It's Not What You Know ...

Sam Tarran ponders meritocracy with reference to the selection of prefects. A dark tale of corruption and revenge ... while the increasingly amusing Jingoistic affects never to have had any illusions to lose ...

A Soggy Night In Newport Town

Well, the Dragons beat Glasgow 13-3, but it was easily the worst I've seen them play this season. None of the usual fire - maybe the pools of water all over the pitch and the non-stop downpour had something to do with it. Despite the water, the pitch was in tremendous nick and cut up very little. But it was comedy rugby, with handling difficult and both teams kicking and hoping for a defensive error. There were plenty of those, but no-one could take advantage as time and again the ball held up in the lakes (you could have drowned at the bottom of some rucks) or slipped from hands.

3 up for half the game, Glasgow battled superbly against subdued Dragons and deserved a draw, with their forwards more than matching the Dragons pack, even when Beattie was sinbinned. It must have been a heartbreaker when they conceded a penalty with a minute left, Ceri Sweeney kicked it and then played a cross-kick to the left corner for Aled Brew to score unopposed with the clock on 81 minutes. 13-3 didn't really reflect the game.

I've noted before the wonderful prices for children (I took six last night) at Rodney Parade - £3 each. Noting that pretty much every male on the terraces had pint glued to hand, I thought maybe a Guinness would ward off winter chills and keep the rain out. £2.20 a pint ! Has earth anything to show more fair ?

“We have been extremely tolerant and patient”

Educated, liberal English culture is not so much a supertanker as a series of them, one behind the other. Just because the one at the front has stopped doesn't mean that all the others have noticed. Since 7/11 I've noted the changes at the top - the volte-face on multiculturalism, the sudden interest in cohesion and social solidarity - the kind of things that an older Britain (Ulster excepting) took pretty much for granted, despite the odd IRA collector rattling his tin in the pubs of Stockwell or Sparkbrook.

Yet it takes a long time for everyone to get with the new programme. Educationists are still planning to teach the evils of Empire. I'm sure there are lots of bright young teachers and deputy heads just itching to implement their new diversity strategies as soon as they get the chance. And so forth.

But you do have to wonder what kind of idiot thought this, reported by the Pub Philosopher, was a good idea.

A row is brewing in Corby after the Prison Service announced that it was closing its office in the town and moving to nearby Leicester. The Tory parliamentary candidate wrote to the Prison Service to ask why and received a letter from the Director of Finance stating that one of key influencing factors was:

Our ability to attract a more diverse workforce - 93.7 per cent of the population of Corby are white British, compared to 59.6 per cent in Leicester.

Talk about 'it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder'. That's a few thousand BNP votes IMHO. I guess that against stupidity the gods themselves battle in vain.

In the heart of the Black Country, depending on your viewpoint, there's either been an outbreak of people power or racist Islamophobia. Maybe even both.

An £18 million mosque and community centre for Dudley has been thrown out against the advice of planning experts – but the battle will almost certainly continue with an appeal.

One man was arrested during scuffles outside the meeting to consider the plan which prompted the biggest protest campaign in memory.

Anti-mosque campaigners cheered after proposals for a £6 million mosque with 65ft minaret and £12 million community centre were rejected by all nine members of the planning committee.

But chairman of Dudley Muslim Association Khurshid Ahmed today said the bid to build the mosque would almost certainly continue.

“We have been extremely tolerant and patient”

There's a video here. Evening Mail coverage also. And the BBC, with a slightly different focus.

Something seems to have happened. A few weeks ago, with only 1,000 signatures against it, the mosque was set to go ahead. But the numbers, like Topsy, just grew and grew. Eventually there were 20,000 signatures - a campaign seemingly organised by a UKIP councillor, Malcolm Davis. Whether you agree with his campaign or not, this is the first known instance of an elected UKIP representative actually doing anything outside the EU parliament.

A Small Postette

At Biased-BBC.

