Thanks for the cash and the work ...

Cheers, Gordon. An extra £120 a year will go a little way to offsetting the (approx) £350 a year extra fuel duty we're paying - and the extra £150 for taxing the cars.

I might even get to code the tax changes. It's all work.

They seem to be running scared at the moment.

And it looks as if even the current social care ripoff (for the English) is considered too generous.

There was "no option" but to sell the house to fund the cost of the home, which they are very happy with but is costly at £700 a week, says Susan.

"After a while it dawned on Mum that this was for good. She became very low when the house was actually gone."

My uncle felt just the same way when his house had to be sold to pay nursing home fees when he had terminal cancer. I thought the NHS was for sick people like that, but there you go. He was an independent sort who spent every spare minute on the house and it broke his heart having to sell it. Naked he came into the world and naked departed it.

Once upon a time families would care for their elderly. Now fewer and fewer even care for their own children.

The number of stay-at-home parents has fallen by a fifth to its lowest level in 15 years, a YouGov poll has found.

Now, 2.2 million parents stay at home, down on 2.8 million in 1993, the survey commissioned by uSwitch.com said.

Many of the 2,198 adults surveyed - of which 1,391 were parents - cited the rising cost of living as the main reason for returning to work.

We were lucky that I earned enough for Susan to stay at home for eight years. For many it's a choice between raising your own kids and keeping a roof over your head. Yet some people manage it, sacrificing the holidays and consumer durables for the chance to raise the next generation.



PS - knee hurting. Switching to rowing machine !

A Very Good Year

Mark Steyn's stuff on music is as good as his political writing. A year or two back he wrote a wonderful piece about the creation of Wimoweh (aka 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'). Then it disappeared behind the Steyn firewall, never to be seen again by mortal man.

Here's his take on Frank Sinatra's A Very Good Year. Get it while you can.

And while you're at it, before it goes - get the strange story of the man who wrote Nature Boy.

(Frank's arranger Gordon Jenkins also arranged the first American version of Wimoweh, after collector Alan Lomax introduced Solomon Linda's original to folkie Pete Seeger. Not much resemblance between it and this.)

Gut busting

I used to be thin - very thin. At 21 I weighted 9 stone and had a 30-in waist, and was still pretty skinny (and fit) in my mid-thirties - but a desk job, three meals a day and lots of kids and D.I.Y (meaning far fewer weekends in the hills) left a fiftysomething Laban looking at 13 stone and a 38-inch gut. Euuch ! (I'm 5'9'')

When I noticed the tops of my thighs rubbing together and my GP started dropping hints about blood pressure, statins and the possibility of diabetes, it was time to do something. So for the last 5 weeks or so a greying, teddy-bear shaped figure has been pounding the lanes at lunchtime or in the evening pretty much every day. I try to do about 4 miles at lunchtime or 3 in the evening.

The routine tends to be :

Run 150 yards ... walk 25 while recovering wind ... run 150 yards ... walk 25 ... and so on - although the running machine seems easier (no gradients ?) and one can do a mile non stop on that at about 5-6 mph (well, 1500 metres at 9kph says the machine).

It's having an effect. My legs never had this sort of muscle on them when I was 10 stone and fit - presumably having to shift 13 stone gives them that much more to do. The thigh fat has almost gone and been replaced by muscle.

But ... I've put on half a stone and the gut looks just as it did before ! Should I be doing something apart from running ?

Tower Hamlets Church Attack Update

The second in the last couple of months.

Mr Scully, however, insists it was not a ‘policing’ problem, but a ‘community’ problem.

“These are someone’s sons, someone’s brothers,” he said. “These people are known in the community. There is a certain racial and religious element to this, I have been and was taunted religiously — and that is a worrying aspect of it. But I would not make that a ‘flag of convenience.’ These are drunken yobs and that is the shame of it. They could probably have a very bright future ahead of them if they only did something about it.”

Police are investigating the assault and say they are looking for three Asian youths, all aged about 16.

The attack has also brought condemnation from Tower Hamlets Council.

