Critically Injured Musician - Green Party Candidate Arrested

Via Tim Blair.

"Billy Leeson, 19, lead singer with rock band Les Incompetents who have supported Pete Doherty's group Babyshambles, is fighting for his life after falling into a coma when his head hit the ground after the punch was thrown.

A man who handed himself in to police appeared in court this morning and was released on bail.

New Zealander Christian Briggs, 30, appeared at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court today charged with causing grievous bodily harm after he allegedly attacked Billy Leeson in Islington last month.

Dressed in a pale green shirt and grey trousers, a gaunt-looking Briggs spoke only to confirm his name and personal details in the 10-minute hearing.

Briggs, of Haringey, north London, was ordered to stand £10,000 bail, surrender his passport and observe a curfew at his sister's home in Kingston-on-Thames. "

Mr Briggs is a Green Party candidate.

An Iraq "Human Shield".

A man who considers the 7/7 bombings to be 'the chickens coming home to roost'. Unless MI5 did it.

"... you can enjoy your pint of beer in the sun and ignore the murderous actions of your so-called democratic government in faraway lands, but don't go complaining when someone comes looking for some justice in the form of a bomb under your ass."

"Whether this was the act of MI6/MI5 operatives or the so-called 'Al-Qaeda' ..."

A blogger who scorns those who defend accidental killers, but who quotes approvingly Emma Goldman : "Crime is naught but misdirected energy".

7/7 Remembered

From the Ilford Recorder :

"POLICE are investigating the source behind dozens of controversial stickers put up around Ilford Town Centre, just days before the first anniversary of the London bombings.

Bright yellow stickers that read: "Islamic Values Vs British Values" contrasting honesty and charity for Muslims to gambling and homosexuality in Britain have appeared on lampposts, bus stops, phone boxes and road signs in the past week.

Redbridge Racial Equality Council alerted police, amid fears they could provoke tensions in the run-up to the July 7 anniversary tomorrow (Friday).

Extremist Islamic group Al-Ghurabaa produced the stickers, but a spokesman claimed he did not know who put them up."

Their website has the tasteful heading : "Are we ready for another 7/7 ?". Who's we, paleface ?

That 'are we ready' reminds me of something.


"Are you ready, Shahib ?" "Ah-hah"

"Shehzad ?" "Yeah"

"Germaine ?" "Mmm-mm"

"Alright fellas - let's go !"

What Planet Am I On Again ?

Zoe Williams in the Grauniad :

"I would love nothing more than to put such a letter together: I would be particularly interested in getting MPs as signatories, for three reasons: first, they represent the summit of respectability ..."

Is she from the Planet Zog, or am I ?

Would The Last Industrial Worker In The UK Please Turn Out The Lights ?

A Wearside tyre factory, where 585 people worked, is closing its doors for the final time. In April, Goodyear Dunlop announced it was ending production at its Washington factory, a site where tyres had been produced since 1968.The company said it could no longer compete effectively with competitors in Eastern Europe and the Far East.Unions said there had been hopes that the jobs could be saved and they were disappointed at the closure.

Plans to cut 800 jobs in Devon and Cornwall as part of a china clay firm's reorganisation will hit the entire South West economy, MPs and unions say. Imerys said the changes were necessary to protect the future of its business. It is blaming high energy prices, a weak dollar and strong overseas competition for significant losses. More than 700 jobs will go in Cornwall as Imerys consolidates its operations. Up to 85 jobs will go in Devon as the company closes its pit at Lee Moor.

Broad And Pleasant Road News

Syphilis up. Abortions up.

Sexual infection diagnoses have been almost continually rising since the 1990s, with the highest increases in recent years being seen in the 16 to 24 age group.

We obviously need more and earlier sex education.

Another One Breaks Ranks

First the great Frank Field. Now Tony Wright has noticed what's in front of his nose.

Mr Wright said the UK's population had topped 60 million for the first time last year and was expected to rise 12% in the next generation. The rises were equivalent to having a new Oxford, a new Middlesbrough and a new Ipswich every year, he said.

And migration was the main driver, he told the prime minister.

Mr Wright urged Mr Blair to set up a commission to give a cost and benefits analysis about different levels of population, which was being driven up mainly by migrants.

Asked if the government had a population policy, Mr Blair replied: "No, but .."

Tomorrow's "Independent" Editorial Today

Yesterday we reported on the shocking institutional abuse of disabled patients in NHS care homes throughout Cornwall. Once again, a supposedly caring and civilised society turns out to hide shameful treatment of its most vulnerable members.

