Vote Fraud Update

Following the jailing of their biggest donor Michael Brown, two Lib Dem councillors face their electoral fraud trial.

The court was told that Burnley was part of an all- postal election experiment in 2004. Many voters in Daneshouse with Stoneyholm, which is mainly populated by people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, had applied for a proxy to cast their vote for them, saying that they were going abroad.

“It was incredible really,” said Dr Taylor, who was then the borough’s chief executive. “There were that many people (195 - LT) all out of the country unable to get to a postbox during that period in particular. We only had 15 proxy applications for the whole of the rest of the borough — 14 wards.

“There were other concerns I had as well when I went through the forms. It seemed to me that there were a lot of similarities about the handwriting.”

Mr Ali, who held on to his seat, told police that his writing appeared on most forms because he had filled in details about voters on their behalf.

As you do.

This story gives little glimpses into the slow appeasement process.

In the council :

Under cross-examination by Paul Reid, QC, Mr Ali’s lawyer, Dr Taylor accepted that the area had experienced a large number of proxy applications when the council decided in 1999 to let Asian women cast absent votes for religious and cultural reasons.

I'd love to know if those reasons were documented. Not being allowed out of the house ? Enabling the husband to control the wife's vote ? Feminism - for whites only ?

And in the police :

As in previous years, most of the applications for proxies were delivered to the town hall just before the deadline. Labour handed in 28 and the Liberal Democrats 167.

Dr Taylor said that the council asked the police to investigate and gave copies of application forms to detectives. The police chose 12 people, all white, whose documents claimed that they were going on extended holidays. None had any intention of going away and the council disqualified their applications.

However, with the deadline upon it, police were unable to check the rest.

Oh, damn ! We've run out of time !

So Lancashire police, faced with 195 applications from an area "which is mainly populated by people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin" and 15 applications from the rest of the borough, chose to investigate 12 people called Smith.



More vote fraud news here, here, here, here, here and here.

Underclass Round-Up

Down in the Forest ...

A man has been banned from his home town for ten years after terrorising its residents for the past three decades. Mark Bowkett, 40, described by police as the “Scourge of Lydney”, was expelled from the town and the surrounding areas as part of an antisocial behaviour order made at Gloucestershire Magistrates’ Court. It has left him homeless and separated him from his wife and seven children. The order was granted after behaviour that brought him an average of two criminal convictions a year since 1977

Two convictions a year since he was 12. During which time he's fathered 7 kids. I'll take a wild guess that the taxpayer will have been stumping up for their trainers, not to mention Daddy's legal expenses.

Over at Tim's he's asking when exactly the concept of exile was reintroduced to English law.

"Such an advance in freedom, liberty and civilization."

I'd imagine it's a major advance in freedom, liberty and civilization for the guy's neighbours. But, as commenter Pete points out, what exactly is the point of moving this nasty bit of woirk elsewhere, to terrorise others ?

"This is nimbyism taken to new heights of selfishness."

It seems likely that Mr B will be just as unpleasant wherever he ends up. Whatever happened to "detention at Her Majesty's pleasure" ?





North to Sheffield, where the close-knit Bennett family are an object lesson in caring for their children.

"On the day of the crash in April, Bennett, then 19, had bought the Subaru car for £5,500, using part of a cash payout his mother had received to care for his disabled brother."

Your tax money at work, helping the unfortunate (or their brothers, anyway) to buy an Impreza. Young Mr Bennett was banned from driving at the time, incidentally. In fact he'd never held a license or taken a driving lesson.

"Andrew Bennett, 20, had been drinking lager and smoking cannabis before he lost control of a high-powered sports car that he had owned for less than a day.

He was racing at 90mph when the vehicle span and crashed into trees.

Bennett’s girlfriend, Kirsty Cash, 17, was flung through the windscreen of the Subaru Impreza and was found unconscious on the other side of the road behind a wall.

Sheffield Crown Court was told that there was a good chance that Miss Cash would have survived if she had received prompt medical care.

Bennett refused to allow another passenger, Joanne Kilner-Farr, to dial 999, telling her he would “smash her face in”. Instead he telephoned his family and constructed a plan to cover up the accident.

