Is It All About Sudanese Oil ?

Neat post from Expat Yank on the BBC's Sudan coverage.

But it isn't necessarily just about "oil". Oh, no, it might be those pestering, fundamentalist Christians again ...

. . . Other issues are more likely to be driving Washington's policy.

One is the pressure from right-wing Christian groups in the US, who have taken up the cause of their fellow Christians in Sudan.

Their nagging - on the issues of slavery and the forcible imposition of Sharia law - helped get sanctions imposed on Sudan in 1997. . .

"Nagging"? She actually wrote, "nagging." Well, darn it, but slavery and sharia tend to make the open-minded, democratic and, yes, even "right-wing Christians", a bit tense.

Lo, the BBC stealth editor strikes again. Expat blogs Thursday, by Friday pm 'nagging' has mysteriously changed to 'lobbying'.

This could be a win-win scenario for Guardianistas. Who needs geologists ? I predict liberals will discover oil in Sudan if Bush sends troops, but not if he doesn't.

So if he sends troops, he doesn't care about anything except oil. If he doesn't, it's because (unlike Iraq) there is no oil.

Anybody seen that trans-Afghanistan pipeline yet ?

Those Jewish Schoolgirls

Scotsman - Southerner is rude to Highlander.

Scottish Daily Record - Outrage as Southerners are rude to Highlander.

Independent - Schoolgirls rescued as three children die in Gaza.

Al-Jazeera - Zionist settlers take control of strategic mountain top.

Melanie Phillips - The tidal wave of anti-semitism that has swept over Europe is now lapping at the Cairngorm foothills.

Tam Dalyell - This illegal incursion was planned in advance by the secret neocon cabal led by Rabbi Burns - Nurse ! Nurse !

Polly Toynbee - Why won't Blair ban mountain walking ? And religious schools ? A sure-fire vote-winner. He must be mad not to listen to me.

John Pilger - For the girls of Beth Jacob seminary, hot cocoa and safety. For the girls of Yab Snamron primary in Nablus, a hail of cluster bombs, napalm and cruise missiles.

The Sun - The half-dressed girls held each other for warmth as their wet clothing clung tightly to their ...

Small But Perfectly Formed ...

Natalie Solent has a beautiful little item on the award of Most Islamophobic Media Personality to the Guardian's Polly Toynbee.

But give the self-styled Islamic Human Rights Commission, who present the 'awards', their due. I searched their site for 'Darfur', expecting, I confess, to find nothing. Instead among other things I found this.

We are saddened and outraged that even as the world focuses so much attention on conflicts in the Middle East, so little is spared for Sudan. Is this what the war against terrorism is about? That as long as the terrorised are Africans anything goes?

This campaign, which will stretch through the summer and fall, began on Saturday with a 24-hour vigil outside the UNHCR office in Millbank Towers. Friday’s protest will be the continuation of this campaign. We expect 300-600 people to participate.

I guess they couldn't resist a crack at the Great Satan - they could have asked 'is this what defending Muslims is all about ?' which might have been more apt. But I'm pleased they mention it at all. Let's see how much coverage the Guardian give the protests. My guess is sod-all unless they turn into 'evil US won't send troops' demos. For which, see my previous post.

UPDATE - David Clark, former Foreign Office adviser, on Darfur in the Guardian.

The Chomsky/Pilger left, which led the charge against the Iraq war, has been morally disarmed by its insistence that the use of force by the west must always, by definition, be wrong. Like Tony Blair and George Bush, it has nothing to offer the suffering of Sudan - so it affects not to notice them. This explains the silence.

Evil Americans Urged To Send Troops

There's an iron (self-hating) liberal law on the presence of US troops overseas. If there's any way in which their troops can be said to be defending US national interests, Yankee Go Home. If their soldiers are getting shot in the interests of some third party, send more - as many as you can (and we'll forget all about it before you can say 'Kosovo').

So while the presence of US forces in Iraq is an affront to the Guardian's Seamus Milne, their presence in Sudan may not be so unwelcome.

Human Rights Watch, who have been among the fiercest critics of US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, have called on US Secretary of State Colin Powell to warn Sudanese authorities that the international community will protect the civilians in Darfur, if the Sudanese government fails to do so.

