Wow

From Brussels Journal, a long Roger Scruton essay on multiculturalism.

A few highlights :

"Someone who is in a state of denial regarding his mortal illness, his wife’s infidelity or his child’s delinquency will turn angrily on the one who refers to the forbidden truth. Likewise, a political culture that is in denial about a serious social problem will condemn those who seek to discuss it, and try its best to silence them. For a long time now the European political class has been in denial about the problems posed by the large-scale immigration of people who do not enter into our European way of life. It has turned angrily on those who have warned against the disruption that might follow, or who have affirmed the right of indigenous communities to refuse admission to people who cannot or will not assimilate. And one of the weapons that the élite has used, in order to ensure that it is never troubled by the truths that it denies, is to accuse those who wish to discuss the problem of ‘racism and xenophobia’. People of my generation have been brought up in fear of this charge, just as the people of Salem were brought up in the fear of being denounced as witches. We saw what happened to Enoch Powell, as a result of a public speech that warned against the dangers. I don’t say that Powell’s speech, in which he referred to ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’, was wise or helpful. On the contrary, it was all too easy to accuse him of scaremongering, and his quotation from the Cumean Sybil in Aeneid Bk VI – which of course nobody recognized – was instantly re-written as ‘rivers of blood’, and he himself dismissed as a dangerous madman. That was virtually the last time that a British politician dared to warn against the effect of large-scale immigration. Since then an uneasy silence has prevailed at the political level, while discussion at every other level has been hampered by the periodic show-trials of those judged to be guilty of ‘racism’ – for example, because they have argued that immigrant communities must integrate, and that separatism is intrinsically dangerous: the position adopted by The Salisbury Review under my editorship, and which was the cause of my own castigation.

By denying a problem you prevent its discussion, until discussion is too late."

"Every society depends on an experience of membership: a sense of who ‘we’ are, why we belong together, and what we share. This experience is pre-political: it precedes all political institutions, and provides our reason for accepting them. It unites left and right, blue-collar and white-collar, man and woman, parent and child. To threaten this ‘first-person plural’ is to open the way to atomisation, as people cease to recognize any general duty to their neighbours, and set out to pillage the accumulated resources while they can. Without membership we risk a new ‘tragedy of the commons’, as our inherited social assets are seized for present use."

"Now I do not doubt that there is such a thing as racism, that it has been immensely destructive and that our governments are right to look for methods to prevent its expression. Racially motivated crime carries an added penalty in English law, and incitement to racial violence is regarded as a serious offence. However, the adoption of such provisions should not blind us to the many double standards that haunt discussion of this issue.

First, the double standard over ‘racism’: a charge constantly levelled against innocent members of the indigenous majority, and almost never levelled against guilty members of immigrant minorities..."

"... It is in the light of these double standards that the charge of ‘racism and xenophobia’ should be assessed. It is a charge almost invariably levelled at members of the indigenous communities of Europe, and in particular against those at the bottom of the social scale, for whom mass immigration is a cost that they have not been schooled (and through no fault of their own) to bear. It is levelled too at political parties that attempt to represent those people, and who promise them some relief from a problem that no other party seems willing to address."

RTWT. For a long time the Left have viewed immigrants as useful allies in the culture war, without troubling too much about the world-view or culture of the arrivals. Wouldn't they always vote Labour ? Just so did the Kentish king Vortigern view his mercenaries Hengest and Horsa fifteen hundred years ago. They turned out to have ideas and ambitions of their own.

Spot The Difference

When I saw this BBC report my antennae pricked up.

A 34-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a car ran into a group of teenagers has been released on police bail.
The crash happened late on Friday in Jerome Way in Shipton-On-Cherwell, Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

A 17-year-old youth remains in a serious but stable condition in the John Radcliffe hospital after suffering severe head injuries.

Two other 17-year-olds suffered minor injuries and a fourth youth was unhurt.

A man arrested after the crash was bailed on Sunday and told he will have to return to Banbury police station on 25 July.

Thus the £3 billion, taxpayer-funded BBC. Why should a 34-year old take it into his head to try to run over four teenagers in an Oxfordshire village. Was this some underclass 'domestic' - or a law-abiding citizen pushed to the limit - and beyond ?

