Hitchens ...

On top form, describing why the survival of the Tories is so important to Labour.

Mentioning that he (Peter Kellner - LT) had himself been a Labour Party member for 33 years, he said: "I think it's really important that the Conservative Party does survive as a substantial brand, because there will always be a need for a centre-right party."

Oh, really, I wondered as he spoke. What might that need be, and who felt it? Mr Kellner read my mind and continued:" If the Conservatives were to go the way that Peter expects (and I think possibly would relish) I am frightened as to what kind of right-of-centre politics would then spring up...

"One of the great virtues of British politics...is that we have not had a substantial far-right nationalist xenophobic party in Britain. A substantial Conservative Party is our best bulwark against the kind of politics that I think could become very nasty".

The scary language about 'far-right', 'xenophobic' and 'nationalist' is just the jargon that Labour Party people like Mr Kellner use to describe those who want to leave the European Union, those who don't want mass immigration and those who think that criminals should be punished. As for things turning nasty, I think myself that this would be far more likely as long as there continues to be no mainstream party to speak for the people of Britain on such issues.

He is absolutely correct to see the Tory Party as the Left's best line of defence against the development of a party that was properly pro-British and socially conservative - and the Cameroon Tory MP Ed Vaizey, who was sitting on the same platform, did not leap in to disavow Mr Kellner's endorsement.

He has a point. The BBC believe that it was Rock Against Racism which saw off the National Front. I thinkit was more likely to be Margaret 'Swamped' Thatcher.

The most famous use (of 'swamp') was by Margaret Thatcher way back in 1979, when the immigrant communities in Britain were half their current size. She spoke of people’s fears about being ‘swamped by people of a different culture’ and was roundly assailed for this by people who pointed out that ‘ethnic minorities’ only made up a few percent of the British population. With hindsight, some on the left have acknowledged that this speech, so condemned at the time, cut the ground from under the feet of the anti-immigration far right, who disappeared off the political map for twenty years.

In the light of the above, I blogged on the Tory choices regarding the minority vote and multicultural Britain here.


There are therefore three choices open to the Tories.

a) embrace multiculturalism in a half-hearted fashion as done currently, with the conspicuous success described above, in the hope that the wheels will come off Gordon Brown's bus in spectacular fashion.

b) embrace it and really mean it - go beyond Teresa May's wildest dreams. Major on self-help and education (thank you Hindu voters) and family values (add the Muslim vote). Problems ? Most competent potential Indian/Hindu leaders are too busy making money to bother with politics, Muslim leaders care about politics, but it's intimately linked with religion. The other great risk is that you'll shed party members like autumn leaves, some of whom, perfectly decent people, will find a home in the BNP.

c) accept the fact that these votes are unattainable and all that springs therefrom. Become the political voice of the Native Brits, grab what remains of the white working class vote, campaign strongly against further immmigration while retaining a strictly One Nation approach (i.e. no discrimination of any kind, judging on content of character rather than skin colour etc) to those immigrants already here and their descendants. Risk - a sad farewell to the Letwins and Camerons of this world. Plus no prospect of power for the foreseeable. On the plus side, the BNP will wither away like the State in an ideal Socialist society.


Hitchens view of the Tories ?

The Tories are an unleadable party based on a hopeless, seething coalition of people who hate each other and have nothing in common to enforce unity in their ranks. Some want to leave the EU, some love the EU. Some want homosexual marriage.

Others want heterosexual marriage to have unique privileges. Some want more grammar schools. Some hate grammar schools. These are not positions over which it is possible to compromise. Were he the Archangel Gabriel, and he is not, David Cameron could not turn this rabble into an election-winning force. Nor, if he did so, could he govern the country with any conviction. He would be in office, but not in power.

This means that the urgent task is to replace the Tories with a movement that can beat New Labour and which believes in something, and to do this we must bulldoze the wreckage of the Tories out of the way.

