Could Gaddafi Win ?

OK, so he's lost 3/4 of the country. But as I understand it, the army units which opposed him have just taken off their uniforms and gone home, rather than staying intact.

No matter how brave the people who've looted the armouries, given that Gaddafi's not fussy about shooting demonstrators, bombing them or turning naval gunfire on them, surely the decision in Libya's going to come down to 'who's got the tanks and aircraft?'. If Gaddafi's troops and mercenaries have a unified command and the hardware, won't they win even if 90% of the country's against them?

Remember the city of Hama in Syria. Lefties will still throw the massacre at Sabra and Shatila at Israel and the Maronite Christians - and it was indeed a grievous crime, condemned by the world. Yet Assad of Syria could bomb a Syrian city, surround it with troops then (after an earlier assault failed) destroy it with artillery and kill tens of thousands with hardly a squeak.

Massacre of opponents and anyone near them is a very effective way of operating, if you don't care about slaughtering your own civilians and neither does the rest of the world. Lenin and Stalin could tell you that. I'd like to see Gaddafi hanged (if only for sending large amounts of arms and explosives to the IRA - the then Labour government tried to bribe him not to do it) but I'm not sure he's anywhere near dead yet.





UPDATE - while we're on the subject of Labour bribes to Gaddafi, at least Harold Wilson's attempts were in a good cause.

“The first thing that must be understood about the Megrahi affair is the vastness of the entanglements among Libya, the oil companies, and the Blair government. This is no ordinary set of relationships, and the economic stakes are high. As the Blair era wound down, and as officials began looking toward wealth and security in the afterlife, the opportunities available in Libya loomed very large. They had everything to gain by a show of cooperation. As a result, what one sees in the final years of Tony Blair’s government is the transformation of New Labour into something that might be called New Libya.”

And Gordon Brown was sending the SAS to train their troops less than two years ago.

Auchinleck

I see that eight schoolchildren were shot at with a BB gun yesterday, in Church Street, Auchinleck.
















Photo - Michael McGurk/Daily Mail


Church Street is also where Labour MSP and Scottish Justice Minister Cathy Jamieson was given a traditional Ayrshire welcome (by this chap) on a visit to the local Co-Op.















UPDATE - via commenter dr cromarty, this :

"Police have been called to a junior football match in Ayrshire after reports that fans were fighting on the pitch. The violence flared at the game, between Cumnock Juniors and Auchinleck Talbot, which ended with a 3-0 victory for Achinleck.
Strathclyde Police confirmed that a disturbance had broken out at the game and that the incident was on going. The teams are playing a local derby game in the Emirates Junior Cup."

Those Tough New Immigration Rules

... explained by commenter Sassenach in this Guardian thread :

"From the main article:

It is right that immigration must be controlled, which is why Labour was right to introduce the points-based system (PBS) for managing migration.

Speaking as somebody who's worked for the last 6 years as an immigration caseworker and seen PBS in operation right from its infancy, I have to say I found this sentence rather amusing. PBS is a complete shambles. In fact it's such a complete shambles that in my more cynical moments I begin to suspect that it was deliberately designed that way. Fraud and abuse are absolutely rife across all tiers, and there are gaping loopholes all over the place that seem specifically tailored to making our job of controlling the borders more difficult.

Let's take Tier 1, which is supposedly the route for attracting highly skilled people. I know this area very well since it's the area I've spent most of my career working in. At present, if you talk to any caseworker who handles Tier 1 General applications they'll all tell you that it's a complete joke. I know this will just sound like hyperbole, like I'm exaggerating for effect, but I mean no word of a lie when I say that my estimate of Tier 1 General applications is that at the very least 50% of them are completely fictitious. I'm not alone in this view, and in fact I only differ from my colleagues in that I'm slightly more charitable in my assessment, most would put it well above 50%.

The most common ruse, and believe me it's almost physically impossible to go through a day without coming across an application of this type, is to supply completely bogus evidence of self-employment income in order to prove that you score points in the earnings band. This is so pitifully easy to do it's hilarious. The people who drafted the policy for Tier 1, in their infinite wisdom, decided that all we need to 'prove' self-employment income is a letter from an accountant accompanied by unaudited business accounts. Generally these are drawn up by dodgy accountants who deal exclusively with overseas nationals, but in reality it doesn't even require the accountant to break the law since they're not carrying out an audit, all they have to do is add a disclaimer saying that the accounts and accountant letter have been drawn up according to information supplied by the applicant. In effect this amounts to taking their word for it. We ask an applicant how much money they earned and whatever they tell us we accept at face value. I've lost count of the times I've seen somebody who works the night shift stacking shelves in Tesco for £6 an hour and then in his spare time works as a self-employed 'business consultant' on about £60k a year. We even talked one time about doing 'self-employed bingo' in our office, where we'd write out bingo cards with Tesco, Sainsburys, McDonalds etc on them and whoever came across Tier 1 General applicants working there first got to take a cash prize.... (we weren't allowed to do it though).

The reason I mention this in particular is because staff at the coalface who work Tier 1 applications have been making as much noise as we possibly can about this and any number of other laughably lax loopholes ever since PBS began but nothing has ever been done. There have been various changes to the policy but all of them have actually made it even easier to defraud the system. So whoever it was earlier in the thread who quoted that survey that supposedly found Tier 1 General migrants to be regularly working in high salary jobs, I'm afraid I still haven't stopped laughing. Sure, some of them are, but the vast majority are not, or certainly the ones I come across each and every day.

Now let's consider Tier 2. This is the system which was brought in to replace the old Work Permit system. Now, I don't actually have direct experience of working cases under the old system, but I obviously know a helluva lot of people who do and to a man/woman they all say that it was vastly superior to the system Labour brought in to replace it. Which is not to say that it was particularly good of course, but Tier 2 has been a disaster. The root problem is the sponsorship system that's been introduced. Under the old system an employer needed to make an application for a specific permit for a specific job and was required to demonstrate that they'd carried out checks of the domestic labour market and that the job met certain wage and qualification criteria before the permit was issued. In practice of course the checks were not especially tough and it was easily abused, but at least there was some attempt to vet the people who were being given permits and some of them were refused. That all changed with Tier 2, and it changed for the worse.

As I was saying, the change brought in with Tier 2 was sponsorship (which also affects the issuing of student visas under Tier 4, with similar associated problems). What now happens is that a prospective employer simply hasa to apply to go on the Sponsors Register and they will be issued with an allocation of Certificates of Sponsorship. They can allocate these to whoever they wish, and pretty much all a caseworker on Tier 2 now has to do is check to make sure that an applicant has a valid CoS. All of the other checks such as resident labour market tests and various other checks that were supposed to ensure that onl;y suitably talented and necessary individuals get given work permits have been sub-contracted out to the sponsor, who in theory is meant to carry them out before issuing any CoS. Yeah right, I believe that too. It's a massive conflict of interests. We're effectively handing control of our borders directly to businesses who have a direct interest in not playing too closely by the rules.

