Stories

2nd Lt. Hulbert Robertson

A story.

Relatives of an American Air Force crew whose plane crashed into a west Wales hillside in World War II have unveiled a memorial in their honour.

The bomber hit the slopes of Carn Llidi near St Davids in thick fog on 4 June 1943, killing all four on board. One of the aircraft's propellers, found on the hillside, forms part of the memorial at nearby Whitesands Beach.

The daughters of pilot Robert Lawrence and navigator Hulbert Robertson travelled to Wales for the ceremony. On Saturday - 62 years to the day of the crash - they were joined by civic and military representatives to unveil the memorial and plaque.

The story.

In late summer, 2003, while skimming through my hometown Texas newspaper, the Comanche Chief, I was surprised to see a name I recognized. A man in England, I read, had written in search of relatives of 2nd Lt. Hulbert H. Robertson, who served in the Army Air Corps in World War II. I knew that name well. Hulbert was my mother’s first husband, father of my half-sister Gwen. He died on June 4, 1943, when his B-26 Marauder crashed into a Welsh hillside. He was buried in the American Cemetery near Cambridge, England.

Gwen was not quite two years old when her father died, too young to remember him. My dad raised her and loved her as his own, but from early on I knew that my big sister and I had different biological fathers. Her daddy was the smiling young soldier whose picture hung on the parlor wall of his parents’ old dog trot cabin in the country near Comanche.

I knew he’d died in some war, and that it made people sad to talk about him, but they were proud of him just the same. As I got older and understood more I thought it was kind of tragically romantic. 2nd Lt. Robertson would remain forever young and handsome and brave, and those he left behind would have only happy memories of him.

Gwen grew up, married, had children and grandchildren. They knew, in an abstract way, that they’d had another grandfather, but he was just a young man in a photo to them, a part of history they knew little about. Now, out of the blue, someone, a complete stranger from another country, was asking about him.

Read the whole thing.

She said she got a little shiver every day when she drove by the cemetery and thought about those boys, and she got a bit teary eyed as she talked about it. So did we. That would happen a lot during our trip.

Happens when you read about it too. Shirley Wetzel can write (and she knows Kinky Friedman).


One of my Welsh relatives spent many years investigating WW2 crash sites in the North Wales mountains. I was fascinated by the hardware he'd retrieved, and though the crews might be always in your mind as you hold a part of their aircraft, it's easy to forget the families changed forever by the death of their young men. There are photos of the visit here. And as well as Lt. Robert Lawrence, Flight Officer James Grady Jackson, 2nd Lt. Hulbert H. Robertson and Sgt. William "Billy" Brown, there's another hero in this story - the Port Talbot fireman and aviation history buff Steve Jones, who contacted the relatives, put them up at his place, and seems to have no Web presence at all.

More photos and more about the crash on the B26 Marauder site, including one with Mr Jones in it. I wonder if he wrote the text ? The stories on the site's guestbook are riveting.

Female Foeticide Legal In Sweden

The Local

The woman, who already had two daughters, requested an amniocentesis in order to allay concerns about possible chromosome abnormalities. At the same time, she also asked to know the foetus's gender.

Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the foetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

The board has now responded that such requests and thus abortions can not be refused and that it is not possible to deny a woman an abortion up to the 18th week of pregnancy, even if the foetus's gender is the basis for the request.

Call me a cynic, but I wonder who exactly this will benefit ? You have to (if you're me) jump to the conclusion that people who really, really want a boy might be involved.

I've not thought too much about sex ratios in relation to UK demography and mass immigration. It might be that we're not only talking about 23% of schoolchildren, but more than 23% of boys. I wonder what the sex ratios are for these births ?

(via David Duff)

Hmmm...

I've noticed the odd comment from a chap called 'Anatolie' turning up in places like CiF and now on this blog - odd because the spelling is so idiosyncratic it almost seems deliberate.

"I think that the brittish system of imigrasion can bee compered with the subpraime morgage scheme. Some peoples has benefitted on it for some time but in the end the countrie wil sufer when the scheme colapses wich of corse sooner or later it wil."

I don't know. He can spell 'system' and 'scheme' but not 'will'. He's the Nigel Molesworth de nos jours.

If it's deliberate it seems like a lot of hard work for not a huge result. Maybe he needs time to find his blogging voice, but as of now he's no Manolo or Stanislav.

But either way, he's taking it seriously enough to have started his own blog - the Anatolie Examiner.