The Risks of Passive Smoking

Christopher Booker :

In 1998 and 2003 came the results of by far the biggest studies of passive smoking ever carried out. One was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation. The other, run by Prof James Enstrom and Geoffrey Kabat for the American Cancer Society, was a mammoth 40-year-long study of 35,000 non-smokers living with smokers. In each case, when the sponsors saw the results they were horrified. The evidence inescapably showed that passive smoking posed no significant risk. This confirmed Sir Richard Doll's own comment in 2001: "The effects of other people's smoking in my presence is so small it doesn't worry me".

In each case, the sponsors tried to suppress the results, which were only with difficulty made public (the fact that Enstrom and Kabat, both non-smokers, could only get their results published with help from the tobacco industry was inevitably used to discredit them, even though all their research had been financed by the anti-tobacco cancer charity).

Robert Putnam

I blogged last year about Robert 'Bowling Alone' Putnam's research which suggested that the level of trust in a community is inversely related to the level of ethnic diversity.

He presented a paper with some of the data here.

(Professor Putnam is still optimistic though. As far as I can see the reasoning goes - America is a successful society. America has had lots of immigration. Therefore lots of immigration is the recipe for a successful society. It's not recorded if the Native Americans were asked for input.)


(name corrected - thanks)

Quote of the Day

Blognor Regis :

'why, generally, do the same people who reckon someone is totally British the instant he prises his fingers off the underside of a Eurostar almost always describe The Queen as "a German" despite her being able to trace her ancestors back to the 7th Century Kings of Wessex and 6th Century Scots ?'

Didn't Last Long, Did It ?

Financial Times :

Gordon Brown quietly slashed by a third this year’s hospital building and equipment budget in one of his last acts as chancellor.

Prompted by the tightness of the public finances, the new prime minister, who has placed the NHS as his “immediate priority”, cut the capital budget of the English NHS for 2007-08 from £6.2bn to £4.2bn. The move could delay the government’s hospital building and reconfiguration programme in England.

However, Mr Brown avoided equivalent cuts to the Scottish and Welsh NHS budgets even though the funding formula for the UK nations suggests they should have shared the pain. That decision leaves him open to criticism that he favoured patients in his home country.

...

The Treasury Friday night confirmed the NHS capital budget had been “adjusted”. But it indicated that, although it was not yet published, it would allocate the missing £2bn to spend to English hospitals over three years from 2008-09. No published health spending plans exist for these years yet, so hospitals will not be able to verify that the money is additional.

Well, everyone's been saying public spending is too high. But Mr Union Jack is getting off to a cracking start - by giving the English one last slap in the face as he leaves Number 11.

I can't see this story on Ian Dale or Conservative Home. Who will "speak for England" ?

Olga Craig

Middle name "gullible" .

Katie Gillespie gives a slight shrug. "It was a pretty average night out really, nothing overly out of the ordinary," she says, as she begins counting on her fingers.

"Let's see. Well, we saw the tail end of Ben Hitchcock's murder, the 16-year-old lad who was knifed to death in Beckenham. That was pretty scary. The gang of about 25 boys in dark hoodies scattering from the scene was really intimidating. Then, just after, we saw a kid injecting himself with heroin on the street. We drove up to traffic lights on our way to a bar and across the road there was a girl smashing a bottle and thrusting it into her boyfriend's neck. He was covered in blood and tried to get away by crawling across the bonnet of a car. But she came after him and stabbed it into his face and gouged it round and round."

The 18-year-old pauses for breath. (LT translation - she's thinking up her next story).

"Then, in the nightclub, there were a couple of fights. Most of the boys had knives. They keep them down their socks and you can see the bulge. That is the clue. If a boy approaches you and you see that, you walk away. Even the posh boys have them. Oh, and one lad chased another with an axe and a machete. He swung it into his head. He was covered in blood, too. I can't remember if that was before or after I saw another fight between two groups of boys.

In next week's Sunday Telegraph - the fifteen year old boy who sleeps with seven different women every night.

Muslims "Very Angry", Fear Backlash Part 4621

As ever, the BBC are foremost with the least predictable stories :

Mohammad Sarwar told BBC Scotland that he had received calls from people who had been threatened or targeted by abusive graffiti.