Demonising Single Mothers

In a Bag stylee.

Hideous BBC Lies

Never have such falsehoods been published by the BBC. I am outraged.

One of the world's earliest locomotives has made its final journey - by road - from Manchester to Liverpool.

The 170-year-old locomotive, called Lion, ran between the two cities on the world's first passenger railway line.

The swine. Satan has ordered two tons of extra 'Coalite' and a carbon-fibre reinforced toasting fork especially for the person who wrote that.

Any fule kno that the world's first passenger railway, the Mumbles train, would have been 200 years old this year. It was scrapped in 1960 by the local council, all of whose members are now being toasted here. Ever since I can remember, Swansea councils have been corrupt, incompetent or both - and according to this blog the tradition lives on.

Had it survived it would have been a World Heritage site and the biggest tourist attraction in Wales.


Picture by John Davies of Swansea Camera Club. I think he's photoshopped the red onto a black and white photo.


I'm just old enough to have ridden the beastie. The terminus was at the back end of the long-gone Victoria Station, in what used to be a fascinating hinterland between station and docks. Railway lines ran in the roads between the warehouses and docksides - the Swansea of Kingsley Amis' novel 'That Uncertain Feeling'. Alas all gone, replaced by dual carriageway, retail sheds and a sanitised marina. What wonderful yuppie flats Weavers Warehouse - an early 20th-century brute concrete monstrosity, built over the river like a bridge, would have made !

The journey - along the sea front past the prison, the Vetch, the Slip (with its station, floral gardens, bridge and beach funfair), Patti Pavilion and St Helens, to Blackpill (where the accompanying main railway line turned off towards Gowerton), Oystermouth and the Pier - is still pleasant now, as a walk or bike ride on the path where the line ran. But it doesn't compare with a pasteboard ticket, a box of Paynes Poppets from the machine at the terminus, and a gloriously rackety journey. In winter the ride could be scary. The train always rocked a bit, but in a gale it would move disconcertingly. Upstairs, where the motion was accentuated, you'd wonder if it was about to fall over into the sea. Downstairs, with a stormy high tide the spray of breaking waves would slap against the windows - if you left them open you could get wet. We loved it.

Perhaps This'll Work

Immigrants should carry out community work before being granted UK citizenship, Gordon Brown will say. The chancellor is expected to tell a seminar on Britishness that the move would help new arrivals settle. Mr Brown's comments follow his earlier call for all incomers to learn English, and for the UK to have its own day to celebrate its national identity.

Of course he's always believed this. I well recall his many speeches on the subject in years past.

The chancellor will tell his audience in London that obliging migrants to carry out community work would help introduce them to the people they will be living alongside. It would also demonstrate to the host community that new immigrants will contribute to society as a whole.

Community work is what criminals are sentenced to do - I'm not sure what that says. It looks as though we're going to hear of lots of 'tough' tests and lots more 'Britishness', as he cozens and gammons the Native Brits. It's worked so far, so whu shouldn't it work again ? There's nothing he won't consider - except of course turning the flow of incomers off. After all, there's no upper limit to migration - and we don't have a population policy (the current default being that the natives are replaced).

Bwown's attitude to high levels of immigration is a bit like his attitude to high levels of taxation.

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back."

Lefty Luvvie Royalist Shock

When I saw the 800-odd hits for 'Helen Mirren' this morning I thought that Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov had probably won her Oscar.

"For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty - and her hairstyle," Dame Helen said.

"She has had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head and her handbag on her arm. She has weathered many, many storms. And I salute her courage and her consistency and I thank her because if it wasn't for her I most certainly would not be here."

She ended her speech by holding up the Oscar statuette and saying: "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen."

UPDATE - 2,500 hits makes it another Mirrstalanche. And the Dumb One ponders the Oscars.

"For Future Generations"

Natalie Bennett's Philobiblon is an interesting read. She writes on history, theatre, politics, feminism, "cyberspace" - pretty much everything - and she writes well, which is why she does it for a living (and why I don't). Her politics are red/green.