Hello, my name is Anatolie. I live in Australia, where I move to about one year ago. I have desided to start this webpage to print articles from the newspaper that I think is good and i will make coments to. I will also print storys that are funny and will make people lauhgh to.

And as he links to me, the least I can do is link back.

Poetry Corner

Nick Drew at CityUnslicker (who I believe brought us the One-Eyed Yellow Scotsman) turns his attentions to Lewis Carroll :

“You are odd, Father Gordon,” the young man said,
”And your party is in disarray;
And now your delusions have gone to your head –
Do you think you should call it a day?”

“In my youth,” the Prime Minister said in reply,
“My integrity mattered a lot;
But, now that it’s obviously gone by-the-by,
Depart? I shall certainly not!”

He's At It Again

Edmund Conway in the Telegraph on demography and pensions. The man's an idiot. Not only does he take the Dave Osler view of immigrants as tax-producing units and nothing more, he even thinks the chav mothers of the UK will help.

thanks partly to our relatively open immigration policy and partly to a rise in births, Britain's old age dependency rate is set to increase far less rapidly than that of any other major country between now and 2050, according to UN projections.

In and out of wedlock, babies are being born at a higher rate than for many years, and every new child represents another prospective taxpayer to help reduce that bill.

Teenage pregnancies may bemuse nonagenarians such as Gertrude Janeway, and they may cause hand-wringing among social commentators; but in economic terms, they may be the best hope we have for solving the impending fiscal timebomb.

The man's practically certifiable.

Firstly, the underclass kids will all be on benefits themselves in 18 years. The least-educated mothers are the ones having more kids.

Secondly, according to the ONS figures on unemployment by ethnicity, all immigrant groups have lower employment rates than the natives. Now you can blame that on the evil racist Brits, but you can't have it both ways. They can't be at once both poor victims of unemployment AND doing the jobs the natives don't want to do.

Thirdly, both immigrant and underclass members who are in employment are likely to be in low-paid jobs where they cost more in government expenditure than they pay in taxes.

Fourthly, and this is conjecture rather than established fact, I would be amazed if the tax take was the same for all ethnic groups, even when controlling for income. Those in cash trades, taxis, catering etc have far more opportunity to do things 'off the books' than someone working 9-5 for an FTSE100 company. I don't know if the Revenue have done any research (probably not - and if they have it'll be in a locked leadlined safe somewhere), but I would venture the suggestion that as time goes on and the composition of the UK changes, the percentage tax take per economically active person in the UK will fall.

It's a pity his prescriptions are so bloody awful, as his diagnosis is spot-on :

In the 1940s and 1950s, Britain went, via the Beveridge Report, from being a warfare state to a welfare state. We may take the current system for granted now, but it was nothing short of a massive economic experiment, one forged in the shadow of terrible suffering. Moreover, it is a system that has been in operation, in its full embodiment, for less than a lifetime.

Unfortunately, it has been an experiment based on unrealistic assumptions about Britons' longevity and their fecundity. Since the 1940s, life expectancy at birth has climbed from just over 60 years to just under 80. And fertility rates, which peaked at an average of almost three children per family in the baby boom era of the 1960s, have now seen a drop to below two children per family for three decades.

In other words, the cultural revolution kicked in and babies went out along with churchgoing and wearing a tie on weekends.

Until relatively recently, most funds were designed either as defined benefit schemes, with pensioners given a guaranteed payment no matter how much they paid in, or plain unfunded schemes, with pensioners paid from the current account.

Several companies suffer a hangover from large versions of the former British Airways and British Telecom being prime examples. Many insiders fear that before long we could see a major British company taken down by the burdens of its pension scheme.

But these bills are as nothing compared to the unfunded liabilities of the state. By even conservative estimates, the state and public- sector pensions liabilities could more than double the total national debt, causing far more damage than the current financial crisis. The situation is hardly any better in the US, where the unfunded liabilities for social security and Medicare health care for the old are more than $50 trillion.

For all the talk of waste in the public sector, of inefficiency and of profligacy under Gordon Brown, nothing that this Government has done to dent Britain's public finances can compare with the damage imposed by decades of this demographic disaster.

There's a word for financial schemes which take in money, promising a good return in the future, and use the new money coming in to pay existing investors. They're called Ponzi schemes. A characteristic is that they need to recruit more and more new investors to pay the outgoings to the current investors. When the supply of new investors dries up, the scheme cannot continue to pay out and collapses.