"I have spoken to a number of people from the Muslim community and the Asian community who feel very angry," he said.

"They're concerned about a backlash and that's why the emergency meeting has been called."

I feel we (and the BBC) need to keep a sense of proportion here. When Islamic terrorists killed 52 people on London trains and buses, what was the backlash ?

Someone said something nasty on a bus to a mate of Yasmin Alibhai Brownes, or was that after 9/11 ? A school dinner lady made an inappropriate remark to a Muslim child. An Afghan taxi-driver was badly beaten up in Kingston on Thames (I don't know if its ever been established if 7/7 was the motive). And an idiot in Edinburgh tried and failed to set alight to a mosque.

Perhaps before we beat ourselves up we should consider the deaths of 50-odd people killed by Islamic 'militants' on a train at Godhra, India in 2002, and the "backlash" of the non-Muslim population of Gujarat to that atrocity.

Kinda puts graffiti, even unpleaasant graffiti, into perspective. There are by the way, according to the BBC, some 500,000 Gujaratis living in the UK.

Council Election Results

via 24dash.com

Milton Keynes City - Whaddon: Lab 1108, C 914, England First 221, Lib Dem 129, Ukip 109, Ind 49. (May 2006 - Lab 1125, C 984, Lib Dem 220, Ukip 202, Better MK Ind 93). Lab hold. Swing 1.1% C to Lab.

England First voters are the difference twixt Labour and Tory votes. Looks like half their votes came from Tories and half from UKIP.

Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough - Slough: Lab 862, BNP 582, C 499, English Democrats 102, Lib Dem 83. (May 2006 - Lab 792, C 708, Lib Dem 346). Lab gain from C. Swing 6.3% C to Lab.

BNP from nowhere to second. Another English party takes votes. Lib Dems squeezed out of existence.

Pendle Borough - Craven: Lib Dem 632, C 260, Ind 241, BNP 237, Lab 76. (May 2007 - Lib Dem 736, Ind 428, C 405). Lib Dem hold. Swing 2.3% C to Lib Dem.

Lib Dems lose votes to Labour, Con lose more to BNP.

Sandwell Borough - Charlemont with Grove Vale: C 870, Lab 801, BNP 544, Lib Dem 238, Green 71. (May 2007 - C 1460, Lab 970, BNP 788, Lib Dem 671). C gain from Ind. Swing 4.9% C to Lab.

Haven't done the maths on this - the turnout seems to have dropped a lot. Labour gain Lib Dem and Green votes - share increases, Cons lose vote share, BNP tread water.

Wigan Borough - Tyldesley: Lib Dem 784, Lab 619, Ind 377, C 170. (May 2007 - Lib Dem 1838, Lab 447, C 370, Green 260). Lib Dem hold. Swing 19.6% Lib Dem to Lab.

Big Labour swing. The fabled 'Brown boost' ?

Fight of the Week

Ed Husain vs Ken Livingstone on the Today Programme (RealAudio). Not quite in the league of Galloway vs Graffy, but still good stuff.

I'll say this for Ken - his hatred of straight white England is totally non-ideological. If it was 1947 and Mervyn Paice and Clifford Martin had just been murdered, Ken would be welcoming Irgun delegates to Zionist conferences while explaining that the root cause of terror was our racist refusal to allow Jews into the ancestral homeland.

I read his "If voting changed anything" a few weeks back - surprisingly very tedious stuff, practically no politics in it, but lots of politicking. Organisation man par excellence. He'd have gone far in a big multinational. I noted his struggle with, and total defeat of, one John O'Reilly, who I would guess is probably the John O who ran various pro-criminal sites like MOJUK and NCADC from a Digbeth council flat.

Another ex-Jihadi, Hassan Butt, in the Observer :

"By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology."

Darwin Awards - Early Leaders

As my son said "They're letting down terrorists all over the world".

If every potential jihadi in the UK would just set fire to himself before crashing into Glasgow Airport I'd find it highly satisfactory.