Via her blog, this piece on the end of privacy - food for the thoughts of a parent with three avid bebo/msn users aged 9 to 17.

Ms Bennett is yet another intelligent, talented woman who's childless.

Finally, as a single, childless woman, with an active social and professional life, entirely happy in that status, she's pleased to write about that, as an antidote to the inevitable Bridget Jones stereotypes.

Maybe I read the wrong blogs, but I don't see many - if any - Bridget Jones stereotypes on the web.

So what, anyway ? She has no children. Big deal. Neither have a lot of other people. Are you going to trawl the web for childless bloggers to tag ?

No. I only mention it because of this piece on using the internet to resurrect women's lost history. In among the quotes from Barthes and concepts like "the stuffedness of the body" there's stuff that's relevant to all historians (and that applies to both sexes). She (correctly IMHO) identifies the enormous potential of the web in gathering together snippets from disparate sources to begin 'the reconstruction of a life' - something I think is happening above all in the world of geneaology, where a post on a local bulletin board, forgotten for a year, suddenly brings an email from Canada with information about your great-great grandfather. (If only this site had the source texts as well !)

I digress. When Lionel Shriver wrote her magnificent essay on childless boomers she generalised that they weren't very historically-minded.

We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead.

You couldn't say that about Ms Bennett.

The second reason why silicon immortality is important to feminists is that it offers many women the opportunity to contribute to the resurrection of women of their own and other ages, when other avenues are closed to them. Norma Clarke in The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters asks why Jane Barker, Sarah Fielding, Eliza Heywood, Delavrier Manley, innovative, popular, admired writers, were almost forgotten, while the men who were their compatriots – Milton, Pope, Steele, Swift – have got as close to immortality as any person who spends their life laying pen to paper could reasonably expect. I’m angry, sometimes, that these, my foremothers, like so many of their compatriots, did not do enough to ensure their own survival into the future (my emboldening - LT), and I have to ask: why ?

Trouble is, the 'survival into the future' not only depends upon the preservation of these women's stories, but on the continued existence of people who'll want to read about these women. As Ms Bennett writes :

If a memory of, or knowledge of, a person exists within a single human body/mind, then the person remembered has an existence, albeit a tenuous, wraithlike one ...
This alternative, embodied view of immortality chimes with a longstanding 'commonsense', pre-silicon-age view, which also holds that a person lives on whilesoever their memory is retained in that of another (my emboldening - LT). Making this “life” possible is often, consciously or not, the aim of historians, as Lerner says in explaining "why history matters … the dead continue to live by way of the resurrection we give them in telling their stories".

In this context a look at the demographics is instructive. As the ONS 2005 Poulation Trends summary (pdf) tells us :

As many as two in five secondary or medium educated women born in England and Wales in the mid-to-late 1960s were still childless going into their 30s, and almost half (46 per cent) of higher educated women were still childless at age 33. Among the generation of women born in the 1960s in France and Norway, fewer than one in three women of secondary and higher educational attainment were respectively childless entering their 30s and at age 33.

This isn't only a UK phenomenon. "Expected family size varies inversely with wife’s education" says this US presentation. The same's true in Japan and in Latin America (though in the non-welfare Latin American states both "the least educated and the best educated women share the small family norm").

The UK population is going up. Not all the new Britons will have the same attitudes to historical inquiry. The number of natives is going down - and they're ageing. And perhaps the natives producing the most children aren't rearing so many who'll read about seventeenth century lady jailers for pleasure and profit.

What have you done today to preserve a woman’s life – even your own – for future generations ?

A good question. Another good question is 'what future generations ?'

Underwater Rugby ?

Your Supervision Order Gunman Tonight

At the end of a two-week trial, John Laidlaw, of Holloway, north London, was found guilty by an Old Bailey jury on three counts of attempted murder and two firearms charges. The jurors were not told that 19 days before the shootings Laidlaw had been convicted of racially aggravated actual bodily harm and using racially threatening or abusive words, and given an 18-month supervision order.