Or in Dave Osler's words "Either immigrants keep this country going, or it folds." For 'new investors' in the Ponzi scheme, read 'new taxpayers' paying for some old chap's pension and NHS treatment.

I have wondered for some years about our Government's attitude to mass immigration. Even white liberal guilt seemed insufficient motive for their determination to see the positive side - and not exactly ignore the negative side, but rather deny that there was or ever could be a negative side (and only racists would suggest such a thing).

Maybe they've just been looking at the sums all along, and see mass immigration as the only politically acceptable solution. After all, no-one's going to suggest that we stop killing 200,000 babies a year, are they ?

Losing It ...

Polly Toynbee ...

It's all over for Brown and Labour. The abyss awaits. As long as he remains leader, there is nothing that wretched Labour candidates can plausibly say on the doorstep at next month's European elections. They are struck dumb. Why should people vote for them?

"Gorbals Mick" Martin ...

MPs exchanged looks. Now Norman Baker, who has campaigned long and hard on this issue, arose to mutters of irritation. He was urging the release of more information when Mr Speaker, robes swishing, cut him off.

“Another individual member who is keen to say to the press whatever the press wants to hear!” he announced, embarking on another rant, the nub of which was that Mr Baker had said in the past that the Commons authorities had done nothing on this. “It’s wrong for you to say that!” he said.

MPs just wanted it to end now. Yesterday should have been the Commons at its best, instead we were seeing it at its worst.

He just doesn't get it, does he ?

Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail,

Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may sell wheat, making the measure sold small, and the measure bought great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?

That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea, and sell the sweepings of the wheat?

The LORD hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, "Surely I will never forget any of their works".

Let's start with the works of Margaret Moran, shall we ?

Labour MP for Luton, seen here attempting to justify the unjustifiable.

Most MPs on the fiddle (i.e. nearly all of them) flip their 'second home' (which attracts all kinds of expense goodies) between their London home and their constituency home.

This convent schoolgirl flipped her second home between the two in traditional style, but then flipped it last year to a third house in Southampton, 90-odd miles from Westminster and 100-plus from Luton, which was owned by her lover and which she'd just become part-owner of. Immediately she claimed expenses of £22,500 for dry-rot treatment.

Now an uncharitable person might assume that when her paramour discovered the dry-rot, they jointly hatched a plot to get the taxpayer to stump up for it. You just can't stop cynical people having ridiculous ideas like that. That an MP could behave in such a way is of course unthinkable.

On 10 May 2009 she defended her expenses claim on the BBC Politics Show as follows:

Margaret Moran: "I have to be able to have a proper family life sometimes which I can't do unless I share the costs of the Southampton home with him (her partner, Booker)."

Andrew Sinclair: "But why should the taxpayer pay for your home in Southampton when clearly you are not using it for work?"

Margaret Moran: "Well, I... I... I...you could argue that I use it to be able to sustain my work. Any MP has to have a proper family life.

Two points. Strange that she needs to go to Southampton when Mick Booker's Companies House address is given as Luton, and he's also on the electoral roll there, sharing a house with a voter called Margaret Moran. Mick does (or did) indeed work in Southampton - and from this 2002 photograph he's more prepossessing than his mercenary mort. Is Health and Safety Officer at Southampton Uni a more important job than an MPs ? Can't he get up to Luton to keep Margaret suitably sustained and serviced ?

Maybe she had to go down to Southampton Docks to give him a tug.

Second, and this is the one that gets me, is this nagombi about "family life". She's got no kids (like so many other 70s Sociology grads). What family ? Does sleeping with someone constitute a family ? Perhaps we should all have got bigger student grants back in those liberated, unGodly 70s days ? After all, we all had families ... some of us more than one ...

"Well, I... I... I...you could argue that I use it to be able to sustain my work."

For God's sake ! Mark Oaten could have said the same thing about his rent-boys ! Lord Lambton could have said the same thing about his prostitutes - and his dope for that matter. Perhaps we could indeed all do with a quickie to sustain us - but how many of us charge it to the taxpayer ?

What do her fecund, pious Muslim constituents see in her ? I suppose God is the Knower.

This fubsy, fraudulent fornicator is a disgrace even to the disorderly House that is the Commons.




UPDATE - I was going to mention Blears Capital Gains Tax shenanigans, millionaire Shaun Woodward's claims, Jack Straw's dodgy Council Tax deals, the Repairs of the House of Ussher. I haven't the heart. Apart from a few saints like Hollobone and Dennis Skinner, the main difference seems to be that some are bigger crooks than others. Oh, and did you know that all Blair's expenses were "accidentally" shredded ? And that Thursday was a good day to bury the news that Labour's dodgy Abrahams contributions won't be prosecuted ?


