It Should Have Been Me ...

1976 ? The Queens Hotel, Bradford. No relation at all to that posh place in Leeds.

It was a jukebox favourite ... "Somebody call the Po-lice! That woman down there is a doggone thief!"

Hmmm ...

One never quite knows what to make of something like this. After all, an ill-intentioned person or persons could in principle spread the word to create a kind of Googlebomb effect.

He's madder than ever

Rasputin's really gorn and done it now. When even liberals like Ruth Gledhill wonder if you've gone crackers you know you're in trouble.

Has the Archbishop gone bonkers?

Forgive the stark clarity of my headline, but sometimes when writing about the Archbishop of Canterbury, clarity is what is needed. I ask this of readers here, because this is the question put to me time after time this afternoon by incredulous commentators of every variety, stunned into blunt expression by the Archbishop of Canterbury's uncharacteristically clear comments on Sharia in Britain. The Archbishop believes adopting aspects of sharia law into British law would help maintain social cohesion.

The funny thing is that only a few days ago this 'liberal' Archbishop was calling for "thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking and acting” to be made a criminal offence.

Now we may all have an idea of what that would mean in practice. But you can't get much more thoughtless than the Mad Monk's latest. Even John Humphrys might not be too keen on Sharia, though the extra wives might come in handy. What's Hebrew for "chutzpah" again ?




UPDATE - I'm sorry to say that Rasputin is an alumnus of my mother's old school, Dynevor - as was Spencer Davis (this video marking the first recorded appearance of the fuzzbox) - whose mum I think worked in the Lewis Lewis department store. By strange chance, the last I heard of very wonderful singer Steve Winwood - what a voice for a teenager - he was playing the church organ on Sundays not so very far from where I live.

She's At It Again

Yazza in the Evening Standard on Dewsbury MP Sadiq Khan's visit to "his childhood mate and constituent Babar Ahmad" - a visit which turned out to be recorded by the authorities, breaking a convention which has applied since Harold Wilson's time that MPs are non-buggable.

Considering that, I find it hard to believe that the murderous duo of Adams and McGuinness weren't bugged. I certainly hope they were.

Yazza does have an unfortunate way of expressing her conviction that her co-religionists are peaceful, just-like-us-but-without-the-binge-drinking types. It always seems to end with the threat of what will happen if we don't believe her.

"People comfortable in their bicultural skin, like Khan, hold the key to a peaceful future. To his credit Brown has brought in young blood and ministers such as Hazel Blears and David Miliband, who, thankfully, have no problem with assertive Muslims. They actively seek creative, intelligent ideas to break the hold of the fundamentalists.

But after this scandal, they had better do right by Sadiq Khan, otherwise trust will be shaken, suspicion stirred once again that in this land the most upstanding Muslim is still only ever a potential terrorist. And imagine what that could mean for the security of our nation."

(see also the remarkable statement from the secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain).


UPDATE - Brian mails to point out that the Sinn Fein Two failed to take the Oath of Allegiance and so never actually became Members of Parliament.

She's living in a Hibernian World ..

I've written a couple of small pieces on the major changes in Ireland over the last 20 years.

"Strange times in the Irish Republic. The boom years have been on for 20-odd years now, the country's becoming much more secular, immigration and asylum levels are high, the youth/dance/drug culture is widespread - it's starting to feel much more like degenerate, decadent England."

In fact, given their smallish population, immigration is massive - and it's pretty much all been in the last ten years. According to the BBC, one in seven - about 14% - of the Republic's population - were born abroad - the sort of demographic shift that took thirty-five years in the UK crammed into ten.

Ironic really. Traditionally all the problems of Ireland have been seen as the fault of the perfidious English. Murderous republicans have killed English toddlers in Warrington or Pakistani shopkeepers at Canary Wharf, but have avoided blowing up Dundee or Wrexham. Only in the North have they been happy to slaughter people of Scots descent whose forebears emigrated to Ulster 400 years back - and who, ironically, were of Ulster stock.

So while Sinn Fein pledge a rebel's stand against "England's sons with their long-barreled guns", the country is filling up behind them. If one in seven of the Republic's residents were English you can be sure that the petrol bombs now burning Orange halls across the North would be toasting the joists of English-owned homes in the South. Instead Sinn Fein call for immigrants to be welcomed "with open arms" - on the grounds that the nasty Brits gave us such a hard time when we went over there, and we don't want to be like them, do we ?