The Philosopher's not impressed with the New Wave Of British Jihad (© Laban Tall 2007). Neither's Tim, who weighs in with some handy hints about oxidiser, while the Guardian offers advice on improving the anti-personnel effect of nail shrapnel.

But no-one seems to have noticed the as-far-as-I-know unique feature of this act - the first terrorist attempt against Britain which doesn't target England.

When the murderous bums in Labour MP Chris Mullin's Rolodex wanted a spectacular, they killed and destroyed in London, or Birmingham, or Manchester. They always avoided Scotland and Wales - after all, weren't they fellow-Celts and brothers under the English jackboot ?

Either the "Glaswegian sizzlers" are too dim to realise that England is the traditional venue for attempted mass murder, or they're ahead of the game as politicians, if not as engineers, and have realised that the rulers of Britain are actually Scots !


UPDATE - my more considered view :

The New Wave Of British Jihad is IMHO very poor quality compared with its illustrious predecessors. If the "Fantastic Four" were alive today they'd be turning in their graves.

I'd been wondering for a long time why science education was being dumbed down so much, to seeming government indifference.

The fact that these guys can't put anything that makes a bang together is a tribute to our education system. I understand now that Blair and Brown have been playing the long game - ensuring that anyone who hates them won't have the skills to do anything about it.

If those guys had gone to a decent privately run educational establishment - say a madrassa in Waziristan - they'd have been far more successful in their chosen career.



UPDATE2 - Lenin : "They are the underachievers of global terrorism".

Rachel : "Cottage-industry terrorism, by under-achievers who are too clueless to so the maths/science stuff about fuel bombs, and who can't drive without crashing into bins, - or so Darwinian-Award dim that they set themselves on fire before throwing the Molotov cocktail ..."


UPDATE3 - Houston, we have a problem.

UPDATE4 - William Rae, Chief Constable of Strathclyde, with a pre-emptive "Muslims fear backlash".

Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said he was also keeping "optimistic" that the men were not terrorists, and said he would be "astounded" if the facts proved otherwise.

In another development, it emerged that the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, where one suspect in the airport attack was taken, had to be partially evacuated after a "suspicious device" was found on his person. Police refused to confirm that it was a suicide belt.

Eyewitnesses at the airport spoke of incredible scenes as one of the car occupants attempted to throw what appeared to be a petrol bomb into the passenger area after the car rammed the doors.

He emerged from the vehicle and collapsed on the floor with his clothes ablaze, while another man who was in the car was restrained. After airport staff extinguished his burning clothes the man got up and fought with the police shouting "Allah, Allah".

Mohammad Sarwar, Labour MP for Glasgow Central, which is home to the largest Asian community in Scotland, warned against jumping to any conclusions.

I guess I should point out that these are all press reports - although a lot of the detail seems to be from eye-witnesses rather than the police. I still haven't got over the coverage of that dark-skinned guy, wearing a bulky padded jacket on a hot day, who ran from the police and jumped the barriers to get on a tube train.

Not a good sign ...

Bugaboo in the Guardian comments :

Gordon Brown's appointment of Digby Jones gives the game away really. We won't see an open door immigration policy, we will see the door being taken off its hinges.

"It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands"

Quentin Davies could be describing Britain rather than David Cameron.

"Under your leadership the Conservative Party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything. It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.

Although you have many positive qualities you have three - superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions - which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of national leadership to which you aspire and which it is the presumed purpose of the Conservative Party to achieve."

Didn't do Tony Blair any harm though, did it ? We get what we deserve.

In related news : Pride in Britain has fallen sharply over a generation, researchers said yesterday. The percentage of people declaring themselves "very proud" of the nation fell from 55 per cent in 1981 to 45 per cent now. The shift is attributed to younger people being less likely to have the "strong attachment" of older generations, the study by the National Centre for Social Research found. It said generational change had been more rapid in Wales and Scotland than in England, suggesting that young people may be more receptive to appeals from nationalist parties.

Oh deer : Success among stags was judged on the basis of how many fawns they sired.

