NWOBJ (Junior Section)

Remember the Ravensthorpe Ravers, potentially (if convicted) 'Britain's youngest terrorists' ?

The trial continues :

The schoolboys attended Westborough High School, in Dewsbury, West Yorks, the home town of a number of the London Suicide Bombers, Leeds Crown Court heard. Ali's former religious education teacher and form mistress Nichola Colloby told the trial he school was 85 per cent Asian, but none of them was as religiously or politically obsessive as he was.

Mrs Colloby said: "Wasir said he was interested in becoming a politician and he was very interested in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was of the opinion that that he terrorist attack on America was a good, positive thing and he saw America as the enemy."

In art lessons his paintings concerned the teacher and he wrote the slogans 'President Bush must die' and 'Tony Blair must die'.

His year planner, in which ordinary pupils inserted holidays, birthdays or sports events, was confiscated as he wrote 'September 11, Twin Towers blown up – 3,000 dead!'

Mrs Colloby said all Ali ever wanted to discuss was the Muslim and American struggle. "It was quite disturbing really," she said. "He was vehement that his was the right opinion and he could not empathise with the other view."

Mrs Colloby, who has an American partner, told the jury that she entered her classroom in April 2006 to see Ali being restrained by fellow pupils.

On her white board in black marker were the words 'All Americans MUST die!'

She said: "Wasir was being held by one of the other students because some of the others wanted to be physically violent with him. One said 'Look Miss, look what Wasir has written on your board'. I was upset and angry."

She said the whole class knew her partner was American and their three-year-old daughter was half-American.

Hmm. Not a terribly empathetic chap, then. And what sensible children. Interesting look at the cultural front line - Mirfield Grammar School, where Wasir Ali enrolled to do A-levels.

The court was told that despite the initial concerns, Ali was enrolled to do A-levels in philosophy and ethics, history and psychology.

However, his vocal attitude in the classroom soon unsettled several members of staff – and within days they had expressed their concerns to Mr Hawkins.

The court heard Ali had become "excited and animated" by a picture of the 9/11 twin towers attacks which featured on one of his textbooks and had "challenged teachers in a really unhelpful way" about issues such as abortion and divorce. After a meeting with Mr Hawkins, Ali was eventually asked to go home in a bid to "cool him down a bit".
However he only attended once or twice more and eventually withdrew from the course completely.

I wonder if "challenged teachers in a really unhelpful way" means "challenged teachers" in the context of abortion and divorce. I must say it'd be interesting to know how teachers with 'partners', signed up to the whole liberal package, handle kids who've been taught, as British kids were once taught, that fornication and divorce are sins - and abortion is murder. I wish some of them - or even one of them - blogged.

But he doesn't seem to be quite as harmless as I'd supposed.

Ali, now 18, denies three charges of possessing articles for terrorist purposes, namely a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook, 3.5kg of potassium nitrate and a quantity of calcium chloride. His co-accused Dabeer Hussain, also 18, denies one count of possessing the cookbook, which lists how to make lethal bombs.

I still don't know what the calcium chloride's for - unless to remove water from some other compound, as it's generally used as a desiccant - anyone know ? - but 7lbs of saltpetre is enough to make a fair whack of gunpowder - a David Copeland-sized device, if not bigger.

UPDATE - both were acquitted.

Mr Ali, of Dearnley Street, Dewsbury, was also accused of buying and storing significant amounts of potassium nitrate and calcium chloride, chemicals which can be used in the preparation of a bomb. But the teenager said he was a "prankster" who was interested in experimenting with fireworks and making smoke bombs.

Mr Hussain, of Clarkson Street, Dewsbury, said he had been sent a copy of the Anarchists' Cookbook but had not read it and was not interested in politics. Speaking outside the court after the verdicts, Mr Ali said he was "extremely relieved" that he had been cleared of the charges but was angry about how he had been treated. "I believe that if I was not from a Muslim background, I would not have been prosecuted," he said. "I have had to live in fear of being branded a terrorist. I feel it was completely obvious once the police looked up the evidence that I had nothing to do with terrorism at all. Silly teenage chat and things I said at school were taken out of context and presented as if it was evidence that I was an extremist."

Keith Reid Update

Mr Reid, if you remember, "aged 42 and from Walsall, was in the town centre when he was confronted by a number of people. He was pursued by the group and suffered multiple stab wounds."