This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if the compliance features of PBS were effective. In theory there are supposed to be regular audits of sponsors to punish those who are not fulfilling their obligations. In practice of course the resources available for compliance visits are miniscule and the sanctions are too feeble to be a concern. There are no criminal sanctions for failure to meet your sponsor obligations, all that might happen is you may be downgraded from an A to a B rating, or at worst removed from the register. Big deal, you could have sponsored 20 or 30 migrants through the door by then, and in any case it's pitifully easy to just register a new company and get back on the register with a different name. Background checks are absolutely laughable. Tier 2 is absolutely wide open to abuse, and so of course it's being heavily abused.

But the biggest scandal around Tier 2 isn't really fraud and abuse, it's the perfectly legal Intra-Company Transfer scam. This is absolutely staggering. We allow companies to bring in literally thousands of skilled workers from overseas every year under these visas. The worst offenders are the big IT contractors. Tata Consultancy Services have an annual allocation of 2500 ICT visas. 2500 every year ! Many of these come in on short term contracts of just under 1 year and so they benefit from a despicable taxation agreement which allows them not to be subject to any income tax on what they earn in the UK (which is paid as a 'subsistence allowance'). Needless to say this means that Tata (and all the other big Indian players in this market) can afford to pay their qualified staff thousands of pounds a year less than domestic competitors would have to pay to attract somebody similarly qualified. Not only does this depress wages in the sector for domestic workers, it also acts as in effect a massive competitive edge that is driving domestic companies out of business. We're directly subsidising big Indian multinationals and causing unemployment at home through our dysfunctional ICT system, it's a complete disgrace.

Tier 4 is even worse of course. It works on similar principles to the Tier 2 sponsorship system but the numbers are much,much greater. I believe that at last count there are somewhere in the region of 300,000 new Tier 4 students arriving in Britain every year. Approximately 48% of these (or thereabouts, I'm going from memory) are studying at below degree level in non-accredited colleges.This is the source of a ridiculous amount of abuse. There are thousands of bogus colleges out there, they spring up like mushrooms, get onto the sponsor register with ease and sponsor as many new students through the door as they possibly can before eventually being found out and closed down, when the owners (usually foreign nationals themselves) simply set up a new bogus college. All of this could be ended at a stroke if the rules of Tier 4 were to be changed to simply ban any tier 4 visas for non-accredited colleges or below degree level studies. Easy, quick and it would elminate over 100,000 migrants a year without affecting genuine students or university funding one iota. It's enough to make you wonder why they didn't do something like that 13 years ago instead of the opposite......"

At which point someone mentions the Report of the Migration Advisory Committee, particularly the graph on p96 showing that the vast majority of those applying for further leave to remain "are earning more than £40,000 pa" i.e. are "those nice skilled workers the UK needs so desperately".

"The problem with those figures from the MAC report is the methodology by which they were obtained. It was a small sample of cases that came up for extension. Now, there are 2 glaring issues here. One is that the time this data was sampled there was no easily accessible database of application data to draw from. It wouldn't have been possible to simply look at all applications for extension that came through because that would have been a truly enormous effort and required the recall of every file from deep storage and going through them one by one. I know for a fact that this never occurred, so it must have just been a small sampling exercise, probably involving a select few caseworkers who were asked to retain some data as they were working. Secondly of course, it assumes that the applicants were telling the truth. As I already explained Tier 1, and it's forerunner HSMP, are/were abused on a truly epic scale. All MAC did was look at what they claimed to be earning and assume it was the truth, which is a very dangerous thing to do."

The same commenter comes back with :

As for your point about abuse, the sample was restricted only to those whose FLR application was successful. I trust that you guys at UKBA are all professionals, and can quite easily find out who is telling the truth, and who is not.

"You're far too trusting my friend...

My point earlier about abuse within Tier 1 was meant to illustrate how the rules of the scheme had been written in such a way as to make it very difficult to tackle abuse. like I said, we all know that most of the people who apply claiming to be self-employed are lying to us but there's a limited amount we can do about it because they tick the appropriate boxes and supply the evidence that we stipulate. If all we're asking for as evidence of earnings is a letter from an accountant and unaudited accounts then there's not much we can do about it. How do you verify that information ? Since both forms of evidence came from the same source (the accountant) we could ring them up and ask them to confirm it, but all they say is that it was drawn up based on information supplied by the applicant. Since they're not required to carry out an audit they don;t have to actually physically verify this stuff themselves so it's an easy fee for them. This is just one example among many of how our own policy is written in such as way as to make verification of fake evidence extremely difficult.

It's interesting that you brought up the MAC report actually because one of the inadvertant effects of that report was to make Tier 1 even worse than it already was. One of the key recommendations was to bump up the bandings for earnings, meaning you now have to be earning a lot more money to score the same points than you used to. All this achieved was to drive away a lot of the legitimate applicants. We did used to have quite a lot of people earning 30-35k a year and in the old days this was often enough in combination with a masters degree and being under a certain age. Nowadays that's nowhere near enough, the same age applicant with the same qualification would need to be earning around 55-60k a year to get approved. The result has been that pretty much all we ever see these days is the fraudsters. They don't give a damn what level you set the earnings band at because all their evidence is fake anyway. Tier 1 General in the wake of that MAC report's recommendations is almost entirely comprised of fraudsters and merchant bankers (I'll leave you to make the obvious joke....)"

"Look, what I've described is the current situation with Tier 1 General and it's the reason why it's being scrapped (or it ought to be). It wasn't always quite this bad of course, and over the years quite a lot of talented people with good jobs have had Tier 1 or HSMP visas. However, it most certainly has always suffered from rampant abuse, which has been largely ignored by the higher-ups who set the policy but is an open secret among anybody who actually works at UKBA. You can choose to believe me about that or not, but I'm only sharing my perspective as somebody who knows a helluva lot more about Tier 1, and PBS in general, than anybody else in this thread."

If People Wouldn't Notice Things We Wouldn't Have To Hide Them

Blogger (and English professor) Sarah Annes Brown comments at Shiraz Socialist on 'grooming' :

"The grooming case seemed very complicated – I don’t think it is necessary to think that the men were wrongfully convicted to be able to at least *ask questions* about the way the case was reported. Was it under reported/investigated at first? Was it then over reported? If men of Pakistani origin were over represented in one particular crime in one particular area, does the picture change greatly if you look at a wider area and a wider range of sex crimes? Is it enough to ask whether a particular report of it seemed fair and balanced? Should one also look at whether the attention paid to the crime was (if not inherently objectionable) disproportionate, and thus a possible vector of anti-muslim bigotry? Or was the real problem the initial urge to cover the story up in order to protect sensitivities? Yet of course that initial urge wouldn’t have been felt if it wasn’t for the bigots."

(after the grooming issue appeared to be going mainstream in January, February seems to be business as usual. This story appears to have been completely ignored by BBC/Telegraph/Guardian etc. What's particularly impressive is the total, complete, utter silence on the issue from feminist writers* - saving only the mighty Bindel. As I've said before, race seems to trump gender for most soi-disant feminists. Not so for JB. She doesn't care what race or creed the abusers are - she judges them not by the colour of their skin, but by the contents - indeed the existence - of their scrota.)


