Category Archives: history

Diane Abbott, racism and “positive discrimination”

Robert Henderson

The black shadow minister and  Labour MP for Hackney Diane Abbott has  been up to her racist tricks again labelling whites as being those who wish to keep blacks down through a policy of divide and rule.  Replying  on Twitter  to a black correspondent  who complained about the lumping together of all blacks  in Britain with phrases such as “the black community”  Ms Abbott replied that wicked ol’ whitey  just loves playing “divide and rule” and that was why a united black front should be presented:

This immediately prompted cries for her to resign from conservatives on the grounds that she was obnoxiously stereotyping whites (http://www.mirror.co.uk/2012/01/05/labour-mp-diane-abbott-faces-calls-to-resign-over-racist-tweet-storm-115875-23681033/). But white liberals and their non-white auxiliaries were strangely tolerant of her racism.  Her fellow black Labour MP David Lammy was positively outraged that  anyone should have accused Abbott of racism when her  mistake was simply “ Forgetting to add the word “some” [before white in her offending tweet]  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8999638/Posturing-and-indignation-do-nothing-to-curb-racism.html).  To put the cherry on the top of the forgiveness cake,  the leader of the Labour Party  not only failed to withdraw the Labour whip from  Ms Abbott but allowed her to remain in his shadow cabinet as his spokesperson for Public Health.

All this liberal forgiveness meant Ms Abbott  was consequently allowed to escape with no more  than a non-apology   -“I apologise for any offence caused. I understand people have interpreted my comments as making generalisations about white people.”  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8998430/Diane-Abbott-and-Luis-Suarez-are-not-really-apologising.html )- and,  unlike so many white people these days,  she escaped the attention of the Metropolitan Police whose representative  dutifully said  “The service was contacted by members of the public in relation to the comments made by Diane Abbott.”

“We reviewed the circumstances of the comments and having considered all of those circumstances and the information available to us, we do not believe a criminal offence has been committed.”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9001757/Diane-Abbott-will-not-face-police-action-over-racist-tweet.html

To add insult to injury, after the storm broke  Ms Abbott offered a  gross misrepresentation of what she had tweeted.  She tried to claim that the offending  remark referred  to the distant colonial past.   ”Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jan/05/diane-abbott-accused-racism-twitter). As can be seen from the tweet I reproduced above this is nonsense.   “White people love playing “divide and rule”   is a simple unqualified statement  which refers to whites generally and in the present.   The hash tag “tactic as old  as colonialism”  merely states that whites have used the tactic from the time  they gained colonies. In short, Ms Abbott was making a statement attributing a quality and mentality to whites as a group throughout the centuries up to and including the present.  Moreover, even if the statement had been made about the colonial past,  it would still have been racist because it assumed that all white people had felt the same during colonial times. Clearly they did not,  as the British anti-slavery movement and the  later critics of Empire show.    It is also worth noting that she did not use her full 140 characters in the original tweet.

Ms Abbott has “previous” on the hating whitey front.  In 1988, a year after being elected an MP, she claimed Britain invented racism (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082527/Diane-Abbott-Twitter-race-row-MP-faces-calls-resign-racist-tweet.html ).

In 1996 she delicately  said that she disapproved of her local hospital employing “blonde, blue-eyed” Finnish nurses’ rather than  black West Indian ones (John Rentoul Independent Friday, 29 November 1996  Diane Abbott is sorry (For the record Miss Finland is also black – go to  http://www.theapricity.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-20066.html and scroll down), which elicited another feeble apology but no withdrawal of the Labour whip.

In that fracas she received the robust support of her now dead fellow black MP Bernie Grant ,  a man who came to public prominence in 1985 when he greeted the murder of Pc Keith Blakelock  by near decapitation during the  Broadwater Farm  estate  black riot  with a jolly “The police got a good hiding “ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/706403.stm).  In the matter of the “blonde, blue-eyed” Finnish nurses’ Mr Grant offered a judicious  “”She [Abbott]  is quite right… Bringing someone here from Finland who has never seen a black person before and expecting them to have some empathy with black people is nonsense. Scandinavian people don’t know black people – they probably don’t know how to take their temperature.”   (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-20066.html). Mr Grant, like Ms Abbott, did not have the Labour whip removed from him.

In 2010 Ms Abbott had  further bites  at the racist cherry. She was having a little local difficulty on the BBC Late Night show with the political commentator Andrew Neil. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1289868/Diane-Abbott-fumes-branded-racist-TV-This-Week-host-Andrew-Neill.html#ixzz1iQ5ZvyRW). The subject was her son’s education. Ms Abbott had always been a strident critic of private education and frequently publicly criticised  Labour politicians who sent their children to private schools or even worked the state system, like the Blairs, to send their children to state schools which offered a similar educational experience.  In 2010 she suddenly announced that her son would attend the £12,000-a-year City of London School.

Neil attacked her hypocrisy.  Abbott defended herself  with : ‘West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.’  This led to the following exchange:

“Mr Neil hit back by demanding: ‘So black mums love their kids more than white mums, do they?’