Someone's been charged :

A man has today appeared at court accused of attempted murder in Walsall. Abdul Malique, aged 41, from Cobden Street, Coventry, has been charged in connection with the stabbing of Caldmore man Keith Reid. Mr Reid, 42, remains in a serious but stable condition in Walsall Manor Hospital after suffering multiple stab wounds. It follows an attack near the junction of Wednesbury Road and Corporation Street just before midnight on Sunday. Malique appeared before Walsall Magistrates Court this morning. No plea was entered and the case was committed to Wolverhampton Crown Court.
Two other men, 21 and 24, have been bailed pending further inquiries. A 35-year-old has been released without charge.

Hmm. If this was a random attack then it's got 'racist attempted murder' written all over it. On the other hand, does a 41-year old travel from Coventry to stab a random gora in Walsall ? Aren't there any left in Coventry ? And isn't 41 a bit old for that sort of thing ?

Doubtless all will be made plain in time - as long as one monitors the local papers on a regular basis.

Hmm ...

Accidents do happen. But if you read this about an opposition leader in a third world country, what would you think ?

Austria's Haider dies in accident


Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a road accident, police say.

Mr Haider suffered severe head and chest injuries after his car came off the road in Carinthia, his political base.

Police investigating the crash said he had been driving alone.

As I recall, there are two right-wing parties in Austria. I forget the name of the chap who runs the other one, but in his shoes I'd be tempted to invest in a driver and some security.

US, UK Governments - "Send More Money"

Dear Taxpayer,

The $800 billion US and $450 billion British bailouts have proved highly effective pilot projects, and in some cases have seen share prices fall less quickly or even on occasions rise.

However, as was always made plain, these were only trials of the technique. Following today's largest one-day Dow fall since 1987, and continuing weakness in London, it has been decided that the pilot phase is over, and that some real money is necessary.

A task force consisting of the most highly regarded tax lawyers have for several days examined the options for moving us forward, and there are three :

a) a massive reduction in government spending. Ridiculous. Only a strong state can protect the vulnerable at this critical time. And don't you feel just a little bit vulnerable ? Of course you do. You need to be protected, don't you ? And told what to do. Spending cuts would plunge the world into depression and a new Dark Age.

b) a massive increase in taxes. Not so ridiculous, but may impact upon the wealth creators who more than ever are vital to the economy. Could plunge the world into depression and a new Dark Age. Nonetheless, some taxes will rise. Value Added Tax will rise on November 1st by the value of the rate of inflation (measured by the new Energy Price Index - currently at 24%).

c) a further substantial increase in liquidity - the so-called "Mugabe Miracle" option in its Weimar variant. Would wipe out all debts in very short time and massively enrich "us"* all. While this option successfully restarted the German economy in the late 1920s, some worry that it led to the persecution of minorities. We have examined the British and American situations and are firmly convinced that persecution, if anything is likely this time to be the other way round. The only serious risk is of a shortage of wheelbarrows. It is this third option that has been decided upon as our - as your - best way forward in the continuing financial uncertainty.

You need do nothing at this moment. Stay indoors and listen to the radio. We thank you for your patience. Your vote is important to us. You are being held in a queue. Your call may be recorded - as may your email, browsing habits and text messages.


Best Regards

G.W. Bush
G. Brown

pp Ug, the Giant Lizard, Secret Ruler of the World

* ("us" i.e. not you)

Food For Thought

Four links. At Conservative Home, Peter Hitchens does battle with Blu Labour and all its works. Comments are also illuminating. Peter Cuthbertson replies.

Solzhenitsyn's legendary/notorious 1978 Harvard address. While I don't quite see Russia as he does (the land of the spiritual, purified by suffering - the burned Georgian villages aren't exactly testament to this nobility), his criticisms of the West are spot-on.

"Relations with the former colonial world now have turned into their opposite and the Western world often goes to extremes of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the total size of the bill which former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient for the West to foot the bill."

Way back in 1978 they muxt have wondered what he was on about.

"But the blindness of superiority continues in spite of all and upholds the belief that vast regions everywhere on our planet should develop and mature to the level of present day Western systems which in theory are the best and in practice the most attractive. There is this belief that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. "

Which is why we're mouthing platitudes about Afghan democracy when in our own countries democracy is hollowing out. Read the whole thing.