* UPDATE - one or two people said 'what about Yazza' - and she has indeed condemned grooming by her co-religionists on more than one occasion and in no uncertain terms :

"The criminals feel they did no wrong. These girls to them are trash, asking to be wasted – unlike their own women, who must be kept from the disorderly world out there."

It's true that Yazza is indeed a feminist, but not a professional one. She has too wide a range of interests, enthusiasms and sympathies - which is why she's my monstre sacré. The missing feminists are the people who would, were the perpetrators white, be all over these cases.

People like the F-Word, or Cath Elliott, who finds time to bewail the involvement of Helena Kennedy in Julian Assange's defence team but has nothing to say about joint enterprises, often involving males from school-age to middle-age, to abuse, rape or prostitute young working class girls. For some bloggers (the Stroppers and Harpy spring to mind) I get the impression (and impression is all it is, garnered from reading their blogs regularly) that it's almost an unconscious decision - it raises all sorts of uncomfortable issues, it gives comfort to the far right - why go there when there are so many other things to blog about? I'm not sure that Cath Elliott, who from her writing seems to be a serious person quite capable of facing unpleasant realities, falls into that category.

One For The Guardian

Next time there's a Guardian article (and there will be, soon) on crime and punishment, and the usual suspects show up to contrast their empathy for the murderer of the moment with the sick, punitive authoritarianism of what I'd call 'my side' of the argument, I hope someone links to this, by a surgeon in South Africa (now there's a country for surgeons, if you like plenty of work).

(via)

'teaching other religions to our sisters'

Soon it'll be time for my daughter's school trip to the local mosque, which all pupils get when they hit year 9. I do wonder whether her Muslim classmates get a trip to a Sikh temple, a Catholic Church or a Jehovah's Witnesses assembly (to be fair, they're exposed to Catholicism-lite as pupils at a Catholic school).

From London, this :

"Four men launched a horrific attack on a teacher in which they slashed his face and left him with a fractured skull because they did not approve of him teaching religion to Muslim girls. Akmol Hussein, 26, Sheikh Rashid, 27, Azad Hussain, 25, and Simon Alam, 19, attacked Gary Smith with a Stanley knife, an iron rod and a block of cement. Mr Smith, who is head of religious education at Central Foundation Girls' School in Bow, East London, also suffered a fractured skull."

I remember wondering if it was just a coincidence or if he was targeted. What's weird is :

"Detectives made secret recordings of the gang's plot to attack Mr Smith prior to the brutal assault. The covert audio probe captured the gang condemning Mr Smith for 'teaching other religions to our sisters', the court heard."

Couldn't they have stopped it ? Just imagine if police had been monitoring the planning of some semi-mythical white supremacists before they succeeded in an attack - the conspiracy theorists would be all over the Guardian opinion pages. I would have thought Mr Smith would be consulting his union* - and his lawyers.






* yes, I know they'd have the squits over a case like this and would probably rather a dozen teachers were incapacitated than do anything that could possibly be seen as inimical to the rainbow nation narrative. But they are, formally, supposed to look after the interests of their members. This guy's been seriously injured for teaching the national curriculum.

From Know-Nothing To Know-Everything In Two Years

It's cognitive dissonance time again.

"Lib Dems: raise age of criminalisation to 14"

After all, there's no way that a thirteen year old can know whether something is wrong or not, is there?

"Nick Clegg: Yes I am a big supporter of votes at 16. The state can ask a 16 year old to fight and die for this country*, why not vote too?"

After all, there's no way that a sixteen year old isn't mature enough to take decisions on who should govern, is there ?

This leaves just a narrow window of two years for a young person to develop from only just being responsible for their own actions, to being responsible for the fate of the nation. As I wrote previously :

"The liberal policy wonks seem to be engaged in a process of lowering the age of political responsibility while simultaneously raising the age of responsibility for everything else."

* Clegg's talking nonsense. 16 and 17-year-olds don't get sent to the front line.

A Few Snowdrops From The Curate's Hedgerow

Muslim prison gang stab Serb war criminal. Why is he in a British jail - are we paying for him?

UPDATE - the attackers, including one of Mary-Anne Leneghan's killers, were all serving life (one of the others had killed while on bail for rape). They've been given life sentences - to run concurrently. In other words, no sentence at all.


Will Hutton's Work Foundation (formerly known as the Industrial Society) goes bust with a large pension deficit. I thought Mr Hutton was against that sort of thing? He's still dispensing economic advice in the Guardian, I see.


Man with 48 IQ (low enough to make him a 'vulnerable person') banned from having (homosexual) sex on the grounds that, inter alia, he fails to understand the health risks :

The judge said it requires an understanding and awareness of the “mechanics of the act”, “that there are health risks involved” and that sex between a man and a woman may lead to pregnancy. He said that the psychiatrist thought Alan “believed that babies were delivered by a stork or found under a bush”, and that “sex could give you spots or measles”. On that basis the judge ruled that Alan did not have the capacity to consent to sex, but also ordered that the council should provide him with sex education “in the hope that he thereby gains that capacity”.

And woman with 'learning dificulties' could be forcibly sterilised to stop her giving birth to any more children.


"We can't control the Duchess of York" said Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Fair play to her - I believe her former husband had a similar complaint.


Composer James MacMillan on BBC recruitment:

"In my Labour Party days, during the 80s miners’ strike, my local branch was visited by a representative of Militant Tendency, who were on a recruitment drive. The Trotskyists have used entryism as an effective manouevre for a long time. It was not just the Labour Party they targeted, but many of our other institutions. Years after this Militant spoke to us (again in a VERY LOUD VOICE) I saw him cropping up as a senior news and current affairs reporter on BBC Scotland"

And Andrew Brown on the BBC and Ye Olde Grooming Saga - the Beeb actually asked some Asian youth what they thought of the Gori :

"Today the BBC took a good look at multicultural Britain – and they didn’t like what they saw."

"Accusing minority groups of being a security risk because they are a minority group is not a new practice" sayeth the (State-funded) Samosa blog. Laban points out in the comments instances where minority groups did actually constitute such a risk, and suggests that the important thing is to be able to distinguish between ill-founded fears (of dual loyalties) and well-founded ones. The fact that people have frequently made bad calls on this doesn't mean that calls don't sometimes need to be made.

A remarkable R4 programme, 'Teenage Kicks', which isn't quite like the Undertones single, and which I didn't get to record, illustrates the condition of 'girlfriends' in (primarily) inner-city black youth culture, an elephant in the room ignored by the producer and feminist commenters. Gone are the days when you'd tell your mates what you'd been up to - the thing to do now is give them all a crack, if that's not an unfortunate expression in this instance.