The authority’s community cohesion spokesman, Cllr Ohid Ahmed, said: “The idiots who carried out this attack have let their community down as well as themselves and their families.

Elsewhere in East Lahndahn - underclass man 'loses marbles'.

THIS is the yob who has been slapped with a unique anti-social behaviour order banning him from carrying rocks, pebbles and marbles for four years anywhere in London's East End.

Kalum Lamptey admitted using stones to smash car windows when he went before magistrates.

The order also bans him from touching any motor vehicle without the permission of the owner for the same period. The 20-year-old was sentenced to an 18-month Supervision Order by Thames magistrates after pleading guilty to stealing from a car on April 30.
He appeared in the dock after being arrested in Wapping on April 22, when he asked for 13 other similar offences to be taken into account. A 60-day curfew banning him from leaving his home in Zetland Street, Poplar, between 8pm and 6am has also been imposed.

"Kalum". Really. Reminds me of this.

"Please, please can someone help us"

The travellers encamped illegally at Crays Hill have won their High Court battle against eviction after Lawrence Collins ruled they they could stay 'while concerns about their needs and welfare are further investigated.'

Tragically the needs and welfare of those whom obey the planning (and other) legislation don't seem such a high priority.

Posted by: Hovefields resident, wickford on 2:59pm Fri 9 May 08

We have been totally let down by this government. I don't know which cloud this judge has been sitting on for the past 6 years but he should be knocked off his perch and told to live in the real world. We have suffered so much down here I just want to sit down and cry buckets but no I have to pick myself up and fight again. Our human rights are non existent, why will no-one listen to us, why is this allowed to happen to us. We have no faith in our judicial system whatsoever. Please, please can someone help us because we are at a loss as to what to do. Most of the comments are realistic and supportive and I thank you for these.

Love Music Love Racism

From the East London Advertiser, via reader Jockney :

"A gang of 20 youths attacked four Asian youngsters outside Victoria Park's Love Music Hate Racism carnival last month, leaving them needing hospital treatment. As they left the festival ground, the group was set upon by the gang of between 15 and 20 white and black youths around 6.30 pm on Sunday, April 27"

They don't seem to have quite got the hang of this "Black and White Unite and Fight" business, do they ? I wonder if they're the same crowd that were such a sign of progress for Simon Price ?



(also another attack on the clergy in Tower Hamlets)

Posting Is Light

I'm back on a revamped Harry's Place blogroll - for reasons as mysterious as those which led to my removal ... as I said about Expat Yank a couple of years back :

Having a favourite blog undergo a makeover is like the wife returning from town with radical new hairstyle. You'll get used to it and grow to love it, but what was wrong with the way it was before ?

I don't know why, but the new HP layout has a touch of the Iain Dale's about it. Or something. Not sure it's got the same bold identity as before - the previous layouts shouted 'Harry' to a visually impaired man 50 feet from the monitor and this doesn't. Get more red in there for starters !

I'm fully entitled to say this of course, as I chose my layout and colour scheme from the 2003 blogger defaults - and since then it's been like unto the laws of the Medes and Persians - unchanged and unchangeable.

Now if only Clive Davis would put me back ...

Blogging is light due to work-type things, have a look at some of these ... Ross at Unenlightened Commentary, Sam Tarran, and the mighty EU Referendum - easily IMHO the best, most informed blog around, its only drawback being that you have to sit and think when reading it. Gordon Brown being still doomed, the site Bloggers4Labour also offers entertainment to those of a sadistic disposition.

State Broadcaster Does Its Bit

Maddy frets because it creates low paid, insecure jobs.

Johann frets because it creates BNP voters.

Laban chips in :

Mass immigration is IMHO the main engine of insecure employment/low wages - and that's what it's there for.

Jon Cruddas pointed out two years back that the govt "tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering."

Immigrant labour "is the axis for the domestic agenda of the Government".

They certainly have a flexible labour market in the States, thanks to mass illegal immigration from Mexico and points South. During the Republican primaries it seemed that every other day some populist anti-immigrant candidate was busted for having an 'undocumented' gardener or nanny. Might be hard to credit, but evil fascist GWB was only stopped from 'regularising' millions of illegal migrants by a revolt from his own party.

