Calling People "Thieves" the PC Way

Where else but a Guardian editorial could you find such a wonderful euphemism?

"Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights."

(via)

Landlord Laments

I think it was the previous Conservative administration that changed the rules (with the best of intentions) so that housing benefit was paid direct to the landlord :

Designed to increase the amount of rented accommodation, it created a class of landlords for whom the main attraction was the guaranteed income stream. The last thing they wanted was a tenant with a job - they'd have to collect the rent themselves. As unemployable drug-users and lowlife move in, so other houses in the street become harder to sell and prices fall - at which point in steps a private landlord to buy the property and move in more benefit recipients. A nice feedback loop, which I observed at close range, selling my late fathers house on a rough estate in County Durham. Bea Campbell wrote a long piece about this phenomenon, focusing on Newcastle and Sunderland, in the Observer some ten years back.

And I'm presuming that it was Labour who changed them back again, doubtless with the best of intentions, and with results like this :

A north west London landlord was asked to house a single mum arriving from Nigeria and was told it would be her, plus one child, although it was later established that there were four children in the property. The tenant started off well and passed over the rent for a couple of months - then it stopped, building up arrears of around £3,000 which is where it stood when we were contacted by the landlord to evict her as he wanted her out to get a more reliable tenant. She was successfully evicted and, in this case, the money was eventually paid back although it did take a very long time and, unsurprisingly, it put the landlord off letting to housing benefit tenants again. The tenant in question? Well she went on to be re-housed by her local council!

How do you just 'arrive from Nigeria' and start claiming benefit ? I digress. But I have a feeling that despite their travails, mass immigration plus UK benefits must have produced many housing benefit millionaires among landlords in London and other large cities.

The law was brought in to empower tenants and make them feel part of the buy to let market place and there are many good tenants, however, there are still a large number that are not so conscientious. I wrote to Tony McNulty MP at the department for work and pensions at the end of 2008, expressing my concerns at the way the system currently works and it took him nearly 3 months just to acknowledge my letter and then his response was to insist that safeguards were in place to ensure it worked properly. I beg to differ.

An Ealing landlord emailed to say her tenant had started to claim housing benefit but had lied about how much she was receiving and when she was being paid so, after a few months of not receiving her rent, she rang Ealing housing benefit direct to find out what was happening. Due to the data protection act, they were unable to pass on any information but, as she was owed the equivalent of 8 weeks rent, she was able to apply to the council to be paid directly which she duly did. However, the tenant used her 30 days to object and, soon after the rent was paid over by the council, she left the flat without notice...

As the landlord in question quite rightly pointed out to Ealing council, her tenant had embezzled £2,600 of tax payers’ money and the tax payer loses out on many counts. Their reaction? They just laughed and said it happens all the time.

A tenant in receipt of housing benefit does not pass it on, waits for the landlord to apply to the council directly, waits 30 days for their objection to be heard and, as soon as the money is paid directly, they leave without notice. The council recognises that their system is being abused and yet it is not regarded as benefit fraud.

This one's impressive :

"Today, a landlord told us a tenant is withholding rent and sending it to Kosovo to fund the building of a house," says Shamplina. It is almost you-couldn't-make-it-up territory.

Mind, some of the tenants who do stump up might present other problems :

"The most common cases appear to be organising gangs looking for an easy money making scam. They take out a tenancy and then sublet to multiple occupants. The worst case we have dealt with was a three bedroom, one bathroom, semi detached house in North London which was found to have had 53 occupants, all illegal immigrants. They were mattresses literally littering the floors from wall to wall in every available space. The sanitation issues were stretched to say the least."

"Another case was of a lady who had a lovely two bedroom flat in Victoria. Her tenant paid six months rent up front but she later discovered that 18 sets of bunk beds had been put into her property and was being used as a youth hostel. A website in China was offering students visiting London accommodation at £20 per night"

ROFL

Lecturer Peter Gumbel, whoever he may be, on the French education system :

"Although the French with their national curriculum have maintained standards and avoided being dumbed down, their system focuses on the transmission of knowledge and doesn't even remotely address the child or their wellbeing."There is more to school than getting good marks, and in Britain schools are not just a about your brain but about sport and arts and finding lots of different ways of excelling. The British system may focus less on results, but it nurtures self-esteem, personality and character".

