Ed Husein Interview

When Radio Four is too dull and Radio Five unspeakably PC (i.e. betwen 10 am and 4 pm every weekday), I sometimes listen to BBC Asian Network, easily the least PC of the BBCs output - because it's not aimed at evil Whitey and his unspeakable racism. Some good music, too, and it's mostly in English - unlike my favourite Asian station Radio XL, which plays some great music and can be picked up on 1296 AM as far south as Swindon.

Nikki Bedi's show today featured a longish interview with Ed Husain, author of The Islamist. Interesting stuff, worth a listen when they put it online.

It's Not All Bad ...

I've blogged afore about the over-representation of ethnic minorities in the NHS, universally accepted by the great and the good as a Good Thing.

I wonder if this is a side-effect ? Ethnic minority doctors would IMHO be more religious than the natives - they could hardly be less.

Opposition to abortions is growing among family doctors with nearly a quarter refusing to refer women for terminations and a fifth wanting the procedure banned outright, according to a survey published today. The poll by doctors' newspaper Pulse found 24% of GPs would not sign referral forms for an abortion and 19% believe abortion should be illegal.

The survey of 309 GPs also found that more than half (55%) wanted the current 24-week limit for abortions to be reduced. The findings have heightened fears by women's and sexual health organisations that Britain is heading for an abortions crisis due to a shortage of doctors prepared to carry out terminations.

Vote Early, Vote Often

Three hundred years ago the United Kingdom was formed. Ten years ago the party and the leader who were to destroy it came to power.

I was a Guardianista then. What a happy day that was. But soon I was to be wringing my hands.

The general consensus seems to be that if the SNP win power, they'll ramp up and magnify every difference with Westminster - and there'll be plenty - hoping to win a referendum on full independence a few years down the road.

In the end, "it's all our fault". As I wrote a few months back :

While there was some metaphorical sniping from the political sidelines, the settlement endured - as long as England had self-belief. Sadly that English self-belief was just one of the things what went down the tubes during the cultural revolution.

At which point we entered a different ball game. When England believed in herself, there was no need for concessions to Scots and Welsh Nationalists (Ireland being a different and bloodier story). When it becomes the done thing for educated Englishmen and women to criticise, deride or hate their country, no amount of subsidy and concession can be enough - indeed it will only stimulate further demands. The squirrels in our garden can tell if a hazelnut is rotten inside just by looking at it - and Scottish nationalists are very like squirrels, casting a jaundiced eye on the rotten husk of English identity.

So in one sense it's wrong to blame it all on Blair. He's a symptom, not a cause. But had he left well alone, the moment might have passed. We're off down the slope now - and not all the Seaforths and Camerons will drag us back up it.

The thing that's less predictable is what effect this will have on the English. So far the West Lothian question has so hacked off the English that they're keener on Scottish independence than the Scots. What will be the consequences of English self-government ? That remains to be seen. Interesting times.



(I claim copyright on the 'tectonic plate shift' analogy btw, first used in this 2004 post.)

Great Liberal Myths Revisited - Migration and Crime

When I wrote this post in 2004, 10% of all UK prisoners were foreign nationals.

The figure is now 15%, according to the answers to Parliamentary questions obtained by the Telegraph.

Keeping foreign nationals in overcrowded British jails is costing the taxpayer more than £398 million a year, it has been claimed. Figures obtained by the Tories show that 15 per cent of the nearly 80,000-strong prison population are from outside the UK. The largest contingents among the 12,122 come from Jamaica and Nigeria, with 1,490 and 1,070 respectively. Another 879 inmates are classified as having "unrecorded" nationality - raising questions over why officials have been unable to establish their origin, and what will happen to them when released.

Shadow immigration minister Damian Green, who brought the details to light through Parliamentary questions, said the situation was "truly shocking". "It shows what happens when the Government loses control of our borders. We seem to attract criminals from all over the world, and the British taxpayer ends up paying for them," he insisted. "Many of these criminals come from friendly democratic countries where deportation could be arranged. If we could remove the Jamaican prisoners alone we would save £49 million a year. And why are there nearly 1,000 people who have gone through the criminal justice system and been jailed without the Government even finding out where they come from?"

Mr Green used the "snapshot" figures from the end of February to calculate costs based on Government estimates of £33,000 annual expenditure for each prison place. Some 164 nationalities are represented in British jails, according to the data.

I like this intervention by Juliet Lyon of the Prison Abolition Trust.