He persuaded his mother’s partner to drive to the scene at Worrall, near Sheffield. Miss Cash was bundled into the car and taken to his mother’s home in the Stannington area of the city, where she was placed on a bed upstairs.

His mother’s partner, Robin Scholes, then returned to the scene of the accident with Steven Scott, a friend of Bennett, and set fire to the vehicle.

Bennett waited until an hour after the crash before — realising that Miss Cash was no longer breathing — he finally agreed to call an ambulance. By then she was dead."

Associating with lowlife can be dangerous to the health.

"Bennett, who is unemployed, pleaded guilty to manslaughter ..."

Unemployed ? You amaze me. Surely not. I'll take another wild guess that the taxpayer has been stumping up to keep the Bennett family in lager and tabs for the last 20 years or so. Also amazingly, Judge Alan Goldsack seemed to think he should have been banged up earlier.

“You are 20 and this is your sixteenth court appearance since you made your first in 2002, aged 16. The majority have been for offences involving motor vehicles. It is too late now to say whether locking you up earlier in your criminal career might have brought it to an abrupt halt.”

Doesn't the judge know you shouldn't lock up anyone under 23 ?

And finally ... let's away to the leafy shires, John Major's Huntingdon no less, where the Oxmoor Estate shows that no matter where you are, the underclass lifestyle can be yours.

"A woman is facing jail after admitting being in charge of the dog which viciously savaged little George Brown.

The four-year-old was in surgery for four hours, needed 200 stitches, and will be scarred for life following the horrific attack on August 14.

Toni Badcock, 30, of Thongsley, Huntingdon, pleaded guilty at Huntingdon Magistrates' Court today (Wednesday, 27 September) to being in charge of a dog which was dangerously out of control in a public place and caused injury to George.

In addition she pleaded guilty to three similar charges relating to another incident on May 24 when George, a 14-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy were hurt.

Craig McDougall, prosecuting, said: "It is an extremely tragic matter we are dealing with. George was savaged and received severe facial injuries."

The dog, which belonged to Badcock's partner Michael Feehily, was said to be extremely large, powerful and dangerous.

On the first occasion on May 24, Badcock was at Feehily's address in Norfolk Road, Huntingdon, and at 6pm she opened the front door and the dog escaped onto the green area outside where children were playing.

The bulldog, called Buddy, started to jump around and the children started screaming, the dog knocked over George, grabbing hold of his foot, and the other two children tried to get him off, before running to a nearby house.

George and the other children suffered minor injuries.

On Monday, August 14 the dog struck again, but this time with horrific consequences.

The court heard mum of four Badcock had opened the front door in Norfolk Road to call her children in at 8pm.

The dog escaped and George tried to run away but fell back and hit his head on the pavement. Someone tried to get the dog off but it kept attacking him.

George was rushed to Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Huntingdon, where he underwent a blood transfusion before being transferred to the facial injuries unit at Addenbrooke's Hospital for surgery.

David Potter, mitigating, said Badcock offered her sincere apologies to the children and their families.

"Mum-of-four". Aged 30. "Partner". Call me a complete old cynic, but I'll take yet another wild guess that the taxpayer may just possibly have been keeping the Badcock family fed, clothed and housed.

Speaking Truth To Power

While the Right Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn, Viscount Stansgate, addresses the massed Islamist/Guardianista ranks in Manchester, Iranian human rights activists Reza Moradi and Shiva Mahbobi attempt a counter-protest. Watch the video at Moonbat Media.

Strange, How Potent Cheap Rhetoric Can Be

Well, he did it again. Once Tony Blair opens his mouth the Labour Party Conference roll onto their backs in traditional style.

He's a master of the art. Non-stop fulsome praise of the party just wouldn't do the job. It's the combination of the slapping around and "I only do it because I love you so much" that never fails.

The only false note was early on, when at Sedgefield he "sat in the company of the most normal people I had met in the Labour Party", which brought a few murmurs of disapproval. But you have to admire a man who can get a rousing cheer for dissing Cameron's "hug a hoodie" idea - from an audience most of whom think hoodies are poor victims of insufficient Social Services funding.