French schools concentrate on 'the transmission of knowledge', do they ? The swine - call the Emotional Intelligence Police !

You have to wonder what planet he's living on, until you read :

Gumbel, 52, who also works as a journalist, has lived in Paris since 2002 and was prompted to criticise French schools, colleges and universities after putting his two daughters, now aged 10 and 13, into the education system.

In other words, he and his daughters have no experience of UK state education.


UPDATE - Anna Raccon reports that Guardianista Emily Barr finds her poppet similarly trumatised by French education.


ANOTHER UPDATE - could be worse - they could be in a Chinese school :

When my children were 6 and 8, taking tests was as much a part of the rhythm of their school day as tag at recess or listening to stories at circle time. There were the “mad minute” math quizzes twice each week, with the results elaborately graphed. There were regular spelling quizzes. Even today I have my daughter’s minutely graded third-grade science exams, with grades like 23/25 or A minus.

We were living in China, where their school blended a mostly Western elementary school curriculum with the emphasis on discipline and testing that typifies Asian educational styles. In Asia, such a march of tests for young children was regarded as normal, and not evil or particularly anxiety provoking. That made for some interesting culture clashes. I remember nearly constant tension between the Asian parents, who wanted still more tests and homework, and the Western parents, who were more concerned with whether their kids were having fun — and wanted less.

I still have occasional nightmares about a miserable summer vacation spent force-feeding flash cards into the brain of my 5-year-old son — who was clearly not “ready” to read, but through herculean effort and tears, learned anyway. Reading was simply a requirement for progressing from kindergarten to first grade. How could he take tests and do worksheets if he couldn’t read the questions?

Friday Night Classical (Totty)

I think the word for this is 'lush'.



I've got a lot of RVW's works, the symphonies and the well-known stuff like Tallis and the Lark Ascending, but he wrote an awful lot of music so there's a lot of more obscure stuff around. His Phantasy Quintet is good. When I discovered RVW I found a host of other British composers of the same period - Bax, Bantock, Butterworth, EJ Moeran, Frank Bridge, John Ireland, Warlock. When I get round to it I'll have to get Walter Leigh's 'Concertina for Harpsichord and Strings' onto Youtube - tremendous stuff, and maybe a chunk of Moeran's Cello Concerto.

RVW was a great fan of the pianist (and later Zionist) Harriet Cohen, about whom I knew zilch till I looked her up.

"His letters to her reveal a flirtatious relationship, regularly reminding her of the thousands of kisses that she owed him."

He wasn't the only one. Her rumoured lovers ranged from Ramsey MacDonald to D.H. Lawrence. Einstein called her his 'beloved piano witch'. Alas, she died childless.

What did they all see in her ?

























Hmm. OK. Here she is, playing Bach.

Nail Struck On Head

Shuggy :

"What Pastor Jones was intending to do was gratuitously offensive - but what made it potentially insane was the disregard for its consequences. What I find utterly depressing about this whole affair is the extent to which these were taken as a given - a fact of the world to which we have to adjust. In case anyone is unclear about what this is, let me spell it out: the burning of the Koran would have had disastrous consequences because everyone with any sense understands that there are not only people who consider a book to be more more sacred than the lives of their fellow human beings but who are both willing and able to use murderous violence in order to see the incarnation of this belief.

It is the routinization of this - the acceptance of this as a banal fact of life - that I find so absolutely depressing. It shows itself in the comments made by even people who are resolutely opposed to any of the claims made by politicized millienarians. Martin writes, "In their fundamentalism and intolerance, Pastor Jones and the Islamists are mirror images of each other." No, I don't think so. The reason that there was such an intervention over this matter is that everyone understood that if this group of fanatics had burned the Koran, people would have died. But Pastor Jones did not threaten to kill anyone. In contrast, death threats had already been made - not just against Mr Jones, which is in itself insane - but against Americans in general. Because merely being one of the some 330 million citizens of this nation is enough for you to deserve death because of your association with the behaviour of fifty embittered religious eccentrics. "

Absolutely. When some Orthodox Jews burned New Testaments in Israel a couple of years back, as part of their campaign against evangelising by Messianic Jews (who accept Christ as the promised Messiah), then-President Ehud Olmert didn't beg them to desist Obama-style, on the grounds that it would lead to terrorist attacks on Israelis or Jews worldwide. No army chiefs condemned the burnings as putting troops at risk, as General Petraeus did. I didn't see national leaders all over Europe urging Israel to take action. I doubt that anyone from the Israeli Chiefs of Staff got on the phone to the burners.