Furious Ms Abbott said: ‘I have said everything I am going to say about where I send my son to school.’

Mr Neil persisted: ‘Supposing Michael said white mums will go to the wall for their children. Why did you say that? Isn’t it a racist remark?

‘If West Indian mums are as wonderful as you say, why are there so many dysfunctional West Indian families in this country? And why do so many young West Indian men end up in a life of crime and gangs?

‘You didn’t want your son to go to a school full of kids who have been brought up by West Indian mums.’

As Ms Abbott repeatedly refused to reply, Mr Neil asked: ‘Would you like to make it clear that West Indian mums are no better than white mums or Asian mums?’

When Ms Abbott, squirming in her seat, replied, ‘I have nothing to say,’ Mr Neil taunted her:

‘You don’t want to do that – you still think West Indian mums are the best?’” (ibid)

Ms Abbott also referred to David Cameron and George Osborne as ‘two posh white boys’ in 2010 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280358/Diane-Abbott-race-row-calling-Cameron-Clegg-posh-white-boys.html).

Since her “divide and rule” tweet  Ms Abbott has been working hard on her  “hate whitey” credentials .  Again on Twitter she  accused tax drivers of routinely ignoring black people hailing cabs ‘Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism.  ‘Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?’  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083252/Diane-Abbott-sparks-ANOTHER-Twitter-race-row-branding-taxi-drivers-racist.html).

A 25-year-old black politics graduate Jade Knight has also added to our knowledge of  Ms Abbott’s attitude towards Britain and its white population. Miss Knight   had the temerity to approach Ms Abbott  in a Boots store and engage her in conversation. After describing her conservative with a small c politics and saying  she admired Abbott and  desperately wanted to work for her , Ms Knight encountered this response :

‘She [Abbott]  said, “You’d be better off working for a white Conservative. You’re a black conservative, you don’t do the black thing.” I couldn’t believe she had said it.

‘She was basically accusing me of selling out, which is not true. I told her being a conservative wasn’t going against my heritage. Anyone who understands black culture knows black culture can be very conservative. I thought she would understand that as she is educated.’  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2086722/Work-white-Conservative-What-Abbott-told-Tory-voting-graduate-asked-job.html#ixzz1jYOlQf4K).  Note  the reference to “white” rather than just conservative.

There are several things interesting  about  Diane Abbott’s frequent and casual racism. She clearly sees herself as living as in a country  divided into “them and us” with her  ‘us’ being the black population and her ‘them’ is the white population.   She has no sense of being part of a society entitled British or English. Her world is black “us” and  white  “them”.  Her use of “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls”  suggests that she has an  active hostility to white physical attributes.  Had she wished to merely complain about cultural differences between Finns and West Indian nurses there would have been no reason to mention the physical differences between the two.  It is rather  difficult to see how someone with  her mentality could represent her constituents or the interest of  British society generally without racial fear or favour.

An anti-white racist she may be, but if  other things were equal I would enthusiastically defend Ms Abbott’s right to say whatever she wants  because  I truly believe in free expression for everyone except those who would deny it to others.  But in politically correct modern Britain others things are not equal.  Whites who made the sort of statements that Ms Abbott has made would have been treated very differently.  If they were politicians the media would have bayed unceasingly for their blood.  They would have lost any position held within the government or on the opposition front bench. They would probably have had the whip withdrawn or,  if that did not happen, been deselected as a candidate by their party before the next election.   Indeed, they could have suffered such things for far less obviously racist than any of Abbott’s remarks. The Tory MP Patrick Mercer was sacked from his shadow cabinet post by simply being  honest about his experience of black soldiers when he was a serving army officer: “”I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours “  (http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2007/03/patrick_mercer.html).

More generally, any white person who made similar statements to Ms Abbott could expect to  be the subject of disciplinary action by their employer up to and including the sack; suffer  media vilification and,   increasingly,  find themselves involved in a criminal prosecution, for example,  the England football captain John Terry (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/dec/21/john-terry-racism-case-cps).     Even putting golliwogs for sale in a shop window can result in a visit from the boys in blue (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-452477/Police-order-shopkeeper-remove-golliwogs-window.html).

Racist blacks and Asians generally are treated very leniently .  Even where the racism is violent and unambiguously  directed at whites,  it is treated very different to racism by whites against non-whites.   Recently four Somali Muslim girls  – Ambaro and Hibo Maxamed, both 24, their sister Ayan, 28, and cousin Ifrah Nur  28 – viciously attacked a white British girl Rhea Page, 22.  They  were charged with Assault occasioning Actual Bodily Harm (ABH),  having torn part of Miss Page’s  scalp away, knocked her to the ground and repeatedly kicked her, including kicks to the head  and repeatedly screamed racist abuse at her (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p). The Somali girls were not only not convicted of a racist attack but were given non-custodial c sentences.

There is a strong argument for disregarding the  motivation for a crime in sentencing. A crime is a crime. Allowing motive to intrude provides a lever for subjective likes and dislikes to be given the force of law. However, as with the prosecutions for “inciting racial hatred”  and their ilk, while such laws are on the statute book they must be applied even handedly to preserve the rule of law.

