"plotting to blow up members of the British National Party"

Looks like the original BBC story - which they hastily pulled to replace with something more anodyne - was kosher.

Yorkshire Post and icHuddersfield also report that BNP members were the potential target of the two young men arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000.

We're in new territory here. I can't remember any previous cases in UK history of trying to kill people for their party membership, although one Billy Bragg did call in a Guardian interview for BNP members to be "duffed up in the street", while a Jeremy Hardy said on the BBC that they "should be shot in the back of the head".

UPDATE - when one considers the relatively peaceful past of UK party politics, one does tend to forget Erin's green isle, where killing politicians is an old and dishonourable tradition both North and South of the border - although even then, did people try to target ordinary members of, say, the DUP ? The situation is complicated when you consider that some parties were terrorist front organisations.

Which countries have traditions of political violence aimed at ordinary party members or supporters ? Well, pretty much all of them outside the Anglosphere and some parts of Europe, really. Pakistan and Bangladesh for starters. India's not immune. The Land of Wood and Water.

Looks like we're not just getting the voting practices of the subcontinent along with the kuthlama and the dosa.

England 12 Australia 10

Took the Welsh hat off for the afternoon. You wouldn't have thought it was the bunch who faced South Africa. The forwards dominated to such an extent that an English knock forward in their 22 was nearly as good as an Aussie one, because their scrum just couldn't stand against them.

And Sackey, who we thought couldn't tackle very well, made a try-saving tackle facing a 3-on-1.

Wilkinson kicked poorly, looking tense and wound-up, or England would have had more to show for a first half which they dominated. The backs were pretty anonymous except in defence. But a heroic performance all round. The Aussies looked shell-shocked at the end - as you would.


UPDATE - better and better. Not a great game - all that kicking in the first half - but I had a fiver on France to win ! If only Fiji and Scotland can win tomorrow to make it four underdogs out of four. After Argentina beat France I said they'd meet again in the final. Still possible.

Dumb Britain Part 3282

It's not just our own language what we can't write in.

"there are today more men and women in jobs than ever in our history"

So sayeth the Jelly-Bellied Flag-Flapper.

Trouble is, they're not going to Brits.

More than half of all new jobs have gone to foreigners since Labour came to power. The statistics put Britain is at the bottom of a European league of countries for getting jobs for its own citizens.

The figures, compiled by the House of Commons library using data from the European Labour Force Survey, showed that, between 1997 and 2006, 54 per cent of all new jobs in Britain – 862,000 jobs – were taken by foreigners, compared to 731,000 jobs for Britons. Over the same period, the number of British nationals in the workforce went up by 2.8 per cent, compared to a 90 per cent increase in the number of foreigners. In a league table showing the increase of nationals in the workforce, Britain was ranked 11th out of 12 EU countries, behind Spain (32 per cent), France (13.6 per cent) and Germany (7.4 per cent). Only the Czech Republic was behind Britain.

James Clappison, the Tory MP who obtained the figures, said Britain's place in the table was due to its migration policies and the issuing of work permits. He added: "Gordon Brown's boast of British jobs for British workers is substantially hollow."

This really is criminal. When Blair chickened out of welfare reform early on and sacked Frank Field his government missed its chance to transform Britain. Just as Bill Clinton was able to dramatically reduce, though not eradicate, American welfare dependency, a Labour government could have taken on the Polly Toynbees and Rowntree Foundations to change the underclass culture that's grown up since the 70s.

How many jobs for non-Brits again since 1997 ? 862,000.

How many on Jobseekers Allowance ? 852,900. Plus a million or more who, in the words of this lefty (and probably tax-funded) thinktank, "have been diverted from unemployment to incapacity benefits".

Jon Gaunt

I consider Talk Sport to be an invention of the devil (aka R. Murdoch), but I like the cut of Jon Gaunt's jib.

