"The longest public execution in American history"

Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice :

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.
She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists.

Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case—Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him—to have her own lawyer represent her.

Greer has declared Terri Schiavo to be in a persistent vegetative state, but he has never gone to see her. His eyesight is very poor, but surely he could have visited her along with another member of his staff. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, Terri Schiavo is indeed responsive beyond mere reflexes.

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die.

Ann Coulter finds good in the few on the left who had problems with killing a diabled woman because her estranged husband wanted it - Nader and Jesse Jackson among them.

Liberal Larry gives the perspective of the caring Left.

And NRO sum it up pretty well.

" ... we saw euphemism after euphemism deployed to cloud the issues.

Perhaps chief among these was the fiction that we were "letting her die." On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it's been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed.

And for that to happen, the use of words like "starvation" and "dehydration" would have to be discouraged. Those words might, after all, have reminded us that what was done to Schiavo would be criminal if done to an animal and provoke cries of "torture" and "cruel and unusual punishment" if done to a convicted capital murderer. And "killed," of course, was totally verboten."

Poor Terri just didn't kill enough people to get Clive Stafford-Smith's juices flowing, did she ?

Late Daffodils From The Curates Garden

In Manchester a special needs teacher with no previous convictions is jailed for six months for firing an air pistol at the pavement near a group of teenagers she believed had vandalised her son's car. She had been the victim of a sustained campaign of harassment and vandalism.

Interesting contrast in views between the BBC 'Have Your Say' page ('in a civilised society ..) and Manchester Online ('the current justice system is a joke').


On the left, blogger Dead Men Left is concerned at Tariq Ali's current political stance.

"Ali has arrived upon a formulation perhaps unique in British politics: support the Iraqi resistance, vote Liberal Democrat."

Of course it's not Ali's support for 'the resistance', the cheerful catch-all for the Saddamite fascists, the mosque-bombers, trade unionist torturers and the head-choppers, which is the problem. It's the thought of voting Lib Dem.

(Ali's 1970s phrase 'Let It Bleed' was a hip restatement of the old (Tsarist) Russian revolutionary slogan 'The Worse, The Better !" - implying that the greater the suffering of the working class, the nearer the revolution. Didn't seem to work in Thatcher's time - nor now, come to think of it.)



And all praise and honour is due to two brave living Catholics - Il Papa and Archbishop Pius Ncube, one of the few holy men with a name resembling a games console (the others being Cardinal Xbox of Vietnam and the Most Reverend Giles Sinclair-Spectrum of Oxford) - as well as the late Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred twenty-five years ago.

Il Papa for his wonderful bravery and devotion to his flock, Ncube for the same.

The Zimbabwe elections are going to be even more of a farce than the last ones, if this report is correct. Note the name of the MDC secretary general - the even more wonderfully named Welshman Ncube.

Ncube further alleged that while the delegation representing the polling officers was meeting with the DA, the Zanu PF candidate for Mudzi East and provincial chairperson, Ray Kaukonde came to the centre. He was in the company of other local Zanu PF leaders, who told the polling officers they were not wanted in Mudzi because they were MDC supporters and sympathisers.

I see from the Indie that Mugabe is arming his youth militia with weaponry from China and Iran. Not good news. "Youth militia" and "Africa" generally seem to make for "dead people".

Doubtless we'll hear an outcry in the Guardian and Indie over this ...




And finally ... anyone still feeling cheerful ? If so can I recommend a quick read of Schopenhauer ?

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

Generating Genius

"No one, however, is going to fund you if you talk about developing the talented tenth in school."

Thus spake the great Tony Sewell only a month ago.

I'm not sure what (say) the Guardian and BBC would say about a scheme for which only white males qualified, but let it pass. Tony Sewell has found funding to send talented twelve year olds off to university in Jamaica for a month each summer. I'm presuming the idea is to catch the bright ones before street culture hath them in thrall.

Sewell believes that by identifying bright children when they are young and supporting them for more than three years, he has found a way of turning round the trend of underachievement.

Asked why he chose Jamaica: “In Jamaica they will see that every person in a position of authority looks like them. That fact alone is very important. Those boys will never be the same again and it’s all positive.”