"Mr Green rightly points out the large number of foreign nationals in UK prisons, but fails to mention that the dearest wish of many is nothing more than to go home."

Well, yes. I imagine it's the dearest wish of most of the native villains too.

The BBC discover Brum Vote Fraud

Three years late. At Biased BBC.

Judge Clarence Thomas

When George Herbert Walker Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the US Supreme Court in 1991, I was a card-carrying Guardianista and took little notice. If asked I'd probably have been quite happy to parrot the line that he was a token replacement for Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court judge.

There's a whole lot more to him, if the Wikipedia entry and this City Journal profile are any guide. And he's a Thomas Sowell fan, too. A few snippets :

Thomas on Judging

“In my mind, impartiality is the very essence of judging and of being a judge. A judge does not look to his or her sex or racial, social, or religious background when deciding a case. It is exactly these factors that a judge must push to one side in order to render a fair, reasoned judgment on the meaning of the law. In order to be a judge, a person must attempt to exorcise himself or herself of the passions, thoughts, and emotions that fill any frail human being. He must become almost pure, in the way that fire purifies metal, before he can decide a case. Otherwise, he is not a judge, but a legislator. . . .

“My vision of the process of judging is unabashedly based on the proposition that there are right and wrong answers to legal questions. To be sure, judging is a difficult challenge because the Constitution itself is written in broad and sometimes ambiguous terms. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not come with Cliff’s Notes or a glossary. When it comes time to interpret the Constitution’s provisions, such as, for instance, the Speech or Press Clauses of the First Amendment, reasonable minds can certainly differ as to their exact meaning. But that does not mean that there is no right or correct answer; that there are no clear, eternal principles recognized and put into motion by our founding documents.”

—“Judging,” a 1996 speech to the University of Kansas School of Law

The most important Supreme Court decisions on counting by race in recent years have both involved the University of Michigan, and Thomas’s opinions in those cases are his clearest and most passionate statements on race and the law. In Gratz v. Bollinger, the Court deemed unconstitutional Michigan’s undergraduate admissions program, which blatantly used quotas, and Thomas concurred. “I would hold that a State’s use of racial discrimination in higher education admissions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.”

But in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court approved Michigan’s law school’s admissions program, which claimed that race was just one factor among many considered in admissions—though the statistical evidence implied the existence of thinly veiled quotas. Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, held that the school’s desire to achieve “diversity” was a “compelling interest,” sufficient to support taking race into account, and that its admissions program was “narrowly tailored” enough to be constitutional.

Thomas’s dramatic dissent, joined in pertinent part by Scalia, began by quoting a speech that former slave Frederick Douglass made to abolitionists in 1865. “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us,” Douglass had said. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! . . . And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!”

Thomas is well-known for listening rather than actively asking questions during oral arguments of the Court. He has offered several reasons for this, the most strongly supported of which is that he developed a habit of listening as a young man. Thomas comes from the Gullah/Geechee cultural region of coastal Georgia and is a member of this distinct African American ethnic group; he grew up speaking the Gullah language, which is a hybrid of English and various West African languages. Later in life, Thomas began to acquire an enthusiasm for his heritage, writing about it in the December 14, 2000 issue of The New York Times:

"When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now. But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are... So I...just started developing the habit of listening."

"Violent immigrants fuelling crime"

Not me saying it, although I do wonder at the naivety of those who think England can import, say, a large number of Somalians without taking on some of the characteristics of Somalia.

'Tis the BBC.

Young immigrants from violent and war-torn countries are fuelling mayhem and murder on London's streets, according to a new report. Research from Scotland Yard says increasing numbers of youths with significant post-traumatic stress are having a negative impact in the city.

And after they've been at their work other people have post-traumatic stress - or worse.

There are currently 171 street gangs operating in London says the report. Some 43% of gangs are estimated to have more than 20 members, while 18% have more than 50 members. Although 90% of gang participants are male, there are believed to be three female gangs operating in London, and women are often used "to mind weapons" for brothers and partners. The document states that half of gangs identified by police intelligence are based in the African-Caribbean community.

Hmm. "The African-Caribbean community". Do I detect a change of terminology ? Is this designed to include Africans as well as those whose immediate antecedents are Caribbean ?

Historically most of the bad gangstas have come from down Jamaica way while the more recent African immigrants were, like most first-generation migrants, pretty law-abiding. Contrast Damilola Taylor and his killers. But since we started importing young men from war zones there's been a change. Somali gangs now feature in the urban bestiary. People like Robert Malasi and Shukri Bilal are starting to clog up our jails with their useless carcases and our mortuaries with their victims.