As is increasingly the case, you have to go elsewhere to find the details.

A man aged 34 was being questioned on suspicion of attempted murder last night after he allegedly mowed down a group of teenagers who had apparently vandalised a car near his house. One of the victims, a 17-year-old, had severe head injuries. Two others aged 17 suffered minor injuries and a fourth was unhurt. A witness in Shipton-on-Cherwell, Oxfordshire said the car’s windows had been smashed with baseball bats and its tyres slashed late on Friday. The four teenagers were run down by a van shortly afterwards.

UPDATE - more in the Guardian and Sun.

Elsewhere the BBC does have some details. From Scallyland :

An 83-year-old man has collapsed and died of a heart attack after a confrontation with youths in a park.

The man argued with two boys in Hesketh Park in Southport, Merseyside, on Saturday afternoon, police said.

A pine cone was thrown at him during the altercation and soon after getting up from a bench he suffered a fatal heart attack.

He was taken to Southport Infirmary where he was pronounced dead. Police are treating the death as suspicious.

The man, who has not been named, is believed to have asked the youths to stop playing football in a rose garden.

See No Evil ...

We're getting used to this sort of coverage now. Compare the coverage of a South London murder.

First the £3billion, taxpayer-funded BBC.

Then the coverage of Lifestyle Extra, a site run by Pathom Ltd.

Two To View

"Liberals have spent years telling us that racism is a feature of right-wing thinking. So what’s going on in the People’s Republic of Scotland ?" muses Dumb Jon.

And the Coulter/Paxman video is most entertaining. Paxman introduces her as "Ann Coulter, whose right-wing rants ..." then asks "You also believe there is some sort of liberal hegemony in the media, do you ? ... I just don't see how this argument stacks up.".

"No, you're right - with the warm introduction like you just gave me - no - no liberal hegemony there ..."

See it at Youtube.

As We Know, The Rich Get Richer, And The Poor ...

... quadruple their population. Or more than.

Willam Rubinstein on the third world population explosion.

Afghanistan: 12,000,000 (1939); 29,929,000 (2005)

Brazil: 44,460,000 (1943); 186,113,000 (2005)

Chad: 1,433,000 (1931); 9,826,000 (2005)

China: 457,835,000 (1936); 1,306,000,000 (2005)

Colombia: 9,523,000 (1942); 42,954,000 (2005)

Congo (ex-Zaire): 10,384,000 (1942); 60,085,000 (2005)

Ethiopia: 12,100,000 (1945); 73,053,000 (2005)

Honduras: 1,106,000 (1940); 6,975,000 (2005)

India - includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka: 388,998,000 (1941); 1,407,000,000 (2005)

Iran: 15,055,000 (1935); 68,018,000 (2005)

South Africa: 10,709,000 (1942); 44,344,000 (2005)

These levels of increase are, of course, simply staggering. They are greater, both in absolute numbers and almost certainly in percentage terms, than anything known before in a relatively short period in human history. They have occurred despite losses in wars and civil wars, such as have occurred in India -Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, and Iran-Iraq, among other places, despite totalitarian mass murders as in Communist China, despite immigration abroad, and despite losses through AIDS and other illnesses. In just over sixty years, Brazil's population has increased by 318 per cent; Colombia's by 352 per cent, and Ethiopia's by 503 per cent - and so on, with, in general, the most impoverished of these nations showing the most unbelievable increases.

While everyone knows that the population of the Third World has increased dramatically, how many realize that there are now 73 million people in Ethiopia - more than the population of Britain or France - or 43 million in Colombia ? The supergiants of China (1.3 billion) and the Indian subcontinent (1.4 billion) will be less surprising, perhaps, than the current size of several countries not on the above list, such as Indonesia (242 million), Nigeria (129 million), or Mexico (106 million).

The causes of these vast increases are obvious enough: Western medicine, applied to the eradication of communicable diseases and epidemics and to a decrease in infant mortality, in countries which have not undergone the "demographic transition" to smaller family size and lower rates of population growth, such as Britain experienced after about 1870, and in cultures where birth control and family limitation are shunned.

