Nothing new, but have we learned ?
In early days the spirit burned
To fight the fights of the oppressed
But they were shot down like the rest
So what's it going to be and how long now ?
Who's going to rule when the government falls ?
Funnily enough, I was given a similar warning in Malaga some twenty years back - 'watch out for the gypsy flower-sellers' said the girl at the hotel desk. Now Laban pictured someone sitting in front of large flower-baskets in the style of the late Buster Edwards at Waterloo, and wasn't too worried.Beware, they told us in the train stations of northern Italy, of the Gypsy baby trick — an old ruse by Europe’s most reviled underclass. A woman will suddenly ask you to hold her child, and then just as you fumble to respond another Gypsy will grab your wallet.Watch out, they cautioned us in the lovely Turkish port city of Kusadasi, for the Gypsies who prey on tourists along the waterfront. And old lady will bump you, while a teenage hooligan grabs your bag. The Gypsy old-lady trick.
Those Gypsies, known by the less pejorative term of Roma, are getting kicked around the continent again, hardy perennials of European scapegoats. Unspoken characterizations based on ancient stereotypes — they are shiftless, clannish, prone to petty thievery and to begging, prostitution and dark motives — are now out in the open.
"if a country that contains Dundee thinks it might be verging on the unlivable, then we should take their word for it"
Tell you what.
Why don’t you ask the guy who wrote “Another White Terrorist Against ‘Non-British’ Caught”?
For what it's worth I imagine the occasional 'of Somali/Algerian/whatever origin' that I hear on the news is a little Community Cohesion comfort blanket - a quiet way of pointing out that whoever-it-is is not a second generation Brit who captains the local cricket XI and helps out at the primary school.
I'll pass over the fact that he seems to be pre-empting the verdict. You could just imagine how Sunny would react if the Mail and Sun started producing 'Another Asian terrorist' headlines every time a wannabe jihadi got banged up - which a year or so back was about every other week. He'd have a fit.
Andy - why the constant worship of our new Chinese overlords? The socialism of China has a highly nationalistic and patriotic flavour - one that you would hate and fear were a UK party to be offering it.
As a born-again cultural conservative I can appreciate what China's doing - looking after #1 while useful idiots all over the world embrace globalisation. As the new manufacturing powerhouse, they'll naturally be in favour of free trade and open markets - for others. The US firms which rushed into China, swooning over the size of the market ('if we only had 3% that could be x million customers'), are discovering that the Chinese have no intention of allowing roundeyes major influence.
Meanwhile military spending increases and the sabres are rattling in the South China Sea, while China is buying up as many resources in Asia and Africa (ores, coal, oil) as it can and developing strongly in future green technologies, especially solar generation.
They're driven by Chinese national interest, something I can completely understand. But Andy - and, to be fair, pretty much all the UK left - openly hate the concept of British national interest. What have they got that we haven't, Andy?
"Once the Labour Party NEC decided to suspend Rahman as candidate, in the face of Gilligan’s Islamophobic witchhunt, then they could not go to the person who came second in the poll for the Labour Party candidate selection, John Biggs, without it looking like they were choosing a white British candidate in preference to a Bengali. So they have ended up imposing the unloved Helal Abbas, who has little support. "By putting John Biggs second in the poll, Labour activists of all ethnicities were indeed choosing him in preference to Abbas, who came third - on grounds presumably of proven ability (former council leader) and voter recognition. That was apparently OK as long as he was second - it was just putting a white British candidate first in Tower Hamlets that was unacceptable.
A register of over 5,000 people who are either members or have registered their interest in the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), has been published on the internet.
"... people here believed Sweden was the best country in the world because it was the most internationalist. This led to a fantastically generous policy on asylum and integration. Nearly a third of Sweden's population today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. There are more Iranians living in Sweden than there are Danes. In 2007, one small town outside Stockholm took in more Iraqi refugees than the whole of the US. Professor Jan Ekberg at Linné University has calculated that unemployment among immigrants means the excess cost of their welfare payments over the tax they pay is at least as high as the defence budget, and possibly 50% higher. "Hmm. Sounds a vaguely familiar scenario, although I don't know where Andrew Brown's getting those population stats from. A/c/t Wikipedia :
As of 2008, 18% of the population had foreign origins (13% if excluding Finns and 9% if also excluding other Scandinavians), with 14% foreign-born and another 4% born in Sweden of two foreign-born parents.And while I can't find the relevant info on the Swedish stats site, 44,000 immigrants pa in a population one-seventh of the UKs makes for a pretty high immigrant number, but probably not (yet) 33%. Like the UK and Spain, the birth-rate has been increasing following decades of decline - what on earth could be responsible for that ?
He moved the party away from Nazism and some forms of racism, but they were still pariahs. "No one would vote for them because they were seen as fascist yokels," says Niklas Orrenius, a journalist who has studied the movement for years. To be a known member was to risk sacking from any kind of job. Far-left activists beat them up, on one occasion breaking into a party gathering with iron bars. Last Friday two masked men attacked David von Arnold, a party candidate in Malmö, outside his flat and carved a swastika into his forehead. The respectable media largely ignored this as it ignores the party as a whole.That sort of thing sounds familiar, too.
If you believe the international rightwing press, the answer is simple, and has been since 2004, when Fox News made a special report on the subject: Sweden, and especially Malmö, has become a laboratory for the creeping Islamisation of Europe. The most common child's name there is now Muhammad; police dare not go into immigrant districts, where only sharia law is respected; and soon all the Jews will be driven from the city. All this, flecked with varying amounts of spittle, is recounted as fact on the net and in US papers.So Andrew gives us the evil rightie worldview - what's his actualite ?
A 2008 government report (on the massive Rosengard estate), which drew entirely on the experiences of teachers, police and social workers, described a place where Islamic orthodoxy was enforced by young thugs; women were forced to wear headscarves and children segregated in religious free schools. There was a small riot after one of the 20 or 30 unofficial mosques in cellars was closed when its lease was not renewed, and nastier riots when the Israeli tennis team played a Davis Cup match in the city last summer.I like Mr Brown's methods of refudiating those right-wing, spittle-flecked slurs, with his "33% immigrants" figure and his 'young Islamic thugs' - you can read the article to see his refudiation of rape statistics. But with friends like Andrew Brown, who needs enemies ?
"The poem was first collected by John Aubrey in 1686, who also recorded that it was being sung in 1616, but it is believed to be much older."
"One sometimes feels that the best thing that His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI could do for the United Kingdom would be to perform the rite of exorcism over it. "
"Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights."
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.This one's impressive :
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.
"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.
"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"
"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".
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.
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?
"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. "
"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".
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.
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?
Hundreds of guns have been found in a semi-detached house in one of the Metropolitan Police's biggest ever weapons seizures.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.
Pump-action shotguns, M16 rifles, revolvers and antique firearms were among weapons seized during raids on three properties in Dartford, Kent.
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.
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.”
"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!"
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.The police do seem to have done something :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.
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 :
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.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.
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'.