During the course the boys will study various sciences and will work in some top laboratories in Kingston and undertake real experiments. The boys will return to Britain able to do demonstration lectures in medicine and research science.

When the boys come back from their summer residency they will be supported by a number of English universities.

Tam-tip - the indispensible Booker Rising (again)

Whipping Up A Storm

At Black Triangle, Anthony reports on a radical new Russian therapy for depression :

“The whipping therapy becomes much more efficient when a patient receives the punishment from a person of the opposite sex. The effect is astounding: the patient starts seeing only bright colors in the surrounding world, the heartache disappears, although it will take a certain time for the buttocks to heal, of course.”

While mirabilis covers traditional Czech Easter whipping :

"It is only the women who are given a good spanking with whips made of willow twigs, decorated with colourful ribbons ... It is mainly younger boys who go from door to door, hoping to thrash a few girls ... while singing traditional Easter carols.

The whipping or "pomlazka" is to get rid of all the bad things that had accumulated during the winter and bring the vitality back in the ladies, as well as ensure beauty and, of course, fertility."

They'll be bringing back the Flagellants next.

Ply well the scourge for Jesus' sake
And God through Christ your sins shall take ...
Had it not been for our contrition
All Christendom had met perdition ...

ASBO News

Remember ASBOs ? Brought in to deal with neighbours from hell and unruly youth gangs ?

"A man who was made subject to an Anti-Social Behaviour Order for putting up a sign saying “porking yard” in his pub car park, because it was offensive to Muslims, today described the court action as “a joke”.

Leroy Trought, 42, was given a two-year Asbo at a hearing at Bristol Magistrates’ Court on Monday.


Magistrates ordered him to change the wording of the “porking yard” sign at The Swan With Two Necks in St Judes, Bristol, to “parking yard”.

He was ordered not to display any signs that may be threatening, abusive or insulting at the pub, which is next to a Somali mosque."

Now such a sign may be pretty tasteless, presumably referring to the kind of activity which is not unknown in pub car parks, but were Christians to protest against it they'd be laughed out of court. Under multiculturalism all cultures are equal, some are just more equal than others.

Hat-tip - TP.

Dalrymple on the Shabina Begum case

In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.

Read the whole thing.

Whisky-Drinking Cats Catch More Mice

The Glenturret Distillery is looking for a replacement for the departed Towser, who killed 30,000 mice in single combat over a 24-year career.



"The story goes that Towser's incredible mousing prowess was the result of a tiny nip being added to his milk each night, but we don't have any scientific proof to back this up and we certainly wouldn't advise this to anyone whose cat is under-performing in terms of vermin control".

In a press release, the Mouse Liberation Front described Towser as 'a mass murderer' and said 'we had hoped to see him stand trial at the International Criminal Court, along with the inventor of the 'humane' mousetrap. You know, the one that starves mice to death slowly, like Terri Schiavo'.

Glengarry-tip - Freedom and Whisky

Bring Back The Brit Imperialists

Last week's "From Our Own Correspondent" on Radio 4 contained among its primeval liberal slime this uncut gem :

Sierra Leone today is one of the poorest countries on the planet.

The last time I was there, veterans of the liberation generation - men and women who had risked imprisonment and death in the last years of British rule in the fight for independence - were earnestly making the case for a return to colonialism.

I guess the place has been a bit of a shambles since we left. And a few hundred Brit troops have at least stopped a few more people having their limbs hacked off. Imagine what could be done with a few thousand troops, a Governor and some District Commissioners ?

Couldn't be done of course. Brits are incapable of that sort of thing nowadays. The Guardian, Indie and BBC would have teams of reporters in Freetown looking for evidence of corruption or Brit brutality (and there would be some). Half the nations of Africa would send arms to whatever 'rebels' were currently active. And the educational factories which could turn out Hilary Hooks by the dozen sixty years ago are now producing bond dealers and futures brokers.

O'Rourke On BBC Shock Horror

Tonight ! 5.40 !