The ideal thing would be for all criminal restrictions on speech  to be lifted  and motivation to be ignored when prosecuting.

Diane Abbott and Cambridge

The special treatment Ms Abbott  has received extends to other aspects of her life.  She is a history graduate having studied at Newnham College, Cambridge.  In 2003 she  wrote a piece for the BBC’s Black History Month  entitled Multi-racial Britain. It  contained this gem:

“From the days when the Norman French invaded Anglo-Saxon Britain, we have been a culturally diverse nation. But because the different nationalities shared a common skin colour, it was possible to ignore the racial diversity which always existed in the British Isles. And even if you take race to mean what it is often commonly meant to imply – skin colour- there have been black people in Britain for centuries. The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/dabbott_01.shtml).

For any educated person brought up in Britain the belief that the Roman legions came to Britain “hundreds of years before Christ”  would be to put it mildly surprising for the dates of 55 and 54 BC for Julius Caesar’s  two expeditions  to Britain (the first Roman military action in Britain) and  43 AD for the Roman conquest of Britain are iconic  dates in British history. For a history graduate from one of the two leading British universities to make such a howler is astonishing for it  shows a disturbing  lack of historical perspective and absence of very basic general historical knowledge.

But that is not the only startling part of the passage. Ms Abbott also says  “The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions”.  Why on earth should she imagine that if blacks did come to Roman Britain they would all be centurions?  That is not only historically dubious in terms of blacks coming to Roman Britain in ant guise, but absurd in its conception that the blacks were  probably all drawn from the centurion class.  That is a simple failure of intellect.

In the light of  the mental capacity revealed in  Multi-racial Britain, it   would be interesting to know exactly how and why Ms Abbott was selected for a much sort after place on a popular degree course at one of the two most prestigious British universities and once there how she managed to take a history degree. Could it be that an informal “positive discrimination”  was exercised in both the granting of the place at Newham and her completion of her degree course?

Diane Abbott and Is it in the blood?

In 1995 I wrote an article for a specialist  cricket magazine Wisden Cricket Monthly. This dealt with the use by the England cricket team of many black and white immigrants. In the article I argued that this made a mockery of the very idea of national sporting teams.  This created a vast media outcry. Ms Abbott sent me an unsolicited letter which I reproduce below together with my reply to which Ms Abbott did not reply.

Her comments  “You show no appreciation of acceptable terminology or mores” and “I believe that we have a duty to write on subject we know about”  prompt a smile at her lack of self-knowledge, but the most important aspect of her letter is the quiet desperation of her “Black and Asian culture is now an integral element of British society. I have always thought that the best thing about British culture is its diversity and receptiveness to new, creative influences.”    Of course, if that were the case there would be no need to say it.

————————————

DIANE ABBOTT, M.P.

Labour Member of Parliament for Hackney North & Stoke Newington

Our ref: DPV/Rcm

Date: 3 August 1995

HOUSE OF COMMONS LONDON SW1A 0AA

Tel: 0171 219 4426 Fax: 0171 219 4964

 

Dear Mr Henderson

A constituent of mine has sent me a copy of the article you wrote for Wisden Cricket Monthly entitled, “Is it in the Blood?”

I was rather saddened by your article. You show no appreciation of acceptable terminology or mores. I know that your article was focusing on cricket. But it shows a level of ignorance which is pervasive in many walks of British life. Imagine a young white man born in England, one parent English, one parent Spanish. Is it unnatural for him to express an interest in his Spanish origins. Does it make him any less British? No.

Black and Asian culture is now an integral element of British society. I have always thought that the best thing about British culture is its diversity and receptiveness to new, creative influences.

As an ex-journalist, and someone who still dabbles, I believe that we have a duty to write on subject we know about. And if we are not fully conversant with the topic to undertake the necessary research. I believe that if you had undertaken the appropriate research you would find that your assertions are flawed.

I hope that you will give my comments some thought.

Yours sincerely

DIANE ABBOTT MP

————————————

Miss Diane Abbott MP

House of Commons, London SW1

13/08/95

Dear Miss Abbott,

If you take the trouble to read the enclosures you will see  that I am more than ordinarily qualified to deal with the  subject of coloured alienation. (I wonder if you could claim  such a comprehensive experience of white or indeed Asian  society?) Moreover, even the proverbial visiting Martian  could see the illogic in the claim (incessantly made by ”anti-racists”) that English bred blacks and Asians are both  alienated from and unquestioningly loyal to England.

The evidence of coloured alienation is mountainous. The tape  I enclose of the BBC Radio 5 programme “Word Up” is of  particular interest for it contains both the visceral hatred  and irredeemable resentment of your colleague Bernie Grant  and the uncommitted  internationalism of self-described black  professionals, whose adamantine smugness achieved what I  would have thought impossible, a fleeting moment of sympathy  in me for Mr Grant when he railed against their selfishness  and lack of concern for the working class. You might also  wish to note Mr Grant’s comments about the House of Commons.