Hmmm : The number of marriages in England and Wales has slumped to the lowest level on record, it was announced today. The 10% cent fall reversed three years in which an increased number of people had tied the knot. Provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics showed there just were just 244,710 weddings in 2005.

In London the decrease was even more marked, with marriages falling by 35%. The figures follow changes in the law by the Home Office in February 2005 to make it more difficult for non-Europeans to win the right to stay in Britain by marrying.

"Sometimes it is hard to avoid despair"

Mrs Dinnegan said she learned of Martin's murder when her eldest son received a call at their home in Holloway shortly after it happened. She said: "One of Martin's friends phoned to say Martin had been stabbed and they didn't think he was breathing. Apparently they were looking at each other the wrong way. "I've just been speaking to one of his friends - apparently, there were lots of boys fighting and he said he looked and Martin was lying on the ground."

Mrs Dinnegan said police initially told her it was a robbery and that his attackers were five black youths on bicycles. Police sources stressed, however, that detectives are keeping an open mind on the motive. Inquiries had revealed that Martin was with a group of friends who became involved in an altercation with another group of about 15-20 youths following "a verbal exchange".

"At first I thought it was to do with his mobile phone but it turns out that it’s not. The police have found his phone. He must have let it fall in the struggle."

"When they returned there was a row going on between Martin and a large group of boys - I heard 16. He saw Martin fall to the ground and he thought he had been knocked out. Martin was lying on his back and the boy tried to call him. He said he would never forget the colour of Martin's face. He was white then went blue. He said his eyes got scary and just staring, and he kind of gasped. They were calling his name, saying 'Martin wake up, wake up.' He opened his mouth to try and say something and then nothing came out. They tried to get him up because they didn't realise he had been stabbed in the back but the boy said to me he knew he was dead."

A man in his twenties was stabbed to death in east London earlier today, triggering the eighth murder inquiry in the capital in just seven days.

A man in his thirties has been killed in a London pub brawl as the wave of recent violence continued in the capital. Police said they rushed to the scene outside The Rocket Pub in Euston Road, north-west London, after reports of a fight shortly after 11pm last night. But they found a man, who has not yet been identified, dead at the scene.

From Natalie Bennett's (highly readable) Philobiblon blog:

I was standing this evening at the door of Bloomsbury Waitrose, watching the rain plummet down. It felt like the Bangkok wet season. Water was tumbling off the awnings and overwhelming the drains, reminding me of the mountains of Bali.

I had been trying to buy some asparagus. There was aspargus from Peru. There was asparagus from Thailand. Then when I dug around, on the top shelf, hidden away, there was some asparagus from the UK.

Sometimes it is hard to avoid despair.






Bloomsbury Waitrose is a couple of hundred yards from the Rocket pub, and about two miles from Tollington Way, where Martin Dinnegan - a child - was murdered. You do have to wonder about Ms Bennett's sense of proportion. I think a quote from W.M. Thackeray is in order here :

" ... these wonders and terrors have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see for ourselves, but we never did ..."

The Horror ...

The Blairy England blog is ceasing to post following the Assumption of the Blessed Gordon.

But you can still hear the authentic voice of the extruded-tofu sandal-wearing classes here. As the poet says "the dead children cry through the desert winds for justice". Certainly I was near tears.

Cui Bono ?

The newspaper world and his wife publicised the Centre For Crime and Justice Studies' report on Middle-Class Crime, whose thesis was presented as follows :

Daily Mirror : THE MORAL MAJORITY IS A MYTH - 6 in 10 middle class are cheats

Guardian : Meet criminals who cost UK £14bn: the middle class

Independent : Criminal nation: Two-thirds break law regularly

BBC : Law-abiding majority 'is a myth'

Now the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies is a pro-offender, anti-prison political lobby group. You'd expect the above to be bigging it up. After all, the point of the "survey" is twofold :

i) to blame an increasingly dishonest society on 'the encroachment of market values into areas traditionally viewed as held in trust for the community – such as health services or education' - in other words, blame school league tables and NHS reforms

ii) to emphasise that "the middle classes are the real criminals" - an argument which will be deployed to help keep thieves and violent offenders out of jail. It can't be long before the argument turns up on CiF.