Despite the fact that he built audiences wherever he went, Gaunt's tendency to editorialise made him an uncomfortable fit at the BBC, which is governed by strict rules about impartiality. "I only fitted in at the BBC because I was successful," he agrees. "They would have sacked me otherwise. Of course I should be on Radio 5." In case I missed the point, he repeats: "I should be on Radio 5. I should be doing that show at 9 o'clock in the morning. [Host] Victoria Derbyshire's useless. In the interests of impartiality, balance and Reithian values, they should have me on - clearly flag what sort of show it is, have guests on who oppose what I say - and that would be proper radio. Do you think Victoria Derbyshire and Nicky Campbell don't have their political bias? They come with a soft-liberal, left-leaning view, all of them. And that's what's wrong with the BBC."

New Wave Of British Jihad Update

Alum Rock, Ward End, Perry Barr - within living memory the home of working class Brummagem boys, now changed utterly.

One of the men, Parviz Khan, 36, is charged with engaging in conduct to kidnap and kill a member of the British Armed Forces. Mr Khan, of Foxton Road, Alum Rock, Birmingham, also denied two offences of having CDs on jihad, likely to be useful in terrorism. Mr Khan, Amjad Mahmood, 32, Mohammed Irfan, 30, Zahoor Iqbal, 30, and Hamid Elasmir, 44, denied assisting terrorism by supplying equipment. Basiru Gassama, 30, of Radstock Avenue, Hodge Hill, Birmingham, and Mr Mahmood, of Jackson Road, Alum Rock, denied failing to disclose information about the alleged plot. Mr Irfan, of Asquith Road, Ward End, Birmingham, denied having a CD containing information about explosives. Mr Iqbal, of Elmbridge Road, Perry Barr, Birmingham, denied having a CD on jihad.
Mr Elasmir, of Bristol Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham, denied having information on how to make a suicide vest on his computer hard drive.

Dewsbury. Again.

Mohammed Asha & Co. Such an apt name, considering.

Hold on a minute - that Dewsbury story. What's this Google News heading ?



I don't remember that on the BBC story. Time to look at Revisionista. Strike a light.

"Before"

Boy 'plotted to kill' BNP members
Fri Oct 05 13:40:12 UTC 2007

A British teenager accused of plotting to blow up members of the British National Party has appeared in court ...

After the 40-minute hearing, the teenager was released on bail under several conditions. These include reporting daily to police, living at his home address, only leaving home in the company of a named adult, and not being allowed to access a computer, use an internet cafe or mobile phone.


"After"

Boy in court on terror charges
Fri Oct 05 16:01:11 UTC 2007
A British teenager who is accused of possessing material for terrorist purposes has appeared in court.

Dewsbury Reporter adds :

Another 17-year-old, from Ravensthorpe, appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court on September 19 to face the same charges. He had allegedly been found with bomb-making chemicals under his bed after a trip to Pakistan.



Hmmm. Dewsbury already has quite enough racist attacks.

Errol Gentles said: “I think this is all because we are black. My two children are frightened of this gang - they are too scared to go outside. The oldest can’t go anywhere in Ravensthorpe – he can’t go to the park.” Mr Gentles said his car had been smashed up and shot at with pellet guns twice in the last two weeks, and he had seen the gang running away.

He said: “They have thrown stones through the window and smashed everything up. They are young Asian boys from about 13 up – there are about 20 of them. At night they all linger in the park. I think they will come back and smash my house windows – I’m really worried about it. I don’t know what else they will do.”

More Immigration Stuff

The IPPR report (pdf), which sheds a bit of light on the eternal leftist paradox :

"Hey, these guys are coming to do the jobs we won't do - the economy would collapse without them. Can't you racists get that into your thick skulls ?"

"Hey, these guys have terrible problems with unemployment - just because of all the racism in the natives' thick skulls"

You'd never believe it, but it seems not all immigrants are the same. Some have high employment rates, some don't. No poo, Sherlock !

And the ONS have revised their projected immigration stats upwards by a third.

I'll take a look at the ONS stats and the IPPR report when I have a little more time. The slippery slope gets even steeper.

Love Power

Maybe it's one of those things that's so obvious you don't have to say it. Or am I the only one who thinks Lorenzo St Dubois and his band, whose powerful performance of 'Love Power' wins him the coveted title role in the musical Springtime For Hitler, are an obvious tribute / mick-take of the Doors ?