Great poke at Clare Short, too.

Dennis Skinner.

Watching from his sick bed.

Get well soon.

Never agreed with a policy I've had.

Never once stopped him knowing the difference between a Labour Government and a Tory one.

People like Janet Anderson, George Howarth, Mike Hall.

Good Ministers, but I asked them to make way.

They did.

Without a word of bitterness.

They never forgot their principles when in office; and they never discovered them when they left office.

Touche.

The ending - "wherever I am, whatever I do" made it pretty plain that we won't see back-bencher Blair conducting Sedgefield surgeries once a month next year. He's out of there. Those listening to him : "you are the future". God help us all.

It was a fantastic speech, even if I didn't believe a word of it (apart from those bits which agreed with my prejudices, of course) and consider Blair to have been the most disastrously successful election-winner since Stanley Baldwin. Listening to the R5 coverage, the presenters were struck by the supportive texts and calls coming in (the general message being 'they must be crazy to drop him') - unless they were set up by the people who arranged for the idiotic "safer streets" placards to be waved outside the G-Mex centre.




Ah yes, "safer streets". Following the reports on the Blair speech, Radio 5 went just a few miles along the East Lancs road, to Norris Green, where the streets are so safe that R5 was able to report upon what might be a first since the Krays packed up - the enforced closure of shops and businesses along the route of murdered gangster Luke Smith's funeral procession. Apparently they'd been warned in the best tradition of Northern Ireland or the West Bank, that not closing could be hazardous to their health. The same applied to the removal of the fifty-foot floral tribute to the late lamented "Smigger".

A massive shrine to murdered gang boss Liam Smith will remain until his funeral after a deal was struck.

Friends of the 19-year-old, known as Smigger, erected the 50-yard memorial along Scargreen Avenue in Norris Green after he was blasted in the head outside Altcourse prison last month.

It is believed the council was set to remove it, but was advised it could spark community tension.

Shopkeepers today told the ECHO the shrine's removal could have "sparked World War III".

Police were happy for the shrine to remain and said it could be positive for the grieving process.

The shrine could now remain in place for up to three weeks. The ECHO understands it will be taken down after the funeral.

Bouquets are tied to every lamp-post and graffiti daubed on shop shutters to the teenager who led the Strand Crew.

Inscriptions are also scrawled across the length of the pavement including: "See you on the other side, brother."

Huge yellow letters spelling out Smigger have been daubed between the windows of flats.

I like "Police were happy for the shrine to remain and said it could be positive for the grieving process." Is this the same police force that found the manpower to arrest a 78-year old for writing "Free Speech For England" on the wall of a derelict building ?

You can read all about the Norris Green vs Croxteth gang rivalry at the Copper's Blog. And you can see the Strand Gang pursuing their immemorial customs (like Top Gear but with added pump-action shotguns) at Youtube.

Blair's Britain, 2006.

Cameroonian Highlanders

On David Cameron's trip to Scotland he dissed the English with a disgraceful speech containing gems like this :

Another aspect of English cultural insensitivity that rears its head in the media is the vexed question of sporting identity. Why is that Scottish sportsmen and women who win are habitually claimed by English media commentators as ‘British’ only to be promptly redesignated as ‘Scottish’ the moment they lose ?

I'm sorry, but I just don't recognise this as reflecting reality. Think of racing drivers, from Jackie Stewart to Coulthard - did they become Scots when losing, Brits when winning ? Andy Murray has some strange politics - but I'd still love him to win Wimbledon. It sounds more as if Cameron's researchers grabbed the nearest (untrue) stereotype they could, presumably thinking that any old tainted red meat is good enough to feed the rabid Anglophobe. Cheap, untrue, and nasty stuff - insulting to the English and to Scots.

Stephen Pollard has a post which sums up my feelings on Tory Blair perfectly. He quotes an Observer writer on DC.