Churchill's book The River War - the story of the reconquest of the Sudan and overthrow of the slave regime - is available at Project Gutenberg.

Hasidic Reggae

Now it all makes sense ... the locks ... the hats ... those 'woy-oy-oy' vocals ... all that Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah stuff ... does the whole of reggae come from Zionist Lionist roots ? Matisyahu.

Born In The Wrong Time

When Nicolas Sarkozy announced that one of his first reforms would be to remove the restrictions on Sunday trading which make a French Sunday so much like an English Sunday 50 - or even 30 years back, I thought that his government was going to follow in Margaret Thatcher's footsteps, liberalising and deregulating. Note that I do not necessarily think either of these are necessarily good in themselves. The Thatcher years were when our modern culture - or lack of - entrenched itself, and while this was by no means all her fault, the toxic synergy between her determination to win the economic war and her total defeat in the cultural war produced pretty much the British social landscape we see today. I'd hate to see France go the same way.

Another of Mrs Thatcher's reforms liberalised credit and started a thirty-year house price inflation, which has left us in a situation where someone on average earnings often can't afford to buy a house at all. Younger readers (are there any ?) may find this hard to believe, but before Mrs T, to get a mortgage from any financial institution you had to have been saving with them for several years, you needed at least 10% of the value, and the mortgage was restricted to, at the very most, three and a half times earnings. One person's earnings. The process was, fiscally and morally, conservative.

If this is true, the crash has intervened to save Sarkozy from producing his very own French version of the sub-prime mortgage debacle.

Sarkozy, 2007 :

"French households today have fewer debts than any other nation of Europe. Now, an economy that does not have sufficient debts is an economy that does not believe in the future, that has doubts about its abilities, that is afraid of tomorrow. For this reason I hope to develop mortgage credits for families and to ensure that the State intervenes to guarantee access to credit for sick people. I propose that those whose salaries are modest be permitted to guarantee their loan through the value of their home.

We must reform mortgage credits. If mortgages were easier to obtain, banks would focus less on the ability of the person to pay back his loan and more on the value of the property mortgaged. This would benefit directly all those whose revenues fluctuate, such as temporary employees and a great number of independent workers."

As Anne Kling, the source for this story, puts it :

"Voilà l’exacte description du processus qui a conduit nos chers amis américains au fond du gouffre financier" - which I loosely translate as "that's exactly how the Septics ended up in the merde".

I wonder what other toxic ideas are whirling round the Sarkozy cranium ? Can't he just stick to, in the immortal words of Jackie Ashley, trotting beside his delightful wife "with the dazed-codfish expression of a man who's just swallowed a suitcase of happy pills" ?


(via)

Fame At Last ?

Huzzah ! Coppers and other organs of the state all over the BBC - who are neither Sir Ian Blair not the late Mike Todd - nor any of his (approx) 10 mistresses, all of whom have been offered compassionate leave.

Today at 1.30 pm on Radio Four's Media Show - Inspector Gadget.

The Magistrate (who sounds just the well-educated liberal chap that his blog presents) and the Policeman can be heard on Radio Four's "Law In Action" - 18 minutes in. Nightjack gets a mention too.

"Upholding values which the market alone cannot generate"

Gordon Brown takes hypocrisy into hyperspace.

"My values - the values of the country - celebrate hard work, and effort, and enterprise, and responsible risk-taking ..."

Do they hell. The values of this government include rewarding irresponsibility and idleness, punishing hard work and self-sufficiency, and attempting to abolish risk in the guise of 'health and safety' - while completely ignoring moral hazard.

And the values of the country ? Hmm. 'Get, spend, drink, **** ?' Not all the country, but a substantial chunk. The son of the manse has done his bit to stamp on the remnants of a once-Christian culture.

For rewarding irresponsibility and idleness, see "child poverty" and the wider benefit culture. As the great Norman Dennis puts it in his 'Families Without Fatherhood', the State, through taxation, takes the consequences of a wrong choice of partner - " ...in sexual conduct the cast of mind is that I please myself, but if anything goes wrong, you must be responsible that my children come to no harm. In effect such a biological father is saying, "You must be a socialist so that I can be an egoist. My baby is the hostage through which I, who will not do my duty, will hold you to your duty."