The consequences of these increases are numerous and are almost always extremely deleterious and dangerous. They include:

- The chronic inability of many of these countries to escape from the "Malthusian trap" via economic growth exceeding population growth. Many Third World countries simply lack the economic or infrastructural base to provide a rising standard of living for most of their people, especially in Africa, the Arab world, and parts of Latin America.

Certainly several of the traditional horsemen, war, famine and plague (HIV/AIDS) have been galloping around Africa for the last few decades - but the population keeps on keeping on. Look at the Congo, basket case of basket cases - yet with a six-fold population increase in 60 years.

Sorry About That ....

A 50-hour working week and ferrying children home from cricket matches meant no blogging last week. Didn't get home before 9 pm any night.

"Get to the top - I'm too tired to blog" as Eddie Cochran might have said.

More than a few blogworthy items last week, too.

How, when homosexual couples were allowed to foster children, could anyone have predicted this story ?

Two stories I'd have liked to cover, which Drinking From Home has reported on - the Tory who compares the Cross of St George to the swastika, and the latest Pew report on Muslims and the rest (management summary, with contrast slightly turned up - we think they're alright sorts, religion of peace, etc etc. They hate our guts.) To quote this old post :

Blair has no intention of doing anything about the chain migration which, along with natural fecundity and a severe shortage of lesbian feminists, will have tripled the Muslim population of places like Bradford in thirty years.

The liberal elite's attitude to Islam reminds me of Churchill's comment about Prince Paul of Serbia, whose nation had deeply offended Hitler by the (anti-German) coup of early 1941, but who feared to provoke Germany by mobilising their armed forces.

Prince Paul's attitude, Churchill wrote, "is that of an unfortunate man in a cage with a tiger - hoping not to provoke him, while steadily dinner time approaches".

DFH (and other commentators) don't seem to have picked up on (IMHO) one of the most unexpected (and disturbing) findings of the Pew Report - that only 44% of Turks think democracy can work in their country. This, remember, is the country that the new director of think-tank Demos believes must join Europe or risk "an intensification of Islamism". Ms Bunting (for it is she) thinks that 80 million Turks in the EU 'could shape a new, prosperous and peaceful accommodation between Islam and the secular west.' And Islam, as Maddy will tell you, has only been violent since the Indian Mutiny of 1857.

Lionel Shriver is one of the most clear-eyed Guardianistas around. Her stuff on educated, childless women is top. So's this Guardian piece on migration.

A Forgotten Princess

Everyone knows about Pocahontas, the Powhatan Indian princess who ended her life in Gravesend, but few know of Paskwâwimostos, the Cree Indian girl buried in the same graveyard.

She was the daughter of Mahihkan (Grey Wolf), chief of the Cree in Saskatchewan, when in 1701 she caught the eye of George Montagu Danderville Herbert, youngest son of the Marquess of Powis, a forty-year old adventurer exploring the area in the company of an intrepid Hudson Bay Company employee, Henry Kelsey.

Although Herbert had a wife and three children at home in Kent, he took the beautiful young princess back with him and kept her, with a few personal servants, in a lodge in the manor grounds, where she gave birth to two of his children. He also changed her name, which he found difficult to pronounce (it means 'great bison') to the somewhat easier 'Meg'.

Herbert, however, was not an ideal partner. His drunkeness, his many infidelities, his occasional outbursts of violence, the scandal of his openly kept mistress, gave him an ill name in the country round. No respectable landowner would entertain him - no respectable lady would entertain Meg.

She grew bitter, frequently upbraiding him for taking her from her own country. He responded with blows, and then stopped visiting her, reducing her servants to one and restricting her allowance. Her children were taken away to be schooled elsewhere. She never saw her two sons again. Worn down and heartbroken, she died in 1712, aged only around 30.

Despite her unorthodox life, there was widespread pity for her, and a large crowd attended her funeral in Gravesend. When Herbert arrived he was hissed by the crowd and stones and ordure thrown at his carriage.




The Gravesend Recorder printed a special broadsheet edition covering her funeral.

The heading : "Cad Buries Cree Meg"

She's Back - And This Time It's Personal (and Political)

Anyone at college in the late 70s/early 80s with the slightest interest in feminism will remember Marilyn French's "The Women's Room" - as much a fixture on the 1981 student bookshelf as Hesse and Castenada were on the 1971 version.