"I need me a bitch, like I need my crew
I need me a bitch to pass on to my boys soon as I get through "

Remember the Battle of Mullingar ? Some participants have been jailed:

"Gardai had to use a bus to transfer to prison twenty members of an extended family who were imprisoned for their role in an attack on a family home in Mullingar in a riot involving up to 60 individuals armed with slash hooks, hatchets, pitchforks, baseball bats and stones."

And 'Ditsy' Nevin was later back in court on charges of threatening to shoot officers from the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau who paid him a visit:

Det Gda Harrington said he thought Mr Nevin was going to "strike" the Revenue Bureau officer. He said that the defendant told the men to "get off the site" or he would shoot them and shoot himself before adding that he'd have "no problem" getting a gun and using it. He said Mr Nevin indicated this by pointing his fingers to symbolise a gun to his head... the defendant said it was a "slip of a word that came out on the day".

"He That Will Not When He May, When He Will He Shall Have Nay"

I confess that I haven't a clue why Cameron suddenly pronounced the death of multiculturalism - which death took place on 7/7 and has been previously announced by Labour (and even Trevor Phillips). A problem - maybe the problem - with David Cameron is that when he makes a pronouncement on pretty much any subject, the first thought is not 'what's in it for me?' or 'what's in it for us/Britain?' but 'what's in it for him?'.

A/c/t the Green Party "Mr Cameron’s aim is simple as it is crude - to deflect the anger against his government’s cuts from the bankers and onto the Muslim community" - a theory rather undermined by the following "The prime minister is aping attacks by other European leaders like France's Nicolas Sarkozy, who passed legislation banning the veil, and Angela Merkel, who has also made statements denouncing multiculturalism in Germany." Now call me naive, but thought Germany was doing rather well in the credit crunch, and didn't need to deflect anything onto anybody. The French haven't done too badly either - their main economic worry being the performance of the Euro periphery. Maybe they had reasons which weren't concerned with finding scapegoats.

Three observations from a look at the transcript:

1) Cameron (or his speech-writer) is completely signed up to the post-Cultural Revolution settlement.

"So we should properly judge these organisations: do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths?"

"Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things."

Hmm. So if you're a Christian couple running a bed-and-breakfast, you should get back wherever it was you came from.

2) It's a funny old liberalism that says "to belong here is to believe in these things". Even in the days of Good Queen Bess, when practicing the wrong religion could lead to the stake or the block, she made no windows into men's souls regarding their beliefs. I thought that "as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone" was pretty much the contract that Old England made with the subjects of the Crown, saving only times of national emergency - almost the definition of what it was to live in a free country .

3) the rest of the speech was pretty anodyne, once you've swallowed Cameron's remarkable insights into where Islam ends and political ideology begins. I had no idea he had studied these issues so deeply. The man's a second Hazel Blears ! Only a far-left or Green Party activist could take serious issue with most of it. You never know, he may even believe some of it, and be (as some in the Labour Party appear to be) genuinely concerned for social cohesion.

IMHO it's a bit late for that. All the Cameronian Highlanders aren't going to undo the work of the last 13-odd years, let alone the 30 before that. Over large areas of our cities (and smaller areas of our towns) there's no native culture left to assimilate to. If Cameron thinks that Human Rights Culture aka 'The Religion Set Forth By The Prime Minister' is going to unite anyone when push comes to shove, I fear he's sadly mistaken. The chances of developing a new, over-arching culture, inclusive enough to include a myriad subcultures and ethnicities, is long gone. That's why Trafalgar Square, heart of what was formerly the capital city of England, was full of Kosovans stabbing each other on Thursday afternoon :

"Violence broke out when rival groups of Albanian-Kosovans, armed with knives and hockey sticks, began to fight in one of London's most popular tourist destinations. Officers arrived at the scene on Thursday to discover running brawls between what is thought to have been Albanian-Kosovan gangs, gathered to "celebrate" the third anniversary of Kosovo's independence.

Groups of Albanian-Kosovan teenagers have met on Kosovo National Day as a "show of force" for the last couple of years. "It usually results only in fist fights rather than stabbings but it is hard to concede that this event was spontaneous because it seems that people came armed with necessary tools to commit a serious assault," said a source."

Hmm. Does that come under 'equality for all before the law', or 'equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality', Mr Cameron ? I can't but think the bar has come down on the Cameronian dream, if dream it be - and it came down a good many years ago.

"He that will not when he may, when he will he shall have nay".

We had a perfectly good British culture once, half a century back and before, which covered three-and-a-half nationalities - but as the half (Ireland) could witness, it was not a perfect relationship even when all components were Christian and all looked pretty much the same. And, imperfect as it was (although it was functionally pretty effective), it was forged over centuries of dispute and struggle. The results of future disputes and struggles are IMHO unlikely to look like Cameron's script. How long did Gordon Brown's script last?

Compare And Contrast

Yazza on Cameron's evil (delivered at Munich!) rejection of multiculturalism:

"in both nations, millions of their own natives rigidly hold on to their languages and cultures"

The swine ! How dare they !

The BBC on the perfectly reasonable desires of young refugees in England:

The children of the first wave of refugees fleeing conflict in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Turkey and Iraq are coming of age now and are confronted with the expectations of their parents and their peers.

The first imperative is to preserve their cultural and ethnic identity, to engage with their homeland.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry at people's complete lack of financial savvy"

I was looking up some old work notes last night, and with them I found a few old letters - obvious circulars - that I'd failed either to open or throw away. One, dated 2005, was an invitation from a company called Inside Track to attend a free seminar as my first step in becoming a property millionaire :

Start From Scratch - Live on Easy Street Instead of Struggling For a Living!

Dear Friend,

Are you sick of the daily grind? Tired of working hard for little reward and sick of never having enough to make ends meet? At last there is a way out...

Have you noticed how ordinary people are quietly getting wealthy through property? How even your taxi driver and window cleaner mention their 'buy to let flat'? Ever thought "Huh? How did he manage to buy investment property?

They discovered the way out ...

Have you ever felt you were being left behind? Isn't it your turn to get rich?

My name is Jim Moore. Eleven years ago, I was broke, toiling for a pittance, massively in debt (credit cards, bank loans, HP you name it, I had it). I was utterly sick and tired of the daily grind. Sure, my job was okay in parts. I even liked some bits of it, but I knew that I could work there until my dying day and never make any serious money.
Nobody else thought like me.They seemed content to be drifting into old age and poverty. But I was different - I wonder if you are too? Do you think the purpose of life is to slave for 65 years, pay off a mortgage on some pitiful little house and then huddle in front of a 1 - bar electric fire, struggling to make ends meet on a government pension ?

No ?

Neither did I - and swore that I would do something about it. I didn't want fantasy riches. Like you, I'm not a greedy person. Heck, What is the point in rolling in a gleaming heap of gold - more than you can spend in ten lifetimes? No, I didn't want that, But what I did want .... Freedom. Freedom from worrying over money - can I pay this bill, or that debt? I've had that - never again! Now I can pay any bill of any amount instantly it becomes due. That's a great feeling, let me tell you.