Some say mass immigration is the Left's revenge on the working class for the Thatcher years, but that implies a degree of planning and forethought so is unlikely. It's more a cultural thing, but it does neatly coincide with a need for cheap workers.

People like Johann Hari and some Guardian commenters are calling for an increase in the minimum wage as the answer to the "problem" - the problem being that the natives are restless. They've missed the point. Keeping wages low are what it's all about.

(Of course if immigration stopped tomorrow and all the Poles went home OR if the minimum wage was doubled then yes, wages would rise and that would cause a rise in inflation. But to a great extent inflation has been 'hidden' over the last 10 years via a combination of the Chinese miracle (goods) and mass immigration/offshoring (services). In one sense it OUGHT to rise - that would give a truer picture of where we actually are economically. Then we might look hard at our education and manufacturing disasters and start doing something about them)

And talking of restless natives, did you see the State broadcaster doing its little bit for social cohesion on all its news bulletins tonight, with the video (kindly provided by HMG) of the UK Border Agency (60 guys in Clockwork Orange white boiler-suits, backed by police) in action ?

"Shocked, scared, confused - 56 workers are lined up"

Putin can't teach this lot anything about media control.

"There are dodgy employers out there who are trying to undercut their competitors and drive down British wages by employing people illegally, so we've come up with this new way of taking much faster on-the-spot action," Immigration Minister Liam Byrne told the BBC.

Ah, those British wages ! Can't you just see Britannia on the coins and the Queen (God bless her) on the notes ? Drive them down illegally and the white boiler-suits will nail you ! (drive them down legally and anyone who doesn't like it is a Nazi).

Thus far has the party of Keir Hardie advanced. But hey, it'll help convince the stupid natives that 'they' are doing something.

(There was also an interesting discussion on utility which alas time prevented me from joining)

I Make No Comment - I Merely Report ...

Music journalist Simon Price sounds like a bit of a Steve Strange for the Noughties - small town Welsh boy who's discovered the glorious freedom of swanning round the big city in makeup and outrageous garb. I wonder if he tries that in Stockwell or Harlesden ?

I confess to knowing zilch about him other than that he's noticed that the hippie/crusty/traveller scene is/was hideously white and middle class - which it generally was and probably still is, when I look at its modern enviro-activist manifestation. He thinks that's a bad thing, which is odd when you look at the profile of the club he runs in London - it looks pretty low on melanin to me (and looks like somewhere I'd have loved in my degenerate days).

He's written this for the Indie, on the Love Music Hate Racism concert last week :

I've been mugged three times in London. Now, looking at it objectively, spread over 20 years of living in one of the world's most crowded cities, that's not a bad tally. The trouble is this: every time, the perpetrators were young, male and black. On the third and most serious occasion, I was clubbed on the head with a metal bar, dragged into an alley, and held with a knife to my neck by one guy while his accomplice raided £500 from my bank account.

What do I "do" with that? The progressive thing to do is, if not write it off as a statistical blip, at least place it in the context of wider sociological factors. But one's intellectual and visceral responses are two different things, and as a committed anti-racist I was shocked to find myself flinching every time a young black male (particularly if dressed in a particular fashion) passed me in the street. Maybe I shouldn't have thrown that victim counselling leaflet in the bin.

This is precisely why Love Music Hate Racism needs to exist.

To keep Simon from having bad, Daily Mail thoughts ... he's 40 years old. I don't know, but I think it's unlikely he's bringing up a family.

At Angel Tube afterwards, I'm harassed by a gang of young guys with a Stanley knife. A couple of them are black; a few of them are mixed race; a couple of them are white. That may not be the kind of progress LMHR has in mind, but it's progress of sorts.

Well. What do you make of that ? As the psychiatrist in Fawlty Towers put it "There's enough material here for a whole conference !". I have no time to write a long essay, so let's just leave this as it is.