She's back, with a new book and a long Guardian interview - having, it seems, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. I'd been impressed by 'The Women's Room', empathised with poor Mira ("my taste was bitter, my taste was me" - how the quotes stick in the mind), was awed by feisty Val - it wasn't until some years later that I wondered if all men could really be as bad as that, and if it wasn't a tad overdone.

Ms French is unrepentant : "Well, the men of that generation were stereotypes. I was just being honest."

Amazingly, she couldn't find a publisher for the new work, In The Name of Friendship, which ended up being published in Holland. I'd have thought all the teens and twenties who read it in the eighties would buy another 25 years on. After all, TWR came in at #10 in the recent Woman's Hour fiction poll.

Germaine Greer, who was always media-savvy (anyone remember "Nice Time" on ITV ?) seems to have done rather better for herself than most 70s feminist icons, becoming that most British of instituations, the grande dame. Time was not kind to others.

Shulamith Firestone, whose 'The Dialectic of Sex' left a deep impression on a seventeen-year-old Laban (she said 'men can't love' and I thought I couldn't love. At that age you're the world) ended up in a series of mental institutions. According to this 2000 Andrea Dworkin interview, Firestone was "poor and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk."

Kate Millett, whose "Sexual Politics" could be found on the 1970s middle shelf, somewhere between "The Female Eunuch" and "Titus Groan", also went into mental hospital and wrote about it. For years she survived selling Christmas trees and at 62, poor and unable to find an academic post, penned this cri de coeur in the Guardian.

"I cannot get employment. I cannot earn money. Except by selling Christmas trees, one by one, in the cold in Poughkeepsie. I cannot teach and have nothing but farming now. And when physically I can no longer farm, what then? Nothing I write now has any prospect of seeing print. I have no saleable skill, for all my supposed accomplishments. I am unemployable. Frightening, this future. What poverty ahead, what mortification, what distant bag-lady horrors, when my savings are gone ?"

She's no longer cutting trees, anyway.



Here's something not so completely different - the very wonderful Christina Hoff Sommers review of Harvey Mansfield's book "Manliness".

"One of the least visited memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."

Today, almost no one remembers those men. Women no longer bring flowers to the statue on April 15 to honor their chivalry. The idea of male gallantry makes many women nervous, suggesting (as it does) that women require special protection. It implies the sexes are objectively different. It tells us that some things are best left to men. Gallantry is a virtue that dare not speak its name."

Mansfield takes a different perspective on 70s feminists :

"In the 1970s," says Mansfield, "nihilism came to American women. . . . What interested [feminists] in Nietzsche was the nihilism he proclaimed as fact--God is Dead--and the possibility of creating a new order in its place." Of course, most American women were not reading Nietzsche. But many did read Simone de Beauvoir, and she was the herald of the new nihilism. In Mansfield's words, she was "Nietzsche in drag." Far from being critical of Nietzsche's hypermasculine fantasies, his "will to power," and his rejection of the Judeo-Christian ethic--she embraced it all and urged women to emulate it.

Beauvoir famously said, "One is not born, but becomes a woman." She rejected the idea that there is anything like human nature or any other source of an authoritative moral order. When she said that women must seek "transcendence," she meant that they should reject all the inducements of nature, society, and conventional morality. Beauvoir condemned marriage and family as a "tragedy" for women; both are traps that are incompatible with female subjectivity and freedom. She described the pregnant woman as "a stockpile of colloids, an incubator for an egg." She compared childbearing and nurturing to slavery.

Mansfield reminds readers how far Beauvoir's "womanly nihilism" strayed from the classical feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft and American suffragists. The early feminists questioned the rigidity of sex roles, but they never doubted that there was such a thing as human nature, and that women had distinctive roles to play in the family and society. Simone de Beauvoir wanted women to be free of all roles. Toward what end? She did not specify. Beauvoir's womanly nihilism inspired apostles like Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and (to a lesser extent) Betty Friedan. In the decades following the sixties, it became official feminist doctrine.

Of course, as Mansfield observes, women are not men, and so inevitably they are less effective at being true Nietzscheans. Unlike radicals in other social movements, the feminist revolutionaries of the 1970s and '80s never engaged in violence. None went to jail. So how did they succeed in changing American society?