Is it responsible to define smackheads and alkies as 'disabled', entitled to extra benefits ?

Gordo's plan to abolish child poverty, given the lack of will to do anything about the numbers of one-parent families, amounts to a blank cheque made out to the underclass and drawn on the taxpayer - those "hard-working families" he intends to rip off. Where else can he get the money from ?

"Effort" and "enterprise" will be taxed and regulated - and as we have seen, waltzing round both tax and regulation isn't too difficult for a large financial services organisation, but much harder for a metal-basher in Bloxwich - which is why our manufacturing is disappearing.

Looking at the calls all round for interest rate reductions, it looks as if the plan is to mitigate recession via inflation. Having destroyed half of private final salary pensions, he'll trash the value of the other half via inflation, which bears hardest on those on fixed incomes. Gordon, like Sir Ian Blair and co, have gold-plated, inflation-proof index-linked final salary pensions.

Poor Prudence was put on crack and onto the streets a long time back. Now she's a pathetic figure, prepared to do anything for a fiver and odds-on to soon be found dead in a bedsit.

God, I despise these people.

Who Attacked Keith Reid ?

Stories like this bother me.

A man is fighting for his life after being stabbed several times in Walsall. The 42-year-old, named locally as Keith Reid, was chased through the town centre by a gang of men before being attacked in Wednesbury Road at around 11.55pm yesterday. He was taken to Walsall Manor Hospital with multiple wounds where his condition is described as serious. Police say he had been chased from the town down Corporation Street before being attacked by the gang.

Poor guy. Imagine that - a bunch of people with knives chasing you, like they chased poor Martin Dinnegan. More at the Mail :

The man, aged 42 and from Walsall, was in the town centre when he was confronted by a number of people. He was pursued by the group and suffered multiple stab wounds. The victim was today said to be in a serious condition. The incident happened in Wednesbury Road near its junction with Corporation Street and Milton Street.

Is this just a completely random attack ? Who were the attackers ? Anyone know ?

Ravensthorpe Ravers - BNP Bomb Boys

More on the New Wave of British Jihad (© Laban Tall 2007).

When Dewsbury's Hammaad Munshi, "Britain's youngest terrorist" (do I sense the genesis of a new reality TV show, perhaps on Al-Jazeera - "Britain's Got Bomb-Making Talent" ?) was convicted of terrorist offences in August, I wondered if he was the same chap who'd featured in this story a year ago. I commented :

The age is right. I may be wrong, but I reckon Mr Munshi is the same guy. How many more teenagers in Dewsbury have been charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 ? I'd like to hope it was only one more, but if anyone knows different please tell me.

Well, it was two separate cases. Are these guys linked to the Ravy Terror Squad ?

Two West Yorkshire school boys cooked up a plot to blow up a BNP building, Leeds Crown Court heard. Dabeer Hussain and Waris Ali, now both 18 and from the Ravensthorpe area of Dewsbury are accused of possessing a terrorism manual called the Anarchists Cookbook on their computers and of discussing a plan to spy on and blow up a building connected to the far right politicals group, British National Party, the jury at heard.

Sounds sinister. What exactly did they do ?

Ali, of Dearnley Street, Ravensthorpe, Dewsbury is also accused of downloading a copy of the Proper Anarchists Cookbook onto his computer and possessing small amounts of potassium nitrate and calcium chloride, the court heard.

Both chemicals can be used in the preparation of a bomb, the court heard.

Well, you can certainly make a bang with potassium nitrate, finely ground charcoal and sulphur - aka gunpowder, but calcium chloride ? If these guys know how to make explosives out of that, GCSE chemistry is less dumbed-down than I thought. Not only that, but I'm worried - as there are a couple of pounds of the closely-related sodium chloride in our kitchen - and a couple of hundredweight of the stuff in a big yellow bin at the roadside.



Lancaster jihadis position a massive roadside sodium chloride device in an unsuspecting Cumbrian village.

I digress - where was I ? Ah yes ...

At the time of the offences between May 2006 and September 2007 Ali was still 15, and Hussain of Clarkson Street, Ravensthorpe was just 16.

Looks like Mr Munshi's "Britain's youngest terrorist" title is in danger (update - both acquitted).