And David Cameron says sensible, liberal, moderate things. Some of them are so sensible as to be truisms . For example: we should consider 'general well-being' as well as gross domestic product when measuring national success; big business has responsibilities to society as well as duties to shareholders; public-sector workers deserve respect; sometimes private enterprise might not have all the answers in public-sector reform; globalisation has losers as well as winners; kids in hooded tops aren't all bad.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a check list of what's wrong with the Cameron Conservative Party. Every single one of those sentiments is the exact opposite of reality. And the electoral need for Cameron to mouth them is the perfect demonstration of what's wrong - and getting worse - about Britain. Business owes no duty to anyone beyond making profits (within the law) by servicing its customers' needs. Genuine globalisation (with a world wide free market) would be the greatest possible boon. The concept of 'general well being' is subjective drivel, and dangerously so in the hands of government. The public sector is necessarily worse at provision in the interest of its consumers than private provision. Etc. As Private Frazer put it: We're doomed. Doomed.

You said it.

Reality vs Satire - a fighting draw

Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times on Richard Hammond:

Richard Hammond, the Top Gear host critically injured on Wednesday in what is possibly Britain’s fastest car crash, has eaten cornflakes, walked, talked and recognised his co-presenter James May as a “****face”.

I first heard of the accident as I was doing a rather pedestrian 175mph in an Aston Martin round the programme’s test track in Surrey. The producer, Andy Wilman, called from the central London edit suite to say that Hammond had had what he called “a big one”.

But there was no sense of urgency. Yes, on his previous run he’d reached a speed of 315mph and there was every chance he’d been doing a similar speed when the accident began. And yes, he’d rolled over several times before coming to rest upside down with his helmet full of soil and his head buried in the earth. What’s more, he had been unconscious when the paramedics arrived.

But he’d come round, insisted that he should do a “piece to camera” and had even had a fight with the air ambulance crew who thought that on balance it’d be better if he got on the stretcher to go to hospital in Leeds. Richard’s like that. He spends most of his spare time fighting.

I was therefore not even slightly worried. Nor was I embarrassed that just 40 minutes earlier I’d called his mobile phone and left a message saying: “As I haven’t heard from you, I can only presume you’re dead.”

He’d hear it in the helicopter and call me back to say he had just driven 100mph faster than I’d ever managed.

Via the Old Heatonian :

More Sick-Bags

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.

More 'emotional claptrap' from the sister of a barman stabbed to death by five men after he stopped one of them pestering a woman :

Mr Owens' sister, Donna Owens, said: "The men responsible for TJ's death will never feel our pain or understand our loss.

"So it's fair to say it is only us that have been dealt a truly life sentence."

Five men have been jailed over the death of a barman who was stabbed as he stepped in to help two women being molested by one of them on a night out.

Trevor Owens, 25, from Birmingham, was attacked in Broad Street, Birmingham, in November 2005. The case led to a knife amnesty by West Midlands Police.

Mazoom Ali, 30, of Bordesley Green, was jailed for life after admitting murder.

Four other men were jailed for between six years and nine months and nine years after admitting manslaughter.

The barman, known as TJ, stepped in to help two women who were being abused, pestered and molested by one of the group of five.

In other news : this story and this one are all over the place. According to a commenter here, there was a media blackout on the rape of the five year old until the BNP site reported it.

Technical Illiteracy

Luke Harding in the Guardian on the German Maglev rail crash.

The accident is the first involving the Transrapid system and calls into question the long-term viability and safety of magnetic trains. They had been hailed by some as an ecologically friendly alternative to conventional diesel-powered train travel.

Of course. Conventional trains are perfectly safe to run at high speeds over a line containing a stationary maintenance vehicle. It's only with maglev that you get a collision.

London

You can find these reports tucked away on the BBC website, but somehow you never hear them on the news :

A man was stabbed to death yards from his front door in an attack by a mob of up to 40 youths on bicycles.

Jason Gayle-Bent, 29, was sitting on a wall with two friends when the gang rode up in Ludwick Mews in south-east London on Sunday, police said.

One of the youths pulled out a gun, aimed and fired several shots before the group dispersed.

Police believe the same gang may also have attacked and wounded another man shortly afterwards in Deptford Wharf.

Straight after the attack on Mr Gayle-Bent, the gang is thought to have fired shots in the air outside the Community Action Centre in Grove Street.