I'm presuming that by 'the international community' he doesn't mean the Dutch or Greeks.

Darfur is a sticky one for liberals. It wasn't so bad when Arabs were massacring black African Christians and animists in the forty years of ongoing war in the South (two million dead so far). That sort of violence, like that in the Congo, doesn't count.

But now they're massacring their fellow Muslims in a war that strangely hasn't caused outrage on the Arab street, Preston to be twinned with Darfur, or the Muslim Association of Britain to call for anti-war protests.

After all, everything bad in the world is caused by evil white men like Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell - so when Powell is greeted by Muslims as a saviour, best to just ignore it.

After visiting a refugee camp in northern Darfur, Mr Powell warned that the UN will take action ... - The Guardian

Secretary of State Colin Powell was mobbed by thousands of desperate Sudanese on Wednesday as he toured a camp in the western Darfur region for people forced to flee their homes by rampaging militias. - News24.com

Worse still for liberals, the violence reveals possible racism against black Africans by Arabs, and brings the other slavery to their attention. For a thousand years the African slave trade meant the Arab slave trade, as slaves were taken to the great markets at Cairo and Marrakesh, or shipped from Zanzibar. Best just stick to the Atlantic Triangle and West Africa, shall we ?

Along ancient Saharan trade routes, 1,300 years of shared history that have mingled the faiths, cultures and skin tones of Arabs and Africans has left another, more vicious legacy: Arab-African slavery that has endured as long as the two peoples have been together, leaving black Africans fighting perceptions of themselves as lesser beings, and of Arabs as the civilizing, conquering force.

Today, the old roles are playing out at their most extreme in Sudan's Darfur region, with murderous results: Arab horseman clutching AK-47s raze non-Arab African villages and drive off and kill the villagers, in what rights groups call an ethnic cleansing campaign backed by Sudan's Arab-led government.

Education - Black Culture Or White Racism ?

The debate continues in the Indie, after the news that some education authorities are sending children to school in Jamaica, where exam results are better despite much lower resources.

Racist teachers ?

Professor David Gillborn at London's Institute of Education believes that while this kind of programme can have positive effects, it doesn't address the main problem in Birmingham, which is low expectations on the part of teachers rather than bad behaviour by students.

Street Culture ?

Dr Tony Sewell, an educationalist and director of the Learning Trust, which runs Hackney's education department, says that part of the problem is the attitude of the children themselves. "It's the old story of British/American black culture celebrating sport, music, and, yes, violence," he says.
"There is a stereotype within the black community of what masculine black men are like, and it's not a great scholar. So white teachers are often afraid of black children, and this leads to a lack of discipline."

Our old mate Institutional Racism ?

Asif Afridi, of the Birmingham Race Action Partnership, is another person who thinks that the exchange scheme is not addressing the right issue. He believes that efforts should be concentrated on institutional racism in schools which is preventing black children from achieving. "Teachers and the LEA need to understand that they are working in a system that discriminates against pupils from certain groups," he says.
Dr Sewell disagrees. It's no good accusing teachers of racism, he says. That's a waste of time. "We need to support them in reducing their own anxiety and be clear about discipline. We need to set clear boundaries where students feel safe, not be full of liberal 'oh, we'll just come and sit next to you and talk to you now and rationalise your bad behaviour.'"

Black Pupils - Black Teachers (the Apartheid Approach) ?

A more radical solution still is put forward by Lee Jasper, race equality adviser to the Mayor of London, who thinks the answer lies in the racial profile of the teachers themselves. Black children need black teachers who understand the cultural needs of black children. That raises attainment, he says. "I don't believe these exchange schemes will be useful. It would be better to bring Jamaican teachers here."
For Professor Gillborn, the issue is less clear-cut. Black students do well when they are taught by teachers who have high expectations of them, he says. And that does not mean the teachers have to be black.
In the past, Jasper has called for all-black schools. He is not alone. Dr Sewell, however, argues that classrooms full of black pupils would be positively detrimental. "In fact, the black boys who do the best are the ones with non-black friends," he says. "The ones who do badly are in the 'mono' group."

Don't Ask Me, Mate ?

Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, says that it's not simply a question of money.
"We could offer more support to schools with large numbers of African and Afro-Caribbean pupils," he says. "But why should we discriminate against Indian pupils who may be just as economically disadvantaged, but somehow have overcome that disadvantage, or white boys, increasingly among the lowest achievers and often among the poorest?"

Exterminate ! Exterminate !

The Indie and the Guardian lash out like ... well ... like a 15-week old baby ?


15-week old 'insentient blob' (© J. Hari 2004)

Mark Steyn On Form ...

Reviewing Clinton's autobiography.

'The shaft of light from the dying sun through the Oval Office window caught the swell of her bosom as she slid the extra-large pepperoni across the desk. I knew it was wrong. I'd penciled in that evening for bringing peace to Northern Ireland, but what the hell, the two sides of that troubled island's sectarian conflict were separated by as deep a divide as the plunging cleavage now beckoning from her low-cut angora sweater. Ulster could wait.'

Link via the excellent Talking Hoarsely.

It's The Stag's Antlers

New blog Cabarfeadh, by an ex-member of what was once the Seaforth And Cameron Highlanders, looks promising. I think the name literally translates as 'big antlers' (thanks to Gaelic Dictionaries Online).

Author David Terron lives in Elgin, where the Tall family spend a day curling (great fun), skating and swimming each February half term as a break from skiing. We usually combine it with a trip to Lossiemouth, a pretty town with spectacular free daily air displays. And if you take a wrong turn onto the road which crosses the runway you're stopped politely, but at gunpoint (it was just before Iraq 2003, planes were leaving for the Gulf). The children were very well behaved that day ...

He's training to teach history. Good luck - we need teachers like you. I don't know about Scottish education, but in England history teaching is designed to make us feel bad about our evil past.

He's also the webmaster of the Highland Warriors website, devoted to the Seaforths, Gordons and Camerons.

Just imagine a totally devolved (or dismantled) UK. The English are a fine fighting race when roused, but in time of trouble I'd also like to have men like these on our side.

Dumb Jon ...

.. yet again tells it like it is. Mr Cuthbertson is right behind him, if that's le mot juste.

Thoughtful people can disagree on the rights and wrongs of granting civil partnership rights to homosexual couples, but surely everyone can agree that same sex couples living together should be given the same rights whether or not they have sex?

Apparently not. Militant homosexual groups have denounced the whole idea as "deeply distressing". When the amendment was attached to the bill, the government refused to pass it.

Not so long ago it was all about love, about acknowledging a caring relationship between people. Only sad straights were hung up on who put what where. Small minded bigots.

But now apparently who puts what where is a bit more important. Can't just let any old couple join the party.

It seems a little unfair that two elderly sisters who have shared a house for years cannot be treated in law the same way as the two elderly teppich-fressers next door.

And what of Canon Elton John, who lives with his significant other, but has been celibate for many years ? Will Gordon Brown force him to do a spot of uphill gardening before he can pass on the house free of inheritance tax ? I say, Gordon, that's a bit stiff.

NOTE - some of the comments on the blogs above seem a trifle hysterical, implying the usual 'bigoted homophobia' mullarkey. I'd like to make it plain that if I describe an act as 'an unspeakable perversion suited only to the lowest gutter' that this is in no sense a perjorative description, and only a very narrow-minded person could take it as such. In my experience unspeakable perversions can often be tremendous fun.

The Final Call To (Black) Power

Johann Hari's been to a meeting of the Nation Of Islam and he's a worried man. The anger and sense of exclusion he encounters has left him fearful. Let me tell you all about it ...

It's not so bad as long as the target is those evil white men.

"Why is this area called Broadwater Farm?" he (Brother Hilary Muhammed) asks. "They don't call it the Hamptons. They don't call it a boulevard. What were the architects and the council thinking, when they called an estate for black people a farm?"

So far this all feels comfortable - stirring, even. There's nothing here a white liberal can't nod aggressively to.

I think that's par for the course.

The Hamptons are the holiday retreat of the American East Coast rich, whereas a Hampton is Cockney rhyming slang for a penis. What would the Brother have made of it if the estate had been called the Hamptons ? Broadwater Farm was named because it was built on the site of - guess what ? (And the farmer's daughter was an anti-slavery campaigner). The estate wasn't built "for black people" - we had to wait until 2004 for apartheid housing. It's not the Man's fault if the remaining Native Brits got out after the events of 1981.