I am undecided as to whether you were disingenuous or naive  in your example of the white man with a Spanish father. It is  true that such a person might have some feelings for his  father’s homeland. However, his potential circumstances are  vastly different from those of the son of a coloured  immigrant, for if he chooses the white man may be accepted  without question by the host people. Do you seriously wish  to maintain that there is no difference in the lots of a  white and a coloured person in this country? If so, why do  you join in with the “anti-racist” shouting?

The most disturbing message of your letter is your rejection  of the right to free expression. Both “You show no appreciation of acceptable terminology or mores” and “I  believe we have a duty to write on subject (sic) we know  about” are attempts to suppress my right to free expression. This is a supremely dangerous thing for once you try to take  away my right you have no moral argument to repel those who  would suppress your right. I suggest that you study the short  essay ‘The fulcrum of freedom’ to see exactly how dangerous  the absence of free expression can be to a society. Free  expression is not merely a civil right designed to improve  the amenity of a man’s life, it is the surest guard against  tyranny. You might also wish to reflect on the fact that you  are willing to sit in the Commons with a colleague who  gloated over the near decapitation of a white policeman by a  black mob which had shed every vestige of civilised  behaviour. I presume Mr Grant’s behaviour after that event  comes within your definition of “acceptable terminology or  mores”.

You, Miss Abbott, have been sold a most monstrous pup by the  white liberal establishment. All your life (or at least your  adult life) you have allowed yourself to believe that the  liberal view of Race was the only reasonable view on Race.  You have luxuriated in the fool’s paradise of believing that  the remarkable international security and stability enjoyed  by Europe since the war – the only circumstances in which  liberals could have held such sway – was the natural order of  things. In fact, it has been an abnormality.

The age of liberal internationalism is drawing to a close,  perhaps in five years, perhaps in ten. Nothing anyone does  will prevent this process. What we do have is the choice  between a benign nationalism and authoritarian government,  probably fascism. If we are to save ourselves from fascism  all races must begin to talk honestly. That is what I am trying to achieve, the honest discussion of Race. (Do not  think, incidentally, that Britain can live in a cocoon  shielded from the racial events on the continent,  particularly in Germany – within ten years Germany will be  displaying all her old racial arrogance. You are, I presume,  aware that de facto black and Asian British citizens already cannot travel freely throughout the EU).

Your friend, Darcus Howe, recently wrote to me offering a  chance to discuss the subject of coloured loyalties. This I  have turned down for the moment because of my health.

However, I may well be cured within the next six to nine  months through a revolutionary treatment. I have written to  Mr Howe suggesting that in the event of my recovery I would  be willing to take part in a programme debating the subject  of black and Asian commitment with one other. I enclose a  copy of my letter to Mr Howe detailing the conditions under  which I would take part. If you are interested, why not  suggest to Mr Howe that you be my protagonist?

You asked me to think about your comments. I would ask you to  do the same with mine. In particular ask yourself whether if  racial shove comes to racial push you can imagine the likes  of Tony Blair risking anything substantial for blacks and  Asians. Remember Blair has overturned one of the main planks  of Labour policy simply to serve his own petty convenience in  the choice of his children’s schools. Do you think such a man  would risk his life for blacks and Asians? He would not even  risk his comfort.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

Human Accomplishment and the English

Robert Henderson

In his book “Human Accomplishment” the American Charles Murray calculates the contribution to civilisation made by individuals throughout history up until 1950. To give his calculations as much objectivity as possible he measures the amount of attention given to an individual by specialists in their field in sources such as biographical dictionaries – put crudely, the greater the frequency of mention and the larger the space devoted to an individual, the higher they score.

Murray quantifies achievements under the headings of astronomy (Galileo and Kepler tied for first place), biology (Darwin and Aristotle), chemistry (Lavoisier), earth sciences (Lyell), physics (Newton and Einstein), mathematics (Euler), medicine (Pasteur, Hippocrates and Koch), technology (Edison and Watt), combined scientific (Newton), Chinese philosophy (Confucious), Indian philosophy (Sankara), Western philosophy (Aristotle), Western music (Beethoven and Mozart), Chinese painting (Gu Kaizhi and Zhao Mengfu), Japanese painting (Sesshu, Sotatsu and Korin), Western art (Michelangelo), Arabic literature, (al-Mutanabbi) Chinese literature (Du Fu), Indian literature (Kalidasa), Japanese literature (Basho and Chikamatsu Monzaemon), Western literature (Shakespeare).

Objections have been made to Murray’s methodology such as the fact that many of the great achievements of the past, especially in the arts, have been anonymous, which give it a bias towards the modern period, and fears that it has a built-in Western bias – the representation  of non-Western figures in the science and technology categories is minimal. Nothing can be done about anonymity – it is worth pointing out that the majority of those heading the categories lived at least several centuries ago – but Murray substantially guards against pro-Western bias with the breadth and number of his sources and it is simply a fact that science and advanced technology arose only in the past few centuries and that both are essentially Western achievements.

It is also noteworthy that Murray’s method only places one of his fellow countrymen at number one in any category (Edison in technology). If any bias exists it is unlikely to be conscious. At worst, Murray’s findings can be seem as a fair rating of Western achievement.