Police believe they then chased a man who fled the centre on a moped. In his bid to escape the gang, he crashed his bike and then tried to run off.

The youths caught up with him at a doorway of an address in Deptford Wharf, where he was assaulted and stabbed.

A firearm was also discharged at the scene. The victim was treated in hospital and has since been allowed home.

Police are investigating whether the two attacks were linked and are keeping an open mind as to the motive.

More today - again I haven't heard anything on the news.

Gang threat shuts schools early

More than 2,000 pupils were sent home early on police advice, after threats of gang violence outside two schools in south-east London.

Pupils at the Peckham Academy, Peckham, and Harris Girls' Academy in East Dulwich were sent home at 1400 BST.

Police advised head teachers to end the school day early and said they would step up patrols over the weekend.

BBC London correspondent Guy Smith said it could be linked to the murder of a man in nearby New Cross on Sunday.

"Revving Engine in a Racist Manner"

via Tangled Web, this story.

Scottish motorist Ronnie Hutton, 49, was jailed for two days for the crime of "revving his car in a racist manner" last September. After waiting more than a year to try the case, the Stirling Sheriff court finally convicted Hutton last week of breach of the peace and fined him £150 (US $282).

An off duty officer, Chief Inspector Eoin Jenkins, said Hutton had revved the engine of his Lotus Esprit near two Muslims last year. After Hutton dismissed Jenkins' concern with an expletive, Jenkins immediately dispatched two police officers to Hutton's home where he was taken and thrown in jail for two days without formal charges. Hutton explained that his revving had nothing to do with nearby pedestrians, rather, he was keeping his temperamental and expensive V8 engine from stalling and being damaged.

"To be convicted for revving my car in a busy street is hard to take," Hutton told the Sunday Mail newspaper. "Does this mean anyone driving a noisy car in Scotland is now a criminal?"

Asked in court why the man may have revved his engine, Hana Saad, 23, said through an interpreter, "Maybe because we are Muslim."

That great patriot Billy Bragg is interviewed "by phone from his Barking, Essex home".

Somebody tell the Ottowa Citizen he left years ago ... but he's still got his finger on the pulse.

"People are being deported from our country because they have Arab-sounding names"

More Lib Dem Moonbattery

Even before the Lib Dems Mark Oaten found himself in the pooey stuff, I'd long since marked his card.

It was the go-karting lessons that got me, even more than votes for Ian Huntley.

But this is worse than any amount of dodgy daggy doings.

Radical ideas were suppressed - such as his long-held wish to abolish prison. "If I'd been brave enough when I had the home affairs brief, that's what I wanted to say, that we should abolish prisons. But I was clamped down. 'For God's sake, Mark!' they'd say. 'Even just saying something like prisoners should have the right to vote is causing us enough electoral damage.' So I never said it."

This was at the same time the dippy deviant was coming out with stuff like this.

"The plan for community justice panels is part of what Mr Oaten calls "tough liberalism" - policies which he says are liberal, effective, but not perceived as weak.

The challenge is to appeal to voters wanting a tough approach on crime while keeping support from those preferring a liberal stance.

Mr Oaten told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the idea of recruiting residents of estates or parishes to the panels was a "tough option" against offenders. "

Tough liberalism, eh ? While all the time he'd have let all the bad guys out ?

Two faced ? He's got more faces than Bradford Town Hall clock.

"the best possible nanny"

La Toynbee :

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

Erm ...

Three-quarters of children in care have no educational qualifications at all when it ends, a report into the state of the care system claims.

Out of the 6,000 children who leave the care of the state each year, 60 make it to university, says a report by think tank the Centre for Policy Studies.

Report author Harriet Sergeant said a failing system was a "major contributor to social exclusion in this country".

But don't worry - something is being done.

The Department for Education said it had plans to help children in care. A department spokeswoman said: "We are already working on a major consultation document"

The Countdown Begins ...

Following the distresssing news of Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond's high-speed crash, how long before the first "what goes round comes round" piece about it in either the Guardian or Independent ?