I may be wrong - "African-Caribbean" may just be a synonym for "Afro-Caribbean". It's hard to keep up. More on London gangs here.

From the Divorce Court

The court heard that the couple had been married for 21 years but in recent years their relationship "had hit an all time low". Mr Gallanagh claimed that his client had endured "continued mental abuse" over a period of about five years which had taken its toll on her. He said Mr Martin had routinely questioned his wife's parental skills and had started a new business venture without her knowledge.

Hmmm. I hope the "continued mental abuse" included criticising her cooking.

Stepford Scientists Report Breakthrough

When I heard this morning that scientists were developing a drug that boosts female sex drive while helping women lose weight, all manner of 'witty' ideas for blog posts came to mind - a few even printable.

But by the time I got home to a warm keyboard, the Pooter of Geek had already shot my particular fox :

"A member of the group also reassured the public that they were doing everything they could to prevent their discovery from falling into the hands of Kate Moss."

"Vibrant and Alive"

Let's say you're a liberal researcher looking at a phenomenon well-known in UK. As more and more incomers arrive in the city, more and more of the natives move out. How do you to put a positive spin on this, lads ? We've done 'diversity' and the improved choice of restaurants to death. Any ideas ?

Tell you what. You don't want to imply that the people coming in are driving the people going out. Why not start with the phenomenon of the natives leaving, and present it in isolation, with no context - as something that's "just happened".

Then we can present the incomers as arriving just in time to save the poor city from becoming empty - as saviours propping up the ailing cities !

Brilliant !

Immigration is helping to keep America's big cities vibrant and alive, buffering major metropolitan areas from a slow drain in population as longtime residents move out, new data released yesterday by the US Census Bureau shows ...

By the middle of this century those patterns of movement - native-born Americans moving out, newcomers and their families moving in - will put a very different face on the average city. The majority population will be members of ethnic minority groups. In some of the fastest growing cities, such as the Dallas Fort Worth area, immigrants accounted for nearly 80% of population growth over the last six years.

Immigration figures 'are false'

Observer

Councils are so concerned that official figures are failing to record the true number of migrants entering their area that they are to start their own polling to gauge the scale of the influx.

This is a serious embarrassment to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which has tried to play down concerns that its estimates for the number of people entering the UK are badly flawed.

Although the office plans to improve its methods for tracking immigration, critics say the new way of counting migrants was equally problematic. The critics point out that, under the new calculations, the number entering London supposedly decreased by 60,000 between 2002 and 2005 - the most up-to-date records available - though most experts say they actually increased. Councils in and around the capital claim the rise in immigrants is placing greater pressure on services and is starting to have an impact on their finances.

Don't get the impression that any of these councils are actually concerned about social cohesion or nonsense like that. The problem is that they want more funding to service the needs of these migrants. Strange - I thought only the swivel-eyed brigade worried about the burden on public services.

'Our electoral register has gone up by 23,000 over the past few years yet they're saying it's gone down,' said Sir Robin Wales, mayor of Newham, east London. 'It's ludicrous. We've nothing against migration - it is great for the economy and great for Newham. However, it needs to be properly funded. We would be willing to pay for a census just to rectify these figures. It would cost us a lot of money, but these inaccurate figures are costing us even more.'

23,000 extra voters on the electoral register, eh ? Are they all entitled to vote ?

The ONS estimates that Slough has received 1,100 extra migrants since 2002. But the local council estimates that at least 10,000 Polish people alone have arrived to work in the town since 2004.

Critics say the office's figures are also at odds with those collated by the government. Migration figures released by the ONS earlier this month suggested that approximately 56,000 Poles entered the UK in 2005, although the Department for Work and Pensions has issued figures suggesting that over 170,000 Polish citizens applied for National Insurance numbers in the same year.

'The government's new figures suggest we have fewer migrants than three years ago,' said Councillor Mark Loveday, cabinet member for strategy at Hammersmith and Fulham council. National Insurance registrations by people from countries which recently joined the European Union 'are up by more than 550 per cent and that's before other migrants are counted'.

More Vote Fraud

Yes, it's that time again, with your hosts Leeds Labour Councillors Keith Wakefield and Graham Hyde.

Isn't it amazing ? There's a story about them in the Sunday Times.

Wakefield and Hyde then delivered their briefing. "Simply, what I want you to do is to knock on the door, say you are from the Labour party," instructed Hyde.