I wanted freedom from debt - crippling month on month debt - Visa, bank overdraft, HP interest being piled upon interest, final demands for payment, threats of CCJs. You know the situation, I'm sure. Now I am debt free (apart from commercial loans to fund portions of my property portfolio - those are not the sort of debts I am talking about). I am using the awesome power of OPM - Other People's Money to make myself incredibly wealthy. You could do this with our help.) It is hard to believe that just a few short years ago I was a humble wage slave with zero prospects. Now 1 have transacted millions of pounds worth of property deals and amassed a private fortune. I even buy and sell entire football grounds!

Now I have the car of my dreams, a wonderful private house (worth £1 million+) and all the cash I could ever spend. More importantly, I am FREE free from the daily grind, the commuting, the bosses the mind numbing routine. I 'work' about 3 hours a day (visiting properties, doing deals) and I travel extensively. I have never looked back. Would you? I cannot believe that I sat in that office all those years, taking orders; doing menial, pointless work; watching the clock... and for what? £7 an hour, I seem, to recall! Ha! Recently I made £30,000 for an hour's work (of course, I cannot do that 40 hours a week I wish!) Ten of those is a cool £300,000 in my pocket.

I made my fortune just dealing in property (some of which I have never even seen).

I am living proof that property is the fastest and safest way for the ordinary person to become wealthy. And by 'wealthy' let me state exactly what I mean. I mean at least £1,000,000 in property assets within 3 to 5 years of you starting. And that's just step one, of course. You can go on from there if you want £3 million, £10 million it's up to you. My own goal is £50 million by the time 1 am 50 (£1 million for each year of my life).

Property wealth is not some fantasy. Take a look at The Times list of the 500 richest people. It is boring in its repetitiveness property, property, retail, property, property, property, brewing, properly, leisure, property... you get the idea!

Take a look at property prices over the years. I have shown the graph on the next page. It just keeps going up and up and up... Sure there have been a few minor little dips - hardly what you would call a crash, merely a blip in an ever rising graph. People often say to me - "Jim, haven't prices peaked out? Aren't we in for a crash? I read in the paper that... " Yawn! They said that to me in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and they are still saying it in 2005! Boy, did they miss out.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at people's complete lack of financial savvy. They are heading for a lifetime of drudgery and lack, and a poverty stricken miserable old age.

Let me ask you some questions: Do you see any of Britain's richest dumping their property portfolios? Uh... no. They are quietly accumulating more. Do you see any crash in house prices, bearing in mind that there is an estimated shortfall of 4 million homes in the UK? Remember what you know about supply and demand - huge demand, little supply means... Price rise. In 1901 there were 4.7 people, per household on average. Now it is 2.1 and falling. People want more space. They want to live alone. They are getting divorced and swapping one home for two.

Property has risen on average 11.3% year on year in the UK since 1948.

I'm sure you know enough about compound interest to realise that 11.3% looks unexciting by itself, but compounded over even a few years can bring very decent gains. (Just £50,000 invested at this rate returns half a million pounds in 20 years!)

I have had people walk out of my workshop and make their first deal within a few days. One man bought a brand new home for which he outlayed the grand total of £350 from his own bank account and then promptly received a £10,000 cash back! He is now on his fifth property.

And this man was a novice before hearing about Inside Track. These were his first property deals. He admits to being nervous doing the first one. He felt like a fish out of water. But after receiving the £ 10,000 cash back, he became a believer. Why not come and learn exactly how ordinary people are getting steadily wealthy by accumulating a tidy property portfolio? These are people with no experience, no training and little or no money (let's face it, it isn't hard to make a million in property if you have half a million sitting in the bank already!).

Look, I do not have the space to convince you here. So what I have done is put together a superb (and what's more FREE) 2 hour session where I will begin to explain these wealth generating principles to you in person. This letter is my personal invitation to you to come along and see for yourself. For the last four years I have been teaching thousands of ordinary people the astonishing money making secrets of residential and commercial property. Secrets which you can apply for yourself. Secrets which can make you independently wealthy. The Inside Track programme (as it is called) has helped many to achieve their financial dreams.

How to retire completely debt free in 3 to 5 years.

How to buy lucrative UK property with little or no deposits.

Simple formulas used by the wealthy to create income.

How to make money from property in good times (easy) AND BAD (even easier!).

Buy as many as you wish and access the very best mortgage rates.

Build and grow a successful rental property portfolio in record time.

Buy property and get paid tax free cash on certain transactions.

Locate the best, most profitable transactions which are never advertised.

Get 'hands on' assistance from top property professionals.

Aside: Perhaps you are wondering why I am happy to pay for this workshop? The answer is simple. We provide in depth property investment education proven to make you wealthy. Only when you start making deals and getting rich do we make a small commission from properties we introduce to you. Take this small percentage on hundreds of deals and it adds up to a sizeable amount. (Obviously you are under no obligation at all to purchase this property, we just think the deals we introduce to clients provide the very best revenue potential, and we'll prove it).That sounds a fair exchange, I hope you will agree. Our knowledge for a small commission when you make a deal. I hope also that has put your mind at rest.

Any averagely bright and hungry person could build a £1 million portfolio, from scratch in five years or less.

What other plans do you have to make £1,000,000 and retire? If you do not do something right now, you will fritter away the next few years and be in exactly the same situation you are in now or worse. Not nice. Not nice at all.

Finally, let me ask you a question. Are you going to carry on exactly as you have for the last five years? Or are you going to seize control of your destiny, right now, today? The cost is trivial (travel expenses plus some of your time) so if you don't do it now, 1 think it is fair to say you never will. As this is a free introductory workshop, the places tend to be grabbed fairly quickly so please call right now to reserve your place.

Years ago, I came to a crossroads like this. I chose the right path - the one that led me to the good life. Why not give yourself the same break?

Best regards

Jim Moore
CHAIRMAN

I looked at this and thought - I bet a pound to a pinch of poo that they're bust - and that there are a lot of unhappy (and poorer) wannabe millionaires.

Yes, they were bust (humble wage slave Jim failed to mention above the multi-million pound bankruptcy of a previous venture, L'Arome) - and yes, there are indeed some unhappy clients. It's bad enough borrowing to bet on price rises on off-plan (i.e. you buy before they're built) city flats - let alone Spanish property.

After hearing that buying property could help them wipe out their mortgage before they retired and attracted by claims that Spanish property prices were set to rise by 30% a year, the couple signed up to buy an offplan three-bedroom house for €253,000 (£171,000). The deal was struck by mortgage broker Anson Bailey, say Steve and Cate. Its representative then persuaded them to buy a second off-plan three-bedroom house for €230,000. They planned to sell both homes before they were completed. The 30% deposits were financed by switching the couple's £65,000 repayment mortgage on their four-bedroom house in Telford, Shropshire, to interest only and raising it to £162,000.

Oh dear.

Inside Track received 10% of the sales price from the developer.

Inside Track indeed.

They got the money for one house refunded after it was sold to someone else and they were offered a poorer replacement.