I've always been, in Neville Chamberlain's words, a man of peace to the depths of my soul. But I don't know. I'm starting to think that all those ranting commenters looking for lamp posts and hempen rope may not have been as mad as I thought.

UPDATE2 - the first Tories are in. Michael Gove and Francis Maude look in trouble.

Tomorrow Belongs To Me ?

I'm not at all sure the guy (Dewsbury Labour MP Shahid Malik) is, as described, 'a terrorist in a suit' - in fact I'm pretty sure he isn't. But he sure understands compound interest. According to the Youtube description, this chunk of his speech at the October 2008 Global Peace and Unity conference, organised by the Islam Channel, was excised from the released version. But God willed it otherwise.

(I wouldn't bother with the Youtube comments if I were you, btw. The first page was enough for me.)


(via)

Lightbulb Menace - The War Goes On

Not content with killing off the hundred-watt incandescent bulb (to be replaced by a mercury-filled one - it's all about the environment, you see) - they've declared war on pearl and frosted bulbs.

A spokesman for the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs said: 'From September 1 it will be illegal for manufacturers to sell frosted incandescent bulbs to EU retailers. Anyone who has them in stock can still sell them off."

I understand the reasoning. The frosting cuts down light emission, making them less efficient. As of course does a lampshade. How long before the EU bans those ?

As Livimg Streets (formerly the Pedestrians Association - I do hope they're not another fake charity) put it :

When you think about a romantic dinner, what's one of the first things that comes to mind? Probably candle light. Now imagine a scene in a prison cell, in which somebody is being interrogated - what comes to mind now? It's probably the harsh bare light bulb. Lighting affects our mood. It can help us feel relaxed, friendly, warm. Or it can make us feel agitated, nervous, cold.

More Dirty Dogs ...

Telegraph :

• Barbara Follett, the multi-millionaire Tourism Minister, claimed for private security patrols outside her London home costing more than £25,000. The parliamentary fees office, which is supposed to monitor claims, warned Mrs Follett that her claims may appear "excessive" if made public, but she was not deterred, saying she felt unsafe in Soho after being mugged.

Now this really gets me mad. How many people get mugged in London each year ? According to the Met's rolling 12-month total, "Robbery - Person" is running at 29,318 incidents to March 2009.

29,000 a year. They really meant it about being 'Tough On Crime', didn't they ?

Victims of crime get nothing from the taxpayer except derisory sentences for those who prey on them. Are this lot going to turn into good guys when they come out after their two years each ?

But we are taxed to pay for a millionairess to feel a bit more comfortable in her expensive home, when all over the country poor pensioners live in fear in their own homes.

She should resign. But they all should and none of them do, so all we can do is express our disgust at the ballot box.

M. Poujade was right.

"Throw the rascals out !"

Friday Night Is Music Night

Via my son (again), very much in the style of the Bon Iver he recommended a few weeks back. There seems to be a lot of good accoustic stuff coming out of the States.

The Shins - New Slang. Strange lyrics :

Gold teeth and a curse for this town were all in my mouth.
Only I don't know how they got out, dear.
Turn me back into the pet that I was when we met.
I was happier then with no mind-set.

And if you'd have took to me like
A gull takes to the wind.
Well, I'd have jumped from my tree
And I'd have danced like the king of the eyesores
And the rest of our lives would have fared well.

You may recall I posted music here - and blogged here - about the King of the Boogaloo, Pedro Gutierrez aka Pete Terrace.

However he wasn't the only contender for the throne. Here's Pete Rodriguez, 'El Rey Del Boogaloo'. Let Powers and Princes contend.


"Hear me now, let's get it straight. Boogaloo, baby, I made it great. Because I gave it a Latin beat ..."

I Like It Like That.



When he wasn't ruling his mighty Land of Boogaloo, he could salsa with the best of them. Don't get him mixed up with Pete 'El Conde' Rodriguez, by the way - quite another kettle of chillo.

I'm a sucker for any Latin American music containing the words 'Ay Ay Ay'. El bugalu lo bailo !



This seems to have turned into a Latin post, so let's move a little further South. Some twenty five years back, long before salsa classes arrived in the UK, I picked up at a car boot sale a thin vinyl LP on the Discos Fuentes label, from Medellin, Colombia, a place better known for cocaine and gang warfare. Early Sixties at a guess. 'Cumbias Y Gaitas Famosas de Colombia' it was called - and blimey, you can still get it on the Web from the same company, though the track listing seems to have changed a bit.