Because no-one supposed that Christians worldwide would consider that the actions of a few Israeli book-burners was a justification for attacks on any Jew or any Israeli insitution. Had such attacks taken place (there were none AFAIK) they would have been condemned by all - not least by those so vehement against Pastor Jones. No one would have said 'what did they expect if they burn Bibles?'.

But everyone assumes that Muslims worldwide will consider that the actions of a few American book-burners is a justification for attacks on any Westerner or any Western insitution. This view's pretty much internalised by now. While no one would ever say so explicitly, in practice we expect a lower standard of behaviour by Muslims than we expect from Christians - and we adjust our own behaviour accordingly - which is why useful lefty idiots will be demonstrating against the Holy Father who would never dream of demonstrating against Yusuf al Quaradawi.

As Salman Rushdie put it :

"When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable - satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not? But you see it every day, this surrender".

Gun Club Chairman "Had Guns" Shock Horror

OMG !!

Residents on a quiet suburban street were stunned when police found an arsenal of weapons including guns, missiles, grenades and rocket ­launchers.

Armed officers and an Army bomb squad uncovered more than 30 ­firearms in an early-morning raid on a semi-detached house in Worcester.

People watched in disbelief as police also carried out stocks of shells and ammunition.

How could someone amass such a collection?*

The owner of the property, gun club chairman Graham Lane, 65, was arrested on suspicion of possessing an illegal firearm and bailed. Neighbours said they had seen him wheeling a cannon out of the house. Yesterday he insisted all the weapons are fully licensed and only used for historical battle re-enactments.

I see. Could it be perhaps that the chairman of a gun club might own guns?

I don't know why, but I'm reminded of this story.

Hundreds of guns have been found in a semi-detached house in one of the Metropolitan Police's biggest ever weapons seizures.

Pump-action shotguns, M16 rifles, revolvers and antique firearms were among weapons seized during raids on three properties in Dartford, Kent.

The owner of said guns, dealer and historic weapons expert Mick Shepherd, spent ten months on remand before being acquitted on all charges. As far as I know, he's still not been compensated for those months inside and the Met still haven't returned all his property. As you might expect, he's not too chuffed about it and has a very low opinion of the Met and Operation Trident. According to the comments left on my blog post, the media had been alerted to the raid and a Sky News helicopter was overhead as they went in. The front page of the London Evening Standard screamed of the ‘Biggest haul of illegal guns in Met history’. The Mirror called it an ‘Arsenal of Murder’, and newspapers were briefed that the raid was linked to four North London murders.

What's provoked the raid on Mr Lane?

Speaking after being released from police custody, he said: “There are other matters ongoing with the police at the moment but I do not want to talk about them.”

Oh dear. I do hope someone at West Mercia isn't bearing a grudge on some unrelated matter. Alas, these things can happen - it wouldn't be the first time.

One of Mr Lane's children has commented as follows :

"My father is absolutely no threat, not a nutter and has complete confidence that all of his weapons will be returned. It's just unfortunate that his hobby is guns and militaria instead of stamp collecting!

I believe it was a "tip off" from someone (who may have done this before to my father with no success and which hadn't been publicised). Due to the lack of result the first time around, it appears that they've tried again a few months later. Hopefully that person will now be prosecuted for wasting police time.

The bomb squad was called in for a WWII hand grenade which they had found..this was a great toy of mine when I was growing up...of course it was completly deactivated (like all of his collection)...he was going to make it into a table lighter, but didn't get around to it.

The cannon shells were filled with sand and not explosives. Dad didn't want them falling over on anyone whilst giving his cannon demonstrations..the Police were very disappointed to find out it was sand and not powder...