17:40 O'Rourke Talks
1/2. The Ties that Bind: American satirist P J O'Rourke, offers frank and funny insights into Anglo-American relations. [Rptd Sat 7.45pm]

This Is Our Justice System

Take a look at the weblog of Judy McKnight, General Secretary of NAPO, the Probation Officers union - the people who kept Tony Martin inside because he was a risk to the burgling community.

If amy of you find anything about the victims of crime, even a mention of the fact that they exist, do let me know. I'm not hopeful though. A quick search for the word 'victim' revealed nothing.

This is more typical.

Martin Narey didn't like me pointing out that the NOMS Vision statement lacked vision, and that in contrast to the Prison Service "Statement of Purpose" and the Probation Service "Aims" and "Values", his vision was silent on supporting staff.

Martin Narey countered by pointing out that the NOMS statement referred to "focussing a diverse, competent and professional workforce". I pointed out that this was not the same as "supporting " and "valuing" staff, and that this reference to "diverse" was the only reference to diversity in the whole statement; in other words, the NOMS statement is silent on diversity being an underlying value in the work of the service.

This is fairly shocking.

"nothing can replace the role of parents"

Via the already-indispensible Booker Rising blog, Tony Sewell on the Trevor Phillips 'segregation' story.

Killer quote (well, a man sees what he wants to see, and disregards the rest) :

However nothing can replace the role of parents in supporting their children’s work and behaviour. Even our vague English language can’t cloud over this reality.

RTWT.

Socialist Ideology And The Nazis

A week in bed provides reading time as well as blogging time, and I got through among others Hugh Trevor-Roper's 'The Last Days of Hitler'.

And pretty mad days they were, too. Where there is centralised power you always get the court and courtiers. But even Cherie and her crystals had nowt on a movement where every other leader seemed to have his pet astrologer. Weird scenes inside the goldmine.

I'd already read snippets about Hitler's vegetarianism and love for animals - indeed, knowledge of this is so widespread that, amusingly, vegetarians feel the need to counter it. But it's still odd to hear Heinrich Himmler, who at the time was engaged in exterminating millions of people, denouncing blood sports as 'the cold-blooded murder of innocent and defenceless animals', or attacking Goering, a noted huntsman, in these words.

"Goering, that damned bloodhound, kills all animals. Imagine, Herr Kersten, some poor deer is grazing peacefully, and up comes the hunter with his gun to shoot that poor animal ... Could that give you pleasure, Herr Kersten ?"

Hitler and the Nazis have been done to death academically. Even our schools have been Hitlerised, in order to teach the children of what inevitably follows if you have a negative attitude towards bogus asylum seekers.

But there's one massive lacuna in the pile of Hitler books and research. What happened to the socialists in the National Socialist movement ? Who were they, what were their writings ? Even the Wikipedia author, while denying that the Nazis were socialist, writes that they liquidated socialists "including from within their own party in the Night Of The Long Knives".

Let's quote Churchill on Ernst Roehm, the uphill gardening leader of the paramilitary SturmAbteilung or Brownshirts.

Under Roehm's leadership the SA increasingly represented the more revolutionary elements of the party. There were senior members of the party, such as Gregor Strasser, ardent for social revolution, who feared that Hitler of arriving at the first place would simply be taken over by the existing hierarchy, the Reichswehr, the bankers and the industrialists ... To the rank and file of the SA the triumph of January 1933 was meant to carry with it the freedom to pillage not only the Jews and profiteers, but also the well-to-do, established classes of society.

And then Roehm himself, two months before Hitler had him shot.

The Revolution we have made is not a national revolution, but a National Socialist revolution. We would even underline this last word, "Socialist". The militant in the Brown Shirt from the first day pledged himself to the path of revolution, and he will not deviate by a hairbreadth until our ultimate goal has been achieved.

The Munich beerhall rally Hitler attended in 1919 was the "German Workers Party".

What happened to the writings and theorists of socialism in the Nazi party ? Was all the old 20s literature destroyed after Roehm and Gregor Strasser were shot ? Did the archives of the Nazi Party for the 1920s and early 30s all disappear ? Did the Russians get them ?