Stabbing someone ?

Scott Howard has one previous conviction dating from March 2005 for possessing an offensive weapon, and committed the latest offence while subject to a community order – having appeared before magistrates three days earlier for breaching it.

No prison for you, my son.

Stabbing someone to death ? Three whole years.

A 16-year-old boy who stabbed another teenager to death in a children's play area in south London has been sentenced to three years' detention. Last month Adam Eastmond was found guilty of manslaughter after stabbing Gavin Brown, 17, in the neck with a commando-style knife in October 2005. Gavin's mother Anita said she was "appalled" by the sentence.

Chlorine Bombs

I've not seen coverage of this in UK media.

The gas cloud in Baghdad, meanwhile, suggests possible new and coordinated strategies by bombers trying to unleash toxic - and potentially deadly - materials. "Terrorists are using dirty means," said Brig. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, an Iraqi military spokesman.

In Baghdad, a pickup truck carrying chlorine gas cylinders was blown apart, killing at least five people and sending more than 55 to hospitals gasping for breath and rubbing stinging eyes, police said.

On Tuesday, a bomb planted on a chlorine tanker left more than 150 villagers stricken north of the capital. More than 60 were still under medical care on Wednesday. Chlorine causes respiratory trouble and skin irritation in low levels and possible death with heavy exposure.

In Washington, two Pentagon officials said the tactic has been used at least three times since Jan. 28, when a truck carrying explosives and a chlorine tank blew up in Anbar province. More than a dozen people were reported killed.

Nasty.

My feelings about the troop withdrawal are mixed. I can't but agree with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, as quoted by the BBC.

"The most significant implication behind Blair's Iraq pullout is political, not military... Blair understands very well the importance of staying in Iraq... in order to prevent the country from splitting apart... He knows that an exit in defeat means an added crisis for the world and not Iraq only... That is why it is a surprise that he insisted on staying in January and then decided to withdraw three weeks later." Syria's Tishrin says 'this withdrawal is definitely the start of the actual defeat in Iraq'.

What's particularly depressing is the possibility that

a) Blair's trying to get out while saving as much face as possible

b) that course is approved by the British people

EU Referendum says it pretty well - neither one thing nor the other. A little retreat. As Richard North writes :

Loathsome though the newspaper is, it is very hard to disagree with the general thrust of the front-page headline in the Independent today, or the tenor of their story, which begins:

It is an admission of defeat. Iraq is turning into one of the world's bloodiest battlefields in which nobody is safe. Blind to this reality, Tony Blair said yesterday that Britain could safely cut its forces in Iraq because the apparatus of the Iraqi government is growing stronger. In fact the civil war is getting worse by the day…

Meanwhile our troops are still being killed in under-armoured Land Rovers, while the Government spends £500 billion a year on other things.

Mill Hill Boys

People are throwing things at your house. You ring the police. The missiles continue for over an hour. No police come until they've gone.

TEENAGE yobs bombarded the homes of frightened residents with mud for more than an hour during a bizarre attack. A gang of 12 used a homemade device to scoop mud from a nearby field and fired dozens of clods of earth at houses in Exeter Street, on the Mill Hill and Ewood border in Blackburn. Residents, including pensioners, said they felt under siege and terrified during the attack, which was the latest in a series of incidents involving teenage gangs in the Mill Hill area.

However, seven calls were made to police by residents during the mud throwing on Monday night, but officers did not attend until after the offenders had fled. Residents criticised the police response, but bosses said there were other incidents which meant they could not send any officers right away.

Not the first time :

MEMBERS of a gang of car vandals have been leaving behind their "calling card" in the form of a graffiti logo. Police said that over the past three weeks a number of vehicles have been damaged around the Stephen Street area of Mill Hill. Hundreds of pounds worth of damage has been caused after the gang poured paintstripper on vehicles or scratched paint off door panels and other parts of the bodywork. The letters MHB and other logos are usually spray painted on a wall nearby. MHB is believed to stand for Mill Hill Boys - a local gang.