The careers of Morrison pere et fils will be an interesting footnote in some latter-day "Decline Of The West". A fascinating sound - but the sound of collapsing pillars, of destruction not creation. Will anyone be listening to it in fifty years ?

"Love Power" sounds as if it was inspired by "When The Music's Over" - but it has to be said young Jim was better-looking than Lorenzo. See what you think.

Morrison :

What have we done to the earth?
What have we done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences and ...
Dragged her down

Dubois :

And I give a flower to the big fat cop
He takes his club and he beats me up
I give a flower to the garbage man
He stuffs my girl in the garbage can
And I give it to the landlord when the rent comes round
He throws it in the toilet and he flush it down
It goes into the sewer
Where the yuck running through her
And it runs into the river that we drink

Hey world you stink !
Man it's later than you think !
...
You don't think about the little flowers
On no, all you think about is guns
If everybody in the world today had a flower instead of a gun
There would be no wars.

Victim History ?

During the recent gleeful Dave Hill bashing at CiF, a few commenters mentioned a bit of British-Muslim history that Trev's not so keen on promoting - the Muslim slave trade of the Barbary coast.

Dave did make a valid point though, when he spoke of history being revised and rewritten "as different, often competing, emphases and interpretations are accorded to those already known".

The North African slave trade (aka 'Barbary Corsairs') has been known of and documented for centuries. Maybe a million Europeans were victims.

According to Robert Davis in "Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800", in the 1630s nearly as many Brits were being enslaved annually by (North) Africans as (West) Africans were being enslaved by Brits.

Once it had finally been suppressed, a whole genre of Victorian soft-porn art arose featuring swarthy chaps with towels on their heads examining the sumptuous curves of some poor benighted European maiden. Characters in novels as late as the mid 20th century (by which time it was seen as something of a joke, a spectre to frighten old maids) might mention "white slavers". Yet it's been curiously airbrushed out of English narrative history. Why ?

I'll hazard a guess that until the last 30 years or so we liked to see ourselves as winners - and while we may not have liked to see ourselves as oppressors, that was better than seeing ourselves as oppressed. After all, Britons never shall be slaves.

That's all changing now. Victimhood's where it's at. I've noted on the nationalist, nativist Right in the last few years the increasing co-option of the language of minority rights - which, given current demography, is only being a few steps ahead of the curve. I did it myself when I wrote of the indigenous Brits as the 'native Britons' - a conscious echo of what in the States and Canada are now the First Nations. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is quoted, not in hope that it will have any effect, but to highlight the plight of a nation seen as facing cultural effacement (of which Mr Phillips effort was perhaps one small part).

So I get the impression that "different emphases and interpretations" will include the rediscovery of the Muslim slave trade and its British victims. We shall see.

Jerry Brotton's Myth ...

Arrives at Comment Is Free.


UPDATE - two useful comments

joseph1832

I am confused: if we are to be better disposed to the Turks in Britain for their help in defeating the Armada, are we to be less well disposed to Spaniards for sending it? If history is to help social cohesion, is that because we look generally to our history as the root of identity, or pull out only those parts convenient to a multi-cultural narrative?

It is an approach to history that says we should be close to the peoples of the Indian sub-continent because 2.5m volunteered in the 2nd World War, but suppresses the fact that 40% of Indian Army prisoners taken by the Japanese at Singapore switched sides. Which means that, whatever praise we rightly give to those who volunteered, how far their actions reflect on India/Pakistan/Bangladesh as a whole, is more complicated.

The truth is that history is a very big picture. The role of the Ottomans in the Armada may have been important, but then there were plenty of other very important factors. A historian may run an argument bringing such factors to the surface (eg: AJP Taylor used to draw out factors like railway timetables as a reason for WWI starting), but it isn't really acceptable where there is a fairly avowed political motive. It is essentially what left wing historians have always despised: nation building history.

What annoys those who this article attacks is the constant attempt to hunt the ethnic minority angle in every part of British history. Given the usual dismissal of history as a major source of national identity, this is rather opportunistic. It ignores that in many important parts of British history there is no meaningful (or even meaningless) minority angle, eg: Wars of the Roses. It also assumes that black and Asian Britons can't look at events involving only white Britons and see their countrymen. It means that we end up editing important parts of British history because they don't provide support to the multi-cultural reading.