Or is it a case of 'don't go there' ? I'm not surprised those on the Left want to look away. After all, who wants to think that socialists may have supported an ideology which led to the deaths of tens of millions ? But I'm surprised no one on the 'right' has checked out this particular can of worms. Maybe they have and I'm just showing my ignorance. Wouldn't be the first time.

You mighht almost say that fascism is the bastard child of socialism. Wasn't the whole thing kicked off by a Socialist ? I do like his remark to the Socialist Party as it expelled him (for supporting the war as did the majority of British socialists) :

"You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a socialist. You hate me - because you still love me !"

And weren't the British Fascists founded by a former Labour Cabinet Minister ?

Easter

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may'st rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or, since all musick is but three parts vied
And multiplied,
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.





I got me flowers to straw thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, & th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.


George Herbert 1593-1633

Vaughan Williams wrote a beautiful setting of the words, available on CD along with the Serenade To Music, a piece for which the only description is 'lush'.

You Get What You Pay For

Barry Beelzebub and the Yorkshire Post on the Scott family of Wakefield.

Yorkshire Post plays a straight bat :

Mr Scott quit his job as a factory packer three years ago. He said: "I didn't like work and when Barbara found it difficult with her arthritis I gave up work to help with the kids."
Every week, the family receives £482 income support and £71 child benefit.
As three of the children have learning difficulties, they receive £197 disability benefit, adding up to £39,588-a-year compared to the average salary of £24,000.
They live rent-free in a three-bedroomed council house complete with £1,000 widescreen TV and fancy hi-fi system in Portobello, with their eight youngest children, but are on the waiting list for somewhere larger. They don't have a car but a free minibus is provided by the council to take the children to their special schools.
Mrs Scott said she wouldn't change a thing. "I don't go out at all but Anthony goes to the pub sometimes. We don't have to scrimp and save and we can afford to buy the kids everything they want at Christmas and birthdays.
"The girls are all into Barbie. The boys are more expensive – they ask for Power Rangers and video games."
None of her three eldest children work, although daughter Lisa already has two children and son Steven has a baby.

Whereas Mr B:

As is often the case, some or all of the Scott clan claim to be "disabled". At least three children, while physically fit, have "learning difficulties" (ie. are thick, badly behaved and lazy), Mrs Scott suffers from arthritis (ie. is obese, but is fit enough to catapult offspring from her elasticated womb at regular intervals) and Mr Scott cannot work because he also has learning difficulties.

Surely it cannot be that difficult to teach him the basic facts of life in the hope that he might at least learn to keep his appendage in his trousers in future?

Mr B also reveals that :

It appears that £100,000 of your money has gone to something called the Gipsy and Traveller Law Reform Council which lobbies Parliament on gipsies' rights (why they feel the need to bother, I don't know) while grants of up to £3,000 have gone to individual gipsy groups trying to get planning permission (or completely ignore it, as the case may be).

But he's only working up steam for this week. How long before Trevor Phillips' Thought Police are on the case ?

"There is a myth about those people we call travellers. The image we treasure, conditioned by Enid Blyton children's books, is of a gaily-painted, horse-drawn caravan, meandering its way down country lanes as swallows fly overhead and the sun beats down. We tolerate the fact that Mrs Gippo sells heather and clothes pegs door to door while Mr Gippo does the odd spot of scrap metal dealing. They add colour, after all, to our sad, grey, suburban lives.

"The reality of the situation is that some of these people are nothing but scum. They're a bunch of no-good, work-shy layabouts who cynically exploit the political correctness of Labour-run councils and who wouldn't know an honest day's work it bit them in the arse. They content themselves with resurfacing pensioners' driveways at £1,000 a throw while Cousin Joey slaps a bit of mortar on the chimney pot for another five hundred notes, cash in hand. Oh, and they steal babies."

You Pays Yer Money ...

As Dead Men Left welcome the arrival of Islamophobia Watch, Paul Anderson declares "long live Islamophobia".

There must be something to this Islamophobia thing if it can encompass both me and Polly Pot. Inclusive or what ?

Elsehere a Guardianista on the "Islamophobia myth".

