Fornicating Frontman

The cultural dominoes are tumbling. Nick Clegg was AFAIK the first openly Godless party leader in British history - and, while not the first politician to notch the bedpost, the first to share his score with the electorate.

Now Ed Miliband is (AFAIK) the first party leader to be openly cohabiting and the first to be openly producing children whose parents aren't married.

The Guardian are outraged that the Mail has pointed this out - after all, aren't all family structures equally valid ? (having lived communally for more than 40 years, he is survived by seven children)

Laban into the breach :

Why is that anyone's business?

Because the personal is political. The Miliband/Thorntons are stating that "they don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall".

A view which is perhaps defensible when Daddy was born into our ruling class and Mummy is a highly-paid lawyer. But for Mr and (especially) Ms Average that view's a disaster.

Remember the UNICEF report a few years back ?

"The UK is bottom of the league of 21 economically advanced countries according to a "report card"' put together by Unicef on the wellbeing of children and adolescents, trailing the United States which comes second to last."

Did you know that one of the indicators of child well-being used in that report was whether a child lived with both biological parents ?

"The use of data on the proportion of children living in single-parent families and stepfamilies as an indicator of wellbeing may seem unfair and insensitive. Plenty of children in two-parent families are damaged by their parents relationships; plenty of children in single-parent and stepfamilies are growing up secure and happy. Nor can the terms 'single-parent families' and 'stepfamilies' do justice to the many different kinds of family unit that have become common in recent decades. But at the statistical level there is evidence to associate growing up in single-parent families and stepfamilies with greater risk to well-being – including a greater risk of dropping out of school, of leaving home early, of poorer health, of low skills, and of low pay. Furthermore such risks appear to persist even when the substantial effect of increased poverty levels in single-parent and stepfamilies have been taken into account (although it might be noted that the research establishing these links has largely been conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom and it is not certain that the same patterns prevail across the OECD)."

And what's one of the key producers of one-parent families ? Cohabiting partnerships a la Miliband.

# Cohabitation is one of the main routes into lone parenthood. Between 15% and 25% of all lone-parent families are created through the break-up of cohabitating unions.

# Children born into married unions are estimated to be twice as likely as those born into cohabiting unions to spend their entire childhood with both natural parents (70% versus 36%)

So there. The new Labour leader is setting a dreadful example - albeit one that's being followed by an ever-increasing number of his countrymen.

You could of course produce the beautifully circular argument, as the Institute of Fiscal Studies did a while back, that while it's true that cohabitees are more likely to split up, maybe they are just the sort of people who are more likely to split up. An unanswerable assertion.

"it is true that cohabiting parents are more likely to split up than married ones"

"it seems simply that different sorts of people choose to get married and have children, rather than to have children as a cohabiting couple, and that those relationships with the best prospects of lasting are the ones that are most likely to lead to marriage. "

So a/c/t the IFS, maybe cohabitees just aren't that serious about their children's welfare....

Aiiieeee!

"For Bush may come, and Blair may go, but I go on forever"

She's back. And while she seems less unbalanced than of old, her idiosyncratic mental hobgoblins haven't gone away, you know.

"Beneath the surface glamour and exciting TV shows about death, America still yearns for savage modesty and the right to burn uppity women."

Except they don't want to burn the uppity Sarah Palin or Christine O'Donnell, something which Ms Kennedy finds both inexplicable and infuriating.

"Who's gonna rule when the government falls ?"

I was just thinking of loading the Ruts' 'Secret Soldiers' to Youtube, and blimey if someone called rustykwak hasn't beaten me to it. 7 views so far ... a doomy variation on 'Won't Get Fooled Again'. But a lot has changed since both these songs were written. Whatever happens, it won't be like this, or that.

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 ?

Those Awful Stereotypes

One Timothy Egan in the NYT :

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.

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.

About to cross a road - a lady of maybe sixty blocks the way, thrusting a carnation at me and smiling. A younger woman with her.

"Cuanto es ?"