I know the post-modernists amongst you think that all history is made up, so what is wrong with making up a new history? But history is, as Ranke said, about trying to tell it how it really was. Promoting minor events into earth-shattering importance is an amusing counter-factual game, but ultimately such minor events sink back into the background.

The progressives must face it: multi-ethnic Britain's origins owe almost everything to post-War immigration. The small and sporadic presence of black and Asian people during previous centuries is of incidental importance. Without post-War immigration, the B.E.M. communities would still amount to less than 1% of the population. Without the pre-Windrush presence, the B.E.M. communities would be about the same size as they are today. The presence of absence of a few more historic forebears neither adds to nor diminishes the rights of the ethnic minority communities. However, building their rights on bad history can only be harmful.

And fernickity :

I'm surprised so few commentators are interested in whether it's actually true that the Turks gave the aid that Jerry Brotton proposes they did. In fact, this question was looked at in great detail by Edwin Pears in the 1890s, with the results published in his article "The Spanish Armada and the Ottoman Porte", published in the English Historical Review, vol. 8 (1893), pp. 439-66. He went over the extensive correspondence between Walsingham and the English ambassadors to the Ottomans, William Harborne and his successor Edward Barton, in great detail (the letter Brotton mentions is just one among many), and although they had been urging the Turks to make a joint attack on Spain from the early 1580s (on the grounds that Protestants, like Muslims, were anti-idolaters and thus had a common interest in defeating Catholic Spain), and Sultan Murad III had promised to make such joint action, the letters show that no naval action was ever actually performed: the Turks were simply too busy with internal revolt and war on their eastern front, and the governor of Constantinople, one of Murad's principal advisers, was being bribed 60,000 ducats a year by the Spanish precisely to prevent their intervention. As Pears states: "The defeat of Lepanto, the war with Persia, and the rising of the subject provinces in North Africa did much to deter the Turk from lending aid. The heavy bribes by which Spain was able to obtain the support of the ministers and favourites of the sultan probably did more." So contrary to Dave Hill's remark, opinion is not divided about whether the Turks intervened or not: there is simply no evidence that they did, and quite a lot of evidence that they didn't. Is Jerry Brotton simply unaware of this earlier research, which I've discovered simply by googling? It sounds like it.

Ferickity is obviously an academic, because the documents he quotes are subscription-only via JSTOR, to which most university libraries subscribe. But it seems that he's banged the final nail into the rotten Brotton theory's coffin.

More Grooming in Northern Mill Towns

This Sunday Times piece is by Julie Bindel, via the Community Cohesion blog. In the standard form of victims poker, the perpetrators ethnicity and religion would trump their gender. Not so for Ms Bindel, for whom their gender trumps everything else, so paradoxically giving us perhaps a more honest piece than we'd get from most journalists.

It's a pretty impressive cultural collapse. From memsahib to white bitch in three generations.

I must say it can't be fun being the native parent of a teenage girl in Bradford, Preston, Burnley, Blackburn. Given the difficulty of checking out who the good and the bad guys are, even the most committed anti-racist parent would be tempted to play safe, and make sure she went to a secondary school dominated by her own community.

Uh-oh. That option's been taken away for parents in Burnley and Blackburn. Looks like the State is the biggest pimp of all. Bring back single sex schools.


(I would imagine that for Ms Bindel, some forms of grooming are worse than others).

Honour Killings in British Culture

When people in immigrant communities kill their daughters for unchastity or for falling in love with someone they disapprove of, some commenters get all genetic about it. As you know, I'm a big culture person. The Brits of a few hundred years back would have understood these New Brits completely.

Here's a girl who loved beneath her and paid a tragic price. Best version is by the matchless Ray Fisher :

"Oh, Fyvie's lands are far and wide
An' they are wondrous bonnie
But I wadnae give my ain true love
Not for all your lands o' Fyvie"

At this her faither struck her sore
And likewise did her mother
Her sisters all they did her scorn
But woe be tae her brother

For her brother struck her wondrous sore
With cruel strokes and many
He broke her back against the high hall door
All for loving Andrew Lammie

"Oh faither, mother, sisters all
Why sae cruel tae your Annie ?
My heart was broken first by love
Now my brother's broke my body"

Another Quote ...