As I've said before, I'm a little - more than a little - concerned about the legislation under which you can be charged with possessing items "likely to be of use for terrorism" - a category so vague and wide-reaching as to render pretty much the entire UK population liable to arrest. A road map ? A Stanley knife ? Every arable farmer with a bag of ammonium nitrate is a potential mass-murderer. Perhaps they should be taken into preventive custody.

Motivation is all. Possessing items "likely to be of use for terrorism" is such a broad concept that in practice the 'likeliness' is decided not by what the items are, but what the accused may have wanted to do with them. The 9/11 murderers used Stanley knives and Microsoft Flight Simulator, but those of us who possess both are unlikely to get arrested at 5 am unless we start posting on jihadi websites while simultaneously researching flight deck door locking mechanisms and when the stewards bring the pilots coffee.

Similarly Omar Altimimi got nine years despite the police admitting that "we will never know exactly what Altimimi was preparing to do". He had built up a library of terror-related literature - but on those grounds Professor Paul Wilkinson should be inside.

You see what I mean ? Young men have enjoyed making things go bang ever since gunpowder was discovered. I'm sure these two are very naughty boys - but does possession of information about making explosives, plus a very small quantity of an oxidiser, make these young men terrorists ?




("NWOBJ" and "New Wave of British Jihad " are registered trade marks (© Laban Tall 2007))

How Could I Forget ...

You may recall my post last week on all the female voices I've loved ... how could I have overlooked this slice of Lovers Rock ... Jean Adebambo's beautiful "Paradise". Absolute bliss.

Dooomed !

Reminded me a little of Black Wednesday, this afternoon. It tends to put you off your work when the FT index is heading southwards like Captain Scott and you're wondering which bank will still be there this time next year - and will it include yours ?

An 8% hit on the FT is a lot for one day ... but the Fannie Mae CDS auction doesn't seem to have been too bad. Maybe it'll all bounce back tomorrow. Around 4 pm I was thinking about buying a rotovator, digging a cellar and getting a shotgun license. Have prices of fortified compounds in Montana fallen ?

Boris n' Blair - and "minority officers"

I don't know. Wouldn't it have been better to leave Ian Blair twisting in the wind, while the people he spent half his career appeasing queued up to kick him ?

Boris is moving to try to defuse concern and prevent the usual 'racist Tories' meme re-establishing itself. But surely the lesson of history is that such attempts are doomed to failure. If the most PC PC (I reckon Ken Jones of ACPO now succeeds to the title) in history ends up being called a racist, what chance does anyone else have, particularly under a Tory Mayor ? Some people, just like the late Keith Hudson, won't be satisfied.

Some soft-spoken 'black' activist from the Met was on the Today programme, saying that minority officers were particularly overrepresented in disciplinary cases.

I'd imagine he's right. That's certainly the case for minority doctors, nurses and lawyers. If you see a BBC story 'doctor struck off for sexual assault', say, the guy's (and it will be a guy) unlikely to be called Dave Smith. They are indeed over-represented. The question is - why ?

One of my hobby-horses is the question of culture. For some reason UK liberals believe (or claim to) that, no matter whence you hail, the moment you set foot on UK soil the mystic properties of Old Albion (or Cymru or Alba or Erin) flow up through your shoes and make you just like the natives - in terms of your propensity to evil. But in the case of your propensity to good, all the good bits of your culture magically stay, enriching the poor natives by the power of diversity.

Call me an idiot who doesn't understand how that works. I suggest that if you recruit, say, 500 police officers from a country - say Country X - famous for the corruption of its police, that the level of corruption in that group will be higher than in the police as a whole. It probably won't be as high as back in the old country (such magical-soil features as the likelihood of getting caught and of punishment will probably reduce the levels) but it'll still be higher than the statistical average. At which point someone will be able to point to the higher-than average level of disciplinaries and cry "racist !"

None of the above would apply in the presence of a strong host culture into which the newcomers chose to integrate. But that's just what we haven't got. I imagine "we're British - we don't do that" is probably the kind of phrase that gets you chucked out of the Met.

Take a look at Transparency International's Corruption Index.

The UK is 16, having been knocked down because of the arms-to-Saudi affair.

India 85
Sri Lanka 92
Jamaica 96
Nigeria 121
Pakistan 134
Bangladesh 147

(It's not as if liberal lefties aren't aware. When Mirza Tahir Hussain was due to be executed in Pakistan, everyone from the Muslim Council of Britain to the Guardian told us how corrupt and dodgy the Pakistani courts were. To its credit, the Pickled Politics site often covers corruption in India.)