But the Biddles have been saddled with the second property, which they have been unable to sell despite all the assurances. As a result, they have a Spanish interest-only mortgage for €190,000 while the mortgage on their Telford home, where they have lived for 14 years, stands at £112,000 after the refund of the deposit on the first property. The couple had owed £65,000 on their UK house before buying the Spanish properties.

Ho hum. I guess a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest when it comes to deals like this. Doesn't anyone ask why, if property dealing is so lucrative (and it has been, for many people - right up until the time when it wasn't), and you have inside contacts that can find the best deals, you should want to share it with the world, even for a fee ? The answer I guess is that if you get the fees and a cut of each sale, you can make money without putting any capital at risk. That's you the introducer, not you the punter, of course.

Still, you can't keep a humble wage-slave down - remember how it was EVEN EASIER to make money from property in bad times ? - Jim Moore is back with a new venture - IAP Global.

IAP Global's presenter Kevin O'Connor addressed a room of 50 investors, most of whom were respectable middle-class professionals. He didn't waste any time explaining the nature of the opportunity on offer.

"Distress is the reason we're here," he said. "The developer is being pressured by the bank. If he wants to get out, we're happy to deal with him. We then negotiate a discount for you."

Claiming that IAP Global sources property from "distressed developers and individual landlords" who are desperate to sell, a minimum of £25,000 "instant equity" is reflected in the price. He goes on to explain: "If you walked into an estate agents and were talking about £100,000 for a property, we'd get it for £75,000."

Hmm. This appears to be Inside Track in reverse. I wonder if by any chance they get a cut of the price ? And I wonder how you could put together a list of distressed individual landlords, desperate to sell ?

Would it - could it ? - bear any resemblance to the Inside Track client list ?

It has to be said that the Inside Track sell was good - hitting just the right note about being able to pay the bills. My degenerate (and poor) youth gave me a great distrust of people who write about 'the poor' for a living yet have never in their lives been afraid to open the electric bill.

Indeed the sell was so good that it has not died with Inside Track. Here is the opening, word for word, being used by one Brian Watson to sell his online opportunity (with a company called Global Domains International - caveat emptor).

"Whiteness Is All"

Yazza, in her rightful home of the Daily Mail, not for the first time bemoans the female hierarchy of skin colour, as exemplified by the recent lightening of one Beyonce Knowles, apparently a popular singer renowned for her shapely rump (or 'booty') :

"Black and Asian parents work hard to give their children a positive self-image and confidence in their appearance, despite the cultural forces stacked against them. But when black celebrities appear to deny their heritage by trying to make themselves look white, I despair for the youngsters who see those images. "

Hmm. She's certainly not getting any darker, although digital processing can do a lot of that. Mind you, at one stage of his life it was becoming increasingly difficult to tell Michael Jackson from Gloria Estefan. Beyonce has way to go.

I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but the anthropologist Peter Frost, in ‘Fair Women, Dark Men’, pointed out that paleness in women has been prized for centuries, even in cultures with little Western exposure such as medieval Japan – or ancient Israel.

“I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.”

Why ? Maybe because women do tend to have lighter skin than men, due to subcutaneous fat.

Frost notes that a preference for paler women will have the effect of lightening the upper classes in any society – as they tend to get the women considered most attractive.

“Since higher-ranking men marry the more attractive women, the upper classes tend to lighten in color with each passing generation, as in India.”

By contrast paleness in males is not prized – “tall, dark and handsome” is required. Aryan blonde males like Rutger Hauer or Max von Sydow tended to play bad guys. Note the stick Julian Assange is getting for his looks – remarks to the effect that he looks like a classic movie villain who should have a white cat on his lap. In movie casting, the love interest woman is nearly always lighter than the love interest man.

Link to Peter Frost’s site.

Graph of skin relectivity (i.e. lightness) vs age for men and women in India and Spain, showing that females in both countries have on average lighter skin than the males. It appears that lightness is associated with femininity both in fact and in culture.

While Yazza may actually have a (smallish) point here (she also gets into Black Dolly, White Dolly territory), she's also yet again invoking Sailer's Law Of Female Journalism :

"The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking."

God's Above The Devil Yet

MPs have overwhelmingly voted to keep the ban on prisoners voting, in defiance of a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights. The House of Commons' decision is not binding, but could put pressure on ministers to go against the Strasbourg court's decision. MPs backed a motion opposing the move by a 234 to 22 - a majority of 212.

Only one thing I want to know now. Who are the 22 traitors ?

UPDATE : here (thanks Liam)

Lib Dims
Beith, Alan (Berwick)
Reid, Alan (Argyll and Bute)
Foster, Don (Bath)
Hughes, Simon (Bermondsey)
Williams, Stephen (Bristol W)
Huppert, Julian (Cambridge)
Munt, Tessa (Wells)
Brake, Tom (Carshalton)
Hames, Duncan (Chippenham)


Labour
Gardiner, Barry (Brent North)
McDonnell, John (Hayes)
Qureshi, Yasmin (Bolton SE)
Green, Kate (Stretford)
Jackson, Glenda (Hampstead)
Love, Andrew (Edmonton)
McCarthy, Kerry (Bristol)

Conservative
Bottomley, Peter (Worthing)

Green
Lucas, Caroline (Brighton Cottage)

Plaid Cymru
Williams, Hywel (Arfon)
Edwards, Jonathan (Carmarthen E)
Llwyd, Elfyn (Merioneth)

Independent
Hermon, Sylvia (North Down)



Tellers :
Jeremy Corbyn (Labour, Islington)
Lorely Burt (Lib Dim, Solihull - a former prison assistant governor)

Resolved,

That this House notes the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Homicidal Axe Killer v. the United Kingdom in which it held that there had been no substantive debate by members of the legislature on the continued justification for maintaining a general restriction on the right of prisoners to vote; acknowledges the treaty obligations of the UK; is of the opinion that legislative decisions of this nature should be a matter for democratically-elected lawmakers; and supports the current situation in which no prisoner is able to vote except those imprisoned for contempt, default or on remand.

Interesting voting pattern in the 'nay' (i.e. against the resolution) camp.

1) Inner city MPs from vibrant, hi-diversity areas looking to attract the vitally important criminal demographic. Mostly Labour.
2) a cluster round Bristol/Bath/Chippenham/Wells - mostly Lib Dim
3) Lib Dims - more voted nay than Labour MPs. Split between the old rural, low-crime non-conformist heartlands, and SWPL, low-crime, low-diversity towns (Cambridge, Wells, Chippenham)
4) Plaid Cymru - again, rural, low-crime, formerly-nonconformist areas.

Dirty Laundry

I could have sworn at some time in the not too distant past I blogged about the woes of lefty blogger Tim 'Bloggerheads' Ireland. Maybe I just expressed my support at this Peter Risdon post, which explains how he's being targeted by an anonymous and untrue smear campaign, and gives some background, and at Pickled Politics, where the comment exchanges between Tim Ireland and Iain Dale give a flavour of the whole sorry saga*.