Some people in Ireland aren't completely happy about what's happening.

Hibernia Girl is one. She's your one-stop shop for all Irish immigration-related news. Very much worth watching, as the changes really are massive. I don't think Ireland yet has the UK's demographic disaster as well - as far as I know they're still having babies - but I'd be grateful if she'd keep an eye on that, too.

She also nominated me as an "Excellent blog", so thanks muchly.

(It's still ironic though. Even on HGs site there are plenty of commenters who think England's the big problem. As they say at the panto "Behind you !")

A Small Postette

At Biased BBC.

James Barlow

Peter Hitchens at his Mail blog is urging his admirers to read Malcolm Bradbury's 'The History Man' - a thinly fictionalised eye-witness account of the cultural revolution at an early 70s university.

One writer who saw it all coming was the thriller writer James Barlow, who attacked the sixties ethos pretty much from the word go - in fact he was attacking it in his first (1956) novel The Protagonists, when it was still struggling to be born.

He wrote pretty much a novel a year through the 60s - The Patriots is probably his best. While I wouldn't call him a great writer, I enjoy his work. Favourite targets of attack were trendy bishops, TV talking heads and chat show hosts - people whose currency was words. I'm sure as an author he appreciated the irony.

He emigrated to New Zealand in the early 70s, leaving with "Goodbye England" - his disgusted (non-fiction) valediction, featuring a much-mocked paragraph about topless girls walking through London with dust and bus-tickets adhering to their mammaries. I must get hold of a copy, as I've never read it.

There's very little about him on the Web and no site devoted to him. If anyone has any information about him I'd love to hear it.

The Maths, the Maths

Around 140 people voted in the Normblog novelists poll. You chose 10 novelists, number 1 being worth 4 points, number 2, 3 points, 3, 2 points and 4-10 only got one.

Here's the Top Ten :

01 (151) - Jane Austen
02 (113) - Charles Dickens
03 (64) - Philip Roth
04 (61) - George Eliot
05 (54) - Evelyn Waugh
06 (48) - Ian McEwan
07 (38) - Graham Greene
08 (37) - P.G. Wodehouse
09 (35) - Vladimir Nabokov
10 (32) - Charlotte Bronte

If only I knew statistics. But one thing stands out - there must have been a huge spread of novelists in the entries. No fewer than 205 novelists only got one point - I'd love to know who they all were.

FYI, Laban's selection. Not the subject of serious reflection, although #1 was a given. I've probably forgotten a favourite or two.


1. Thomas Hardy - self-taught, flawed master. Am I the only person to find Alec D'Urberville a much more sympathetic character than Angel Clare ? At least Alec knew what he wanted - the most desirable heroine in the history of the known universe.
2. Wodehouse
3. Solzhenitsyn
4. Zola
5. HP Lovecraft - dreadful yet strangely compelling
6. W.E. Johns
7. James Barlow - sixties reactionary who saw it all coming
8. A.G. MacDonnell - only one novel of note - but what a novel !
9. Chandler
10. Enid Blyton. Awful style, but her imagination more than compensates. "Magic Faraway Tree" enchanted me as a child and enchanted my kids in their turn.

Creative Defence Lawyer of the Year

I don't know who's defending Mark Dixie, accused of murdering and raping Sally Ann Bowman, but his defence in the face of the DNA evidence - that someone else murdered her and that his client, chancing upon her bloodied corpse in the street, 'took advantage of the situation', shows him to be a pretty optimistic, glass-half-full sort of guy.

UPDATE - how very apt. His name is Anthony Glass.

UPDATE2 - why is Mark Dixie's face pixellated out in all the UK photos ? Not so elsewhere, as the delightfully named Serial Killer Central (a tasteful place with some pretty sick users) shows us.

Note the comments on the Mark Dixie story. The way we live now.

"remember my girlfriend staying over at his house in croydon and she had said to me that mark and Stacy his then girlfriend were having a big argument over who was going to take the last line of coke."

Not a gentleman then.

UPDATE3 - the Aussies may also want a quiet word with the accused.

Primark Pandemonium

I remember the IKEA riot, but I missed this more peaceful event - the opening of Primark's Oxford Street store. Lordy. Talk about the barbarians at the gates - it's worse than the Scout jumble sale.

Let Freedom Ring !

Today Sri Lankans celebrate 60 years of freedom from the colonial Hush Puppy.

Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic country, with a population of 18m people. It is an ancient centre of Buddhism. It also has a significant number of Hindus, Christians and Muslims. There are also a number of smaller communities such as the Burghers and the Veddas.

The civil war has killed about 64,000 people, displaced one million and held back the island's growth and economic development.

The origins of the current violence go back to the island's independence from Britain in 1948.

Although the years immediately following the end of colonial rule were largely peaceful, from the outset there were tensions between the majority Sinhalese community - who are mostly Buddhist - and the Tamil community who are mostly either Hindu or Roman Catholic.

The communities speak different languages - Sinhala and Tamil - and both claim their ancestors were original settlers on the island.

A Victorian Victim of "Moral Panic"

An early exponent of the "crime as class warfare" school of criminology - who, as befits a wealthy, fox-hunting scion of the manufacturing classes, doesn't seem to realise that crime above all impacts the poor and vulnerable.

Friedrich Engels, "The Condition of the Working Class In England".

"with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation has become the most criminal in the world. From the annual criminal tables of the Home Secretary, it is evident that the increase of crime in England has proceeded with incomprehensible rapidity. The numbers of arrests for criminal offences reached in the years: 1805, 4,605, 1810, 5,146; 1815, 7,818; 1820, 13,710; 1825, 14,457; 1830, 18,107; 1835, 20,731; 1840, 27,187; 1841, 27,760; 1842, 31,309 in England and Wales alone. That is to say, they increased sevenfold in thirty-seven years.

... These facts are certainly more than sufficient to bring any one even a bourgeois, to pause and reflect upon the consequences of such a state of things. If demoralisation and crime multiply twenty years longer in this proportion (and if English manufacture in these twenty years should be less prosperous than heretofore, the progressive multiplication of crime can only continue the more rapidly), what will the result be? Society is already in a state of visible dissolution; it is impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing the most striking evidence of the giving way of all social ties.

I look at random into a heap of English journals lying before me; there is the Manchester Guardian for October 30, 1844, which reports for three days. It no longer takes the trouble to give exact details as to Manchester, and merely relates the most interesting cases: that the workers in a mill have struck for higher wages without giving notice, and been condemned by a Justice of the Peace to resume work; that in Salford a couple of boys had been caught stealing, and a bankrupt tradesman tried to cheat his creditors.

From the neighbouring towns the reports are more detailed: in Ashton, two thefts, one burglary, one suicide; in Bury one theft; in Bolton, two thefts, one revenue fraud; in Leigh, one theft; in Oldham, one strike for wages, one theft, one fight between Irish women, one non-Union hatter assaulted by Union men, one mother beaten by her son, one attack upon the police, one robbery of a church; in Stockport, discontent of working-men with wages, one theft, one fraud, one fight, one wife beaten by her husband; in Warrington, one theft, one fight; in Wigan, one theft, and one robbery of a church.

The reports of the London papers are much worse; frauds, thefts, assaults, family quarrels crowd one another. A Times of September 12, 1844, falls into my hand, which gives a report of a single day, including a theft, an attack upon the police, a sentence upon a father requiring him to support his illegitimate son, the abandonment of a child by its parents, and the poisoning of a man by his wife.

Similar reports are to be found in all the English papers. In this country, social war is under full headway, every one stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous for himself. It no longer occurs to any one to come to a peaceful understanding with his fellow-man; all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in a law-court. In short, every one sees in his neighbour an enemy to be got out of the way, or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage.

And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable. The enemies are dividing gradually into two great camps -- the bourgeoisie on the one hand, the workers on the other. This war of each against all, of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, need cause us no surprise, for it is only the logical sequel of the principle involved in free competition. But it may very well surprise us that the bourgeoisie remains so quiet and composed in the face of the rapidly gathering storm-clouds, that it can read all these things daily in the papers without, we will not say indignation at such a social condition, but fear of its consequences, of a universal outburst of that which manifests itself symptomatically from day to day in the form of crime."

Engels was concerned about 31,000 arrests in 1842. Arrests for 2005/6 stand at 1,429,800.

The stuff that he was horrified by, and that seemed to presage open class warfare, would hardly make a local paper now. The Manchester Guardian in 1844 was far more of a local paper than today. I invite commenters to take a look at the Manchester Evening News a, and see what kind of crimes are now being reported. I think it unlikely that "a couple of boys caught stealing" will feature.


Hat-tip - Norman Dennis.