I know it's a good headline, but, like the Times and Telegraph, the Mail has been suckered.

Are YOU part of the great middle class crime wave ?

UPDATE : Expat Yank - The real crime is against trees

"injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"

"I have been unable to find any report in the mainstream media that identifies the race of either the murder victim, or the perpetrators." says David Warren of this killing. He thinks the local media were right to downplay the racial angle.

"Even though the decision to selectively report the event in Austin was "politically correct," I agree with it. No public good would be served by stirring up racial animosity between America’s black and Hispanic communities."

I understand what he means, but I have to disagree. I think the one-way ratchet needs a little equalisation. Because otherwise we're stuck with what Larry Elder calls the "let's-emphasize-racism-while-minimizing-minority-crime" bias, in which there's only one approved villain - the poor old straight white male. To tweak a quote of MLK, I cannot hold a position which is more devoted to "order" than to justice; or prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive tension which is the presence of justice.

You can imagine how the BBC would have reported it had the "US crowd" or "angry Texas crowd" been white and the victim black or Hispanic.

Locals in Austin think the police and politicians are downplaying links between the the killing and Juneteenth celebrations, which commemorate the ending of slavery in Texas. No arrests have been made despite the large number of witnesses.

Up in Milwaukee, it's an Indian immigrant, Pat Kasthurirangaian, getting the Juneteenth celebratory treatment. Not nice, but at least he's still alive.

Some thoughtful comments among the thoughtless ones at the NYT.

"The Trouble With Blair Is That He's Terribly Good When It Isn't His Problem"

Mark Steyn remembers the June 2004 Iranian kidnapping of Royal Marines - and the national non-response :

Six Royal Marines and two Royal Navy sailors were intercepted in Iraqi waters, forcibly escorted to Iranian waters, arrested, paraded on TV blindfold, obliged to confess wrongs and recite apologies, and eventually released. Their three boats are still being held by the Iranians.

Mullahs 8, HMG nil.

The curious thing is the lion that didn't roar. Tony Blair has views on everything and is usually happy to expound on them at length - if you'd just arrived from Planet Zongo and were plunked down at a joint Blair/Bush press conference on Iraq or Afghanistan or most of the rest of the world, you'd be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the Prime Minister's doing 90 per cent of the heavy lifting and the President's just there for emergency back-up. Yet, on an act of war and/or piracy perpetrated directly against British forces, Mister Chatty is mum.

Likewise, Jack Straw. The Foreign Secretary goes to Teheran the way other Labour grandees go to Tuscany. He's got a Rolodex full of A-list imams. When in the Islamic Republic, he does that "peace be upon him" thing whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed, just to show he's cool with Islam, not like certain arrogant redneck cowboys we could mention. And where did all the ayatollah outreach get him? "We have diplomatic relations with Iran, we work hard on those relationships and sometimes the relationships are complicated," he twittered, "but I'm in no doubt that our policy of engagement with the Government of Iran… is the best approach."

Even odder has been the acquiescence of the press. If pictures had been unearthed of some over-zealous Guantanamo guards doing to our plucky young West Midlands jihadi what the Iranian government did on TV to those Royal Marines, two thirds of Fleet Street (including many of my Spectator and Telegraph colleagues) would be frothing non-stop.

Instead, they seem to have accepted the British spin that there's been no breach of the Geneva Conventions because the Marines and sailors weren't official prisoners of war, just freelance kidnap victims you can have what sport you wish with.

Why didn't Bush think of that one ?

What did Libby Purves say again ?

She was discussing Blair with "a friend, a retired military man of mild and amiable disposition", who told her "you see, the trouble with Tony Blair is that he's terribly good when it isn't his problem". The more Libby pondered this, the truer it seemed. She thought of his support for GWB after Sept 11, his Labour Conference speech when he abolished world poverty, saved Africa, built the New Jerusalem and caused the lion to lie down with the lamb, the graceful way he dealt with Prescott's pugilism - when the problem wasn't his he was assured and competent. She thought then of the fuel protests and his dealings with Sinn Fein/IRA over decommissioning, concluding that the only time he dithers is exactly when he shouldn't - when the buck stops on his desk.

