a former Labour councillor in Blackburn, Mohammed Hussain, faces a possible jail term after pleading guilty last month to conspiracy to rig the 2002 town hall election by getting supporters to fraudulently fill in more than 200 blank postal votes. And alarm bells should be ringing nationwide, because these cases coincide with the build-up to a general election.

They even utter a truth which dare not speak its name.

It's a sensitive issue, but electoral bodies and experts privately agree that inner-city areas of high ethnic-minority population are vulnerable to manipulation of the postal vote system. Ayoub Khan says: "One aspect of the culture is a system of hierarchy that doesn't just extend within the family - it extends into the families of your first cousins, second cousins; and within most extended families there are certain adults who play a very key role." In other words, the deep respect in which elders and senior family members are held means that "key adults and community leaders who have affiliated themselves with a party are in a position where they can extract postal votes in the hundreds".

As I posted last summer:

"It is likely that Labour will consider electoral fraud a price well worth paying for an increased turnout. Which means that future elections where the result is tight will be decided by fraud and/or intimidation. Bad will drive out good as the losers decide 'they're doing it, so we'll have to'. The ruling party will be able to tilt the process, as the police ignore fraud by some parties but prosecute frauds by others. A whole new breed of lawyers specialising in electoral law will exist.

The future ? Soviet levels of turnout and Third World levels of fairness."

"George Bush, Uncle Sam, Iraq will be your Vietnam"

They really, really want that to be true, don't they ?

"The sun shone and banners waved ..." says the Guardian, as an anti-American march took place in London.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the gallant Vietnamese are struggling against US hegemony, expressed as it is in the vile form of educated, independent women who don't wear the right clothes.

In Latifiya, to the south of Baghdad, radical Sunni insurgents have pasted leaflets on shop walls warning women and girls not to appear without a hijab to cover the head and face and prohibiting the use of make-up. Anyone who failed to adhere to these laws “would be punished by death”.

Some die because their work brings them into contact with American or Iraqi officials, others because their advocacy of more rights for women offends certain religious fundamentalists.

A few seem to have been singled out for failing to conform to an extreme Islamic code of dress and for abandoning traditional lives at home.

Zeena al-Qushtaini, a divorced mother who owned one of Baghdad’s best known pharmacies and had contracts with coalition forces, dressed in western clothes and mingled with women activists.

“Lady Zeena”, as she was known, was wearing a diamond necklace and ring when she was shot twice in the head after being abducted. Her body was found dressed in a full-length black abaya that she would never have chosen to wear, the headscarf covered in blood.

Tawheed wal-Jihad, the group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, released a film of her murder and that of her business partner, Ziad Baho, who was beheaded.

Islamic militants have killed 20 women in the northern city of Mosul and a dozen more in Baghdad. The victims shared a common desire to live freely and a vision of a better role for women in Iraqi society.

A better role for women - that would never do, would it now ?

See No Evil

Imagine a demonstration by French Muslims being attacked by hundreds of white thugs. It would be all over the Guardian and BBC like a rash.

Strangely only Scott and the BNP have noted this story from Paris.

Le Monde newspaper carried disturbing interviews with attackers and victims in last week's trouble - both sides agreeing that the violence was exclusively carried out on white boys and girls by black and Arab teenagers.

"If I went, it was not to demonstrate but to take telephones and beat people up. There were groups of people running about stirring things up, and in the middle these idiots - these little French people just asking for it," an 18-year-old of Tunisian origin called Heikel said.

"We came to demonstrate against inequalities and we got beaten up. It's as if they thought that we - the "white Parisians " - had plenty of money, that we could buy a new mobile phone tomorrow," said Tristan Goldbronn, 16, who was badly hurt.

Police estimated that between 700 and 1,000 youngsters came into the city centre to spoil the March 8 demonstration, most of them from the Seine-Saint-Denis department in the northern suburbs.

Heikel, who attends a secondary school in the area, told Le Monde that the mainly white Parisian students who took part in the march - known in street parlance as "bolos" - were seen as spoilt and privileged, and therefore fair game.

"A bolo - he's a sitting duck, a victim," he said.

UPDATE - apologies. Bloggers Faute de Mieux covered the attacks.

Personal Family Matters - A Guide for Liberals

Hitting your significant other - bad.

Smacking your child - bad.

Starving your wife to death ? Well, as Terry Schiavo's husband so rightly said - it's a personal family matter. One really shouldn't interfere.

Amazingly this was the line taken by the BBC Today programme interviewer (RealAudio).