Take David, for example (not his real name). He suffers from cerebral palsy and was cared for in the Tintagel ward of the newly-built (and award-winning) Ley Line Hospital. What should have been a caring, supportive environment was in fact a waking nightmare of emotional and physical abuse, for which no staff have yet been called to account.

There is action the Government could take which would eliminate such abuses. Compulsory scanning and tests for all expectant mothers would detect the vast majority of the infirmities with which people like David are afflicted. These could then be treated in the womb by compulsory termination. In an age when millions of so-called 'healthy' foetuses are, quite properly, discarded, surely it is an anachronism to allow parents freely to give birth to those who would really be better off dead.


Tomorrow - Our Shame - Why Britain Is Still Discriminating Against The Disabled

Moorhen chicks on the Curate's Pond

Ah, the cycle of nature ! Score for the last fortnight :

2 cockerels and a hen taken by the fox - all pinched off the back lawn around six in the evening. The cheek of it. Obviously feeding cubs. Poor hens are being kept in their runs and I'm cutting down some of the garden greenery to give a clear field of fire from the house.

Six moorhen chicks on the pond - of which two weeks later three or four still remain, despite cat, crows, magpies. Ahhhh ! They get into the hen-run to pinch food, then can't get out, so we've handled most of them.

More ambivalent Muslim opinion.

"The Populus survey for The Times and ITV News has found that more than one in ten thinks that the men who carried out the London bombings of 7/7 should be regarded as “martyrs”. Sixteen per cent of British Muslims, equivalent to more than 150,000 adults, believe that while the attacks were wrong, the cause was right."

Bob Rowthorn speaks the obvious.

"If you repeat something often enough, you can perhaps make people believe it. What you cannot do is turn it from being false into being true. And the Government's claim about the economic benefits of immigration is false. As an academic economist, I have examined many serious studies that have analysed the economic effects of immigration. There is no evidence from any of them that large-scale immigration generates large-scale economic benefits for the existing population as a whole. On the contrary, all the research suggests that the benefits are either close to zero, or negative.

Immigration can't solve the pensions crisis, nor solve the problem of an ageing population, as its advocates so often claim. It can, at most, delay the day of reckoning, because, of course, immigrants themselves grow old, and they need pensions.

The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.

For low-skilled Britons, the result is that there are only two options: very low pay or unemployment. The economy becomes dependent on a constant influx of immigrants who are willing to accept low pay and poor working conditions. That is what Labour ministers mean when they insist that "public services would collapse without immigrants".

"He very often tells us how glad he is to be alive"

Man recovers after 19-year coma.

"When Terry Wallis’s pick-up truck crashed through a barrier on a mountain road, plunging into a dry river bed, doctors gave the teenager little chance of survival. The accident, which killed one of his companions, left him with severe head injuries, in a coma and paralysed from the neck down.

That was in 1984. Mr Wallis, a farmer’s son from Arkansas, remained in a minimally conscious state (MCS) and outwardly unresponsive for years, until doctors witnessed what they have described as a medical miracle. In 2003, after 19 years, Mr Wallis called out to his mother and asked for a can of Pepsi.

Scientists from Cornell University, New York, believe that a slow process of brain repair and neural reconnection prompted Mr Wallis’s recovery.

A study of the structure of his brain has revealed that neuronal cells in relatively undamaged areas have grown important connections over a period of years."

Hillsborough victim Tony Bland was deliberately starved to death by doctors. Four years later, another Hillsborough 'PVS' victim, Andrew Devine, had recovered enough to be able to communicate.

I'm sure there's a good reason why the people who support starving people like Tony Bland and Andrew Devine to death are the same people who consider that executing murderers is an affront to a civilised society. Just can't quite see what it is.

Aiee !

My daughter set up her blog today. Just a test post. She loves writing, so we shall see.

Two Good Things

Firefox. Why didn't I switch years ago ?

And Windows updates - an increasingly dangerous option for those of us who occasionally do a re-install and need to get the updates all over again.

If you have Netscape or Firefox, update via WindizUpdate. Most impressed.

Racism

The game - same as last time.

It's a little incident before kick-off that caught my attention. As Beckham stepped up to the microphone and started telling us about the evils of racism, my daughter said 'what about people who are racist to us ?' then told me a story.