We Bush warmongers have grown fond of Mr Blair: often, he's a better salesman for American policy than the President. But in the Shatt al-Arab incident for once he was on his own, and Britain's Number One seed was unable to return a single volley. Iran is emboldened, and that's bad news for everyone else.

Excuse me, Sir

Have you a license for that sporran ?

(via Mr E)

Harman ?

Good news. The Labour Party is in even worse state than I thought. How the hell did she win ?

Luke Akehurst reviewed the candidates a while back - entertaining comments.

Poll Pot sayeth "her championing of women and children's causes won her the job".

Black and White Unite and Fight Part 6539

On the Kentish borders, not so very far from "the racist murder capital of Britain", what appears to be a pre-arranged fight resulting in the death of 16 year old Ben Hitchcock aka Swipe.

Apparently "U MYT B GNE BT NT 4GOTIN INIT".

In Scunthorpe, Lincs, Iraqi Kurds are enlivening the early morning streetscape.

And back in the Smoke young Somalis provide an onboard entertainment experience that's even more distressing than Bongo Mike and Extremely Frank Jeremy's rendition of "This Train".

The ringleader of a vicious 'steaming' gang that attacked and robbed at least 50 passengers on south London trains was jailed indefinitely today. Somalian Abubaker Egah, 19, and up to six other youths, threatened to shoot and stab commuters as they rampaged through carriages stealing money and mobile phones.

One victim, Cecil Loader, 37, was punched, kicked and whipped with belt buckles in front of his pregnant wife after asking the thugs to stop smoking. In another attack, Egah shoved what appeared to be the barrel of a gun in a terrfied passenger's ribs, although it is not known if he used a real firearm. Police believe the mob of mostly Somalian teenagers preyed on more than commuters in just five weeks in April and May last year. In total, they are thought to have carried out more than 50 robberies as they roamed railways from Victoria to Sutton and Balham and the Croydon Tramlink.

Kingston Crown Court heard Egah, the fifth of 12 children, who moved to the UK from wartorn Somalia in 2003, was jailed for two months last year for assaulting a ticket inspector. Passing an indeterminate sentence for public protection with a minimum four year jail term today, Judge Duncan Matheson told Egah he would spend the rest of his life behind bars if his violent behaviour continued.

Three others of the gang were let off with non-custodial sentences. According to an old April 2007 copy of Metro "A member of a 'steaming' gang which robbed 38 railway passengers at random in a month was spared jail yesterday. Bajhed Adan was part of a violent 'crew' which threatened to shoot and stab commuters as they carried out their raids. The 18-year old Somalian, who has previous robbery convictions, was with ringleader Abubaker Egah when they robbed passenger Julian Powell of cash, a mobile phone, and a chain, jurors were told. Graeme Ford, prosecuting, said Egah shoved a gun barrel into Mr Powell's ribs but it was not clear whether the weapon was real or a replica ... Adan was sentenced to 240 hours community service... Two other gang members have already been handed 18-month supervision orders for robbery and assault."

Sisters are doing it for themselves in Croydon.

"The white girl just went into a car, pulled out a knife, and then stabbed one of the black girls. Some of the girls were screaming when it happened. The stabbed girl fell on the ground and was was just on the floor rolling about. I didn't hear her scream at all. A couple of the other girls were trying to help her. The girl that did the stabbing jumped back into the car, and the others got back in as well and closed the window and locked all the doors. Some of the other girls were trying to help the stabbed girl, and the other black girls were trying to get into the car. But they sat there for five or ten minutes in the car until the police arrived, and then they tried to drive off. The other girls were still fighting and the car windows were getting broken. The three white girls were in the car, and the windows were getting smashed, and then the police turned up."

I have no idea what kind of person accused Chelsea Bennett is. But according to the comments it's sister Maxine you need to watch out for.