It was followed by a couple of related reports. As Britain becomes ever more civilised, and the dark days of the 1950s slip further and further from memory, so the number of assaults seems to rise. That's OK - just the inevitable result of disparities in our unjust society. But if the assaults are carried out by males on females - bad news. Domestic violence is creeping down the age range. I'm surprised we haven't seen a survey revealing that 100% of children with siblings have hit and been hit by them. Once that was called being a kid. Put it in the DV box and you have a major problem for society.

"This survey reveals a generation of girls, many of whom are growing up believing that aggression is an acceptable part of life" said an NSPCC spokesman.

If you watch Eastenders, so regularly plugged on Children's BBC, or Casualty, you'll realise that aggression is depicted as the ONLY way of dealing with difference.

The moral bankruptcy of the children's charities was beautifully illustrated by the Barnardo's spokeswoman asked (RealAudio) about her 'manifesto for children'. Her reply ("4th richest country in world .. one in four children in poverty"), apart from being based on relative incomes (meaning that if all UK incomes doubled poverty would remain the same), took zero account of the moral and spiritual poverty which produces cases like this, the attempted sale of a two year old girl by her underclass mother. Full report here, for 1 week only.

The couple can't be all bad though. They use the approved modern method of caring for a young child.

"She wakes up at 8. If you want to keep her in bed till 10 keep it dark," she said.

"She'll watch a video all day. Just put a video on. Any Disney video."

James Hamilton

Ok, so he's a trick-cyclist (the old British Army slang for a psychiatrist), a profession I've always regarded as fundamentally useless (otherwise why is the amount of mental illness proportional to the number of therapists and amount of therapy ? Or are they both symptoms ?).

But he's posting some great stuff at the moment. Try this post, in which he addresses some of the issues that were bothering Paul Anderson at Gauche a week or two back - most of which boil down to 'what's happened to the Left ?'

Hamilton takes as his theme this US piece by Lillian Rubin. It's highly relevant to the UK, and will become more so. Sample quote :

Back then there was a saying that "A conservative is a liberal who got mugged on his way to the subway." When I first heard it, I was outraged by those flip words; now it seems to me that they weren't entirely wrong. So today I wonder if a conservative isn't a working-class guy who heard the "liberal elite" (as the right has effectively labeled us) tell him he had nothing to fear when experience told him otherwise-not just on crime but on a whole slew of issues that have turned the country into a cultural and political battlefield.

I think the piece, and James Hamilton's comments, are directly relevant to the questions asked by Paul Anderson. My view is simple - that somewhere at the height of Thatcherite hegemony the middle class UK left jettisoned, with a sigh of relief, the white working class, put a couple of five-skinners together and concentrated on the politics of race, gender and sexuality. The process continues.

As racial and identity politics became increasingly strident, we were right on economic issues but tone deaf to the cultural and emotional sources of white working-class fear and anger. They objected to what they saw as minority privilege, and we called them racist.

Archbishop 'showing signs of Christianity' shock

UPDATE - Times and Seasons visitors, welcome. I think Adam wants you to see the picture at the bottom of this post.


In a radical departure from orthodox Church of England doctrine, Rasputin has laid aside his concern for Fairtrade chocolate, the oppression of gay clergy, third world debt, the G8 summit, domestic violence and proactively reaching out to broad sections of the community on a multidisciplinary basis while empowering a cross-section of service providers, and addressed himself to the Sixth Commandment.

Writing in the Sunday Times, he points out that "it is impossible to regard abortion as anything other than the deliberate termination of a human life".

Alas the word 'kill' is conspicuous by its absence, and the Mad Monk spends the next three paragraphs reassuring nervous types that "the idea that raising the issues here is the first step towards a theocratic tyranny or a capitulation to some neanderthal Christian right is alarmist nonsense".

But great oaks, little acorns etc.

In the same paper, my bete noir Rod Liddle continues his 180 degree switch and seems determined to corner the market in political incorrectness, this week taking a pop at nutters and headcases, otherwise known as those with "mental health issues". I'm still trying to work out if his radical switch from Guardianista par excellence as the editor of Radio 4's "Today" programme, to a chap who presents documentaries about the 'Immigration Time-bomb', is a road to Damascus job or whether he's a careerist who can sense the way the wind's blowing.

(For amusement, the complaints at the NAAR site exhibit a well worn feature of the immigration debate. "I welcome a full and honest debate. But not with people I disagree with".)

Finally, the wonderful and fragrant Church of England cleric Joanna Jepson has lost her case against the medics who killed a baby on the grounds of its cleft palate.

Apparently there were some 50 deaths a year (source unknown and probably in the 'one in four a domestic violence victim' category) through illegal abortion pre-1967. To prevent this putative evil, 1,365 babies were killed after 22 weeks (the approximate age at which a baby becomes, with medical help, viable outside the womb) last year. And another 180,000 before then, of course. Per year. Five million or so since 1967.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

... higher taxes to pay the state to become the best possible nanny to all babies ....