As Mansfield explains, they "relied on womanly devices." They formed "consciousness raising" groups and enrolled in "assertiveness training" workshops. Pronoun policewomen went to work cleansing the language of sexism. Tantalized by the Nietzschean idea that knowledge was a form of power, and not the result of disinterested inquiry, feminist scholars went on a rampage "reinventing" knowledge. In the academy, women took full advantage of manly men's gentlemanly reluctance publicly to oppose and thwart women.

Cleansing The Streets

Over at Comment Is Free the hottest topic is Jackie Ashley's Londonistan post, with 500-plus comments.

On the one side, people who are worried about a perceived growth in Islamist power in the UK, and think we are on the path to terrible dangers.

On the other side, people who are worried about a perceived growth in anti-Islamic sentiment in the UK, and think we are on the path to terrible dangers. To these posters, the Muslims are the new Jews, and 'Islamophobia' is the new anti-semitism.

I'm not sure if this latter argument holds much water. Did extremist German Jews in the 1920s and 30s set off terrorist bombs in the Berlin subway, and demonstrate in the capital calling for a repeat performance ? Did they announce that German civilisation would soon be replaced by an Orthodox state, with the whole of the Reich one giant eruv ? Maybe they did and the worldwide Zionist conspiracy kept it out of the history books.

I added my four-penn'orth to the debate, and linked to my old post about the cleansing of the red-light districts in Lumb Lane, Bradford and Balsall Heath, Birmingham.

Both cases were hailed as 'community action' at its best. Only an angry correspondent to the T&A pointed out that the cleansing was achieved by "violence and a form of gender/racial cleansing instigated primarily by Asian youth against working white women."

In reality what happened was that the streets became unsafe for ANY young white woman to walk - or even drive, in some instances. A friend of mine was attacked and her car stoned - she subsequently moved from the area she'd lived in for six years.

When posting before I'd missed the angry correspondent from Balsall Heath, pointing out that the same thing had happened there.

"I live in the Balsall Heath of Birmingham and find it strange that the report on community action in the area to remove prostitution fails to mention the Muslims beating up women they suspected of being prostitutes which included students. My friend who was visiting me had a rock thrown at her car because they thought she was a kerb crawler."

You can understand the confusion though - after all, don't ALL non-Muslim women dress like tarts ?

And Another One ...

January 2005 - jailed for "fifteen months" for assault and threats to kill.

June 2005 - released on licence after a whole five months.

October 2005 - beat Jody Dobrowski to death.

The BBC have the story as main news item, playing the 'homophobia' angle for all it's worth (approx £0.41p), full of righteous indignation. Looks like some victims are worth more than others. Would that all murderers got 28 years minimum.

"It is understood to be the first time that a judge has been able to use an anti-gay motive as an aggravating feature to help decide the sentence." We already have higher sentences for 'racist attacks', now a larger tariff for 'homophobes' - not really the correct word, Mr Dobrowski's killers didn't seem afraid of him. Soon there will be higher sentences for 'sexist attacks', and we shall have reached the nirvana where all are valued equally, regardless of race, gender or sexuality - except white men.

Yet perhaps the BBC are forgetting that for a large number of Londoners, death is the appropriate sentence for homosexuality.

Mick Hartley on the latest interview with the Mayor of London's best mate Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi.

Interviewer: How should a homosexual or a lesbian be punished? We mentioned the story of the people of Sodom and how Allah punished them, but how should someone who commits this abomination be punished today?

Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: The same punishment as any sexual pervert - the same as the fornicator. [...]

The schools of thought disagree about the punishment. Some say they should be punished like fornicators, and then we distinguish between married and unmarried men, and between married and unmarried women. Some say both should be punished the same way. Some say we should throw them from a high place, like God did with the people of Sodom. Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. [...]

The important thing is to treat this act as a crime.

Burn them, or chuck them off a high building ? Details, details.


UPDATE - more Home Office/CJS incompetence.

"An illegal immigrant on the run after raping a teenager may have been freed because of bureaucratic delays. Souny Mustafa, 31, was given a five-year sentence in his absence for the attack on an 18-year-old woman in Derby in April 2005.