Now police are urging residents to come forward with information about possible gang members in a bid to put an end to the trail of destruction.

Possible gang members eh ? Difficult ...

"I dont know wat 2 say so ill jus write about myself, my name is phil kenyon + im 16 from blackburn england. im interested in sport and i love hangin with ma m8s (MILL HILL BOYS) wat can i say theres not much 2do in this world. inabit cya.. ps plz sign da guestbook and leave a mesage inabit..."

Hopefully Not Both At The Same Time

The government today dismissed calls from Britain's leading Islamic group for schools to do more to accommodate Muslim pupils who want to wear a headscarf or grow a beard.

Ian Blair - Foot In Mouth Again

Calling the Royal Ulster Constabulary 'paramilitaries' is all in a days work for the PC publican (Wrekin College, fees 10-21K) who :

Thinks that Haringey residents are happy to leave their doors unlocked and open; not everyone agrees;

Can't understand why the Soham murders were in all the papers.

Who says "If you’re not broadly against the police when you’re a teenager, you’re not much of a teenager."

And who thinks that people who pay for private security guards are 'crazy'.

By their friends shall ye know them.

Don't Send In The Clowns

I don't think that's funny.

Charlotte Bradshaw

Is she the world's most incompetent journalist, or was she just obeying orders ?

The killing by Mohammed Riaz of his wife and four daughters has been widely reported.

The Telegraph said that 'a father killed his wife and four daughters in their sleep because he could not bear them adopting a more westernised lifestyle'.

The Manchester Evening News (owned by the Guardian) reported that 'Mr Riaz has been furious over his wife's determination to bring up the children with a western outlook and her refusal of arranged marriages'.

The Johnston Press-owned Lancashire Evening Post said 'a bitter rift had developed between conservative Muslim Mr Riaz and his wife over her determination to bring up their children with Western lifestyles'.

Even the BBC reported that 'Mr Riaz, a conservative Muslim, disagreed with his wife over her determination to bring up their children with Western lifestyles'.

But the report written by Charlottte Bradshaw for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and repeated on other sites owned by Newsquest (parent company Gannett of the US) such as Asian Image, the Blackburn Citizen and This Is Lancashire, strikes a different note.

The hearing heard that the motives behind the killings may never be known.

Could have fooled me, Charlotte. Even the Indie titles its report 'Muslim husband who killed his wife and children because of their Western ways'. The Indie's is actually the most detailed report I've seen in terms of motive.

Police investigations revealed how estranged Mr Riaz, a traditionalist and a practising Muslim who grew up in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, had become from his vivacious wife, a high-profile community worker who had co-founded the local Aawaz women's group, mentored teenage girls at a high school in nearby Rishton, and was a school governor and board member on several diversity groups.

Turns out Mrs Riaz had an English mother - but still she 'was sent back to Pakistan for 15 years after completing primary school'. And Mohammed Riaz wasn't by any means a perfect Muslim, even ignoring the mass murder.

The pressures drove Mr Riaz to drink heavily. Sclerosis of the liver was found after his death.

London

Just another news day in our great capital.

The elderly commuter fighting for his life after being attacked on a train.

A man was seriously injured when he was attacked by three passengers on a train in south-east London. It is believed the victim, aged 61, was knocked unconscious when he was pushed from the train as it stopped at West Dulwich station at 2140 GMT on Monday.
A doctor treated him at the scene before emergency crews took him to King's College Hospital - he has since been transferred to another hospital. A 19-year-old man from Brixton has been arrested by police.

The woman who crashed her car - and the Bad Samaritans.