UPDATE - at 8.58 pm Richard Williams is first out of the pits in the Guardian.

"an expression of a culture that is long past its expiry date ... how could anyone possibly justify the need to drive a car - any sort of a car, in any circumstances - at more than 300mph ? .... Campbell ... Cobb .... distinguished ... engineering history ... the makers of Top Gear and their viewers, however, appear oblivious to the fact that those days have gone for good ... very stupid indeed ... heedless self-indulgence that imperils the future of the planet ... a culture that is now not only obsolete but positively dangerous ... to the human race as a whole, and to its habitat ... Some will say that Richard Hammond's accident used up scarce medical resources".

Others will say that Richard Williams uses up scarce oxygen.

Well It Made Me Smile

Go to Google.

Type in "Woman Sour".

Hit "I'm Feeling Lucky".

Spot The Racist

via Majority Rights, an apparent (i.e. if it's genuine) EU-funded project to automatically scan the web for racist websites (well, some racist websites anyway - those of "majority groups"). I wonder what they'd want to do that for ?

I'm not sure about the methodology. They're picking a bunch of what are generally agreed to be racist websites (the stormfronts of this world), analysing the text and applying the results of the analysis to other websites. Whether that'll pick up the hideously subtle racism which according to the Guardian pervades almost the entire UK media and infects Brit society from top to bottom I'm unsure.

While I've little sympathy for some of the more outre views on sites like MR (according to the comments Baroness Tonge's Global Zionists are behind it all), I can't but enjoy the irony of this bit.

"Minority social groups and belief holders conceptualise truth as something which has been repressed or ‘concealed’ through socialisation processes and global information control at the hands of their chosen out-group. This paranoiac worldview ...."

So you're paranoid if you witter on about global information control and the repression of some ideas - according to this tax-funded supra-national project apparently designed as an aid to exactly that.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times”

Pity Lord Carey never came up with stuff like this in the days when he had more influence. Still, more rejoicing over one repentant sinner etc etc.

Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

The Magna Mater notes the speech, and also John Reid's words in London today.

It seemed to me that what Reid was doing, by addressing the Muslim community in this way, was not merely making a plea to parents but also, for the first time, drawing a line in the cultural sand. In effect, he was saying: this is one country, and it will not be fragmented but everyone has to observe the same basic rules ...whether this tentative throwing down of the cultural gauntlet in the face of creeping Islamisation does mark a more general shift away from the Whitehall strategy of appeasing extremism that has obtained until now remains to be seen. There is still a huge distance for the government to travel before it emerges from its state of collective denial.

Damn right there is. No, I think the collective liberal attitude to Islam and its followers is still to grasp at any hopeful straws (how about "they could hold a multicultural conference") and look steadily away from anything disturbing.

Time for the old post once again :

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".

"How Dare You Come To A Muslim Area ?"

Sometimes you think it's a good thing Labour won in 2005. I imagine had this been a Tory Home Secretary that the Labour Party would as one be denouncing the Islamophobic racists in the Home Office.

Home Secretary John Reid's attempt to connect with British Muslims was hijacked by radical protesters claiming he was an "enemy" of Islam.

Others attending a speech he gave to a 30-strong group of Muslims in Leyton, east London, were angered by calls for Muslim parents to look out for the signs of brainwashing in their children in the fight against terrorism.

Mr Reid was 10 minutes through his speech when well-known extremist Abu Izzadeen, clutching the hand of a small boy, interrupted him. The Home Secretary had just listed a number of terror attacks around the world when Izzadeen began his tirade and forced him to stop.

"How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?" he said. "You are an enemy of Islam and Muslims, you are a tyrant. Shame on all of us for sitting down and listening to him."

The Home Secretary stood and watched as police officers ushered him out of the room, followed by hoards of cameras, photographers and reporters. Continuing his diatribe, Izzadeen accused the Government of state terrorism and said Mr Reid, Tony Blair and George Bush with their crusade could "all go to hell".

After the furore died down, Mr Reid said: "This is not a new experience for me or for those involved in politics. There will always be people who will not be prepared to take part in a dialogue, but who will try to intimidate and shout down. They are not confined to the Muslim community."