Here's one of my favourites, in glorious lo-fi (after all, I don't want to provoke the wrath of Sr Fuentes and his extended family).

Ay Ay Ay ! Suena La Timba !

Quote of the Day

Laurie Penny on motherhood :

"Personally, it's not so much the idea of actually having a growing embryo inside you that's terrifying. We've all had headlice."

"Criminals Into Freeloaders"

Dogwash gives his considered view on the campaign to legalise illegal immigration.

The "amnesty" will simply send out a signal to the waiting millions, nay, tens, hundreds of millions, that if you blag your way into the UK, you need only keep your head down for as long as it takes for your sheer numbers to become a political and logistical embarrassment, whereupon the next one-off and absolutely, irrevocably final amnesty will take place.

Just consider the thousands who camp out at what is effectively Nouvelle Sangatte. Listen to the interviews. They have paid serious money to work their way across Europe in the hope of reaching what, despite all attempts at dissuasion, they genuinely believe to be some kind of El Dorado.

Worse, they also feel a sense of entitlement to be here, usually based on some woolly but unshakable notion of reparation for what the British have historically "done to their people". These guys are not simply attempting to break into the country for their economic improvement, they are exercising their perceived birthright. They are entitled, they believe, to the house and the benefits payments they expect to receive in the UK. The feeble attempts of the British authorities to exclude them are no more than an incomprehensible and unwarranted annoyance.

It is an attitude which finds echoes across the world.

You do not stem that determined flow by saying, "Look chaps, we're full now. Yes, we know we managed to find room for the last lot, but no more. Be good fellows and just bugger orf, will you. What! Wait a minute! No! Stop that man! — Oh dear. — Perkins, just, er, quietly increment that Absolutely Non-negotiable Limit again, there's a good chap."

An amnesty will not stem the demand; it will exacerbate it. I see nothing in the actions or intentions of our government to address that consequence.

Not much to disagree with there. Spain's had, what - five amnesties ? Strangely, they get bigger and bigger.

He then strolls down to the Square to take a look :

People were handing out Union flags along with the leaflets, which struck me as a bit impertinent, to be honest. And there was even, Gordelpus, a feeble rendering of "God Save the Queen". Sorry, guys, I'm not convinced.

Obviously somebody's idea is to paint these "undocumented workers" as patriotic types simply dying to wrap themselves in the flag of the Mother Country. The various lefties blogging the rally aren't convinced either :

My bit of the demo had huge numbers of people waving Union Jacks, which was slightly disconcerting. I saw one banner for Algerian Refugees that was one huge Union Flag and frankly I'm not going to be the one to say that's wrong. Context is everything and if people want to use national symbols to help them press for being treated as equal citizens, well that makes sense to me even if I'm not used to it.

Although when a rousing chorus of God Save the Queen went up I did find myself rocking back and forth muttering to myself "It's alright, it's alright, they don't really mean it" although probably quite a few did.

I think the translation is : 'this patriotic display's a bit creepy, even though I know it's just a show'.

Lots and lots of the marchers were carrying small and large butchers’ aprons to affirm that they have as much right to be treated with dignity as anyone else. You’d need to be a seriously ultra-left idiot to tell them that they were wrong to do so.

Translation : 'if it fools a few useful idiots, then it's acceptable as a (transitional) tactic'.


Slightly tangential, but an interesting-if-true comment on the current Labour troubles at Socialist Unity :

A little birdy told me that some BIG things are happening within the Compass circle right now. A number of MPs within the circle of Compass are preparing to make moves after the Euro Elections, but only if the BNP make a significant breakthrough, they believe this would be enough for them to put forward their centre-left manifesto, and believe it would be enough to inspire the Labour grassroots to get fully behind a Compass candidate in the event of the Blairites looking to oust Brown.

The source suggests that the Compass MPs don’t have the bottle to publically make moves against Brown, however they do have a contingency plan in the result of a Labour leadership contest, followed by a General Election. My source also affirms that Compass would have a swift General Election in the event of their candidate winning.

They believed personally that the Compass candidate would come to an agreement with Cabinet Brownites to prevent the move of a Blairite candidate such as James Purnell from putting forward a reactionary, anti-welfare policy agenda which would be little different from BNP populism, and we can see evidence of Blairite figures moving in this direction already. However they could (or would?) not confirm who the Compass candidate might well be.