Boys and Girls

The Pooter of Geek points out what should be the bleeding obvious - but which still apparently needs saying :

When female friends come to me looking for insights into the behaviour of males—which usually means the males they are about to, are currently, or have just been going out with—I point out that most of the ones I know are simpler than Duplo™ and that no imaginative and sensitive interpretation of their actions is necessary.

“He hit me last week . Do you think that it might be because he’s still be upset about his sister dying when he was twelve?”

“No. It’s because he’s a cowardly, bullying ****. Dump him. (And please let me be the one to give him the bad news.)”

We men are as complex and multilayered as any randomly selected dwarf from Snow White. We are so inept at disguising our natures that we might as well have hoardings floating above us saying things like “kind-hearted”, “unreliable”, “generous”, “bastard”, “affectionate”, “bashful”, or “Sneezy”.

Or as Mrs du Toit puts it :

They don’t use words as a way to manipulate others. There is no hidden agenda. They’re just telling you what they are thinking, right at that moment. It wasn’t because they had a run in with a coworker, or something you said three months ago, or they watched a Hallmark Movie of the Week that caused them to reflect on their lives and relationships.

One of the differences twixt chaps and ladies is that when she says something, even the simplest thing, there may be a subtext - which we, being literal, don't pick up on - much to their disgust. The same thing happens in reverse.

"Is (whatever it was) done ?"

"I had to stay over time with patient X and then school called and I had to pick up Y and Z called round because she wanted me to do W"

"Is that no ?"

"Look, don't start blaming me ..."

And he only wanted to know if she'd collected a library book or got the new tyre on the motor. A straight "no" would have done.

"I'm not blaming you - I just want to know if it's done, that's all. If I was cross I'd say so" .

This sentence may optionally be preceded by 'For God's sake !' and succeeded by "I meant 'is X done?', not 'why didn't you do X ?'"

Reverse scenario.

"Is (whatever it was) done ?"

"No. The garage was running late and it was gone four when I got back"

Two somewhat icy hours later, the exact timespan depending on degree of awareness ...

"Is something wrong ?"

"Look, you knew I wanted (whatever it is) done today because ...."

All part of life's rich tapestry I guess.

Is it just me ...

Or has the ever-popular blog Harry's Place, run by good-hearted lefties (or the 'decents') gone missing due to over-using its bandwidth ?

It's been down for more than a day. Anyone know what's going on ? DoS attack by Lenin or Mad Dog Milne ?

"for smashing skulls, iron is best"

Thus Winston Churchill, in his very wonderful History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Never has a Nobel Prize been better awarded.

At this point [- 400 BC] the march of invention brought a new factor upon the [British] scene. Iron was dug and forged. Men armed with iron entered Britain from the continent and killed the men of bronze. At this point we can plainly recognize across the vanished millenniums a fellow- being. A biped capable of slaying another with iron is evidently to modem eyes a man and a brother. It cannot be doubted that for smashing skulls, whether long-headed or round, iron is best.

Not so, says a Mr Morris (Robert Morris ?) from the Korea Advanced Institute for Some Technology We Don't Do Any More In Britain.


Winston Churchill was individually responsible for a measurable fraction of the history of his own age and was, perhaps as a consequence, an unusually perceptive commentator the histories of others. But in this passage he is wrong. I do not refer to his social psychology, which I am not competent to judge. He is wrong in his metallurgy. Recent research has shown that the iron that appeared in Britain at the end of the Late Bronze Age was, in fact, inferior in its mechanical properties to the bronze that preceded it. Since iron is also less dense than bronze, this metal was in every respect less suitable for smashing skulls, whether long-headed (Nordic) or round (Mediterranean) ...


... there are at least two competing theories that attempt to explain why the ancient British replaced bronze with iron that was mechanically inferior to it. The first suggests that the motive was necessity, the second that it was a misguided sense of opportunity. I will briefly describe both, since they are case studies in motives for materials selection that are applicable today.

The necessity theory begins from the observation that bronze could not be made in Britain, since the island lacks copper ore (bronze is an alloy of copper and tin). In the period around 400 BC trade patterns in Western Europe were significantly disrupted; commercial contact between the British isles and the continent declined precipitously. A probable cause is the establishment of Greek colonies along the Mediterranean coast in which provided better market. According to this theory the British were simply unable to obtain good bronze in quantity, and were therefore forced to turn to iron, which as locally available. Since they were somewhat backward in the metallurgical arts, their Iron was of inferior quality, but it was the best metal they could get.