But enough of this. The point is that someone comes out with a patently idiotic and culturally ignorant statement. And because of the skin colour of the speaker our self-described white liberal can 'nod aggressively'. Tell it like it isn't, bro !

Then leader Louis Farrakhan starts to depart from comforting liberal certainties.

"No Jewish person who reads their history will come away saying their hands are clean of the stain of slavery," he says, waving a book that has been widely discredited as an anti-Semitic screed. Children are crying in the hall now, and the air is ugly. People are cheering bizarre Jew-hating theories. Farrakhan reads sneeringly from the Torah. For the first time, these people I recognised - people I grew up with - look frightening.

An educated guess is that the book is either "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews", an NOI publication, or The Jewish Onslaught, by Wellesley professor Tony Martin (no relation), both of which expand on the theme that Jewish merchants and Jewish capital played a major role in the transatlantic slave trade, a role which has up to now been concealed. The BBC website consider Martin acceptable enough - he has a piece in the Religion section on Marcus Garvey. Others link him with the sort of anti-semitic demagoguery that lead to the Freddy's and Crown Heights killings in New York.

And it hits me: if mainstream politicians don't deliver justice for ethnic minorities fast, this is our future. Smart, fascistic Farrakhans will develop messages of rage and hate nuanced for British ears. The ghettos of tomorrow will not be passive and defeated, nor should they be. They will be angry and fighting, and they may even have the distant scent of Nuremberg.

There are a lot of assumptions in these few sentences.

"And it hits me: if mainstream politicians don't deliver justice for ethnic minorities fast, this is our future."
The implication being that
a) ethnic minorities don't get 'justice'
b) that justice is something that can be delivered by mainstream politicians

Johann's being a bit disingenuous here, methinks, when he talks about 'ethnic minorities'. Does he mean the Jews ? The Indians or Chinese, who so outshine the Native Brits academically and economically ? The Irish ? Which of these minorities aren't getting justice ? And will Pakistanis join the Nation of Islam ?

He means of course one particular minority - Afro-Caribbean people with dark skin, whose ancestors were shipped forcibly across the Atlantic by Brits and others until the trade was stopped around 170 years ago, and who make up the overwhelming majority of the Nation of Islam's adherents. 'Back To Africa' isn't a slogan likely to inspire a recently arrived Ghanaian, though the BNP might be interested in adopting it.

To go into the question of justice will take more space and time than I have here. Suffice it to say that there are a number of commentators (like Tony Sewell in the UK and John McWhorter in America) who consider that the problems black people face are more caused by a self-destructive culture than by white racism, that white liberal guilt reinforces this destructive culture, and that change must come from within 'the black community' rather than being 'delivered' from outside.

The NOI may have an idiotic ideology, but one thing they've grasped that Johann Hari hasn't - the need to do it for themselves. NOI members reject the street, drug and criminal cultures, believe in education, monogamy, fidelity. Which community in Britain has the highest rate of single parenthood ? The lowest educational attainment ? The highest (by a terrifyingly large factor) rates of criminality and incarceration ? There is, of course, a black Britain outside of the crime reports. People like the spotlessly attired families heading for church on a Sunday. But they don't exist as far as popular black street culture or white liberals are concerned. The only times you hear in the media about a black kid with good grades and school attendance is when his poor mother's asked to come and identify the body. Stephen, Damilola, Kieran.

Smart, fascistic Farrakhans will develop messages of rage and hate nuanced for British ears.
Looking at this there's a hint of it already. My college professors rarely lectured flanked by guys in paramilitary kit.


Professor Martin speaking in London last year.




The ghettos of tomorrow will not be passive and defeated, nor should they be.

We're back in Patricia Hewitt country here - this recalls her celebrated and idiotic remark that the tragedy of the 1981 London riots was that the rioters were burning their own (poor) areas. When asked if she'd prefer her own (well-heeled) suburb to be burning she fell silent. After all, the degree of violence will be directly related to the degree of oppression - won't it ?