The way this has been sensationalised is very disturbing. My father takes his hobby and his Chairmanship very seriously and has never advertised the fact that he holds firearms due to safety and security reasons. Unfortunately, now thanks to the press, that's no longer the case and anyone and everyone could easily track down the house....that is far more of a safety and security threat than my father will ever be!"

*And will the 'missiles' and 'rocket launchers' mysteriously disappear, as did the 'rocket launchers' and 'nuclear protection suits' did in the (admittedly completely different) case of Mr Robert Cottage?

Oh Dear

"Tinishya, who lives at the family home in Bristol, with siblings Britney, ten, and Alfie, two, left school to give birth".

A world of ruin in a sentence (the family are from Southmead).

Torment In The Community

In the bleak chronicle of those with 'learning difficulties', tortured and killed in the UK by (mostly) feral underclass youth, I forgot to blog about David Aske, who died of a heart attack in March, bullied to death over a period of ten years or more.

To residents he was a gentle man, a kind neighbour and protective son, but to generations of unruly teenagers he was “Dopey Dave”, a vulnerable man they took pleasure in provoking into a fury.

He collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack on Wednesday evening after confronting several shadowy figures in the front garden who were shouting at him. Last night police arrested a 18-year-old man on suspicion of manslaughter.

One neighbour suggested that “kids” had indulged in “bear-baiting”, effectively tormenting their chosen victim to death and that the bullying had been going on for much of his life.

Over the years his tormentors, some as young as 8, had called at the modest pebble-dashed home he shared with his brother Brian, 63, and mother Rose, 88, throwing eggs and bricks at the walls, kicking in his front door, breaking windows and demanding cigarettes and money. Residents have complained that not enough was done to tackle antisocial behaviour but Greater Manchester Police insisted that officers had gone out of their way to develop a personal relationship with the family and to prosecute offenders where possible.

The police do seem to have done something :

Police insisted they had done everything possible to support Mr Askew, his wheelchair-bound mother, Rose, and brother Brian. They had been to the property in Hattersley, Greater Manchester, 10 times in the last year after reports of anti-social behaviour. One youth – currently in prison – has an ASBO for harassing the family.

10 years of harassment - one ASBO and no-one fined or imprisoned. Is that the police, Crown Prosecution Service, the kids' social workers, magistrates, or a toxic combination? You can see how that tough approach worked out :

It is thought Askew became agitated when two youths broke down a gate and entered his garden on Wednesday evening. Police were called at 9.40pm after the youths tampered with his mother's mobility scooter and a bin.

Officers arrived within nine minutes but discovered Askew collapsed in the garden.

His poor mother. One 'youth' has been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. Possibility of a conviction - zero IMHO. They're just trying to be seen to do something about that open stable door and a missing horse.

Schadenfreude Update

The Magistrate on the ITV revelation that a lot of "community service" youth do damn-all except sit around smoking dope :

I am sure that it came as no surprise to anyone in the system to hear that a number of projects are poorly managed and sloppily supervised. I have been writing on here for years about the dozens of times that governments have promised 'really tough' community punishments. On the whole it hasn't happened.

We don't always see eye to eye, but, like Lib Con's Adam Ramsey he at least seems to realise that a large number of Blair's 'tough on crime' soundbites were 'for amusement only'.

Ken Clarke, by contrast, doesn't even bother pretending to be tough.



(see also It's Schadenfreude Time ...)

Cyril Smith 1928-2010

Why did Norman Scott bite the pillow ?

Because he thought Cyril Smith was next.

They don't make Liberal MPs like that any more - working class, ran a company - not only that, but a company that made things, anti-abortion, pro-capital punishment. Even in the 70s he was a rarity in a party becoming dominated by career politicians.

"Spurred on by the chip on his very large shoulder, he saw it as his duty to fight for the rights of the common man. He was deeply proud of his modest Lancashire origins, and never let anyone forget it.

A shade puritanical, he had far more affinity with the lower middle class than with a Liberal establishment — the Bonham Carters, Thorpes and Grimonds — which he despised. He was the only Liberal to oppose the abolition of capital punishment and abortion law reform (“We are the backstreet abortionists for the rest of Europe,” he declared)."