The list of those heading the various categories (see second paragraph above) suggests that Murray’s method is pretty sound despite any possible methodological shortcomings, because those who come top are all men of extreme achievement. There might be arguments over whether Aristotle should take precedence over Plato or Kant, but no one could honestly argue that Aristotle was an obviously unworthy winner of first place in the philosophy category.

Of the 13 categories which can include Westerners (they are obviously excluded from non-European literature and art), Englishmen are undisputed firsts or share first place with one other in four: biology Darwin with Aristotle; Physics Newton with Einstein; combined scientific Newton alone; Western literature Shakespeare alone. No other nation has more than two representatives at the top of a category. The thirteen Western including categories have a total of 18 people in sole or joint first place. England has nearly a quarter of those in first place and more than a quarter of the 15 who are drawn from the modern period, say 1500 AD onwards.

Apart from those coming first, the English show strongly in most of the Western qualifying categories (especially in physics – 9 out of the top 20, technology – 8 out of the top twenty – and Western literature). The major exceptions are Western art and music, where English representation is mediocre. I think most people who think about the matter at all would feel those cultural strengths and weaknesses represent the reality of English history and society.

The fact that England shows so strongly in Murray’s exercise gives the lie to the common representation of the English as unintellectual. Moreover, there is much more to human intellectual accomplishment than the fields covered by Murray, most notably the writing of history and the social sciences, areas in which England has been at the forefront throughout the modern period: think Gibbon, Macaulay, Herbert Spencer and Keynes.

English intellectual history is a long one. It can reasonably be said to begin in the early eighth century with Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English, which amongst other things firmly establishes the English as a people before England as a kingdom existed (“At present there are in Britain…five languages and four nations – English, British, Irish and Picts…” Book One).

In the late ninth century comes Alfred the Great, a king whose reign was one of constant struggle against the Danes, but who thought enough of learning to teach himself to read as an adult and then engage in translations into Old English of devotional works such as Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.

From Alfred’s reign comes the Anglo-Saxon Journal (ASJ), a work also written in Old English. (There are nine surviving versions written at different places, eight of which are in Old English with the odd man out being in Old English with a Latin translation). The journal is a history/myth of Britain and a narrative of the settlement of Anglo-Saxons within it until the time of Alfred and then a putative record of and commentary on the great events of English life from the time of Alfred until the middle of the 12th century (like all such medieval works the veracity of the ASJ is questionable, but at worst it gives a flavour of the mentality of those living at the time). The work is unique in medieval Europe for its scope and longevity and is particularly noteworthy for the fact that it was written in the vernacular throughout the three centuries or so of its existence, this at a time when the normal language for writing in Western Europe was Latin.

The Norman Conquest subordinated the English politically, linguistically and socially for the better part of three centuries, but it did not kill English intellectual endeavour. Those three centuries of oppression saw the emergence of many of the ideas which were later to produce the modern world. John of Salisbury produced a work on politics (Policraticus 1159) which was “the first attempt in the Middle Ages at an extended and systematic treatment of political philosophy” (G H Sabine A History of Political Theory p246) and one which argued for a form of limited monarchy and the overthrow of tyrants, views given practical English expression in Magna Carta (1215). The period was also noteworthy for the strong showing of annals and histories, most notably those of Eadmer (Historia Novorum or The History of Recent Events – it covered the period 950-1109), Henry of Huntingdon (Historia Anglorum or History of the English 5BC-1129) and Matthew Paris (Chronica Majora). In addition, the Common Law was formed, English became once more a literary language (Chaucer, Langland), John Wycliffe laid the intellectual roots of the Reformation and, perhaps most impressively, ideas which were later to provide the basis for a true science emerged.

Literature

The quintessential English art is literature. I doubt whether any nation can excel England here, either in quality or international influence. Take a few names from her literary past: Chaucer, Langland, Mallory, Sir Thomas More, Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Bunyan, Dryden, Milton, Marvell, Pope, Sam Johnson, Fielding, Wordsworth, Byron, Austen, the Brontes, George Elliott, Tennyson, Shelley, Keates, Dickens, Trollope, Waugh, Greene and Golding.

And then there is Shakespeare, still being read, performed, analysed and reinterpreted nearly four centuries after his death. Most authors famous in their day do not remain so for long after their death. Those few who are remembered tend to be honoured more in the lauding of the name than by reading or watching. Shakespeare has never been entirely out of fashion. Today he is performed more than ever. His reach stretches throughout the English speaking world and beyond – The Germans in particular have a great liking for the Bard. No playwright in history has been so often performed. He has provided inspiration for men as diverse as Dr Johnson, Freud and Verdi. The man was truly exceptional, arguably unique.

The Intellectual roots of the Reformation In the latter half of the 14th Century John Wycliffe and his followers developed the theological and practical foundations of the Reformation in the second half of the fourteenth century, one hundred and fifty odd years before Luther pinned his theses on the door of the castle church of Wittenberg. Wycliffe questioned the reality of transubstantiation (the Catholic belief that the bread and wine at Communion turn literally into the body and blood of Christ), he attacked the uncontrolled authority of the Pope, he railed against the abuses of simony and indulgences. He advocated a Bible in English and either he or some of his followers (who became known as Lollards) produced a complete translation before the end of the fourteenth century. Lollardy was officially and harshly suppressed early in the next century, but their ideas lingered, both here and abroad, feeding into the European consciousness, for example through the Bohemian Jan Hus.