"Una peseta - para fiesta" (it was nearly Christmas and large fireworks were being sold from open street stalls - not at all like the UK)

(Rapid calculation - about 0.5p. Much too cheap to be kosher)

"No. No peseta. No fiesta"

Would you believe, she wouldn't take no for an answer, stepped up to me and started pinning it. I leapt backwards about a yard. Which pulled her left hand (empty) out of my right-hand rear trouser pocket. Impressive - my eye had been on the hand with the carnation, had not had a clue.

I spoke to them both in English then. They seemed to understand and went away.

Quote of the Day

Ross on the Scottish Commonwealth Games team and their doubts about their Delhi accommodation :

"if a country that contains Dundee thinks it might be verging on the unlivable, then we should take their word for it"

From The Moral High Ground ...

Sunny Hundal at Lib Con asks :

“Why do media orgs report ethnicity of terrorist suspects?”

Not a clue, Sunny, not a clue.

Tell you what.

Why don’t you ask the guy who wrote “Another White Terrorist Against ‘Non-British’ Caught”?

UPDATE - I did point out his inconsistencies a fair while back :

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.

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.

He, for one, welcomes our new overlords

In the last year or so born-again Labour man Andy Newman's Socialist Unity blog has started to constantly beat the drum for soi-disant Communist China. I whacked a comment on his latest breathless report, but the spam filter nailed it, so here it is.

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?

"a white British candidate in preference to a Bengali"

Imagine that the Tories have dropped a candidate in, say, Cirencester, for being a bit too nationalistic (i.e. having links to dubious right organisations), after a Guardian-led campaign against him exposed said links. The Tory #2 is an Asian solicitor and a very competent chap, but he’s dropped for a little-known white candidate.

Tory bloggers bemoan the enforced change, but point out that "they could not go to the person who came second in the poll, without it looking like they were choosing an Asian in preference to a white British candidate".

I wonder what the born-again Labour Party members at Socialist Unity would make of that ?

"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.

I can appreciate the realpolitik of it - and a Majority Rights type would doubtless say that the voters of Tower Hamlets would be rationally voting for their ethnic interests - but I say - and see - leftist hypocrisy - what we're seeing in Tower Hamlets is the sort of thing that white voters simply aren't allowed to do without having the BBC and Guardian on their backs until they cry 'Capivi!'.

It's also an interesting insight into the voters of Tower Hamlets - presumably the local Labour Party know and accept what their constituents would feel about a white candidate.

We seem to be further than ever away from a time when John Biggs can be judged not on the colour of his skin, but on the content of his character.

Sweden - Gets More Like Home Each Day

Yet another Swedish story that rings a bell in the UK.

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.

Guardianista Schizophrenia

In the Guardian, of all places, I read this by Andrew Brown:

"... 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 ?

The BBC, in its report on 'far-right' (i.e. anti-mass immigration) election gains, puts the immigrant percentage at 14%. Back to the Guardian. Apparently the far-righters have new policies and new image - sound familiar ?

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.

Andrew Brown is I think the Guardian's religious affairs correspondent. There's definitely one religion he subscribes to :

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 ?

Heh

"In a statement from Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan police said that there were up to 10,000 militant atheists in Britain, each one of them willing to die - or kill - for their beliefs"

Friday Night Music - And Christ Receive Thy Soul

A reminder that giving to the poor and needy is a Christian obligation, to be flouted at one's peril.

"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."

This ay neet, this ay neet
Every neet and all
Fire and fleet and candle leet,
And Christ receive thy soul

If thou from here away does pass
To whinny moor thou com'st at last

If thou gav'st ever hosen and shoon
Sit thee down and put them on.

But if hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The winds will prick thee to the bare bane.

If thou from there away does pass
To purgatory fire thou com'st at last.

If ever thou gavest meat or drink
The fire shall never make thee shrink.

But if meat or drink thou gavest nane
The fire will burn thee to thy bare bane.


I hope this tune doesn't give too much offence to His Holiness - but there's no doubt that the world needs more Japanese people playing and listening to seventeenth-century British dance music - in the appropriate costume. Those dresses are lovely.

Quote of the Day

Martin Kelly :

"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. "

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).