Friday Night Jungle

Mark Steyn's brilliant musical history of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' is back up online:

Solomon Linda's song has penetrated every corner of the globe. It's the most famous tune ever to have come out of Africa.

He and his family must be multi-multi-millionaires, right? Not exactly. Linda sold it to the Gallo record company for ten shillings: that would be about 87 cents. In 1962, just as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was reaching Number One around the world, he died of kidney disease in Soweto, on the edge of Johannesburg, in a concrete hovel with a couple of bedrooms with dirt floors covered in cow dung. He left his widow the equivalent of $22 in the bank and unable even to afford a headstone for his grave.

The child of wealthy New York radicals, Seeger has always been avowedly anti-capitalist. Yet his publisher had a deal with Gallo Music: they snaffled up the rights to "Mbube" cheap and in return sub-licensed to Gallo the South African and Rhodesian rights to "Wimoweh". And Seeger knew all along that Solomon Linda was the composer. He says now that back in the Fifties he instructed his publishers to give his royalties from the song to Linda, and he was shocked, shocked to discover decades later that they hadn't in fact been doing so. Evidently, it never occurred to him, as an unworldly anti-capitalist, to check his royalty statements. It was, on his part, supposedly a sin of omission. Whatever one thinks of that, his associates can't plead the same accidental oversight. Having persuaded Linda to sign away his copyright, the relevant parties made sure to slide some forms in front of his illiterate widow in 1982 and his daughters some years later to make sure the appropriation paperwork was kept in order.

...it was, in the end, a legacy of colonialism that ended the injustice. There are significant differences between US and British copyright law, and one of them is that the latter attempts to restrain the damage a foolish creator can do to himself. Under British Commonwealth law, the ownership in any intellectual property reverts to the author's heirs 25 years after his death regardless of what disadvantageous deals he may have signed. In the courtroom, the quiet courtroom, the lawsuit slept for decades, until Solomon Linda's daughters were apprised of this significant feature of Commonwealth copyright law, and took action. The sleeping lion also took on the Mouse - the Walt Disney corporation, whose film The Lion King had introduced the song to a new generation of children. In America, Linda's family really had no legal leg to stand on, but, faced with potentially catastrophic complications in Britain, South Africa, Australia, India and other key markets, Disney were only too keen to settle. In 2006, Solomon Linda finally received his due.

It's Schadenfreude Time ...

Heh :

Supervisors of offenders on unpaid work schemes are increasingly being subjected to threats, and verbal and physical abuse, with many complaining of feeling intimidated and afraid, according to a new survey.

The report, by the probation officers' union, Napo, details hundreds of incidents in London, Merseyside and Hertfordshire over recent months. In Hertfordshire, one offender told a male supervisor he was going to kill him and rape his four-year-old-daughter. Another slashed the car tyres of a female supervisor and told her: "I know here you live and I'm going to get you and your family."

At least two supervisors have had to lock themselves in a vehicle to escape physical violence and one member of staff was left cut and bleeding after a stone was thrown at him by an offender.

The situation has become so serious that a protection system has been set up for supervisors in the south-west of England.

But ... I thought these were the guys who didn't need to go to prison - the nice chaps that Ken Clarke knew how to deal with !

You can see why so many probation supervisors allow their charges to sit around and do damn-all except skin up - as this ITV programme (available for next 25 days) shows us. The report (download is Word doc) is exceeding revealing of just how much contempt the 'clients' have for the organs of the state :

An offender was instructed to work on a garden site and clear weeds. Later in the day the supervisor used the gents toilet, was not able to get out and it became apparent this was because the offender was holding the door shut. Eventually the supervisor managed to get out of the toilet. The offender told him it was a joke. He was told this sort of behaviour was not acceptable. The offender became very aggressive and started to shout at the supervisor saying ‘You don’t know what we do here. Don’t look at me like that, I am going to thump you now you ******* idiot. Are you going to breach me? You can’t do a ******* thing’.

Can't do a thing, eh ?

"The offender was subsequently sent home".

That chap might be a scumbag, but there's nothing wrong with his powers of analysis, nor with those of the criminal who asked his supervisor "why don't you get a proper job you fat ****?"