"Have you received your postal vote?" he told the students to ask voters. "Have you returned it? If they give it to you in your hand, you collect it and put it in the post box. If they haven’t, you say, ‘Have you got your postal vote?’" Wakefield chipped in: "You’ve got to do it for them."

Hyde then said: "And if you are knocking on the door and they have a postal vote and they haven’t done it, ‘Would you like to do it? We’ll put it in the post.’ We also want to check they are voting Labour as well. Yeah? If they are voting Liberal Dem, then don’t offer to put the postal vote in. We’ve found 10 so far out of all those we’ve done in Gipton."

One of the students then said: "Yes, I’ll post that for you." Hyde laughed and added: "Yes, that’s it, and then it ends up in the toilet."

By a remarkable coincidence, you can't access the details for either Messrs Wakefield or Hyde on the Leeds City Council website. Only Google cache is still there.

The ST also has an editorial.

All three main parties, meanwhile, have signed up to the Electoral Commission’s code of conduct. This means candidates and canvassers will not handle or help voters complete their postal ballot papers, that they encourage voters to post ballot papers themselves and if asked to take a completed ballot paper, to make sure the voter has sealed it first. They must also ensure voters complete ballot papers in secret, and not solicit completed postal ballot papers from electors.

Today we report that the Labour party in Leeds has driven an articulated lorry through this code in a desperate attempt to gain power on the city council. An undercover reporter posing as a student activist was part of a team told by the leader of the Labour group on the council, Keith Wakefield, and a fellow Labour politician, to collect postal votes in two key wards, and if necessary "help" voters fill in the forms. The other councillor, Graham Hyde, who worked in the Commons for George Mudie, the former Labour deputy chief whip, warned the canvassers not to get caught with any postal voting forms on them.

Every aspect of the code, in other words, was breached. As David Crompton, assistant chief constable of West Yorkshire, put it when told of Labour’s actions: "This is extremely sharp practice and a clear breach of the guidelines. We will now be looking at this carefully to determine whether a crime has been committed." Whatever the police do, the Labour party should suspend the councillors involved.

I have an old-fashioned cliche in my mind's eye - of idealistic middle-class types making sacrifices to help the working class. Last week's Indie piece on core Labour demography should dispel any illusions that Labour are in any sense a working class party.

She was among a group of 12 students, mostly studying English, politics and history, who were then driven to the car park of the Fairway pub in Gipton.

The area (Gipton), in eastern Leeds, is one of the rougher suburbs, made up largely of council tower blocks and sprawling estates. Gangs of youths hang around on street corners and the unemployment rate is high.

The suburb, whose residents are typically white working-class or poor Asian families, was until recently solidly Labour.

We're seeing middle-class people making sacrifices to defraud the working class. Thus far have we come since Peterloo and the Chartists.

Richard Price QC, an expert on electoral law, said: "I look at the situation as like a large bowl of water. Previously there were a couple of holes in it — isolated cases of fraud — but suddenly it has become a colander. It is a completely unnecessary crisis. With postal voting you have abolished the secret ballot, and your investigation is a classic example of this."

Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, an academic expert on elections, added: "Postal voting on demand is inherently unsatisfactory. The whole system is open to abuse. Secret ballots were introduced in 1872 to stop exactly this sort of problem and we now seem to be going back to the 19th century."

Sir Alistair Graham, who stood down as chairman of the committee on standards in public life last week, recently accused ministers of being in denial about the "real and potent threat" facing the electoral system as a result of fraud. He warned that the government could not ensure the forthcoming local elections would be free, fair or secure.

Police Decapitation Photos

"There is absolutely no room in this constabulary for this type of communication"

Mr Brunstrom said the images were shown to drive home the true horror caused by dangerous driving.

The Way We Were

I linked the other day to James Norman Hall's memoir of life as an American volunteer in Kitchener's army.

Here's a civilian memoir - Josephine Vernon (nee Batchelor) - a Coventry Kid.

Off to a wedding - see you Sunday.

"I Believe That Children Are Our Future ..."

BBC - it's the annual gathering of the PANDA report figures.

When special schools are included, 798,210 pupils in England's state schools do not speak English as their first language. About one in seven children at primary school in England and one in 10 at secondary school speak a language other than English at home. The figures come from the government's annual school census.

At primary level, 21.9% of pupils are from ethnic minorities, up from 20.6% last year. In secondary schools, the figure is 17.7%, up from 16.8% in 2006.

Anyone who does not describe themselves as being white British is defined as an ethnic minority in the census.