The concept of science

The development of the concept of what we call science is arguably the most dramatic intellectual event in history, for it utterly changed both the way in which men viewed the world and provided them with the means to mould it ever more completely to their will.

Science is the opposite of “by guess and by God”. It is the process of not only knowing that something has worked before and replicating the event or process to achieve the same result, but of understanding the process behind an event or process.

The classic scientific experiment involves the generation of an hypothesis to be tested (for example, the behaviour of falling objects) or a defined field to be investigated (for example, an animal’s behaviour), the creation of the means of doing so and a strict observance of the rules by which the experiment are to be conducted and meticulous recording of data. That in essence is the scientific method, although in practice science is far from being as neat and regular as that. Nonetheless, it does encapsulate what science is supposed to be about: the rigorous observation and rational interpretation of what is rather than what the mind might fancy to be the case. It is inductive rather than deductive.

The beginnings of the scientific mentality can be found in the minds of two 13th Century Englishmen, the Franciscan Roger Bacon (c1214-1292) and Robert Grossteste (c1168-1253), Chancellor of Oxford then Bishop of Lincoln. Both saw the importance of  experimentation and observation, Bacon advocated mathematics as the sure foundation of science while Grosseteste anticipated the idea of the scientific hypothesis. Grossteste was also the first to understood the value of falsification, namely, although any number of observed events cannot prove beyond doubt that something is true, but a it can be proved false by a single case which shows it to be false. There are difficulties with the principle of falsification philosophically but it is in practice a most useful tool for scientists.

Another important intellectual tool for the scientist was developed in the fourteenth Century by the Franciscan, William of Ockham. Ockham formulated the principle of parsimony which we know today as Ockham’s Razor. This is commonly expressed as “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” or, more bluntly, always choose the simplest explanation for something unless there is good reason not to.

Apart from being philosophically important, this dictum is immensely valuable as a guide for scientists, especially those engaged in the “hard” sciences of physics and chemistry, where the simplest explanation has often been found to be the correct one.

Roger Bacon, Grossteste and William of Ockham were also responsible for a substantial amount of important philosophy related to the other aspects of the physical world and metaphysics. In addition, Ockham was a radical political theorist who fought the conciliar case in the long schism in the papacy (which straddled the fourteenth and fifteenth Centuries), arguing that authority within the Church should not rest solely with the Pope but be delegated in part to a council of the Church.

At the beginning of the Seventeenth Century Francis Bacon moved the idea of the scientific method forward in his Novum Organum (1620), in which he laid out the classic version of scientific method and reinforced the ideas of induction and the importance of falsifiability (Bacon stands as the first in the long line of important British empirical philosophers). Bacon was also responsible for the re-classification of sciences in something approaching their modern form in his Advancement of Learning (1625) and argued vigorously forthe separation of reason and revelation.

On the practical science side there is William Gilbert with his work on magnetism (published in his De Magneto 1600), who was one of the first men, even perhaps the first, known to have conducted a controlled experiment, that is, one in which the experiment is entirely artificial and can be exactly repeated. It is the difference between simply watching falling objects which fall without human intent and creating a situation where falling objects can be observed repeatedly under the same conditions.

The practice of science

England was from the seventeenth century in the vanguard of the rise of science. William Gilbert’s work on magnetism was followed by  William Harvey tracing the circulation of the blood, Halley’s work on comets and Robert Hooke’s polymathic span from microscopy to a nascent theory of gravitation. Above all stood the formidable figure of Newton, neurotic, splenetic and marvellous, a man who demonstrated the composition of light and developed the powerful mathematical tool of the differential calculus, besides formulating the laws of motion which form the basis of all mechanical science and the theory of gravitation, which was the most complete explanation of the physical universe until Einstein.

Newton probably had more influence on the world than any man before him. Even today his importance is vast. Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s physics may have superseded the Newtonian as the most advanced explanation of the physical world, but Newton still rules as the practical means of understanding the world above the subatomic.

More generally, Newton provided an intellectual engine which allowed men to make sense of the universe and to see order and predictability where before there had been an order seemingly kept from chaos, and often not that, by the capricious will of a god or gods. The psychological as well as the scientific impact of Newton was great.

To these early scientific pioneers may be added the likes of Joseph Priestly (the practical discoverer of oxygen), John Dalton who proposed the first modern atomic theory), Michael Faraday (who laid the foundations of the science of electromagnetism), J.J. Thompson (who discovered the first atomic particle, the electron), James Chadwick (the discover of the neutron) and Francis Crick (who jointly discovered the structure of DNA with his pupil, the American James Watson).

Then there is Charles Darwin, the man with a strong claim to be the individual who has most shaped the way we view the world, because natural selection provides a universal means of explication for dynamic systems. We can as readily visualise pebbles on a beach being selected for their utility in their environment (from qualities such as crystal structure, size, shape) as we can a horse. As with Newton, Darwin profoundly affected the way men look at the world.