There is of course a subtext to all this. NAPO wouldn't give the people who pay their wages such a revealing glimpse of what goes on, were there not a pressing need to increase the number of probation officers and to pay them more.

Community service came into being in 1976. The idea was that as an alternative to custody offenders would complete up to 240 unpaid hours of work in the community. The thinking then was that the work would contribute toward rehabilitation, that it would not replace paid employment and that it would be of benefit to the community. Last year over 55,000 individuals were sentenced to unpaid work in the community. About a third were given individual placements, such as in a charity shop, the rest were given group work placements. However Napo has observed that groups that were originally supposed to be at a ratio of one supervisor to six offenders have grown; often over a dozen offenders now attend one group with the same number of supervisors. Staff have also complained that it is now rare to have a probation officer (or even a probation service officer, who has less training) on site. Indeed, placements are increasingly staff by sessional workers who are not contracted employees but are paid on an hourly rate. Often the only contact the offenders have with the service is through hourly-paid, sessional, supervisors who are paid on average £8.50 per hour and who often have full-time paid work elsewhere and use the unpaid work to supplement their income... sessional supervisors are increasingly reporting that they are scared on site and reluctant to report bad behaviour for fear of reprisals.

The report shows not only the increasing anarchy in the non-custodial criminal justice system, but the increasing influence of non-anarchist actors - gangs - in the inner city :

The most recent serious incident occurred on 31 July in Hackney where, as a 19-year-old offender was leaving the community service site at Brook House College in London E5, he was shot five times by an assailant using a handgun...It is thought quite possible that one of the offenders on the group phoned the assailant with relevant information. All the offenders on the placement have been interviewed by officers from Trident. This follows two other recent incidents in North London... Staff are now unable to send known gang members to do placements other than in the individual’s postal district. There are similar constraints on placements in other cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Note also that the guys getting the crap are at the £8.50 an hour end of the spectrum. If Rod Morgan or Professor Peter King got threatened or had their tyres slashed on a more regular basis I like to think we'd see some radical new crime reduction initiatives being proposed.

Men At Work

The Aluminium Wire and Cable Company, Jersey Marine, Swansea, in (I think) the 1960s.

Amazingly, we still manufacture both aluminium metal and aluminium wire in the UK. Just don't get me started on Anglesey Aluminium.

Prime Ministers Questions 27 April 2004

Youtube disabled this for copyright reasons, presumably the copyright of the Vengaboys rather than Hansard. It now seems to have been freed up. Created rather a long time ago, the patrician chap asking Blair about murder and mutilation is High Tory Peter Tapsell.

Most Stupid CiF Post Ever ?

Zoe Williams makes a stunning comeback with If sex with HIV is a crime, so is swimming with verrucas.

Or going into work with a cold, sitting in a doctors surgery with flu, etc. You have to wonder if the Guardian's doing what the old Daily Sport used to do - knowingly publishing ridiculous stuff to pull in the punters. Seems to work, too.

"Geoff was the epitome of the London man"

So sayeth Met Inspector Richard Beadle of the killing of 90 year old war veteran Geoffrey Bacon in Camberwell.

Geoffrey certainly epitomised one class of Londoner - the murdered elderly native.

The moment I saw the headline, I was reminded of a piece I blogged about six years back, which appeared in the now-defunct online magazine Right Now. It was about the killing of elderly white people by young black men in South London, and while I disagreed with the author's thesis that the Stephen Lawrence killing and the Brixton nail bomb were some kind of unconscious, inchoate 'resistance movement', he wrote it as he saw it - and it wasn't outside my old primary school that people were being killed.

The link and site has long gone - but the magic of the Wayback Machine has brought J F Cronin's 'The Forgotten Victims' back to life - the victims being Constance Brown, 72, of Streatham, Elizabeth Pinhom, 96, of Herne Hill, Thomas Kidd, 61, of Tulse Hill, Ted Howell, 75, of Lewisham, Leslie Watkinson, 66, of Peckham, and Frank Dempsey, 56, of Clapham.