Vaisakhi Carnival Violence - Update

Sunny has more on the Handsworth Park trouble at Pickled Politics, and the BBC report three remanded on attempted murder charges.

Amandeep Singh, 31, of Walsall, Avtar Singh Thandi, 28, from Birmingham, and a 17-year-old from Smethwick are also accused of violent disorder.

"Influencing the voters of tomorrow while they're still young"

The line between education and tax-funded propaganda gets blurrier and blurrier.

At Tong high school in Bradford, the general consensus seems to be that the words "asylum seeker" and "illegal" automatically go together.

It's a misapprehension that teacher Hayley Clacey is keen to debunk, which is one of the reasons why she has invited local charity Retas (Refugee Training and Advisory Service) to the school. Throughout the day, refugees from Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon will work with children and class teachers to explain why people have to flee their own countries and what life is really like for those seeking refuge in the UK.

Bradford has two BNP councillors and 17 more candidates from the party seeking election next week. This political climate is something of which the school is keenly aware. With a catchment drawn primarily from two poor, predominantly white council estates, teachers are using the freedom of their hour-a-week tutorial programme to combat racism.

Holme Wood being one of them - Holme Wood and Buttershaw seemed to be the home of the roughest 'lads'. Twenty year back when I lived in God's Own City they certainly weren't big multiculturalists.

Influencing the voters of tomorrow while they're still young has also become a priority in Burnley, which, together with Oldham, experienced violent race-related disturbances in the summer of 2001. Around £250m has been spent on a total overhaul of Burnley's education system, with entire schools being closed, demolished, restructured and rebuilt.

Because of the way school catchment areas had been set historically, he explains, Burnley's secondary schools had been either overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly black. The white schools got good results and were oversubscribed, and the minority ethnic schools got poor ones. All this is changing, partly as a result of a report published last summer on the reasons for the disturbances.

"The county council is completely reorganising the schools, including the catchment areas, so there is a better mix of pupils," says Townsend. "Five new schools have just opened and we've got rid of all the old ones so the kids now have the chance to grow up together. The BNP are latching on to that and calling it forced integration. Of course you can never force integration, but you have to give people who would be open to that the chance to experience it."

Of course you can never force integration. Just close all the schools and open new, integrated ones. They can always go private, can't they ?

(Having one child at private secondary and two at State secondary, it's interesting to see that the private school is much more integrated than the State one, where the Asian Muslim kids form a separate group in the playground. At Speech Day they all sat together. Admittedly the state kids all live close to each other and their dads drive taxis, whereas at the private school they live miles apart and their parents are NHS consultants).


I've explained before why this kind of thing is only likely to delay, rather then stop, what I fear will be a split of of British politics on racial lines.

Arresting BNP members, Guardian exposes, BBC undercover documentaries, forced multiculturalism in schools are in the long term ineffective. Unless some kind of leftist police state comes into being.

There is always that possibility, I suppose. I'm just not sure that they could administer it competently enough to be effective !

PS - Sir Andrew Green's essay on the 'Britain a nation of immigrants' spin, "The Great Deception", is here.

Postcode Policing

An Aberdeen they've got nothing to do ...

Mr Kennedy, who is a genetics student at Aberdeen University, said: "I said I was not a police officer, I said I am a stripper. They followed me into the bar, watched the show, then asked me to go back to the station. It was all quite friendly. When I went back later they said they were going to charge me. I have spoken to two solicitors and they do not know if it will go to court."

A spokesman for the Grampian force said the charges were in connection with wearing a police uniform and equipment in a public place.

In the days before target culture they'd have had a quiet word.


In Falkirk they've got nothing to do either ...

A policeman who threw away details of more than 14 crimes and invented excuses as to why they should not be investigated has escaped jail. Matthew Turner carried out the shirking campaign at Falkirk Police Station between November 2004 and August 2005. The crimes included two assaults, a housebreaking, three thefts and eight incidents of vandalism. Turner admitted 14 charges of wilful neglect of duty when he appeared at Falkirk Sheriff Court last month. On Thursday, he was ordered to carry out 225 hours community service. The court heard he was only the third police officer in Scotland in recent memory to face a criminal court on similar charges.

Fortunately his dereliction of duty has been discovered and the law enforced.

The court heard the alleged crimes he had wrongly marked "closed" were all re-investigated. In one case a suspect was sent a warning letter but none of the cases were taken to court.

I suppose they may have been harder to investigate so long after the event.

There'll Always Be An England ?