These are the countries with probably the highest number of non-EU immigrants into the UK. Absent the kind of melting-pot integration characteristic of say the US 1900-1970 (and even then there remained distinctive cultural groupings, in say, New York), you'd expect those kind of corruption index figures to, at least to some extent, migrate with them.

That's not to say that there won't be some cases of real racism directed at black officers. We are flawed beings. But if natives fearful of the 'racist' tag retreat from enforcing what I would call "British standards", it's likely that we'll become less like Denmark and Sweden, and more like India or Bangladesh.


UPDATE - Steve has a slightly different (but not wildly divergent) view at the Pub Philosopher.

Words Fail Me ...

Welsh AM Adam Price. Give me David Pryce any day.

What I actually suggest is that this touring ‘home nations’ occasional side is superseded by a standing European team which would play a series every two years, alternately home and away, against a Southern Hemisphere XV: a sort of Ryder Cup for rugby. I have to confess that my motivation for this is half sporting, half identity-politics. For me, it’s difficult to identify fully with a Lions side which even with the name change in 2001 is something of a (crooked line-out) throw back to a by-gone imperial age ...

This kind of posturing really gets on my wick. This son of Rhys is AM for Carmarthen East, a constituency which, like all of South-West Wales, is being transformed by English refugees moving along the conduit of the M4. Culturally, linguistically, demographically, the area is being changed - becoming less and less Welsh.

This guy is supposed to be a nationalist. One who doesn't care about what happens to his people or their land, but thinks its really important that the Lions shouldn't be 'British'.

And if you can't identify with this (no matter that I'd like to see more Welsh players) then I don't think you actually love rugby.


(via Sam Tarran)

Greece - it's a rising tide of diversity

IHT :

About 80,000 migrants have traveled to Greece this year and decided to stay illegally, according to the authorities, who say the country can no longer handle the task of guarding the European Union's southeast flank.

While initial problems with the flood of migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are desperate to enter Europe centered on the Aegean islands, migrants are now wreaking havoc in the capital.

The historic center of Athens has been riven by several street battles in recent months, involving what the police characterize as rival groups, often involved in dealing drugs, from Afghanistan, Iraq and war-torn African countries wielding swords, axes and machetes.

After 11 people were hurt in one such brawl in late August, the police began 24-hour patrolling of the area. Store owners and residents are leaving the busy central shopping and restaurant district.

According to a residents' group, dozens of people renting in the area have left their homes in the past year, and several stores have closed, chiefly small but long-established neighborhood conveniences like bakeries, hardware stores or delicatessens.

Hmmm. How could this come about ?

Georgiadis said that Greece supported the stricter line on immigration being promoted by the bloc's French presidency. "There will not be another wave of legalization of immigrants in Greece in the near future," Georgiadis said, referring to the three programs that have granted work and residence permits to some 500,000 migrants, most of them undocumented foreigners - at least half from Albania - since 1997.

Well, you legalised the previous half-million - just like Boris Johnson's policy director Anthony Browne now wants to in the UK - and you're surprised you get more ?

The unrest in Athens has triggered a backlash from the far-right party Laos, whose popularity has jumped to 5.4 percent in opinion polls from 3.5 percent when it entered Parliament a year ago.

"The city center has been taken hostage by gangs of illegal immigrants with knives - isn't it about time we asked ourselves if we have too many of them?" a Laos legislator, Antonis Georgiadis, said during a recent television debate. He is not related to the immigration official.

Although some on the Greek left have warned against demonizing migrants, the Athens prefect, Yiannis Sgouros, who belongs to the main opposition Socialist party, Pasok, refers to an "explosive problem" in the heart of the capital, where thousands of migrants living in cheap hotels and derelict houses struggle to find work.

"Illegal immigrants are becoming pawns to local drug barons and are forming gangs," Sgouros wrote last week in a letter to Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis. He added: "Something has to change or the area will become an arena for race clashes and gang wars."

I suppose it might. But if the British experience is anything to go by, most of the natives will have fled the capital by then.

These I Have Loved

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.