The day before, Susan took our two youngest up to Ragley Hall near Stratford-on Avon, which has a giant kids adventure playground. Daughter and son were playing when they were approached by two older boys whom she described as 'brown'.

To my son : "What's your name, white chocolate ?"

To my daughter : "What's your name, white pussy ?"

She is nine years old. She didn't get the sexual reference but she knew they weren't trying to be nice. "I ignored them", she said. Probably a good thing I wasn't there.

She, like primary school children all over England, has been taught that racism is something bad that white people do to brown people. The people who teach her grew up in a world where that was just about a feasible approach, but they're educating children who will grow up in a world where they will be the minority in increasingly large areas. By teaching such things they're betraying those kids.

Bulger Killers ...

They're all over the place - Ireland one day, Oz the next.

Blogging will be light until the Project From Hell is safely put to bed.

He Speaks !

The great Frank 'the unthinkable' Field on immigration. Frank is one of those happy few on the left who will accept that fear of crime, the underclass, and benefit dependency are not artefacts produced by a Daily Mail editorial conference, but descriptions of what is. He also appreciates that it is the poor who are the chief victims.

"Mr Field, a former welfare minister, questioned whether this level of immigration was sustainable without "dramatic" changes to the character of the country and hitting poorer areas, which have to absorb migrants.

"This is the most massive transformation of our population. Do we just merely accept this as another form of globalisation? That it doesn't matter where you are, or that you belong to a country and have roots? That we are all just following the jobs?" Mr Field told the BBC News Website.

People who questioned mass immigration were often accused of "playing the race card" but, Mr Field argued, this was "just another way of closing down debate".

The Birkenhead MP added: "There will be economic gains [from immigration] but I am just raising whether any country can sustain the rate of immigration we are now suffering."

Frank, btw, your website is the slowest in human history.

Another Day ...

... another initiative overturned by the courts.

"A key plank of the government's anti-terrorism laws has been dealt a blow by the High Court. A senior judge said control orders made against six men break European human rights laws. Ministers say they will appeal against the ruling. The orders are imposed on people suspected of terrorism but where there is not enough evidence to go to court. They mean suspects can be tagged, confined to their homes, and banned from communicating with others.

In his ruling, Mr Justice Sullivan said control orders were incompatible with Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which outlaws indefinite detention without trial."

The initiative, of course, replaced another initiative. Which was also overturned by the courts.

Slavery Days

Jeremy Black at the SAU blog on :

The beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade.

Expansion.

Eighteenth Century.

Abolition.

Government Control Of Immigration

"Local services across England are coming under huge strain as a result of unprecedented levels of immigration, council chiefs said yesterday.

They accused the Government of failing to take account of the massive influx of migrant workers, especially from eastern Europe, in their financial settlement for local government.

Over the past 18 months, about 9,000 new National Insurance numbers have been issued in Slough, of which just 150 went to British nationals. Yet, in 2004, the Office for National Statistics recorded only 300 international migrants settling in the area."

"Council evidence suggests that the population is continuing to grow. Workers from Poland were the biggest applicants for National Insurance numbers, at 2,561, followed by Somalians, mainly entering from Holland, at 1,193."

The Pub Philosopher has more on Somali migration.

Josephine Rooney Jailed

I posted about Ms Rooney a couple of weeks ago.

"In 10 years, the street's decline has been so rapid that out of 50 houses, only eight are now owner-occupied, the rest have been bought up by absent landlords and converted into cramped bedsits and flats."

Now she's been banged up.

"Josephine Rooney, 69, of Hartington Street, Derby, will spend the next 12 weeks at New Hall jail in Wakefield, West Yorks, but vowed to carry on her fight after she is released.

A fortnight ago she was awarded £1,000 by the Government's Taking a Stand programme for her work in the community where she provides food and drink for the needy.

After a five-minute hearing before magistrates, the district judge, Joanne Alderson, said she was "sadly" left with no option but to impose a suspended sentence handed down last month after Rooney reiterated her refusal to pay. Rooney, looking frail and nervous, was handcuffed and led away."

I love this bit. Think of the number of murders and other crimes committed by people released early from their sentences.

"She will have to serve the full three months because there is no remission on non-payment of fines."

Protcting the public ? Nul point. Protecting the revenue ? Dix point.


(What's happened to Hartington Street is an unintended consequence of Tory legislation which pays housing benefit direct to the landlord. Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Private landlords were the only people we had offers from. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back, but I can't find it - it may not be on the web.)

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.