Says Polly.

"The nanny state is the good state" says Polly.

"Tell it like it is: only the state can buy the things that make people happiest" says Polly.



In the immortal words of windowlicker :

Imagine a Birkenstock stamping on a human face - forever.

Zimbabwe traditional healer burnt by goblins

What a headline. The Sun and Daily Sport can't compete.

A self-styled traditional healer popularly known as tsikamutanda, was on Monday seriously burnt by a suspected goblin, which he was allegedly trying to get rid of during a cleansing ceremony at one of his client’s homestead in Lalapanzi.

Enriching Our Economy

There can be no doubt that mass immigration has reduced costs for employers drastically. Take what the Guardian calls 'sex work'. Foreign entrepreneurs are capable of finding people who will take on the jobs that the Native Brits don't want. In some cases, they'll even find employees who will do jobs against their will.

The girl was resold seven times, repeatedly raped and forced to work in brothels throughout Britain. She escaped only after enlisting the help of three local women at a Sheffield nightclub and ran barefoot, distressed and traumatised, to a local police station.

The flood of new workers has helped keep inflation low, and some prices have actually fallen. For example, last summer a Lithuanian teenager cost as much as £4,000. Within a few months, thanks to businessmen from Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo, the price had dropped to £3,000, then £1,500. Who says it's a difficult climate for businessmen in Brown's Britain ?



Elsewhere people are developing innovative methods to detect crime. How long before mermaid technology comes to Britain ?


A HARARE woman bought FIVE return air tickets to fly mermaids from London after a spirit medium told her they would help her recover her stolen car and money.

Zimbabwean authorities say this was a swindle and have arrested the spirit medium Edna Chizema, who is also a popular musician, charging her with theft by false pretences.

The bizarre details of the case were revealed when Chizema, better known as Ambuya Maduve, went on trial on Wednesday.

Magrate Mapfumo told a Harare magistrate how she turned to Chizema after her car and $150 million cash went missing from her home.

She said when she arrived at the singer’s home, a mystery voice told her that she had to buy air tickets for the mermaids (injuza in Ndebele, or an imaginary sea creature fabled to have a woman’s head and upper body and a fish’s tail) which would track down the thieves who had stolen her car and cash.



(I must say New Zimbabwe has some fantastic stories. From the same page, Witchcraft blamed as stones rain on family , Man grows female genital organ on face , Goblins burn traditional healer )

Daily Mail Watch Watch

As we celebrate the loss of a million manufacturing jobs since 1997, Poll Pot on Britain, honesty and the Daily Mail.

"the Daily Mail's toxic talent for the breathtaking, punch-you-in-the-face untruth."

followed by

"The fabric of the nation is in better nick than for many a long year"

Polly also calls CBI Director-General Digby Jones 'the old fraud'.

Digby Jones is 49.

Polly Toynbee is nine years older, as well as apparently being descended from the 9th Earl of Carlisle.





One other Daily Mail moment - listen to Labour education committee chairman Barry Sheerman accuse the BBC (RealAudio - near the end) of getting a story (that Peter Vardy's excellent Emmanuel College teaches creationism) from the Daily Mail.

"Barry, Barry - it's a Guardian story"

"Oh, is it ?"

The Eighties Are Back

In music at Harry's, and in the Guardian, where Hugh Muir tells us that "gun crime will continue to rise while it remains the most accessible, rational career choice for so many young people ".

This was the new theme of the 1980s, as liberals who had previously denied the existence of rising crime ("Daily Mail ... more people have insurance ... more people have phones, so it's easier to report... people report crimes now which they would have accepted in past times ... the police are inflating the figures to justify demanding increased resources") suddenly accepted its existence and found a cause - that rising crime was due to poverty and injustice.

As I wrote a few years back

Suddenly there was an avalanche of theories designed to explain the rise in crime that had previously been denied. Bad housing, unemployment, the design of estates - all manner of physical, mechanistic explanations for crime. And the greatest of these was poverty. From the Church of England's 'Faith in the City' report in 1986 to the many reports of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Child Poverty Action Group, the message, put simply, was 'they thieve because they're poor'. And there was great political utility in this view during the Thatcher years. The same people on the 'left' who in the 1970s had characterised paid employment as soulless capitalist wage-slavery, the cause of alienation, suddenly decided that paid employment was a basic human right the ABSENCE of which caused alienation, of which crime was one symptom. Again put simply, the answer to the question 'whose fault was it, then ?' was 'THATCHER !'. So we have the third stage of denial - that yes, there is a lot of crime, but a) it's caused by poverty and our unjust society b) nothing can be done about it without relieving poverty/creating social justice.