Laban's Election Roundup

A few points

a) Labour did well in the Assembly votes - they finished with one extra seat

b) this was in marked contrast to the Labour vote elsewhere. The Ken effect, or an effect of the (relatively) high turnout ?

c) outside of London the working class Labour heartlands are losing the tribal Labour votes. And once identification stops being tribal, it's difficult - if not impossible - to go back. I remember how I felt when I first walked into a booth to cast a Tory vote (2001 after voting Labour since 18). The first time is the hardest. I would still vote Labour again (if Frank Field led them!) but it'll never be a tribal thing again. My children haven't inherited the 'Labour are for people like us' culture that I was brought up on, either. Look at the collapse in the South Wales Valleys. Look at some of the places the BNP gained seats - Bedworth, Rotherham, Stoke. These aren't Tories switching votes. Look at the performance of the Barrow in Furness People's Party. Labour's contempt for the working class - over immigration, the smoking ban, pensions, the 10p tax rate, crime - is at last being returned with interest.

d) Both Respect and the BNP underwent damaging splits over the last year in which some of their best and most committed organisers departed. The BNP seem to have weathered this somewhat better - I'm surprised Respect didn't do better in London. However Respect aren't going to go away - the odd comment at Socialist Unity tells me that Galloway's Talk Sport radio show is attracting a steady trickle of interest and recruits. (En passant, any split in the far-right immediately brings forth conspiracists seeing the hand of MI5 - and to be fair, they do have a lot of enemies. The Respect split sees to have been accomplished without people seeing the hand of the Bilderberg/Freemasons/Jews/Special Branch everywhere). Two possibilities for the Respect performance :

i) (IMHO most likely) Livingstone's courting of the Muslim vote in London squeezed them - but I'd still expect them to do better in City and East. In Sparkbrook (Brum) they gained a seat and now have three.

ii) they miss the organisational skills of the SWP aka Left List

e) the SWP rump Left List got hammered as once again 'the workers failed to recognise their own best interests'. In Lambeth they only got a few more votes than the delightfully named Jasmijn De Boo of the 'Animals Count' party.

f) the BNP vote in London was only half a percent or less up on its previous vote.

g) but in people terms it was up from 90K to 130K - around a 45% increase. Supporter Guessedworker thinks their candidate ought to show the sort of grace that his beloved does.

h) the anti-BNP case has two contradictory strands

i) they are well-organised suited thugs with a Nazi master plan which will end by revitalising the British rolling-stock industry and lead to the construction of new railway lines to some mysterious buildings in mid-Wales

ii) they are incompetent lumpen thugs who don't turn up to council meetings and don't know what an agenda is

They can't both be right. A bit like the Miliband/Burnham dichotomy or the Tory confusion noted by outradgie.

i) in London the Greens appear to be the acceptable left-wing alternative to Labour

j) some exceptions to the Labour disaster - Oxford, where the IWCA, a genuine left-wing workers party, lost two of their four seats and Cambridge. Could it be that liberal academics and NGO wonks outnumber horny-handed sons and daughters of toil in those fair cities ?

k) now comes decision time for Labour. Do they sack Gordon now, or wait, hypnotised, hoping for Boris to say 'picaninnies' again or something else to turn up ? I think they should, but I hope they don't. Let's draw out the agony. Either way, they'll wait for the Crewe bye-election. If their vote collapses there - which I think is quite possible - they really will be on the rack. Inshallah they'll bottle it anyway and the torture (for them) will continue for another two years.

l) yesterday I knew Gordon was doomed when I looked at the press, looked at a few Labour supporting blogs saying 'In the name of Gord, go !' and actually found myself feeling sorry for him. It didn't last. I went to this site to see what the stealth increase would be on our 2.2 diesel car, which does a not-too-bad 44 to the gallon. £170 this year - £270 two years from now. And it's not a 'green' tax, which would be on petrol consumption. The money's just being used to fill the gaping holes in Gordon's book-keeping. The Labour Party can tar and feather him as far as I'm concerned.