Of all the important scientific fields established since 1600, I can think of only two in which an Englishman did not play a substantial role. Those exceptions are Pasteur’s proof of germ theory and Mendel’s discovery of genes. Box A gives an idea of the scope of English scientific discoveries.

Contents of Box A

Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Gravitation, laws of motion, theory of light.

Robert Hooke (1625-1703). Wrote Micrographia, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. Was the first person to use the word “cell” to identify microscopic structures. Formulated Hooke’s Law – a law of elasticity for solid bodies.

Henry Cavendish (1731-1810). Discovered the composition of water and measured the gravitational attraction between two bodies.

Joseph Priestly, (1733-1804). Discovered Oxygen.

Humphrey Davy (1778-1829). Discovered the elements potassium, sodium, strontium, calcium, magnesium and barium nitrous oxide.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Widely regarded as the greatest ever experimental scientist. Conceived the idea of lines of force in magnetism, discovered electromagnetic induction, developed the laws of electrolysis.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Created modern evolutionary theory.

John Prescott Joule (1818-1889). Calculated the mechanical equivalent of heat.

John Dalton, (1766-1844). Created modern atomic theory.

Sir J J Thomson (1856-1940). Discovered the electron and made the first attempt to represent atoms in terms of positive and negative energy.

Sir James Chadwick 1891-1974. Discovered the neutron.

Francis Crick (1916- ). Joint discoverer of the structure of DNA.

End of contents of Box A

The Enlightenment

In his “Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world”, the historian Roy Porter remarks how peculiar it is “that historians have so little to say about the role of English thinkers in the European Enlightenment as a whole” (p3). Peculiar indeed when one considers the English intellectual personnel of the 17th and 18th Centuries and the high reputation English institutions and ideas had amongst the leading lights of the continental Enlightenment, especially in the country which is generally represented as the powerhouse of Enlightenment thinking, France. Here is the philosophe of philosophes, Voltaire, at full Anglophile admire:

“The English are the only people on earth who have been able to prescribe the limits of Kings by resisting them; and who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise Government, where the prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrain’d from committing evil; where the Nobles are great without insolence, tho’ there are no vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.” Lettres philosophiques on Lettres Anglais (1775).

A strong argument can be made for the English Enlightenment not only existing but occurring a century or so before that of any other nation and subsequently providing much of the basis for the general Enlightenment movement.

Consider these figures from the seventeenth century: William Gilbert (science, especially magnetism), Francis Bacon (philosophy and science), Thomas Hobbes (philosophy), John Locke (philosophy), Thomas Harrington (economics and sociology), William Harvey (biology/medicine), Robert Hooke (polymathic scientist and technologist), John Rae (biologist), Edmund Halley (astronomy), Isaac Newton (mathematics and physics). What did they have in common other than intellectual distinction? They were all driven by the idea of reason, by the belief that the world could be understood rationally.

That is the real essence of the Enlightenment, the belief in rationality, in particular, the  belief that the world is subject to physical laws, that God does not intervene capriciously, that the world is not governed by magic. Such ideas did not preclude a God or prevent an intense relationship with the putatively divine, but they did encase God within a rational system of thought in which His action was limited, voluntarily or otherwise. Newton may have been utterly fixated with the numerology of the Bible but he believed the world was ordered according to physical laws.

From the belief that the universe is organised rationally comes the corollary that it can be understood, that everything is governed by laws which can be discovered by men. This idea pre-dated Newton, but it was his ideas, most notably his laws of motion and theory of gravity, that elevated the idea to almost a secular religion. During the next century intellectuals took the example of Newton’s inanimate mechanistic physical world and extrapolated the idea to every aspect of existence, from biology to philosophy to social policy. If only enough was known, if only enough effort was made, then everything, of thisworld at least, could be understood and controlled and everything could be the subject of rational decision making.

The 18th century Enlightenment had another aspect, an association with the democratic or at least a wish that the power of kings should be greatly curtailed – the Voltaire quote given above is a good example of the mentality. This also has its roots in England. The ferment of the English Civil war not only produced proto-democratic political movements such as the Levellers, it also started Parliament along the road of being more than a subordinate constitutional player by forcing it to act as not only a legislature but an executive. Stir in the experience of the Protectorate, simmer for 30 years or so of the restored Stuart kings, mix in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 which resulted in the Bill of Rights and established the English crown as being in the gift of Parliament and season with half a century of the German Georges and you have the British (in reality the English) constitution which was so admired by Voltaire, who thought it quite perfect, and which gave the American colonists the inspiration for their own political arrangements (president = king, Senate = Lords, House of Representatives = Commons, with a Constitution and Bill of Rights heavily influenced by the English Bill of Rights.)