But Mr Reid had only just re-started his speech when a second protester, radical Anjem Choudary, stood up to protest.

"Muslims do not need British values," he said. "We believe Islam is superior, we believe Islam will be implemented one day. It is very rich for you to come here and say we need to monitor our children when your Government is murdering people in Iraq and Afghanistan."

In his speech Mr Reid stressed that the terrorists were waging a "violent and indiscriminate war" and warned that communities needed to be more aware of signs of terrorist activity. He urged Muslim parents to look out for the "tell-tale signs" of radicalisation in their children.

"These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for one thing," he said. "Grooming them to kill themselves in order to murder others. Look for the tell-tale signs now and talk to them before their hatred grows and you risk losing them forever."

I'm not sure I'd have used that last argument - does Mr Reid actually think about his audience ? Just as a Christian would prefer a child to be in heaven rather than on earth but doomed to hell (believe it or not such a view would have been quite mainstream only a few generations back), so a religious Muslim parent might not consider having a martyr in the family to be 'losing them forever'. After all, they could argue, they'll meet again in paradise. Life on earth is short, and eternity a long time.




UPDATE - of course what the press reports fail to mention is that the vast majority of moderate Muslims at the meeting threw themselves on the hecklers, roughed them up, and slung them out the doors ;-)

Lib Dems For Suicide Bombers

And againat the evil Jewish Conspiracy, as reported on the Today Programme (RealAudio, 20 mins in).

Baroness Tonge: "The pro-Israel lobby has a grip on the western media - a financial grip".

She went on to repeat the remarks about suicide bombers which Charles Kennedy considered to be 'completely unacceptable and 'not compatible with Liberal Democrat party policies and principles'.

Only one, nuanced change to her views. The bomber pilot who inadvertantly kills non-combatants is no longer merely the moral equivalent to the suicide bomber deliberately targeting civilians. No - he's worse. After all, the bomber pilot "goes home for a beer" afterwards. I don't think these guys do, actually.

Her views were echoed by MEP Chris "wallowing in your own filth" Davies.

Upper Class Lefties

We've seen the background of media darling Jon Snow.

But compared to the Guardian's Felicity Arbuthnot, Snow is a raving Tory. Anyone who can seriously compare US policy in Iraq with Pol Pot's Year Zero has a different angle on reality. No wonder she and John Pilger are as close as any two people can be without signing a civil partnership form.

Idly wondering about her aristocratic-sounding name, I did a quick Google.

Blimey.

Felicity Anne Clarendon-Hyde (mind you, if she came from this family, she might have married down) married into a family of blue-bloods whose connections are straight out of a Python sketch. A little map of a corner of upper-class Britain, with more soldiers 100 years ago and more solicitors now.

Thelma Grace Arbuthnot. Born 3 October 1911. Died 23 June 1974. Married first, 8 October 1932, Somerset Struben de Chair, ygr son of Admiral Sir Dudley Rawson Stratford de Chair, KCB, KCMG, MVO. Divorced 1950. He remarried more than once.

Rodney Somerset de Chair. Born July 1935. Educated Wellesley House, Broadstairs. Married first Sarah Trubshawe. Married second, 10 July 2000, Camilla ("Cilla") Joy Victoria Burdett-Blackett.

The younger generation are doing well :

Alexander Broadbent Arbuthnot. Born 1 May 1986. Educated Westminster under school; Eton College; Imperial College, London (Physics).

Katherine Rose Joste Arbuthnot. Born 14 July 1989. Educated The Lycée, then Highfield, then Wycombe Abbey.

Eleanor Sophie Duff Arbuthnot. Born 11 August 1992. Educated The Lycée, then Wycombe Abbey.

Alice Wemyss Tempest Arbuthnot. Born 31 May 1998. Educated The Lycée.

I see David Hare, another upper-class leftie, also married in. Different world.

"May Allah Curse The Pope"

At Mass today :

"We pray for Pope Benedict, that he may bring understanding to those of different faith - even those whose misunderstanding is deliberate. Lord hear us.

Lord, graciously hear us".



Meanwhile at Westminster Cathedral ....