He was released on bail as his custody time limit had elapsed before the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) could finish putting together its case. He was supposed to remain in Doncaster but has not been seen for months. "

Whae's Like Us ? - Part 271

Not so very long ago in Scotland, the main danger to small children from drugs came from your addled mum chucking you out of a 14-th floor window, or OD-ing and leaving you to starve by a dead body.

Happy, innocent days !

Lately we've had the primary school heroin smoker and the five-year old with speed.

Now we've added methadone to the mix. In December last year a two-year old died of a methadone overdose. His "parents" face murder charges.

And in Inverness this week a seven year old collapsed in the playground from an overdose. It didn't come from home, either.

No small children involved - but look at this story for a touching tale of solidarity and mutual aid in a working class family.

"At an earlier hearing, advocate depute John Hamilton, prosecuting, said the two women had been listed as Crown witnesses for a murder trial. They were not needed to give evidence, but were each paid £50 expenses.

Mr Hamilton said that as a result of coming into money they arranged to buy heroin then went to the Prestonpans area of the city for syringes. They went to a flat in Prestonpans, East Lothian, to take the drugs.

"The mother, Jacqueline Greenhill, was squeamish and unable to inject herself and, as was common practice, asked her daughter to inject and the accused did so," said Mr Hamilton. He said that it became clear three hours later that Mrs Greenhill was "in a parlous state". "One of the party went to a neighbour's to try to raise an alarm and get help," he said.

Ambulance technicians and medics at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary were unable to save Mrs Greenhill. "

Keeping Poor Kids Powerless

Can't understand it. The comprehensive system is producing the best-educated generation in our history, yet social mobility is declining - and has been since the grammar-school cohort dried up.

Fewer state-educated kids make Oxbridge than forty years ago. And fewer state-educated kids are getting to the top in journalism.

More than half the UK's top 100 journalists went to private schools, a survey for an educational charity says. The Sutton Trust, which helps youngsters from underprivileged homes, also said that more than half of those with degrees had been to Oxbridge. The proportion privately educated had risen since 1986 from 49% to 54%.

The trust's report said: "A common perception among leading editors we spoke to is that the gap in ability between those from private schools and those from state schools has widened over the last few decades. Young, independently educated aspiring journalists, they argued, are just more confident, knowledgeable and self-sufficient at an earlier age than their state school counterparts."

So the privately educated children of the Toynbees and Aaronovitches should have no trouble following the Hattersleys, the Rozenbergs (Mr Melanie Phillips), the Lee-Pollards, the Corens, the Davieses and a host more into the hereditary guild of British journalism.

Got It In One

The Dumb One on Ann Coulter and the Observer.

... the real insight into the Liberal worldview comes courtesy of well-respected MSM figure Eric Alterman (and you are reminded that the Observer must have felt his insights were sufficiently important to reproduce them in this article):

There's a kind of daisy chain in the media that's allowed her to reach this level, with Hillary Clinton responding to her comments about 9/11 widows. Hillary Clinton shouldn't have to wipe that stuff off her shoes. The gatekeeper function of the media has entirely disappeared.

So, there you have it. The role of the MSM is to protect Liberal royalty from having to deal with impudent commoners. So what’s the attraction of this 'blogosphere' again ?

Illegal ?

Have a National Insurance number.

Then have some tax credits.

Bad PR

The very wonderful Colleen Graffy may have been correct that the Guantanamera suicides were 'good PR' (I bet the Independent's editor had to change his pants when he heard the news) but I'd suggest that it's not a sensible thing to say if you're "Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy".

As for 'asymmetric warfare', if Palestinian suicide bombings can be justified theologically (to a Muslim) as an act of war, there's no obvious reason why suicide designed to embarrass the US shouldn't also be justified. Suicide as 'warfare by other means' is something Brits should know about. The slow suicide of the IRA hunger strikes were part of Sinn Fein/IRAs war against Britain.

Not that we can talk about suicide bombers. Didn't Churchill propose "You can always take one with you" as a slogan in case of a German invasion ? I suppose the difference is that we'd have been topping troops. The heroes of Nablus and Ramallah seem to prefer buses and market stalls.

I Just Knew ...

That the Englishman would be onto this story. Hasn't he been waiting forever for the Rural Payment Agency to recycle some VAT back in his direction ?