Clive Davis :

Half a dozen of us were sitting around in the garden last week end, talking about race and immigration. We didn't like the way Southall railway station displays signs in Punjabi, we complained about the way well-meaning agencies stand in the way of immigrants learning English, and we agreed that the lack of control on the numbers coming in causes disssension among people at large. It all seemed pretty obvious to us. And there wasn't a single white face around that table.

Quote of the Day

The Dumb One (slightly paraphrased) on mass immigration being "good for business".

When exactly did the left decide that an employer being able to pay staff less was a good thing ? Ah yes: about the time they realised the British working class were finally shrugging off the insanities of socialism. In a very real sense, open borders is the left's revenge on the working man for the 1987 election.

Jerry Brotton - Another Amazing Discovery

Why we must thank the Turks, not the RAF, for stopping Hitler

John Ezard, arts correspondent
Monday October 1, 2007
The Guardian

For sixty years, the gallant "few" in their Spitfires, Hurricanes and Typhoons have symbolised British nonchalance and cunning in the face of danger. First, according to the legend drummed into every pupil, they beat the Luftwaffe over the Kentish coast in the critical summer months of 1940, as the Wehrmacht gathered in the Pas de Calais. Then in 1944 they despatched the enemy tanks, trains and supply convoys in Normandy with little more than a few rockets and their trusty Browning machine guns.

But yesterday, it was claimed that George VI's 'island race' was saved by a less celebrated ally: the Turkish air force.

Jerry Brotton, a lecturer at Royal Holloway College, London, told the Guardian Hay literary festival that a hitherto unnoticed letter from George's war chief and Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, to his ambassador in Istanbul showed that it was Turkish air power rather than the RAF's swashbuckling pilots which delivered the fatal blow to the Nazi invasion plans.

The letter, which ordered the ambassador, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, to incite the Turks to declare war on Hitler, was written in 1940 and has been buried in archives ever since because it did not apparently relate to any major historical event.

But Mr Brotton told the festival: "Churchill's plan was ultimately successful. Turkish air movements in the eastern Mediterranean fatally split Hitler's Luftwaffe. So alongside all the stories we're told at school about why Hitler failed to conquer Britain and destroy county cricket, we should add another reason: the Anglo-Turkish alliance brokered by George VI, Churchill [and others]."

In his letter to Knatchbull-Hugessen, Churchill wrote: "We do not wish to leave you in any doubt of what our own opinion and your instructions are. We want Turkey to come into the war as soon as possible."

Churchill hoped that Islamic forces might keep the German forces "thoroughly occupied" by "some incursions into Bulgaria and Hungary", or by attacking his Italian satellites from the sea.

The German air force was eventually defeated over the summer and autumn of 1940 as it tried to clear a passage for the rest of the invasion force from Calais. At the battle of Britain, the RAF used radar before closing in on the confused Germans.

Asked about his previous discovery that the Turks stopped the Armada, Dr Brotton said "It's amazing really. The evidence for the Turks defeating Hitler is just as strong as it is for them defeating the Armada".

Next week - how Mongol archers helped win the battle of Agincourt.

Intergenerational Warfare Part 3078

Obviously there's no way these kids should be in prison :

Lewis Wiles, aged 80, was confronted by two youths after his son Mick, who runs Wiles Newsagents on Langsett Road, Hillsborough, asked them to leave when they became abusive.

They had been arguing with him when he refused to sell them single cigarettes instead of an entire pack. Lewis, a retired steelworker and electrician, from Hurlfield Road, Gleadless, followed the pair outside and, according to Mick, an argument broke out and he was pushed to the ground. Police were called to the shop at around 12.35pm to reports of Mr Wiles lying injured outside.
He was rushed to the Northern General Hospital for treatment but died from his injuries a few hours later.

Phrases You Don't Often Hear On The BBC

"Play the white man, be English - come on !"

Heard today on BBC radio - by a presenter in response to a correspondent.