They will be angry and fighting, and they may even have the distant scent of Nuremberg.
Well, anything's better than being passive and defeated - apparently.

The fact that so many black Britons want to hear him should tell us something.
I'm still waiting to hear someone say that the existence of an audience for Nick Griffin or Jean-Marie Le Pen 'should tell us something' .

His foul radicalism must be met not by silencing him but with an authentic and progressive radicalism of our own. It would mean abolishing the racist practice of stop-and-search, investing heavily in schools in black areas, and introducing positive discrimination across the public services. We need to deal with black Britons' real grievances now - or they will mutate into ideologies we cannot appease.

Journeys end in lovers' meeting. We reach our preordained destination. Spend more. Discriminate against whites (who, of course, have caused this situation to arise). Abandon the streets - black and people will suffer from more crime and violence - but our hands will be clean. The word used for this is absolutely the correct one - appeasement.

Didn't you listen to the man ? "Would you like us to whimper and plead for your white liberal pity?" he snaps. From Lord Scarman's report after the 1981 riots through to the Lawrence enquiry, we've seen a hundred well-meant enquiries, confessions of racism, millions pumped into the inner cities, into schools, youth groups, social workers. Even as I write the BMA are the latest establishment body to confess their sins. White liberal pity has done all it can for twenty years now - with conspicuous lack of success.

You want more of the same ? All to stop the Nation of Islam ? You really think that the new school IT suite, given by the stroke of a pen in some council office, will raise academic achievement ? That taking the police away will stop street robberies ?

Dream on. How can a culture be changed from without ? It has to come from within. I would much rather see a black cultural revival that wasn't driven by hatred of whites and Jews. But that a revival is needed there's no doubt. And it isn't in your gift to give it, Johann - nor mine neither, nor Blunkett's nor Gordon Brown's. And for once, that is because of the colour of our skin.

"It must be the flag they are aiming at ..."

"Would it not be wiser to take it in ?"

"Strike my colours!" cried the captain. "No, sir, not I"; and as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him. For it was not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy besides and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade.

from Treasure Island, by R.L. Stevenson.

Cultural Suicide

Rasputin is very excited about a new translation of the Bible produced by wadical Chwistian organisation One (their name refers to the total membership). Like all good radicals they value diversity of everything except thought and opinion.

Apparently it's a book of 'extraordinary power' which Dr. Williams hopes will spread 'in epidemic profusion through religious and irreligious alike'.

We're taking optimism into a whole new dimension here. If, as Muslims and some Hindus think, madness is a sign that God has touched you, some people have been well and truly touched.

He also reckons 'we have here a vehicle for thinking and worshipping that is fully earthed'. I wish the same could be said of my old BSA, with its electrics by Joe Lucas, the Prince Of Darkness.


Let's see this work in all its glory, next to the hideously sexist, racist and homophobic version by the late King James VI of Scotland.

Matthew 3:1-3

Authorised version:

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judea,
And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying,
The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
Make his paths straight.

New:

It was the time when John the Dipper started speaking in the desert.
"Change your ways", John shouted. "God's New World will be here any day now!"
Isaiah, one of God's speakers, talked about John the Dipper. He said,
"Listen for the 'Voice' in the desert, shouting,
"Repair the road for God; straighten out the bends!"


Matthew 23:25

Authorised version: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”

New version: “Take a running jump, Holy Joes, humbugs!



I'll keep a lookout for it in the bestseller lists.



UPDATE - young Mr Cuthbertson gives it what you might call a lukewarm review.

"The best analogy that comes to mind is of someone scrawling a cheesy grin on the Mona Lisa."

Oliver Kamm's not too happy either.

'Tis Now The Very Witching Time Of Night

When churchyards yawn

And Hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world; now could I drink hot blood

And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on ...



I suppose it's only a game. But if you try to defend a single goal lead for 80 minutes against class forwards what do you expect ? We'd have been better off going one down after three minutes, then we wouldn't have been able to surrender midfield.

What's heartbreaking, as in 1990 - and 1996 - and 1998 - is that we had the ability to win the game and the tournament.