"Civil servants are said to have had sex in the lavatories, taken drugs, used foul language, brawled in the reception area and held break-dancing contests in working hours.

Some of the goings-on at the Rural Payments Agency, a branch of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in Lancaster House, Newcastle upon Tyne, are believed to have been captured on CCTV."

It sounds like an interesting working environment.

"There is an horrific new craze of vomiting into official cups and leaving the cups to fester in cupboards until discovered through the horrendous smell."

"Last month Lord Bach was moved from his post as farms minister after a week in office because of the Rural Payments Agency's failure to pay £1.5 billion of European subsidies on time to English farmers and landowners.

The fiasco has pushed many farmers to the brink of bankruptcy."

Ah well. They're only customers.

It's Liberal Myth Time ...

It's the World Cup, and I've been on the punchbag in the gym for the last few weeks, ready for the orgy of domestic violence which traditionally accompanies Engerland games.

As you know, we have a decentralised police service, whose Chief Constables have complete autonomy. It's just a remarkable coincidence that the police forces of Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire, Staffordshire ("Injury Time"), Cleveland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Hertfordshire, Lancashire and for all I know every force in the land are exhorting us to 'show the red card to domestic violence', which apparently is a result of 'increased consumption of alcohol'.

Naturally Amnesty International, fresh from their campaign to establish the univesal human right to kill unborn children, are on the case.

All this can't but remind me of the Super Bowl Myth.

Just three days before the 1993 Super Bowl game, a news conference was called in Pasadena. There Sheila Kuehl, an attorney for the California Women's Law Center, stepped to the podium to report some shocking news: according to a study by Old Dominion University, emergency room admissions of women rose by 40% following football games won by the Washington Redskins.

Media representatives got the warning that Super Bowl Sunday is "the biggest day of the year for violence against women." Soon a media advisory went out warning women, "Don't remain at home with him during the game."

The next morning, Friday January 29, psychologist Lenore Walker appeared on Good Morning America and repeated the same frightening news.

By Saturday, the hysteria had reached a fever pitch. A January 30 Boston Globe article claimed that women's shelter and hotlines are "flooded with more calls from victims than on any other day of the year."

Just before the coin flip for the big game, NBC ran a 30-second spot reminding men that domestic violence is a crime.

Then the Washington Post decided to do a little detective work. Post reporter Ken Ringle called Janet Katz, one of the researchers from Old Dominion University, to verify the claim. "That's not what we found at all," Katz responded. To the contrary, she said any increase in emergency room admissions "was not associated with the occurrence of football games in general."

Ringle's report, "Wife Beating Claims," appeared on the front page of the Washington Post on January 31. This was the upshot of the story: the assertion that watching football games provokes men into a frenzy of wife-beating was actually a hoax.

Within hours, Lenore Walker and the Boston Globe reporter pulled back on their original claims, admitting they hadn't seen the original study. On February 2, the Boston Globe ran a retraction.

UPDATE - that "40% increase" figure, such a feature of the Superbowl fantasy, seems to have taken on the same life of its own as the UK's "one in four" figure (repeated endlessly; based on a dodgy 1993 survey of North London in which "Mooney's definition of violence includes physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse - and each of these categories involves a whole spectrum of behaviour. So under psychological abuse we find 'criticism... jealousy...destroying possessions...and verbal abuse', and - most dramatically of all - 'being forced to do menial and trivial tasks'". Criticism as domestic violence, eh ? Has Ms Mooney ever been in a relationship ? Menial tasks ? I know who cleans the toilets in this house. I digress).

Here are Staffordshire Police, clamping down on domestic violence for Euro 2004.

"Staffordshire Police say they will clamp down on domestic violence fuelled by the Euro 2004 football tournament.
The Pathway Project, the county's only 24-hour helpline for domestic violence victims, reported a surge in calls of almost 40% during the 2002 World Cup."

Note the BBC's use of the "one in four" statistic, on a photo helpfully captioned (move the cursor over it) "Photo staged by actors. Shows: man pushing woman".

Alas the project doesn't seem to have worked. Here's the BBCs 2006 story.

"Violent abusers are to be under extra police scrutiny during the World Cup by a Midlands force. Staffordshire officers are predicting a rise in domestic violence, especially around England's matches, and they will be targeting known offenders.