At this point, a gratuitous link to the wonderful Dhimmi Watch, which isn't so much about Islamists as about the way liberals kow-tow to them (note the irrelevant cultural metaphor - inclusive or what II ?).

Help Make Tim Worstall Rich !

There's more than one way of creating wealth via the Web. Tim has signed up with a company who will pay him a rather over-generous commission for attracting visitors to their site. Decent of them, but it won't last for ever. I'm presuming the company isn't run by a personal friend of his.

See his post for full details. Tell all your friends ! I think I'll post this over at Urban75, where the massed anti-capitalists may be up for it.

Occasionally it does happen that a company misjudges its promotional spend. The most recent example I can think of was the Hoover 'Free Flights' disaster, in which a bright wheeze (two free flights for every appliance sold) to clear an overproduction backlog proved too popular and ended up costing them £48 million.

The Tocharian Mummies

OK, so Fisky blogged on this subject nearly a year ago. And the most comprehensive site may have an agenda (although of course a site called Black History would raise no eyebrows. So are we conditioned).

But what a story.

In a remote part of Western China archaelogists have found not only evidence of an extinct Indo-European language, Tocharian, but the mummified remains, up to 4,000 years old, of the Indo-Europeans themselves.



They were some of the earliest horsemen known to history. They seem to have practiced ritual sacrifice (the fate of the poor toddler, his tears still preserved, isn't very nice), although later becoming Buddhists. They wore woollen plaids and tartans. Blonde or red hair, plaited.

I'm not competent to judge the more grandiose claims of the White History site - that a great Indo-European civilisation existed along the Silk Road which may have provided China with Buddhism and its early Emperors - ethnologists and linguists can argue it out (try following this), but the story is fascinating. If they can just find the Chinese Romans it would be the icing on the cake.







One down note. The area where these discoveries have been made, not so far (on Chinese scales) from the Kirghiz, Kazakh and Tajik borders of China, is neither ethnically nor culturally Chinese. Rather like, say, Tibet 50 years ago. Islam is influential and there has been unrest. China will be keeping a nervous eye on what's happening just across the border in Kirghistan.

Given these factors and traditional Chinese chauvinism, evidence that the indigenous population are descended in part from an ancient Western stock would not exactly be the happiest news in the Chinese capital. And as for the thought that the great Chinese Empire may have been, even in part, created by roundeyes ...

So the mummies, many of which are apparently slowly deteriorating in storage, may not be priority number one when the Chinese Arts Council are handing out the grants.

Was The War Legal ?

Top headline on the BBC this morning and all day.

Quite frankly - who, outside a couple of hundred thousand Guardianistas, gives a monkey's ? And exactly when did the Left start being so keen on obeying the law ? The same people twitching about Iraq will doubtless be at Faslane or Aldermaston this Easter, trying to do as much criminal damage as possible.

I suppose as far as the left is concerned, obeying the law is something the straights ought to do, the left on the other hand refusing to be bound by bourgeois legality.

And this law. Who enacted it ? Who voted for it ? I understand the Geneva Conventions, agreed by a large number of governments in the 1920s. But where did this 'international law' come from ?

I don't remember this kind of mullarkey the last time we invaded and brought democracy to a dictatorship which had attacked several of its neighbours. I'll have to get the history books out.

Ah yes.

Mrs Malice Ahon (Lab, Halifax) - "Can the Prime Minister tell us why he declared war without a second League of Nations resolution ? Already over 100,000 innocent Germans have been killed."

Mr Jeremy Corbyn (Lab, Islington)- "It is surely up to the Polish people to liberate themselves. They will not be grateful for your imperialist help. It's all about lignite, if you ask me. This war is simply a pretext to secure the Silesian coal supplies."

Travellers Tales

It’s time for all self-righteous men and women to stand up against Howard’s plans for gypsy pogroms, the bulldozing of their caravan sites, and the boiling down of Romany bones for soup, his opportunistic response to the shrill campaign of hatred waged by the Sun, Mail and Express against these colourful characters with their brightly painted vardas and their dukkerin.