This is all straight off the top of the head stuff based on a trawl of news and blog sources. The big picture for me is the fragmentation of the Labour vote and the end (or a long pace towards the end) of tribal working-class loyalty to them. Quite right too, given that Labour hasn't been loyal to them since ... when ? Jim Callaghan ? Wilson ? Gaitskell ?

Comments/corrections welcome.

Who's Sorry Now ?

September 2006 ... Blair makes his valedictory speech at the Labour Party conference. You can see the video here.

I commented at the time :

It was a fantastic speech, even if I didn't believe a word of it (apart from those bits which agreed with my prejudices, of course) and consider Blair to have been the most disastrously successful election-winner since Stanley Baldwin. Listening to the R5 coverage, the presenters were struck by the supportive texts and calls coming in (the general message being 'they must be crazy to drop him').

How confident the Labour party were, that they could jettison perhaps the greatest con-man in British political history. "It wasn't the Tories, it was Labour that forced Tony Blair to depart now - instead of serving the full term he promised at the last election."

Now ? Peter Oborne :

It is worth recalling that only as recently as September Gordon Brown seemed unshakeable as British prime minister. He was 15 points ahead in the polls, his leadership was universally praised.

Had Brown called an election then - and how much that memory must torture him! - he would have won a commanding victory and be looking forward to being in power until 2012. Yet, he recoiled at the last moment - and this week he paid a terrible price for that cowardice and procrastination.

In Hank Williams' words :

You know that you're the one to blame
There's no use to pretend
Today's the day you start to pay
I'm Sorry For You, My Friend.

Post-Christian entertainment

In a Johnny Vegas stylee. In fairness, I must say I've seen one or two highly embarrassed chaps get rather worse treatment at the hands of 'lady entertainers' at the works football dinner. They just had to grin and bear it.

It's a lovely day ...

The sun is shining ... the weather is sweet ...

Matthew Parris :

Mr Miliband said the message Labour had now to get across was how different and dangerous were the Tories, who deeply hated government and wanted to cut it wherever they could. Mr Burnham said the message Labour had now to get across was how David Cameron and George Osborne were just shallow copycats with no philosophy of their own - their ideas and plans merely aping new Labour. I didn't have the heart to put to Mr Burnham what Mr Miliband had said.

He correctly interprets the results as a resounding raspberry to Labour and GB, rather than a resounding endorsement of DC. Grauniad commenter outradgie notes :

It's a disturbing echo of the Tory disarray in 1997, when some of them were issuing dire warnings that Blair was a dangerous radical who would ruin everything, while the rest were complaining that Blair had stolen their policies.

Funnily enough, both were right.

Not much has changed and we're still doomed, but it's a lovely day and the garden awaits. Here's some happy music. Don't take it too literally - from personal experiance not all Rastamen are Godly paragons. I do like Biblical reggae :

Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.

Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?

I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me

Politics As Usual

"A new dawn is awakened ... yet nothing has changed ..." as Gregory Isaacs put it.

"Dangerous criminals are being placed in low security open prisons due to overcrowding, at "massive" risk to the general public, the BBC has learned."

A new (to me, anyway) type of crime - kidnapping back in the old country.

Bradford businessman Mohammed Zaman, 55, said: "Kidnappings in Pakistan that resort to ransoms demanded from relatives in England are all too common. I cannot praise the police enough. What are words in a matter like this?"

The police operation's inception has an air of the old country about it, too.

Zaman defied the gang's threat to kill his brother if he contacted the police. He contacted a family friend, Jawaid Akhtar, who is an assistant chief constable at West Yorkshire police.

23.3% of primary school children are now classified as 'ethnic minority', up from 21.9% last year.

The share of pupils in England's schools speaking English as a second language has risen to a record high, government figures show. Some 14.4% of primary school pupils spoke a language other than English as their first language in 2008 - a rise of 0.9 percentage points on 2007. It was 10.5% in 2004, the year before the main European Union expansion, and has almost doubled since 1997.

In secondary schools, the proportion rose from 10.6% to 10.8% over 2007-08. The latest figures translate to some 470,080 pupils in primary schools and 354,300 pupils in secondary schools whose first language is thought not to be English.