Mr Ireland seemed convinced that the abuse was in some way controlled by certain Tories - or at least that they had the power to call the dogs off. He asked them to call off said dogs, and pretty much as one they said 'We're sorry to hear about this but it's really nowt to do with us".

Naturally one can draw one of two conclusions :

i) the MPs and Tories concerned are telling the truth and ain't got a clue
ii) they are hiding what (and who) they know

He seems to have gone for option ii. I read at Chick Yog's :

The clock’s ticking for the Tories

Go and read Tim Ireland’s open letter to Steve Hilton, the director of strategy for David Cameron.

And then count down to the deadline. If Tim doesn’t get satisfaction – and soon – for the years of grief certain Tories have put him through, he’s going to start publicly airing some pretty dirty Conservative laundry**. I’d say he’s been patient enough already.

“I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall –I will do such things —
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth! ”

Call me cynical, but I’d have thought that if he had any ‘smoking gun’ evidence which would reflect badly on the Tories he’d have used it by now regardless of any ongoing feuds or lack thereof. He's a left blogger, and that's what they do. Nowt wrong with it.

I did take a look and couldn’t see much except a repetition of all the ‘he said she said’ stuff as before, plus a few new pokes at Nadine Dorries’ expenses, which I imagine he’d have published even if no one had ever made unpleasant and untrue anonymous allegations about him online.

Oh, and there’s a new variety of potato called ‘Nadine’, with exceptionally smooth skin. He's got photos of it ! He gets very cross if people use words like stalking or harassment, it's just fair political comment…

In their own unique ways, Tim Ireland and Nadine continue to provide ammunition for those who think ill of them. Nadine has further to fall, and seems an impulsive creature, so much as I love her it’s always possible that she might come a cropper one day. Maybe Mr Ireland will be her nemesis, who can tell?

She’s the kind of woman who 150 years ago would have had an opera written about her. In my production Tim Ireland would be played by Antony Sher.

* the exact details of which, including his history of conflict with said Tories, life is just too short to go into - reminding me of those posts by the Policeman or Inspector Gadget where Kayleigh off the estate wants something done about the texted abuse she's getting from her ex Dave, just because of the texts she sent to his new partner Jade etc ... if you really want the full horror may I recommend this feed. Draw your own conclusions.

** if he's got any of one MP's dirty laundry, there's only one place to send it.

A Small Post

At Biased-BBC.

And something that made me smile, also at Biased-BBC.

Quote of the Week

Ed West, on the news that the US are running 'anti-extremist' operations in the UK, and our obligation to celebrate diversity :

According to the local council, “Leicester has a reputation for welcoming and celebrating diversity” and “the residents of Leicester recognise that the city is both multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-faith”. The latter is a tellingly un-enthusiastic phrase. I recognise that I’m not going to ever be confused for Johnny Depp or afford a house in Hampstead, but I wouldn’t “celebrate” the fact, unless you call smashing an empty whisky bottle across the room while listening to Joy Division at 2 in the morning “celebrating”.

Friday Night Music - Strangeness and Charm

I've mentioned the glories of Lewis before. On Saturday at dusk not only the park gate is locked, but the swings and roundabouts chained up as well, in case any child should profane the Sabbath. The hospital's doctors have houses scattered across the island, so that remote communities have someone near - and I was told that a female doctor had been visited by a delegation, asking her to refrain from hanging up her washing on the Lord's Day - the washing in question being on an airer in the kitchen, but visible from outside.

On the more worldly side, everyone seems to drink a lot on Saturday night, and in the morning there's a lot of broken glass about in Stornoway. But 'when in Rome' - you respect the locals and on Sunday walk or go to church. If you are invited to a local home, the hospitality is humbling and the tea you get lasts you for the next two days. Small children, not yet school age, can play outside unaccompanied until dark, and I remember coming across a school on a main road, with the children's bicycles all propped against the outside of the school wall, by the road. Try that on the mainland.

And they do have this amazing church music - like nothing else in Britain. Or maybe in Europe.




Moving a little further south :

"The Clan Maxwell fared badly that day. In all, it is said that up to 700 Maxwells were killed, but this may be an exaggerated number. Many were wounded by downward sword strokes known as "Lockerbie Licks." And their chief, Lord Maxwell, who was one of the most powerful people in southern Scotland, was slain in cold blood by the Johnstones when he asked for mercy and offered to surrender. Although Sir Johnstone escaped punishment from the King for his actions, he did not escape the unforgiving hand of the next Lord Maxwell, son of the chief who was killed at Dryfe Sands. In 1608, Lord Maxwell shot Sir Johnstone in the back during a meeting held “under trust,” which rendered him an outlaw. Lord Maxwell was later captured and executed by hanging."

Quick Thoughts On Egypt

Everyone knows that an Egyptian prison can be bad for your health and your toenails, they stuff ballot boxes, suppress opposition etc, so when a lot of people come onto the streets declaring that the ruler should step down (29 years is enough for anyone, surely), one is sympathetic.

When their demonstrations are mainly peaceful (apart from a few clashes with the pretty nasty police force), one is more sympathetic still.

And when the government sends thugs out to attack them, the sympathometer is off the scale. I must confess I thought the anti-Mubarak people were all going to be horribly beaten at best on Wednesday night, as stone-throwing pro-Mubarak crowds pushed them back into the square. But they stood firm, fought back and were well in control today, despite deaths from what may have been sniper fire.

Naturally I'm on 'their' side. But who are 'they' ? They don't like Mubarak, that's for sure - but is that enough policy to run a country on ?

Not all the pro-Mubarak people were thugs, and I saw some being interviewed just outside the square. They looked prosperous middle class, and made some reasonable points. One eloquent guy asked what had happened to Iraq when Saddam went? He didn't want to see that in Cairo (and there has been looting. And didn't a lot of prisoners break out of jail?). Another reckoned that if Mubarak stepped down there would be anarchy.

I'd been impressed with the way the demonstrators had fought back - but according to one report many of the fighters were Muslim Brotherhood chaps doing jihad. I certainly saw the odd chap in robes chucking rocks with the rest.

And while the way ordinary people set up local vigilante groups to defend their neigbourhoods against looting was admirable, some of those same people were quick to believe government warnings of 'foreign agents' and to start their search for the 'Israelis' who are behind all the unrest (IMHO Israel were probably quite happy with Mubarak, who preferred anti-Israel propaganda to anti-Israel action). There are some eight million Egyptian Coptic Christians, members of one of the oldest churches in the world, who have kept the faith for 1400 years as second-class citizens in a Muslim country, and who have been discriminated against, as well as coming under murderous attack by Islamist extremists. Iraq*, where ancient Christian communities have been slaughtered or driven out, is a terrible warning of what could happen to them.

Over on the Left blogs and the Guardian op-eds, some idiots see their favourite flavour of socialist revolution as imminent, some idiots see Cairo as a useful exemplar for London, more see the bad guys seemingly losing - and cheer that process without too much thought as to what comes next. I worry that might be all too close to my position.

So I'm generally supportive but with no illusions. A corrupt quasi-dictatorship with a democratic front-end, a strong Islamist presence, and a young, over-educated and under-employed demographic profile offers plenty of ways for a transfer of power to go wrong.