When I moved to the sticks from the multiculti city some twenty year ago, my views of travellers were an amalgam derived from reading Jeremy Sandford and George Borrow, and listening to songs like this and this in folk clubs. I swore never to enter the pubs (and they were not a few) with ‘No Traveller’ signs on the doors. As far as I was concerned, they were just people like anyone else – the signs were just what I’d expect from the conservative bigots you’d find in a country town.

My village had two permanent traveller sites, one at either end. I got to know a few of them (in the pub with their wives). Nice people. When my motorbike broke down, one of them gave me a lift to Brum each day for a fortnight in his scrap wagon. But these were the respectable class of the site. You’d read about some of the less respectable young men in the local court reports. Still, apart from one massive domestic (full story here), you’d hardly have known the sites were there.

My local – one of three pubs in the village – fell on hard times. The bikers who made up the bulk of the customers had found new, more fashionable haunts further afield. The old regulars had switched pubs when the bikers arrived, and the landlord was stuck for customers. I would still wander up for a beer though – it was only 50 yards up the road.

One night I strolled up at 10 o’clock and noticed the car park was full of Transits. I wandered into the bar which was full of men – not a single female.

I was an easy-going, idealistic hippy type, not the cynical chap I am now, so when a young man plonked himself in front of me, put his face rather closer to mine than was comfortable, and said ‘Alright, mate ?’ I took him at face value, smiled back and chatted to him like an old mate (this total unawareness of my situation was probably of assistance in dealing with aggressive dealers in the car parks of Aston pubs as well). He didn’t seem as friendly for the rest of the evening as his initial approach had suggested, and I walked home thoughtfully. I didn’t visit the pub again for a fortnight or so, and then I heard it was closed.

The travellers (still without their women) had been boisterous for a few evenings, but then things got out of hand. Closing time had always been flexible, but when the landlord tried to put the towels on one Friday after midnight, he was forcibly prevented from doing so, the phone leads were yanked out (mobiles were still a yuppie toy) and a successful evening ended with the till from behind the bar making its exit in the back of a van. End of a traveller’s pub.

Although the men were all local, village opinion was surprisingly sanguine – what did he expect ? And in any case, the Prices and their patriarch were to cover themselves with glory within eighteen months.

One day the village awoke to find a new travellers site. A digger had moved the concrete blocks and flattened the gate into a field by the industrial estate. Twenty vans and assorted lorries and cars were on site. The Smith family had arrived.

Word soon spread. ‘Old man Smith’s got 8 sons’, said the local policeman, ‘but four of them are inside at the moment’. The young men of the site took to wandering up and down the village with rottweilers, taking a good look at everything. Sheds, outhouses, garages, barns were emptied of their contents – chainsaws, power tools, mowers, bicycles - at first by unknown hands and then what was left by the owners. People took to wandering round their gardens with iron bars at dusk and before going to bed. It really did feel like a state of siege.

What was worse was that the police and council seemed powerless. One man had his motorbike stolen and saw the young men riding it round the site. The police told him he’d have to go and get it himself. The village soon came to the conclusion that the police were desperate to avoid confrontation and that the travellers knew it.

Only one local man set foot on the site. He lived in the council houses immediately opposite, and his car was vandalised by some of the site children.

As told in the pub the night after, he walked onsite and asked to speak to the patriarch. As he waited, he was surrounded by the young men. Out came Old Man Smith and our man told his story. ‘What are you going to do about it ?’ the old man asked him, looking round at the young men. ‘You can beat the ---- out of me’ replied the villager, ‘but you’ll always have to watch your back if you do’. The old boy considered, then peeled off a sum of money from a large roll. ‘Will that pay for it ?’ General opinion was he’d been rewarded for courage rather than for the threat.

Soon after came the incident that indirectly led to the Smiths departure. The village shop was run by a charming spinster who also cared alone for her Downs syndrome brother. Everyone knew her and liked her. The Smith ladies had been in the shop that morning and bought a doll. In the afternoon they brought it back with no box, filthy and minus an arm. She wouldn’t return the money and there were bad words spoken.

At two o’clock the following morning the shopkeeper was woken by the crash of the plate glass shopfront as a block went in through it and what cigarettes and spirits were kept on display went out through it. The police arrived half an hour later, interviewed the shopkeeper, still in her nightclothes, on the pavement through the car window. Then having ascertained that the emergency glaziers had been called, ‘We’ll be off then’. They were actually going to leave her alone in the shop. She wouldn’t let them leave.