Man commits suicide after his daughter loses in the Brighton schools place ballot. I can't help thinking the need for a father comes before the need for an education, but you can understand his distress.

Steve Don, 43, threw himself under a train after telling his wife that if the local education authority would not listen to him while he was alive, “perhaps they will if I was dead”.

A little ramble through the Matthews (as in Shannon) family tree.

Her forbears, though, were the footsoldiers of industrial Britain. Some of her parents' generation even worked in the last factories, mines and mills - relics of West Yorkshire's status as an economic powerhouse. Today, heavy industry has moved on to other, cheaper and more productive parts of the globe. Only 40 people are now employed in weaving in the whole of Dewsbury. The original workforce and their descendants, however, have been left marginalised, often suspicious of growing immigrant communities. Indeed, 13 per cent of Dewsbury's population is of Asian origin - who bring their own traditions and entrepreneurial drive.

Other traditional foundation stones have also shifted. The powerful family cornerstone of marriage no longer exists, nor in many cases does the nuclear household and the maternal bond. The result has been disastrous. At least 13 of the children in the latest generation related to the Matthews family do not live with their mothers, for one reason or another. Several are being looked after by others. One was put out for adoption. Another is serving a life sentence in prison.

What would Grandpa Matthewman have made of it all?

The EU appear to be making it unlawful to hold illegal immigrants in detention for more then 6 months. Apparently illegal immigrants are 'modern slaves'.

He said there would be a six-month limit on detention for most people and a readmission agreement would have to be struck before they were sent home.

And failing that ? You're out and you vanish until the amnesty.

Boris Wins ....

Quite comfortably. And his acceptance speech is as multicultural as any Guardianista could wish, with a generous tribute to the ghastly Ken and Mr Paddick.

Ken : "there is nothing I could have asked from the Labour Party that they didn't give"

That's why they got hammered outside London !

In the Finance department at City Hall the shredders will be working overtime as the bodies are buried. I hope Veronica Wadley has a team of photographers outside 24/7, looking for people removing bulging black bin-liners.

That's just about put the tin lid on Gordon's day. I almost felt sorry for him this morning as the insufferable "Nicky" Campbell told him his fortune on R5. Let's hope Sarah has a hot whisky and a cuddle plus 'extras' on the go.

Only the Assembly top-ups to go. Let's hope the cup of bitterness is full to the brim, pressed down and running over.




UPDATE - I'd lock up loose cannon sister Rachel Johnson as well - speed-gabbling on R5 about the amount of champagne, oysters and caviar at Bozza's party. Apparently 'London belongs to him' and 'who needs Henley' - I'm sure the voters there will be well pleased to hear that. Ah well - you certainly can't accuse her of being in thrall to the spin doctors.

Already people are calling in to protest.

UPDATE2 - the final London Assembly figures were really a contrast to the rest of the country. Labour didn't lose a seat, the Lib Dims and UKIP lost two each, Tories gained two, Labour actually gained one and the BNP gained one. So not exactly a Tory landslide and not exactly a Labour disaster in the assembly.

This Summer's Guardian Today

Opposition leaders arrested again as Livingstone faces critics

· London leader defiant on eve of Labour conference
· No sign of election results
· More electoral officials charged

• Chris McGreal in London
• The Guardian,
• Thursday August 29 2008
• Article history

Ken Livingstone, seen here with his spiritual adviser, has approved proposed legislation to force all white-owned companies to hand over 51% of their shares to Lee Jasper.

London's security forces detained the opposition leader, Boris Johnson, and other political activists in a raid on his party headquarters yesterday as Mayor Ken Livingstone prepared to tell a meeting of southern English leaders today that his rule has not degenerated into lawless banditry. The results of the May 1st London Mayoral election have still not been announced nearly four months after the election.