Two "Good Samaritans" who went to the "aid" of a dazed woman motorist after she crashed her car stripped her before trying to rape her, police revealed today. Cops were alerted by passing motorists who spotted the distressed 42-year-old woman semi-naked at the side of the road late on Tuesday night.

Police said "It appears at this early stage that the 42-year-old woman had been driving along nearby Carterhatch Lane when she was in collision with a traffic island. It is alleged that two men, driving separate vehicles, had offered to assist the woman before getting her away from her damaged vehicle and sexually assaulting her in Theobolds Park Road, near the entrance to Wildwoods House. Police arrived at the scene and two men, aged 25 and 38 years, were arrested in connection with attempted rape. They remain in custody at north London police stations."

Reminded me of about ten years back when a young woman accepted a lift in London one night. I can't recall, but I think she might have come down from the sticks for a concert. She was raped and dumped in the street in South London at 3 am. She stopped the first people she saw for help. They raped her too.

Apparently not enough people are welfare dependent.

More people are being encouraged to claim state benefits. Lambeth council plans to spend £220,000 of council tax payers’ cash on a campaign to encourage more people to claim welfare.

The seventeen year old who stabbed a mother to death gets ten years. A cautionary tale of the company you find yourself in when you mix business - welfare officer at a centre for excluded children - with pleasure - sleeping with 'a former pupil at the centre'.

But funnily enough it's this one that bothers me most. No dead, just an eighteen year old beaten up in his own bedroom and having his nose broken after someone kicked the front door down.

Joseph Boxall pleaded guilty to inflicting actual bodily harm at Dartford Magistrates' Court on February 12. He also pleaded guilty to using violence to secure entrance to a premises.
Boxall was given 200 hours' community service and ordered to pay £400 to David Alexander for the injuries he suffered. He will also have to pay £150 to Allan Alexander for the damage to the door.

200 hours community service ? It's a good job they're only sending violent people to prison, isn't it ?


UPDATE - I blogged the other day about the Lord Chief 'Justice' and his decision to slash sentences because the jails were full, speculating about the superbly named Trigger Seed's crime.

Glassing the girlfriend, according to the Guardian. Apparently it 'slipped out of his hand'.

Posting

At B-BBC.

Sorry ...

for a lack of original posting and a surfeit of depressing news stories. Busy.

Take a look at :

This little post from Unenlightened Commentary.

Links to two fine David Thompson pieces, on Islam and Guardianista culture, at Mick Hartley.

And I've been meaning to put something together on the lines of 'black gun crime is the bastard child of the Scarman report'. The Pub Philosopher has written it.

The government continued with its policy of tying the hands of the police and not allowing them to take the measures that would have enabled them to win back control of the streets from the rioters. Had this been done at an early stage, the riots could have been controlled. The feeling that black youths could attack the police and get away with it would not have spread and there would probably have been fewer copycat riots. The myth of insurrection that led to the curbing of police activity in Afro-Caribbean areas would never have taken hold ...

The Thatcher government's unwillingness to fight this street war makes some sense. The government was deeply committed to an economic battle with the unions at the time and needed to prepare for the inevitable industrial unrest. Taking on the street gangs and the so-called anti-racists as well was probably seen as too much of a risk. In any case, the people who were being abandoned to the rule of drug-dealers and unelected community leaders were mostly poor and black, not the sort of people who were likely to vote Tory.

Twenty years later, the sons and daughters of those who rioted in the eighties are shooting at each other. Two decades of sensitive policing have allowed a generation of black youths to graduate from cannabis and machetes to crack and machine-guns. Those who once cheered the rioters are now asking what the police and the government are going to do about the violence.

There's an interesting comment on the Janet Daley piece that PP links to :

"A black man phoned a 5 live phone-in on this subject, he said it was a cultural problem and that the BBC, in an attempt to be inclusive, have been peddling this violent black rap culture at the tax-payers expense for years. The show’s host took objection to the fact that he thought it was a black problem and cut him off – that’s all you need to know."

The great John McWhorter wrote about this years ago.