You see, those outside Guardianista country are completely unaware of the "polarisation of our society into the haves and have-nots, the connected and the disconnected". It's not a concept we've come across before, having been asleep for twentyfive years, and we need people like Hugh to tell us about it. Apparently there's a "parallel universe of deprived communities, where the concerns and norms of mainstream Britain scarcely register" . I think he's talking about the UK underclass.

The wonderful thing is how the Guardianista worldview has trickled down into even the criminal underclass, providing a moral underpinning, a justification, for the criminal lifestyle. Never mind the fact that their victims are usually as poor and 'deprived' as they are themselves. Ever since the 1980s and the rise of the yuppie we've heard the refrain that "they see all this wealth on the TV which they haven't got - what do you expect ?".

"They see a lot of things happen on TV, famous people, rap stars, gold, big cars, houses; they all want it but everyone ain't got the same means of getting it, so they are going about getting it in other ways."

"Most of the criminals out there, they're not stupid, they're smart people, they just ain't had opportunities ... it's just, they do the easiest, like, the easiest thing that's there. Like me, for example, it was robberies and that. Robberies are easy, easy stuff. I could have done much, I could have maybe been a doctor, I could have been a lawyer, but it's just the way I grew up."

You see, it's all our fault. We don't "support families", whatever that means - I'd have thought we subsidise single parenthood rather successfully. We don't apparently educate the children ("better schools") and we don't provide "access to skills and role models", whatever that means. Perhaps we could bus males into sink schools and say 'this, Kyle, is called a father. He lives with his kids. Take a good look, 'cause you don't see many round here'.

Nowhere does he address the issue that at other times, or other parts of Britain (see my post on the high-crime constituencies), people have been poor yet have avoided crime as a solution to poverty.

Instead we get this.

"We are required to show personal responsibility, but ..."

A Wilted Crocus From The Curate's Garden

Still lagged from the trip to Murrayfield - 700-odd miles in 32 hours !

Highlights - the run from Moffat to Peebles via the Grey Mare's Tail and St Mary's Loch on a beautiful Sunday morning.



The large number of Welshmen in kilts.

The immaculately observed silence in memory of Douglas Elliot.

The haddock at Brattisani's. And the child-friendly waitress, who cheered up a tired seven year old girl.

There was a rugby match too, of which I will say little, in respect to the Scot I watched the game with. Let it suffice that he had his head in his hands after ten minutes, and when he was late back with a drink at half time I was concerned lest I find him cutting his wrists in the toilet ...



Enough. Have a look at this, from Faut De Mieux, checking Blimpish and shoeing Madeleine, whose historical howler this week is that a strong sense of English identity was a 19th century invention. I suppose she could be referring to a certain kind of European nationalism - but the whole glory of English nationalism is that it was never like the nationalisms of Europe, just as England was never like Europe.

Let me quote a great Victorian, writing in the aftermath of the Armada's defeat.

Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them.
Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true

How To Encourage Business

I was talking a year or two back to a chap who has a couple of small engineering businesses in the area, and asked him how the enormous increases in employers liability insurance, fuelled by the compensation culture, were affecting him.

He told me that, in common with perhaps 200,000 other small firms, he was operating without any. When I raised a metaphorical eyebrow at this (it's a legal requirement for any business other than a sole trader), he told me that the cost of cover was so high as to make the business uneconomic - it was a case of either running without cover or closing the company.

I thought of this when a correspondent brought this story to my attention - another classic from Scallyland.

A teenage boy who fell through a roof while he was trespassing on private property has received £567,000 in compensation.

Carl Murphy, now 18, sued the owner of a warehouse after suffering serious head injuries when he plunged 40ft to the floor as a nine-year-old in 1996.

Victims of crime groups yesterday reacted angrily to the payout, which is 50 times more than the family of a murder victim can expect to receive from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority.

He's receiving the compensation because the head injuries he sustained have caused him to behave an a most uncharacteristic fashion for a young Merseysider from a good home.

Mr Murphy is currently living with his grandmother because his mother Diane and her boyfriend, Kevin Parsons, both 36, are serving three years in prison for setting up a heroin and crack cocaine business from their council house.

He was expelled from his primary school in Bootle within a week of returning after the accident, given a home tutor, but that ended when he threatened her with violence. He missed ten months of school before being enrolled at Nugent House, Billinge, a school for children with behavioural problems, in November 1998, but was expelled 18 months later.

It's obvious that the blame for this behaviour lies with Container Care of Bootle, who failed to provide fencing capable of keeping out a young Liverpudlian.


I saw the local businessman again a month or so ago, and was pleased to hear that he will no longer be operating a UK factory without the mandatory insurance cover. He's moving production to China.