* re Iraq - I supported the overthrow of Saddam, but no one can say the implementation's been anything but poor - with dreadful results especially for minorities like Christians. In my defence I'd say that

a) everybody who knew anything about the region and ever made the pages of the Guardian predicted that Iraq would be America's Vietnam, Baghdad their Stalingrad. And that all over the Middle East the "Arab Street" would rise, threatening regimes from Cairo to Casablanca.

What nobody, as far as I can recall (and I was keeping my ears open), said in 2003 was :

"If you overthrow Saddam, the Sunnis will kill all the Shias - and vice-versa"

b) one unknown blogger did seem to grasp the potential for disorder, writing in his third-ever blog post, back in 2003 :

"... will survival be the biggest worry for most Iraqis ? The US and Brits are going to have to turn themselves into aid workers and/or policemen with some speed. When a strong police state collapses, anarchy often follows ... Night is falling in Baghdad. Let's hope they don't wake up to a looted and burning city tomorrow. I'm very pleased - but it seems to me that for the Coalition the hard work has only just begun."

Boom Bang A Bang

I don't know. When the 7/7 bombers struck, the press was full of stories to the effect that

a) the bombs were home-made TATP explosive, as used in home-made Hamas rockets.
b) there was a fully-equipped cookshop in Hyde Park, Leeds, where the TATP was brewed.
c) said cookshop belonged to an Egyptian chemist who happened to have gone to Egypt. The chemist was named as Magdi Mahmoud al-Nashar, of Leeds University. Apparently he was detained in Cairo by Egyptian police and interviewed by a couple of Special Branch officers - after which it was quietly announced that no charges would be brought. He doesn't seem to be at Leeds any more.

Then we were told 'organic-peroxide' bombs. I assumed flour and peroxide as that seemed to be the choice of the 21/7 bombers. In fact the 21/7 wiki, for what that's worth, said "The explosives used by the bombers consisted of Chapatti flour powder mixed with liquid hydrogen peroxide, detonated by a booster charge. This was the same explosive mixture used by the bombers in the 7/7 bombings two weeks earlier."

Yet the 7/7 inquests are now apparently telling us the bombs were peroxide and black pepper. Sounds like a flavour of crisp.

"The bombs used in the attacks on three tube trains and a double-decker bus contained about 10kg of explosives made from a mixture of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and pepper and detonated by a 9-volt battery. Forensic explosives expert Clifford Todd said using this combination of materials for a bomb was thought to be "entirely unique" both in the UK and worldwide."

The Telegraph has most detail :

"The July 7 bombs and July 21 bombs were not identical, but they were, a source at DSTL said, "similar in principle". Both were a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, made by boiling down hair products, and an organic material - in the first case black pepper, in the second chapatti flour. The detonators were also similar - in the case of July 7, made from hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), made by combining hydrogen peroxide, hexamine tablets from camping stoves, and an acid such as citric acid or dilute sulphuric acid. In the case of July 21 the detonator was triacetone triperoxide (TATP), made by combining hydrogen peroxide, acetone from nail varnish and sulphuric acid. The differences amount to just two main ingredients - nail varnish rather than camping stove tablets and flour rather than pepper - and leave the possibility that both bomb-makers were taught by the same man. The cost of the devices was also relatively low - just £500 was spent on hydrogen peroxide."

It must be a pain boiling down all that hairdresser grade peroxide (17 vol?) when a chemical supplier can do you 100 vol.

Now call me daft, but why pepper ? Indeed, why flour ?

I guess you want something flammable (high heat of combustion per gram), fine particles, can be soaked in concentrated peroxide. I've forgotten my chemistry - wouldn't charcoal be better, or doesn't it burn fast enough - as I guess the speed at which the mixture burns affects the power of the bang?

I suppose the driver is that the fuel must be able to mix intimately with the H2O2 - which is a watery oxidiser. Can't mix that with, say, diesel, as oil and water proverbially don't mix.

Is there someone in the Kurram Valley or Mohmand grinding up various foodstuffs and evaluating them as explosives? Seems that there must be.

The King's Speech

About a third of the way into Tony Hooper's The King's Speech, I had a feeling I'd seen the plot before. Stuffy, hidebound, repressed type meets irreverent, vital colonial and is charmed/seduced despite themselves? Ah yes - Titanic, where it was toffee-nosed Kate Winslet who (despite the lack of a formal introduction) needed to find charming chancer Leonardo di Caprio (and the entire cast of Riverdance, travelling steerage to show her what life could really be - Catholics have natural rhythm, dontcha know) before she could unloosen her stays and do some bouncing over the bounding waves with him. I'm not a cinema buff, but I guess that theme goes back a long way.

This time it's Colin Firth's Duke of York (fated to become George VI after his elder brother's abdication), unable to string a sentence together in less than ten minutes due to his stammer, who needs the help of Geoffrey Rush's speech therapist Lionel Logue ("me Lionel, you Bertie") to unbutton his buttons - after which he can bounce about a room shouting swear-words as well as any Brit monarch in history. Rush plays Logue somewhat in the style of Professor Laurie Taylor - a kind of smug mixture of matiness and superiority, a man with a fiver each way on himself. In fact Logue's grandchildren described him as a 'very Victorian' character, not over-familiar - pretty much the opposite of what Rush gives us. "I don't think he ever swore in front of the king and he certainly never called him Bertie.*"

Writer David Seidler takes the usual pop at Christianity, Rush's Logue (in reality a Christian Scientist) dismissing the religious element of the Coronation Oath as 'this rubbish'**, and he absolutely murders British history. Baldwin didn't resign with the words 'Churchill was right' - far from it, he laid down his office confident that Churchill was well and truly sidelined and out of the way. Nor was the Duke of York a strong anti-Nazi - nor a Churchill fan, any more than Churchill, who supported Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, was a fan of his (although he later became one). And if the King couldn't speak by the outbreak of war in 1939 he really did have problems - Logue had been helping him for thirteen years by then.

That said, the direction is excellent, as are the performances. Two hours fly by, and you find, as war breaks out and the BBC mike lights come on, that you really want the big speech to go well. It's not an easy job to make gripping drama out of a man reading three typed pages - but it works. The camerawork is fantastic - London has never looked more gloomily beautiful, a fog-bound sepia fantasy - although again you have to wonder if Logue, whose practice was in Harley Street, really lived in a neighbourhood straight out of Oliver Twist. The cinema audience applauded at the end.


But I fear that a generation*** will grow up knowing that the King was helped by an ur-hippie teaching him to loosen up by jumping about while shouting obscenities. The dramatic core of the film is also its biggest lie.




* as a naval officer who served at Jutland, the Duke almost certainly had been exposed to an extensive armoury of swear-words, but off his ship would not have used them, nor tolerated others using them in his presence.

** oh, and Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang wasn't the idiot presented here, either.

*** unless the sell-out audience where I saw it is typical. They were MUCH older than a typical cinema audience.