It's true that on economics the BNP are probably to the left of Labour. I don't know if the BNP are still campaigning as 'the Labour Party your grandparents voted for', but you could mount an argument that major BNP gains might force NuLab into adopting more radical, worker-friendly policies - if only to provide an alternative opposition to the current political consensus that globalised capitalism is the only game in town.

Trouble is, I can't see that the Labour left as currently constituted is capable of any radicalism which can actually attract votes. On lefty blogs lately the most reviled figure in the Labour Party has been James Purnell - because he suggested that those receiving disability benefits because of their alcoholism could have them cut unless they tried to clean up.

Now to most working people that's a no-brainer. Why should an alkie or smackhead actually get greater benefits than someone who's unemployed and trying to find work ? But to what passes for the left these days, it's an outrage, attacking the most vulnerable in society etc. The party of the working class is now the party of the non-working class. I just can't see that playing well on the doorstep. Any more than I can see this lot of same-olds inspiring the voters.

No, Labour are knacked no matter what. The Tories will win the big prize and form the next government. The fight will be over the smaller prizes.

And while I'd love to be proved wrong, I reckon about two years before the Tories are also in the electorate's bad books. After all, they won't have the head-start of goodwill that Blair had in 97.

Interesting times.

Underclass News - Hull

The court heard how Kirsty Ashley and a large group of friends surrounded Stephen, who was 16 at the time of the attack and did not know them. Ashley accused him of assaulting his girlfriend. There was no evidence to suggest this was true. The gang backed Stephen up against a glass panel while Ashley slapped and punched him, before trying to set his hair on fire with a lighter.

Two days later she was arrested, searched and the earring (ripped from the victim's ear - LT) was found. She claimed to have found it on the floor.

So far, so everyday story of oxygen thief. She didn't get sent down - after all, she's only 16. And she's pregnant. Although to be fair, she lives in a council children's home, so statistically she's likely to end up inside sooner or later. I wonder how her baby will turn out ?

It's the comments which provide the only entertainment in the whole sorry tale.

A Few Daisies From The Curate's Lawn

Boom Bang-A-Bang (again) - in my post about the UK exploding community I mentioned the apparent use by the 7/7 bombers of boiled-down hydrogen peroxide as an oxidant in their bombs.

Those clever chaps at Blood and Treasure (who share my low opinions of the NWOBJ) actually did some experimental work to see if it were true. I think the verdict is 'not proven'.

Via them, a chap called George Smith who also asks if things are true. An interesting blog - a kind of Yankee Alex Harrowell.

True New Labour values. Former Scottish first minister Jack McConnell looks back over ten years of devolution to its crowning glory.

Jack McConnell rates the smoking ban as the crowning achievement of the Scottish parliament, which marks the 10th anniversary of its first meeting this month ... McConnell said: "I was so proud. I was proud of my country, proud of the people and proud of the parliament. It was a defining moment in that first 10 years."

You do have to worry about the mental state of a man who considers a smoking ban the finest achievement of ten years of government. Was it for this that Keir Hardie and the Red Clydesiders fought - for the right of a publican to go to jail if drinkers light up in a Scots pub ?


More New Labour snouts in the trough.

A Labour peer who lives in the East End of London has claimed about £100,000 in parliamentary expenses on a flat in Kent that neighbours say has been unoccupied for years.

Baroness Uddin, who worked closely with Tony and Cherie Blair, has been claiming allowances intended for peers living outside London although she resides only four miles from the Lords.

Inquiries by The Sunday Times have established that the baroness bought a two-bedroom flat in Maidstone in 2005 and has named it as her main home to claim almost £30,000 a year in accommodation expenses from the House of Lords.

Residents from the five other flats in the same block as Uddin’s property all say they have never seen her there. They could see through the windows that the bedrooms were unfurnished.

Ms Uddin seems an archetype NuLab figure :

Born in Bangladesh, Manzila Pola Uddin came to Britain as a teenager and went on to become a community worker and social services officer while pursuing a political career that saw her rise to be deputy leader of Tower Hamlets borough council in the early 1990s.

She was made a peer by Tony Blair in 1998 and took the title “Baroness Uddin of Bethnal Green in our London Borough of Tower Hamlets”. Aged 38, she was the youngest woman in the Lords.

As a campaigner on women’s and ethnic minority issues she has become part of the new Labour establishment, befriending Cherie Blair. Her Facebook friends include the cabinet ministers Harriet Harman, Hazel Blears and David Miliband and Alastair Campbell, the former spin doctor.