The mayor threatened more arrests of opposition politicians and journalists, who it accuses of fomenting a coup, in what appeared an act of defiance by Mr Livingstone towards regional leaders who have become increasingly concerned about London's increasing culture of corruption and critical of violence against the opposition Conservative Party. Four more returning officers for outer London boroughs were arrested yesterday - 11 have already been charged with "destroying votes" for Mr Livingstone and "fabricating votes" for Mr Johnson. All entered guilty pleas after 42 days of "intensive interviews" by the Met's specialist "Voter Support Unit".

In an impassioned speech delivered at the Regents Park Mosque last week, Mr Livingstone denounced the 'British imperialists and their agents in this our city' before calling on his young militants, the so-called "war on terror veterans", to "smash the white colonialists once and for all". Two days later, in a sinister development, several articulated lorries containing what are described as "a few bits and pieces we forgot to decommission" left Crossmaglen, Co. Armagh, for London following a deal struck between Mr Livingstone and border farmer Mr Thomas 'Slab' Murphy. Trade unionists at Heysham have refused to unload the vehicles, and the vessel carrying them left last night for an undisclosed destination.

The Tory party headquarters was raided just before Mr Johnson was to hold a press conference about the rising number of abductions and beatings of opposition activists by squads of armed men loyal to Mr Livingstone.

Southern English leaders called a meeting in Tunbridge Wells to discuss the "political and security situation" in the region after international outrage at the severe beating of Mr Johnson and other Tory activists earlier this month.

Mr Livingstone blames the opposition for the violence and England and the US for the deepening economic crisis. But the region's leaders are increasingly unwilling to accept that explanation.

Gordon Brown, who has resisted public criticism of Mr Livingstone, last week described London as in "meltdown" and is believed to be the driving force behind the meeting of regional leaders.

But analysts said that whatever may be said to Mr Livingstone in private, it is unlikely that Labour MPs will all agree to strong criticism in public.

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Inventions of the British Imperialists

Early 70's Oman. Selected Arabs are being flown to Mao's China for guerilla traning and indoctrination. From Ranulph Fiennes' "Where Soldiers Fear To Tread" :

Ahmad Deblaan remembered the endless indoctrination lessons for the Chinese instructor had spared no pains to see that every word was lodged firmly in his head. He would be able to repeat them for the rest of his life :

"What is the Koran and who is the Prophet, comrade ?"

"The Koran, the Prophet and all other manifestations of Islam are the inventions of the British imperialists who are runing dogs and lackeys of the U.S."

"Why did they spread about such inventions in Arab lands ?"

"They wished to poison our society with the class-ideologies of religion. To cloud the Arab mid with Islamic ritual - leaving no time to ponder the injustice of our suppression ... to make us place all inequalities at the door of a make-believe God when in reality the British and their puppet-Sultans were to blame ... "

The guerillas took it seriously - torturing villagers for publicly praying and executing any of their members who failed to reject God. I'm not sure many on the Left, including those so keen for Mao in the 60s, would follow this approach now.

Busy ...

Busy ... a small post at B-BBC.

And a comment at CiF on the "what does this tell us about Austrian society" coverage of the case where a man kept his daughter imprisoned in the cellar while fathering seven children by her.

I think we can assume that if a big news story fits into an existing liberal narrative, we'll see "what does this tell us ?" rolled out. If there's no existing liberal picture frame for the story, there'll be no interest, and if the story fits into an existing right-wing narrative, media types will shy away from it like an alcoholic sighting a pink elephant. A simple rule, but seems to fit the evidence.

This sad tale of evil fits into the 'evil patriarchal family' picture frame and so will appeal to the people who keep "A Child Named 'what the *** are you looking at ?'" in the book bestseller charts. You see, they really do **** you up, your mum and dad !

Abu Ghraib fits the 'evil US imperialists' frame, the Walker and Lawrence murders the 'evil white racists' frame. On the other hand, a case like Kriss Donald's, the worst racist murder in UK history, has no framing narrative at all, and the Leneghan murder only fits into a far-right 'these sub-human beasts' narrative which all right thinking people would shy away from.

Chucking off balconies ...

... the women the natives just don't want to chuck ?

Dog Bites Social Worker

Not that mad, then.