The opportunity theory is based on the suggestion that by about 400 BC it had begun to sink in to the backward British that the more developed nations of the world had moved from bronze to iron some centuries before. Both the Greeks and the Persians, who led the major leagues in head-bashing at the time, had well developed metallurgical industries. They manufactured iron weapons and implements that were far superior to the best that could readily be made of bronze. This theory suggests that the ancient British moved to iron for exactly the same reason several underdeveloped nations of the present era have squandered huge resources constructing and maintaining integrated steel works: the super- powers made iron, and, by heaven, they would make it too. That their iron was inferior to the bronze they had been using was beside the point, if they noticed at all.

The opportunity theory has less hard evidence to recommend it. But it has a certain appeal. If it is true then, in Churchill's words, "we can plainly recognize across the vanished millenniums a fellow-being".

Tough On Crime ...

Remember all those 'tough community sentences' ?

Criminals are being allowed to miss meetings with their probation officers if they claim they overslept, or had no transport to get there. The "unacceptable" excuses have been revealed by an official watchdog, the National Audit Office (NAO). The sessions were part of supposedly tough community order sentences imposed by courts as an alternative to prison.

Justice Minister David Hanson said action was underway to address the issues raised in the report. The community orders - which involve a variety of activities including unpaid work, drug rehabilitation and alcohol treatment - have been promoted by ministers as a tough alternative to sending offenders to jail. In 2006, courts in England and Wales handed out 121,700 community orders but the NAO said that probation services still need to find out exactly how effective the orders are at preventing re-offending.

How odd. I could have sworn these programmes were 'evidence-based' on 'what works'. I'd never have thought they were just cobbled together in a desperate attempt to keep people out of jail. The Rand report on studies of community sentencing is mixed, to say the least.

We find that the quality of research on the effectiveness of community-based interventions for offenders is extremely variable. However, in two areas – cognitive/behavioural programming and drug treatment – rigorous research exists that points to a reduction in the odds of re-offending. In four other areas – programmes for domestic abuse perpetrators, unpaid work, education and basic skills training and intensive probation – existing studies have not suggested that the programmes have a positive effect on recidivism. Finally, in four areas – anger management, probation, and alcohol and mental health treatment – the question of impact on re-offending remains unsettled. This review highlights the need for more rigorous research – especially randomized trials – into the requirements that constitute community orders.

Two out of ten, in other words. I suppose that's a grade 'B' if the Department for Indoctrination and Skills, or whatever they're called this week, are doing the assessments.

Full NAO report is here.

What did I tell you ?

This blog, Tuesday :

No one seriously envisages hordes of blackshirted Brits roaming the streets looking for suitable windows to smash. Any potential smashers or beaters up of Jews are likely to come from quite another quarter.

East London Advertiser

THE Holocaust Memorial Day marking the genocides of the 20th century was marred on Sunday when a gang of youths stoned Jewish tourists on a guided tour of London's East End. A group of 96 visitors looking at sites of Jewish interest were attacked by youths hiding behind a fence in a back street in Whitechapel.

Two were struck by the missiles, an American woman lecturer at London's Metropolitan University and a Canadian lecturer. The woman had blood pouring from her head and needed hospital treatment. The tour was organised by leading local historian Clive Bettington, who was later asked by police if he wanted officers to accompany him in future, but declined.

"That would be admitting there are 'no go' areas," he said.

And that would be ridiculous, wouldn't it ?

A woman who eye-witnessed the incident saw the youths in the act.

"Stones started to come down and some in the group were scared and ducked," she said. I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away."

Tower Hamlets' newly-appointed senior police officer responsible for youth involvement, Ins Paul Sloan, is treating the incident as "an anti-Semitic attack and as a 'race hate' crime."

He said: "The injured woman certainly felt it was anti-Semitic because she's Jewish and the attack was motivated by the fact a lot of Jews were present. We're keen to work with the organiser to stop this happening again. We might accompany them in future. That's one of the tactics we would employ, but that's not routine. We have to get to the root of the problem and need to know how often it's happened before."

The Met's new police liaison officer for the area, Ins Brian Mitchell, was immediately informed about Sunday's incident in which he said youths shouted at the tourists, 'if you go any further you'll die.'

He added: "It gets flagged up as 'racial' because of the victims' perception of what happened.