Mark Steyn on the song :

"that summed up what was at stake in that testing time between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor when Britannia and her lion cubs stood alone. Its sentiment matched the challenge posed by Churchill: Does England mean as much to you as England means to me? If it does, we can press on, and win."

The piece reminded me of the deportations from Occupied Jersey in WWII. Many of those deported were to die in prison camps.

Most islanders hoped that that the Nazis would be defeated and that life in Jersey would return to normal. This hope became fervent after 1942, when orders came through for the authorities to deport 2,000 people from the island for internment on the European mainland.

Top of the list of those to be deported were Jews, ex-servicemen, and those born on Britain's mainland. On the day that these people were deported, a group of islanders went down to watch the ship depart. As the deportees sailed away they struck up a chorus of 'There'll Always be an England'. From across the waves they could hear the deportees joining in.

As Steyn says, the song :

"belongs to a pre-ironic England. On November 25th 1941 off the coast of Alexandria HMS Barham was torpedoed by a German U-boat during a visit to the battleship by Vice-Admiral Henry Pridham-Wippell. The ship lurched to its port side, the commanding officer was killed, and the vice-admiral found himself treading oil-perfumed water surrounded by the ship's men and far from rafts. To keep their morale up, he led them in a rendition of "There'll Always Be An England". The 31,000-ton Barham sank in less than four minutes, the largest British warship destroyed by a U-boat the course of the war. But 449 of its crew of 1,311 survived. "There'll Always Be An England" was written for that England."

Not the last time either. Here's another pre-ironic song that young Britons of eighty years back would have learned at school :

"Sons of the sea,
All British born,
Sailing the ocean,
Laughing foes to scorn.
They may build their ships, my lads,
And think they know the game;
But they can't beat the boys of the bulldog breed
Who made old England's name !"

And here it is in context. Prisoners of the Japanese, their (Japanese) ship has been torpedoed and hundreds are drowning :

Not far from us was an upturned lifeboat and seated astride it were many Jap officers, still clutching their briefcases and with their swords dangling from their sides. What a pretty sight to see and our lads did not hesitate in expressing their feelings; they made rude gestures to them and called them all the dirtiest names under the sun. Our boys were in good spirits now and someone suggested we cheer the bastards with a song, which we did by singing 'Rule Britannia' and 'Sons of the Sea' and despite our condition we had put them to shame.

And from an American who joined the British Army in 1915 :

There was, however, one burst of enthusiasm, as we started on our journey, which struck me as being spontaneous, and splendid, and thoroughly English. Outside the harbor we were met by our guardians, a fleet of destroyers which was to give us safe convoy across the Channel. The moment they saw them the men broke forth into prolonged cheering, and there were glad shouts of —

"There they are, me lads! There's some o' the little old watch dogs wot's keepin' 'em bottled up!"

"Good old navy! That's w'ere we got 'em by the throat!"

"Let's give 'em 'Sons of the Sea!'"

And they did. They sang with a spirit of exaltation which Englishmen rarely betray, and which convinced me how nearly the sea and England's position as Mistress of the Seas touch the Englishman's heart of hearts.

It was a confession of faith. On the sea England can't be beaten. Tommy believes that with his whole soul, and on this occasion he sang with all the warmth of religious conviction.

Different world - and different Navy - to that of Faye Turney.

Some BBC Confusion Methinks

The main item on Today's 7 am news was to the effect that "Peter Halliday is to be sentenced today after pleading guilty to abusing choirboys over a period of five years. But the Church of England knew that he had admitted the offences 17 years ago." An in-depth report (RealAudio) follwed at 7.35.

Quite right too that they should be het up (maybe not le mot juste) about it. Only the other day I was bemoaning the dreadful record of both the CoE and Catholic churches when it came to dealing with dodgy divines, who have tended to be quietly moved to another parish as the complaints come in.

But what's this item at 7.15 ?

"Academics have uncovered a book written by a man who could well be considered the first advocate for gay rights (RealAudio). We speak to Dr Hal Gladfelder of Manchester University."

John Humphrys even invited Dr Gladfelder, author of such seminal works as "Plague Spots: Deviance and the Body in the Writings of John Cleland" to give a potted history of homosexual rights in the UK, interrupting Dr Gladfelder at the mention of Roy Jenkins with 'that great reforming Home Secretary'.

The actual document discovered by Dr Gladfelder is called 'Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplified'. It is available to Project Muse subscribers. I'd be interested to see a copy.

Perhaps the BBC, so disturbed by people who abuse choirboys, should check out the definition of 'pederasty'.