(Piano by D.H. Lawrence

My earliest childhood memories are of my mother's beautiful soprano singing as she moved about the house. She sang all the time when she was on her own - songs like the Faery Song from Rutland Boughton's now-forgotten opera The Immortal Hour or "This is my lovely day" from Bless the Bride - big tunes with big notes to hit and to hold. At Christmas she'd sing "O Little Town of Bethlehem" to Walford Davies' beautiful tune "Wengen". "Again, again !" and we'd sit entranced by the words, the music and the voice.

She'd sing classics from Gershwin to Eartha Kitt, but it was the sad songs like "Annie doesn't live here anymore" that really got to me.

Since then most of my favourite voices have been female.

Up until I left home, it was just the music - heard on radio - that would hit me; I'd know nothing at all about the performers. As a child, the girlie groups - Chiffons, Shirelles, Ronettes. In my early teens, when boys tend to go for the shouty rather than the introspective, I loved Grace Slick's (W) voice on the early Jefferson Airplane singles. Airplane fans were few and far between in my school year - I never did find any others.

A project on radio aerials in the physics lab in the summer term, tuning our hand-built receiver , 'Stop ! Leave it there a minute ! Who is that voice ?'' the voice belonging to a Melanie Safka.

"We were so close, there was no room,
We bled inside each others wounds,
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace"

What was she on about ? We didn't have a clue, but did it matter ? The voice ! The voice !

Wandering across a cricket field and hearing Maddy Prior singing "The Blacksmith" - would you believe released as a single - drifting from a car window. Voice like a synthesiser, push the slider and up (or down) goes the note. I'd never heard anyone hit such long, pure notes with so little vibrato.

And Sandy Denny (W)- the musical love of my life, along with Vaughan Williams. Hearing 'The Sea' at a sixth form party was the start. Try this beautiful performance of 'Banks of the Nile' - still meaningful today, as our young men head for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Off to college and a world of new people and new music. Nico, beautiful, doomed and mad as a fish. Another Anglo-Saxon princess with a harmonium, folkie Helen Watson of Muckram Wakes. Janis Joplin, dead before I discovered her shouty splendour - this manic, Violet-Elizabeth having a breakdown performance shows you where Robert Plant got half his vocal mannerisms. The glorious Scots folk singer Ray Fisher - I can see I'll have to get "Pride of Glencoe" or "Mill O'Tifty's Annie" onto Youtube.

Another woman with a voice like a synthesiser, strangely detached and slightly soulless but still beautiful - Karen Carpenter. Which leads me onto another weakness of mine - music that's slush, but lovely slush - in which the 70s and early 80s seem peculiarly rich - Starland Vocal Band, Captain and Tennille, Catherine Howe, Marshall Hain's "Coming Home", even (whisper it) the mighty Dollar.

Then the mid-late 70s, the disco and reggae queens ! The Lovers Rock anthems of Carroll Thompson and Louisa Mark, Chic, Evelyns King, and Thomas, the divine Donna . Another slightly detached but compelling vocal - Ingrid Mansfield-Allman on "Southern Freeez". The punks didn't have any real divas - sorry, Souxsie, although I was always rather fond of Poly Styrene - but the new wave that followed had a number of wonderful little-girl voices - Blatt of And The Native Hipsters, Clare Grogan of Alterered Images, Alison Statton of Young Marble Giants, Jane. I discovered country music - Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells.

And I kept finding classics, floating up somehow through whatever was current - Doris Day singing "You're My Thrill", Peggy Lee "The Folks Who Live On The Hill", Nina Simone's "Since I Fell For You", Dionne Warwick's Bacharach and David Songbook.

Vashti Bunyan, long before she was re-released - tapes copied and copied again. Julianne Regan (W), who's singing on All About Eve's "Martha's Harbour" comes as close to the feel of a Sandy Denny vocal as you can get.

And it continues. While my life revolves now round children rather than music, let me just credit Portishead's "Glory Box" (what does she mean ?), Olive's "You're Not Alone", the Sneaker Pimps' (unpleasant name, great singing) "Six Underground".

There are - and will be - more - this post being a bit of a work in progress.

Now old age is creeping up, I'm starting to explore some of those operatic vibratos I despised so much in comparison to Maddy Prior thirty-five year back. I can't find a decent version of "O Had I Jubal's Lyre" on the web, but cop Leontyne Price's "Care Selve". To think I had to be nearly 50 before I discovered Handel.