"I wouldn’t like to be an old person living in Bethnal Green" said musician Jah Wobble when he moved to leafy Cheshire. For Bethnal Green, read 'most of London outside the leafy south west postcodes'.



(UPDATE - at the opposite end of the age spectrum, while she's not a native, the treatment Michele Kirsch's kids received on a Stoke Newington estate is also relevant. The truism that racism isn't only restricted to white people is one that Guardianistas are happy to accept in theory. It's just giving chapter and verse they're uncomfortable with.)

The Land That Stein Forgot

St Columb Major - the most un-touristy town in North Cornwall. Susan and I spent a pleasant morning pottering round the rainy and slightly run-down streets. Lovely church, nice locals, interesting buildings and a couple of excellent butchers.

By contrast, Padstow was a disappointment - a nice but not terribly picturesque harbour, one Spar, a lot of expensive places to eat and a lot of expensive clothes shops. Rick Stein obviously loves the place - but he's killing the thing he loves. His empire is now expanding towards St Merryn and Constantine Bay - I confess to having given him my beer money at the Cornish Arms.

























Memorial to the Cornish wrestler James Polkinghorne. The town was also the birthplace of John Nichols Thom, self-proclaimed Messiah who led a small detachment of Kentish farm labourers to defeat in the 1838 Battle of Bossenden Wood, having promised them invulnerability to bullets in the style of the late Pierre Mulele.



















Above - not much rocket or sun-dried tomato to be seen on Broad Street, St Columb Major.

Maybe Padstow's just a bit more upmarket than last year's Perranporth, but Cornwall seems more hideously white than ever. The beaches at Constantine and Porthcothan rang with RP accents (Constantine has a beach stall which does six kinds of coffee but no tea) as little Barnaby and Saffron splashed about in their wetsuits. The English upper middles still seem to be sprogging, I'm pleased to say. And everywhere we went builders were busy catering for those seeking to escape the "frantic lifestyle". If 'Wales is the new Cornwall' then Cornwall is still the old Cornwall.

Gone ..

Cornwall - see you next week

Yazza - Keeping On Digging ...

Interesting. Yasmin Alibhai Brown is someone who blames half the ills of the world on white men, but the political's not personal. Like YAB herself, Yazza's sister also married out - a Taff social worker, no less.

I'm a big Yazza fan - even with her anti-white nonsense, she talks from the heart - and it's basically a good heart despite the stupid, even vile things she occasionally comes out with. But you shouldn't talk from the heart, in print, about your family.

"My only sister was widowed last month. She is 11 years older than me. My father, who loved her best, had sent her over to England in the Fifties."

Yazza ! No ! That is too much information !

"Her grown-up daughter ... stopped speaking to me two months ago, for reasons not explained."

I'm not totally surprised. But is this revelation going to improve things ?

"My grieving niece puts down the phone and was enraged when I wrote a sober and frank letter to her partner."

Aiiee !

"I lost my only brother too this February. He too was uncommunicative, always furious with me for writing openly about the family."

Not nice. I can see why Yazza's upset. But brother still sounds like a sensible chap.

Yazza is Yazza and she ain't gonna change - nor would we wish her to. But she doesn't half make a rod for her own back. A couple more pieces like this and none of her relatives will be talking to her - yea, even unto the tenth generation.

My father cut me off from when I was 15 to the day he died. Only my mother was different, open and emotionally honest... (I) wonder what my sister would write if only she could. She can't. I can. It may have been the saving of me but it has left me alone, condemned to separation, like many others who will not stay silent nor consent to the deliberate use of silence, even in this age of emotional austerity.

This age of emotional austerity ? She must be talking about some far-away country of which we know little. We haven't been emotionally continent since about, well, about the time Yazza arrived in the UK.

I don't know why the Big Brother producers/exploiters never thought about Yazza as an inmate. She'd have been a natural, and it would have made great television for those who like that sort of thing. Imagine all those confrontations, confessions, confidences and repentances as her fellows confronted their race, their gender, their sexuality.

I wouldn't have watched. But, as Jimi Hendrix said about Radio One, I love her just the same.

Media 101

He moves to the left.

"On Economy, Voters Move to the Left in Hong Kong"

But they lurch to the right.

"EU Voters Lurch to the Right"