Posters with the slogan "Now we're into injury time" will promote the campaign.

Assistant Chief Constable Suzette Davenport said during Euro 2004 there had been a 40% increase in cases of domestic violence."

More on a different "one in four" at Spiked.

More Nationalism

This is the kind of nationalism an English liberal can take any amount of.

Look at the tone of this BBC report, "Boy's petrol bomb revolution bid". Revolution. Rebellion. Call to arms.

You can almost hear the skirl of the pipes and see the clans gathering.

Imagine how the BBC would have covered it if the boy had been an English nationalist. Hate campaign. Racist. Misfit. Bomber.

Words Fail Me ...

This guy is apparently a Welsh Nationalist.

People - especially English people - worry about nationalism. They think it must necessarily involve hating everyone who's not like you. English liberals don't even mind that - as long as "everyone who's not like you" is code for "English", hence the left's love affair with Sinn Fein/IRA over the last forty years. I can remember a time (admittedly it was in student politics) when supporting the right of the oppressed Nationalist people of Ireland to defend themselves against British imperialism "by any means necessary" was pretty much a touchstone of whether you were 'really' on the left at all. After all, if the IRA considered it a necessary defence to slaughter thirty-odd innocent people in Birmingham and maim hundreds more, who were we to judge on their behalf ?

But I don't think I've ever met a Nationalist who doesn't like his own people. Even Billy "England" Bragg might find this speech a tad over the top.

"Presiding officer Lord Elis-Thomas has spoken of his anguish at the lack of ethnic minority representation in the National Assembly.

In an exclusive interview with the Western Mail, he said it was essential all communities of Wales are represented.

He said, "When I sit in my chair in our new debating chamber, I am ashamed when I look out and see before me a sea of white faces."

Well, yes. They're called the Welsh.

Elis needs to take a look at the statistics. There aren't many black people in Wales, but there are plenty of non-Welsh minorities - the largest (and fastest growing) minority being also hideously white - the English white-flighters who are currently destroying what's left of Welsh Wales. This process - and the factors driving it - seems to have passed our soi-disant 'nationalist' by.

Yes, It's Sick Bag Time Again

And next time I hear someone say:- "He'll come out of prison one day - it's us that are serving a life sentence", I shall throw up. - The Magistrate's Blog.

"I'm not happy with the sentence, the realistic sentence. He got what I see as a short sentence but Hayley has got a life sentence - his face is always going to be there." - emotional claptrap from the new partner of Hayley Cooper.

A man who stabbed a woman nearly 30 times has been sentenced to life in prison by a court. Mark Antony Oldfield, 32, from Devizes, Wiltshire, knifed ex-girlfriend Hayley Cooper 28 times, near Salisbury, on 14 September last year.

Salisbury Crown Court heard how Miss Cooper, 23, had to undergo life-saving surgery after the attack.

The sentence passed means Oldfield is subject to lifetime parole but he could be out of jail in as little as two years, the court heard.

The judge reduced Oldfield's actual jail term from nine years to six to give credit for his guilty plea.

Oldfield, who has a string of past violent convictions, will serve half of the six years inside, minus the 269 days he has already served on remand, after which he can apply for release on parole.

Oldfield is 32 - an age at which through most of recorded history a man has been considered an adult. Take a look at him. Alternative or what ?



The great glory of the welfare state and the sexual revolution is that adolescence for males has been extended from its ancient bounds of 15-20 to something like 13-40 - indeed for some beyond that. In ancient days (the Golden Age that never was) the disciplines of work and marriage subdued man's natural tendencies to naughtiness of all kinds. No work meant no food - and perhaps more important for socialisation, no respect from your peers. It also meant no marriage - and no marriage meant no sex - unless you were wealthy, lucky or unusually desirable.

Now in many parts of the UK respect is measured in mohs - the harder the better. Reliable contraception has removed the link between sex and childbearing - and if a pregnancy results and the child hasn't a club foot, Daddy State will raise the child - to the great approval of Polly Toynbee, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the children's charities and all right-thinking people. No need for a hubby to work for his family - Sure Start and Gordon Brown can do a much better job.

In the meantime, men are free to express their inner creativity - as Mark Oldfield did. Bounds ? Of course we know no bounds.