(Welcome to visitors from lgf)

"ministers are sacrificing the lamb of cohesion upon an altar of political vacillation"

Thus the delightfully named Sukhvinder Kaur Stubbs.

But was the lamb of cohesion humanely stunned before having its throat cut ?

Broadband Is Back

Just about recovered from the great evil that is BT Broadband "support" and installed a new Netgear router. Normal blogging will resume ... whenever.

Thanks to jockney for this link. It presumably dates from around the time of the Great Armada Debate.

THE early history of Britain is 'horribly white' and should be rewritten to include the black and Asian people who weren't there, the country’s equality chief said last night.

Freeman: Cut out of British history for being black

Trevor Phillips said he had read a number of key texts on the Middle Ages and not one had mentioned the major part played by Morgan Freeman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

He said the only dark skinned character to feature regularly in works on the medieval period was the Black Death, which he described as a “typically negative stereotype” of people of colour.

(And I know - there were North African soldiers on Hadrian's Wall nineteen hundred years back, just as Brits served on the Roman frontiers in places like Syria ...)

Remember, Reflect, React

It may be me, but after a couple of low-key Shoah Memorial Days (when the Muslims were boycotting) the events seem to have been ramped back up now they're back on board. My views on the commemoration (summarised as 'killing people is bad' and 'the Germans did it') are unchanged.

It's the use to which the Shoah is put which concerns me. The Brits didn't need a memorial day for fifty-odd years after WW2. It seems to have been only in the last ten years that it's been considered that we need to 'Remember, Reflect, React' - though for longer than that the Nazis have been the staple of school history. As long as our rulers feel that we need to be reminded of the evil of the Mail or Sun's views on asylum and immigration, the drum will continue to be banged and schoolchildren will continue to make unpleasant remarks to German exchange visitors.

Not that anyone nowadays is tasteless enough to mention Germany. You can search the BBC scripts (someone spells 'lectern' 'lecturn') without finding anything about the country except as the birthplace of Anne Frank and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (and notice the missing human rights elephant in the list of post-WW2 disasters ). The 'G-word' is banned from the script and the 'N-word' (Nazis) is everywhere.

But this isn't a campaign about anti-semitism. No one seriously envisages hordes of blackshirted Brits roaming the streets looking for suitable windows to smash. Any potential smashers or beaters up of Jews are likely to come from quite another quarter. It is, I'm sorry to say, all about 'us' - 'us' in this case being the natives.

This isn't to imply that we shouldn't remember the lessons of history. I've been reading Hew Strachan's one-volume 'The First World War', a somewhat revisionist history (i.e. not all the generals are donkeys) which focuses on the wider conflicts - Africa, the Far East, the Eastern Front, Middle East and Balkans - rather than the fields of Flanders. One of the points he makes is that, of all European and Russian Jews, those of Germany were uniquely integrated. Pre-War writers like Nachum Goldmann were well in tune with the zeitgeist, describing the military spirit as the means to human progress, because it combined equality of opportunity with meritocracy. Walter Rathenau, described by Churchill as 'Germany's faithful servant' (and after the War murdered by anti-semites), organised industrial production as Albert Speer was to do twenty five years later. There's a wonderful/sad photo in the book, which I'll post when broadband's back, of uniformed German soldiers gathered round a menorah, celebrating Hanukkah in Poland in December 1916. What were their fates twenty-five years later ?



Strachan quotes the conductor Otto Klemperer, a member of the Eastern army's press section, on the Jews of Poland and Russia :

'No, I did not belong to these people, even if one proved my blood relation to them a hundred times over. I belonged to Europe, to Germany, and I thanked my Creator I was German'.

Alas not everybody in Germany thought he was as integrated as he himself did. You can see why one might be wary - very wary - of any nationalisms after that. I've read a lot of stuff in the past few weeks about how well all the different tribes in Kenya lived together before the recent unpleasantnesses.

And that's the point. Our government are worried about how all the different tribes in the UK will get on. Hence the dire warnings. Strangely, they seem convinced that it's the natives who are most at risk of packing cattle trucks or doing some quick machete work. I'd disagree.

They could of course try to reverse, or at least slow down, the tribalisation of Britain - by which I mean the proliferation of disparate ethic/religious/cultural groups with no common culture - surely not a recipe for harmony in Kenya, Kent or Kathmandu. But I think an increased "educational" effort in the schools is far more likely.