We could have been contenders. You can moan about a ref and the quicksand round the penalty spot, but we beat ourselves when we chose not to chase that second goal. All we can do now is accept defeat with dignity. Thank God it's a cold night for fighting in the streets.

Rebel Without A Pause

In a hideous act of censorship, DJ Tony Blackburn has been suspended from his Classic Gold radio show - for playing Cliff Richard songs.

On Tuesday he played the singer's 1963 number one Summer Holiday, leading to an e-mail from head of programmes Paul Baker.

"We shouldn't be playing Cliff Richard," Mr Baker wrote. "We might carry out research on him, but for now we have a policy decision that he doesn't match our brand values. He's not on the playlist, and you must stop playing him."

On his Wednesday breakfast show, Blackburn read a print-out of the e-mail live on air. He then tore it up, threw it in the bin and played two more chart-toppers by Sir Cliff - Living Doll (1959) and We Don't Talk Any More (1979).

Now I am not a cruel man by instinct. But it is difficult to imagine the amount of torture which would be too great for a mentally competent adult who is prepared to say in public that something 'doesn't match our brand values'. Such talk should be kept for internal company documents, to be circulated between consenting marketing managers only.

From hip young dude to embarrassing oldie. It's only a matter of time.

PS - for those interested in little cultural signifiers, note Ed Stewart's beard in the Radio London link - a hangover from the beat/jazz days of the fifties (Stewart played double-bass). The goatee was not to be seen again in hip society for another thirty years.

Great Internet Mysteries

The mighty Richard Littlejohn seems to have vanished from the Sun's website. Last week the site carried an 'If you want to read him, buy the paper' banner.

And Harry's Place seems to have disappeared. The Bloghouse.net site name appears to be available for sale.

Two of the greatest reads on the Web - as one with Ninevah and Tyre !

White Flight

150,000 people a year are leaving inner London. Yet the populations of the inner London boroughs are rising - and getting younger, as immigration continues (immigrants tend statistically to be younger and to have more children). The Greater London population has risen by 627,000 in the last decade.

35,000 people arrived from just one country, Ghana last year.

It's not all white flight, of course. The middle classes of all colours are getting out of the English cities. A few miles away from me is a new edge-of-town estate almost entirely populated by ex-Brummies or Bristolians. My optician, a Kenyan Asian, left Birmingham a few years ago for Gloucestershire, as did a Sikh colleague, who had previously described to me how he heard a noise and opened his bedroom window one evening to be hit in the face by one of the two youths on his kitchen roof. He is stretched to pay the mortgage on his four bedroomed house, bought to house his parents as well as his wife and children - but as he said 'I just couldn't leave them there'.

This isn't good news for everyone. As agriculture declines, council houses have all been sold, and house prices rise, the rural poor tend to end up in the towns - often in the roughest, least desirable council properties. And I can testify that the character of country lanes is changing. The people who twenty years ago would have bought a big suburban house are now out in the sticks. My journey to work starts with 5 miles of back roads, once empty, now made dangerous by the solicitors and sales directors doing sixty in their Mercs and 4x4s. They all live in the converted stables of a local stately home - a development the size of a small village. Affordable housing at £400,000 a pop.


UPDATE - the Countryside Agency's new report is here (5 pdfs - approx 400k each) for those of you with fast links.

And the Indie cover the report well here.

More than a million people every decade are now leaving England's towns and cities to live in the countryside, according to new figures.

Between 1981 and 2002, the rural population grew seven times faster than the urban one, at 81,000 (0.7 per cent) a year, compared to 48,000 (0.1 per cent). Just over 14 million people (28.5 per cent of the population) now live in England's rural districts.

Can We Have Our Boats Back Please ?

Those pesky Persians are at it again. How to put a stop to it ? A cutting-out expedition ? Or do we ram them with our triremes ?

Decisions, decisions.

Shackleton Shot My Cat

Chippy McNeish, the carpenter on the James Caird, the lifeboat which carried the men of Shackleton's expedition 800 miles to South Georgia, is to have a bronze sculpture of his beloved tabby cat erected on his grave. Shackleton ordered the shooting of the cat along with the sledge dogs, after their expedition ship, the Endurance, was crushed by ice and the expedition marooned with little food.