More vote fraud :

Raja Khan, 52, of Oban Court, Montem Lane, was jailed for three and a half years after admitting conspiracy to defraud the returning officer and perjury. He has since been expelled from the Conservative Party. Gul Nawaz Khan, 58, of Richmond Crescent, pleaded guilty to perjury and was jailed for eight months. Mohammed Basharat Khan, 46, of Mirador Crescent, admitted conspiracy to defraud the returning officer and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He was jailed for three years and four months. Arshad Raja, 53, of Broadmark Road, was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud the returning officer. He was given an 18-month prison sentence.

Now the sentences are good, even when you halve them and knock off 18 days. It's the kind of thing that will encourage the others - for a time, at least. According to "the electoral commission" there was less fraud in the 2008 elections - full report here.

Via Cranmer, an interesting paper on the success of the homosexual activist group Stonewall.

And finally, the American lefty singer, activist and songwriter Pete Seeger is ninety years old. While he should IMHO face a musical tribunal for popularising Kumbayah, against this must be set a number of services to music, including his fine tune to the poetry of Idris Davies. More jangly Sixties guitars, electric this time. I know they can't pronounce the name right, and there's a total disconnect between Depression South Wales and a bunch of amiable middle-class American stoners, but the Byrds do a lovely job on Bells of Rhymney.

Listen.

Ship Deserts Sinking Rat

The Labour Party are distancing themselves from him.

Former ministers are putting the boot in.

Now Polly Toynbee has faced reality :

"Self-destructive and bungled tactical ploys mark the Brown era .. there are no ideas, no politics and no breath of life left"



I commented on her piece that this was the high-water mark of the 60s cultural revolution, and that's what I believe - but I don't expect to see the Tories rolling back the waves any time soon. With a few noble and notable exceptions, they are products of that culture themselves - and their libertarian wing don't believe in anything but 'do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law' anyway.

No, I think what'll roll it back will be 'events, dear boy, events'. Probably some not very nice ones, too. The Gods of the Copybook Headings will have to limp up to explain things once more. Don't expect things to happen at once. Even now, Harriet Harman is tweaking up some exciting new 'equality legislation' on the bridge of the Titanic. Word from the engine room takes time to get there. In the words of the late Jim Morrison :

This is the end,
Beautiful friend, the end
This is the end,
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end

New Threat To Israel

Gordon Brown to address Knesset.

They have lived surrounded by hostile forces for sixty years. But this might be too much for them.

Russian Demography ...

It's not that bad, says Russia Blog.

They don't think the Chinese will pour across the Amur either.

Roots of Politics II

More from Steven Pinkers "The Blank Slate". After his review of the competing Tragic and Utopian Visions :

My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life. The sciences say nothing, of course, about differences in values that are associated with particular right-wing and left-wing positions (such as in the tradeoffs between unemployment and environmental protection, diversity and economic efficiency, or individual freedom and community cohesion). Nor do they speak directly to policies that are based on a complex mixture of assumptions about the world. But they do speak to the parts of the visions that are general claims about how the mind works. Those claims may be evaluated against the facts, just like any empirical hypothesis. The Utopian vision that human nature might radically change in some imagined society of the remote future is, of course, literally unfalsifiable, but I think that many of the discoveries recounted in preceding chapters make it unlikely. Among them I would include the following:


· The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.
(for which, see the Labour Party's selection procedures - LT)

· The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the more common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to public goods when reciprocity cannot be implemented.
(we've certainly got the social loafing - but so far, tax contributions to public goods have proven quite robust)

· The universality of dominance and violence across human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.
(I call it Original Sin. Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee called it 'who's to be master ?')

· The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.
(In white people it's called racism, even when expressed in terms of love of one's own rather than hatred of others. Elsewhere it's called solidarity. But group-against-group hostility isn't necessarily ethnocentric.)

· The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies, implying that some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent tradeoff between equality and freedom.
(See also assortative mating. At the other end of the intelligence, conscientiousness, and antisocial tendencies spectrum, although to be fair there are some high-IQ psychpaths, see underclass)

· The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom, and integrity.
(See under "Polly Toynbee")

· The biases of the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty.
(A tendency to confuse morality with conformity, eh ? That's pretty much all of us)

It is not just conventional scientific data that tell us the mind is not infinitely malleable. I think it is no coincidence that beliefs that were common among intellectuals in the 1960s—that democracies are obsolete, revolution is desirable, the police and armed forces dispensable, and society designable from the top down—are now rarer. The Tragic Vision and the Utopian Vision inspired historical events whose interpretations are much clearer than they were just a few decades ago. Those events can serve as additional data to test the visions' claims about human psychology.