Up to this time the Prices had kept out of it. Whether the shop incident was connected only they can say. But a few nights later pretty much the entire Price menfolk – two camps worth – paid a visit to the Smiths, a visit which ended with shotguns being fired and armed police being called out. Suddenly the village was full of police cars, with a couple parked permanently at the entrance to the camp. The Smiths moved on a week later to torment some other poor souls and Old Price was the toast of the village.

I don’t want to give the impression that such visits by itinerants were frequent. We probably had four such in fifteen years, but all of them were trouble. I started to understand the blocked off laybys and the concrete blocks in the gateways of the fallow fields.

The other real trouble – involving violence and vandalism in addition to the usual epidemic of thefts - came from Irish tinkers, about whom I blogged here, but failed to mention the manner of their departure. Unlike the Smiths, there were probably only a dozen men all told in this group. The land on which they’d camped was owned by a Bristol ‘businessman’, who had run illegal Sunday markets until the council got an injunction. One aftenoon a couple of cars containing the businessman and seven men arrived at the site. The businessman got out and had a shortish conversation with the occupants, following which the two cars went for a little cruise around the vans before driving off (all this was witnessed by a friend and his wife, a local journalist, who lived a hundred yards from the vans). The site was clear in a week (clear of people, that is. The local council paid for the site to be cleared as a health hazard). Where the travellers went we knew not.

Only four such incidents in fifteen years, lasting probably six months altogether. We’ve been lucky really – the legendary Johnsons, Gloucestershire's finest, have never paid a visit. But when you’ve lived through such a visitation you get a little twitchy when you drive past a field that was empty on Friday and on Monday contains twenty vans. I left the village for my present home seven years ago. The nearest illegal camp is some five miles away, one of three in the area, close enough for me to find three young men in the garden a fortnight back, taking a look and enquiring if I knew of any cars for sale cheap ? Their car was newer than mine. And yes, I did take the number.

The NSPCC Needs To Be Stopped. Full Stop

Richard Webster's new book on the Bryn Estyn affair is out. In it he describes "the greatest series of miscarriages of justice in recent British history – how innocent lives have been destroyed, the public deceived and millions of pounds wasted in a witch-hunt against innocent people".

More detail on his excellent site, as well as the title link, to Dea Birkett's demolition of the NSPCC.

As readers may have gathered, I'm not a big fan of social workers. Indeed, when then-Southampton manager Dave Jones was accused, I thought 'Social worker. Liverpudlian' and would have given him ten years on those two counts alone (mea culpa - he actually seems to be a fine chap and conducted himself with tremendous dignity during his ordeal). But the more I read of Mr Webster's work the more convinced I am that grave injustice has been done to hundreds, if not thousands of social workers, who are, after all, God's children.

Webster's book is released as in Rochdale, an apparently innocent man is murdered after being accused of being a paedophile.

Naturally the Independent is blaming 'the right' for the killing.

Rising hostility toward minority groups, clamour for tough sentences against offenders and a sinister desire for retribution are being driven by an increasingly prevalent right-wing agenda.

Yet I don't remember the Indie, who have contributed towards the jailing of dozens of innocent people, and the wrecking of the lives of hundreds more, campaigning against false accusations of paedophilia at children's homes. Indeed, in 1994, a retired police officer was awarded £375,000 against the Independent On Sunday after they implied he was a paedophile. The Observer repeated the allegations.

The Independent was a key player in the Bryn Estyn affair.

In a powerful campaign, carried out over a period of some three months, the Independent now published a series of news stories, features and leaders whose apparent aim was to create a sense of national outrage over what had happened.

Largely because of the campaign conducted by the Independent, a sense of crisis gradually developed, and, on 17 June 1996, an evidently reluctant government was forced to announce the public inquiry which had been demanded.

The BBC is also implicated in false accusations.

You can get the true believer's view, so assiduously fed by the Independent, as sensible sites like this one, or at David Icke's.