Without McNeish's skilful adaptation of the boat for its voyage, the expedition would have been lost. But for questioning Shackleton's authority after the loss of the Endurance, McNeish lost the confidence of his leader, and was not awarded the Polar Medal despite his contribution to the saving of 29 lives. McNeish died in poverty in 1930.


Another feat of exploration was announced today - the first privately owned spaceship flight. Burt Rutan, who designed the first aircraft to fly non-stop round the world, is an engineering genius.

The Aristocracy Of Mind

Great Times article by David Brooks, with perfect parallels for Britain.

The percentage of voters with college degrees has doubled in the past 30 years. As the educated class has grown, it has segmented. The economy has produced a large class of affluent knowledge workers — teachers, lawyers, architects, academics, journalists, therapists and so on — who live and vote differently from their equally well-educated but more business-orientated peers.

Quite. We can see the same thing here as a larger percentage head for college each year. The middle class isn't just increasing in size but changing in character, a trend accelerated by deindustrialisation. The BBC's weekly 'Any Questions ?' radio show was known to radical 1970s students as 'Any Fascists ?'. Now the audience are the people who fill the Guardian's letters page. Still middle class, but the middle class has changed.

This phenomenon will be even more marked in the UK, where the state-funded sector is so much larger - all those social workers and healthy eating consultants - and the industrial working class has shrunk more than in America. We saw in the local elections that the anti-war vote was (outside Muslim areas) primarily middle class and that Labour's vote held up in areas with a high number of working-class voters.

As the 'left' middle class expands, so the definition of 'left' changed to reflect the interests of that class. You could call that a Marxist analysis, or a Mandy Rice-Davies analysis. It would, wouldn't it ?
My generation were more interested in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than in the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. None of us thought we'd do anything like actually making things for a living (alright, I'll except pottery, knitwear and wood furniture). Real working class people, with their unreconstructed views, could be a little embarrassing (too like the parents ?) - although an NUM donkey jacket from Saltley had all the status of Bilbo's mithril coat.

And the definition of 'right' changed too. Fifty years ago a socialist could advocate the nationalisation of 'the commanding heights' of the economy while simultaneously supporting economic protectionism, the imprisonment of homosexuals and abortionists and upholding the monarchy. The grammar school was taken for granted as the path to education for ambitious working-class youth. Now a prospective Labour candidate with such views would be offered counselling for his deep seated problems.

The old working class changed too. It shrank as our industrial base disappeared (started under Wilson, accelerated under Thatcher, continued under Blair) and as the skilled beneficiaries of the Thatcher years moved off the estate. It also lost large numbers to the underclass, the non-working class - many of whom have disppeared from the unemployment figures thanks to the tripling of the long-term sickness and disability figures (started under Thatcher, continued under Blair).

Where America leads, we tend to follow. Blue-collar America has long been more conservative than white-collar. In my youth, canvassing at election time, I remember the warm response of the terraced streets, the coolness on the new detached estates ('You're the scum of the earth !'), the relief at finding the occasional middle class leftie there. Remembering our changing definitions of left and right, how long before it's the other way round ?




NOTE - David Brooks is the author of the wonderful and recommended 'Bohos In Paradise', a book about the people who need a Freelander and North Face jacket for the three-mile commute to the IT centre.

"To calculate a person's status, you take his net worth and multiply it by his antimaterialistic attitudes. A zero in either column means no prestige, but high numbers in both rocket you to the top of the heap. Thus, to be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you.... You will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that you yourself have not become one. You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio. "

Cash For Good Causes

"An illegal network has channelled hundreds of members of Zimbabwe's ruling Zanu PF party into Britain, a BBC investigation has found.
Birmingham-based Zimbabwean Community UK is thought to have given fake documents to party members and coached them on how to falsely claim asylum."

Zimbabwean Community UK was created last year with an initial £5,000 grant of lottery money.


Not the first time. I thought this story was entertaining - unless you were a victim.

But it all pales into insignificance compared to with the £340,000 given to the secretive John O'Reilly, who from a council flat in Birmingham runs Miscarriages Of Justice UK (no white middle class victims need apply - like Tony Martin) and the National Coalition Of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, a group with [irony]no political agenda whatsoever[/irony].