The visions contrast most sharply in the political revolutions they spawned. The first revolution with a Utopian Vision was the French Revolution—recall Wordsworth's description of the times, with "human nature seeming born again." The revolution overthrew the ancien regime and sought to begin from scratch with the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and a belief that salvation would come from vesting authority in a morally superior breed of leaders. The revolution, of course, sent one leader after another to the guillotine as each failed to measure up to usurpers who felt they had a stronger claim to wisdom and virtue. No political structure survived the turnover of personnel, leaving a vacuum that would be filled by Napoleon. The Russian Revolution was also animated by the Utopian Vision, and it also burned through a succession of leaders before settling into the personality cult of Stalin. The Chinese Revolution, too, put its faith in the benevolence and wisdom of a man who displayed, if anything, a particularly strong dose of human foibles like dominance, lust, and self-deception. The perennial limitations of human nature prove the futility of political revolutions based only on the moral aspirations of the revolutionaries. In the words of the song about revolution by The Who: Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.

Rally For Mass Illegal Immigration !

via Socialist Unity, translation added in italics by LT. If you want to reward those enterprising souls who are here illegally, get down to Trafalgar Square on May 4th :

They propose that those who have been here for 4 or more years should be admitted to a 2-year pathway to full legal rights (“leave to remain”) during which they work legally and demonstrate their contribution to UK economy and society. After that 2-year period, subject to knowledge of English and employer and community references, they would be granted permanent leave to remain.

The benefits of regularisation

• recognises the dignity of human beings who have made new lives in Britain (accepts that they've got away with illegal entry);
• extends and reinforces the rule of law (totally undermines it);
• levels the playing-field for low-paid workers (increases competition for entry-level unskilled jobs);
• enables businesses to employ legally the labour it needs (because a) there are no unskilled unemployed in the UK, and b) as socialists we care deeply about business profits);
• recognises the role that migrants already play in society (doing the jobs the natives just don't want to do);
• ensures that tens of thousands of British workers receive the protection of the law(que ? I suppose anyone who's got here is British, aren't they ? Like Shaker Aamer.);
• shrinks the black economy (aka we need more taxes);
• frees up billions of pounds in taxes for the Exchequer(aka we need more taxes);
• enables local authorities to plan better (aka enables them to ask for more taxpayer cash to provide services to these guys - that's why we need more taxes);
• solves the expensive, inhuman delay in processing old asylum claims (aka the expense of making at least the pretence of controlling the borders);
• builds a more cohesive British society (aka "we're taking the mick here");
• and turns outlaws into neighbours - “strangers into citizens” –in the best British tradition of pragmatism and justice (aka "forget about the best British traditions of obeying the law and punishing those who break it").

Funnily enough they forgot to add 'Give the BNP another hundred thousand votes' to the list of 'benefits'.

Migrationwatch aren't quite so chuffed :

New research shows that an amnesty for illegal immigrants, or “undocumented workers” would cost £2 billion in its first full year of operation. As those concerned married and had families, the costs could rise to £4 billion a year.

Those granted an amnesty would be immediately entitled to apply for social housing, adding at least half a million to the waiting list (which is already over 1.5 million for England alone). They would also be entitled to bring over their families, thus moving up the queue which is largely based on “need”. Meanwhile they would be entitled to Housing Benefit which is included in this calculation.

Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migrationwatch UK, said:

Clearly the British public can see that to reward people with a meal ticket for life for breaking our laws is an absurd proposition. It will only encourage others to come and take their place in the hope of a further amnesty. That is exactly what has happened in Italy which has granted five amnesties in the past twenty years and Spain which has granted six.

Claims of “a huge increase in tax revenues” are ludicrous when benefit payments are taken into account. So proponents of an amnesty are left only with their claim to be advancing the cause of social justice. However, the real victims are British workers whose wages are held down or perhaps their job opportunities taken by people who came or remained here illegally of their own volition.

"As we enter a recession, competition for work by illegal immigrants should be reduced, not encouraged. The government and Opposition are absolutely right to oppose this ill-considered scheme. The only amnesty worth considering is an amnesty on departure – allowing people already here illegally to leave within a defined window without fear of arrest for immigration offences.”