Let's leave you with one my mother would have loved if she'd known it. While I think Frederica von Stade's is the classic, this version of Canteloube's La Delaissado, by the late Netania Davrath, is pretty gorgeous. Enjoy.

Rod vs Rachel - the gift that keeps on giving

The former Mrs Liddle takes another crack at her ex ...

But when it came to choosing a date, Rod prevaricated and told the vicar that we couldn't get married that summer because much of the countryside was shut because of an outbreak of foot and mouth.

Ridiculous, of course, and probably I should have realised then that something was seriously wrong.

In retrospect, I should have been firmer with him, read him the riot act. But Rod has a very powerful personality - that's part of his attraction - and I'm not great at confrontation.

She's learning fast, though.

I decided I would have it out with the vicar who married Rod to someone else. I explained I was upset that he had married my ex-husband in his church.

'The breakdown of any marriage is very painful,' he told me. 'I have experience of it myself.'

'But she broke us up,' I complained. 'As far as I'm concerned, they are two parishioners who came to me to be married and I could see no reason not to. The wedding is legal,' he said.

He sounded very cold and matter-of-fact. I told him that if he had bothered to look Rod up on the internet it would have taken him two minutes to find out the truth.

'I don't Google,' he replied disdainfully.

I asked him if he would have conducted the ceremony if he had been aware of the facts. He replied that he didn't sit in judgment of others.
'So God doesn't mind if we sleep with other people's husbands?' I cried in distress.

He told me that he didn't think there was any point in carrying on the conversation.

It has to be said that Alicia is rather fetching. You can see that a man might be tempted. I wonder if she's related to Rosa or the late Walter ? I presume not, as they're Catholics. Rod would have needed an annulment Henry VIII-style to get a Catholic wedding, and with two kids already he'd probably have got the same dusty answer that Henry got. You never can tell though - the Church moves in mysterious ways.

More on the Wod'n'Alicia saga here, here, here and here.

Child Poverty ?

You may have noticed lately the publicity of the Campaign To End Child Poverty, a coalition of tax-payer funded organisations conducting a political campaign aimed at getting taxpayers to stump up more cash to relieve said evil. One of the greatest achievements of the UK "left", if I can dignify it with that term, is that they've managed to get the taxpayer to pay for so much of their political work over the years.

As child poverty is measured on a relative basis (beware - most of the wikipedia stuff on the subject is pretty poor), you could abolish it tomorrow by reducing the incomes of those earning more. No child starves in the UK, or goes to school with cardboard in their shoes, unless the parents are just plain bad. Absolute poverty is pretty much non-existent - probably 80% of the world's population would consider UK 'poverty' to be unimaginable luxury.

80% of the population of Mirpur or Bangladesh would also consider it a pretty good deal. I invite you to take a look at child poverty by constituency or the BBC map of same.

Do we se a pattern here ? Ladywood, Bethnal Green, Bradford ?

I wrote a while back :

You can also use the bottom graph - male/female employment ratios for working age people - as an approximate proxy for childrearing. Pakistani/Bangladeshi women of working age are characterised as 'economically inactive' i.e. they're raising kids, not trying for that Senior Co-Ordinator role. What did Sayyid Qutb say again ?

"(if) she prefers ... using her ability for material productivity rather than the training of human beings, because material production is considered to be more important, more valuable and more honourable than the development of human character, then such a civilisation is ‘backward’ from the human point of view ..."

A combination of low wages and high numbers of children, as any father of four can tell you, means relative poverty compared to those in low-child, two-earner families. The statistical spearhead of the child poverty campaign are the large numbers of Muslim parents who consider the development of human character more important than material production. And I mean parents in the plural. Most of the native children in poverty will be the children of single mothers.


Another thing. These children are not culturally poor. They know who they are (not to mention who they're not) and where they come from, what's right and what's wrong. They're taught from an early age the great texts of their religion - in classical Arabic at that. Compared to their relatives in Sylhet they're physically rich - compared to their fellow poverty sufferers in the smack-ridden disaster zones of the Valleys or the estates of Ayrshire they're culturally rich too.

Damn Fool ...

At last. The very wonderful (and sadly deceased) Exuma on Youtube, with the equally wonderful "Damn Fool" . Now if only someone would post Marsha Hunt's "Oh No ! Not the Beast Day !"