The Industrial Revolution

Of all the social changes which have occurred in human history, none has been so profound as the process of industrialisation. The two previous great general amendments to human life – farming and urbanisation – pale into insignificance. Before industrialisation, man lived primarily from the land and animals whether from farming, husbandry or hunter-gathering. In the most advanced civilisations, the vast majority of populations lived outside large towns and cities. Even in industrialising England a majority of the population derived their living directly from the land as late as the 1830s. France did not become a predominantly urban nation until the 1930s. With industrialisation came not merely a change in the material circumstances, but profound social alteration. There arose much greater opportunity to move from the small world of the village. The massive increase in wealth eventually made even the poor rich enough to have aspirations. Sufficient numbers of the wealthier classes became guilty enough about abject poverty existing beside great wealth that the condition of the poor was further mitigated by greater educational opportunity, welfare provision and legislation regulating the abuse of workers by employers. Political horizons were expanded by the extension of the franchise.

The industrial revolution altered the balance of power throughout the world. David Landes “In the wealth and Poverty of Nations” describes the effect succinctly: “The industrial revolution made some countries richer, others (relatively) poorer; or more accurately, some countries made an industrial revolution and became rich; and others did not and stayed poor.”(p168). Prior to industrialisation, the disparity in wealth between states, regions and even continents was relatively small. Come the Industrial Revolution and massive disparities begin to appear. For Dr Landes, it is to the success or otherwise in industrialising which is the primary cause of present disparities in national wealth.

All of this tremendous amendment to human existence occurred because the one and only bootstrapped Industrial Revolution took place in England. Why England? David Landes in the “Wealth and Poverty of Nations” sees the historical process of industrialisation as twofold.

First, comes a pre-industrial preparatory period in which irrationality of thought is gradually replaced by scientific method and what he calls “autonomy of intellectual inquiry”(p201), that is, thought divorced from unquestioned reliance on authority, irrationality, especially superstition. At the same time technology begins to be something more than by-guess-and-by-God. This gives birth to industrialisation by creating both the intellectual climate and the acquired knowledge, both scientific and technological, necessary for the transformation from traditional to modern society. It is as good an explanation as any and fits the flow of England’s historical development. It is not utterly implausible to suggest that without England the world might have had no Industrial Revolution. Those who would scoff at such a proposition should consider the cold facts: even with England and Britain’s example to follow no other nation matched her industrial development until the 1870′s and then the first country to do so was a state ultimately derived from England, namely the USA. Nor did England produce an industrial revolution only in England, they actively exported and financed it throughout the world, for example, most of the European railway building of the years 1840-70 was the result of British engineers and money.

Some may point to scientific advance in Europe from 1600 onwards as reason to believe that industrialisation would have been achieved without England. It is true that Europe advanced scientifically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but scientific knowledge is no guarantee of technological progress. Moreover, a good deal of that scientific advance came from England. Nor does scientific knowledge have any natural connection with the severe social upheaval required for a transformation from the land-working dominated pre-industrial state to capitalism. Indeed, the landowners of pre-industrial Europe had a vested interest in not promoting industrial advance. Moreover, in many parts of Europe, particularly the East, feudal burdens became greater not less after 1500. This was so even in as advanced a country as France. Consequently, the widespread social mobility which historians have generally thought necessary to promote a bootstrapped industrial revolution simply did not exist in Europe at the beginning of the British Industrial revolution. Even the country most like England in its commercial development, the Netherlands, became socially and politically ossified in the Eighteenth century, with a bourgeoise developing into an aristocracy and representative government narrowed to what was in effect a parliament of nobles.

There will be those – Scots in particular – who will chafe at the idea that the industrial revolution was dependent upon England. The facts are against them. Scotland before the union with England (1707) was a remarkably poor state. Nor, despite its much vaunted educational system – supposedly much the superior of England – had it produced many men of international importance. Read a general history of Europe, either old or modern, and you will find precious few Scots mentioned on their own account before the Union. The names John Eringa and Duns Scotus with perhaps a nod to John Knox are the best the reader may hope for, and the former two had to leave Scotland to make their names. If any other Scotsman who lived before the Union is mentioned, he will be noticed only because of his connection with another country, most commonly England. It required the union with England to give Scots a larger stage to act upon. Without the union, the likes of David Hume, Adam Smith and James Watt would in all probability have been roses which bloomed unseen in the desert air. That is not to decry the talents and contributions of Scots, which are considerable, merely to describe a necessary sociological condition for their realisation. Let me demonstrate how much of an English enterprise the Industrial

Revolution was by using the example of the development of steam power. Contrary to many a schoolboy’s imagining, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. That was the province of Englishmen. The Marquess of Worcester may have produced a working steam engine on his estates in 1663; James Savery certainly did in 1698. This was improved by another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen. Their machines were crude beam engines, but the technological Rubicon had been crossed.

It is true that the Scotsman Watt’s improvements to the steam engine – the conversion of linear to rotary action and the introduction of a separate condenser – were profoundly important and provided the means to extend the use of steam engines from their limited applications in pumping water from mines. But it should be noted that he had to come to England to achieve his improvements through his association with an English entrepreneur of genius, Mathew Boulton, who in his Soho works in Birmingham had probably the best engineering facilities then in the world. It was also Boulton who pressed Watt to develop the conversion of linear to rotary action. It is worth adding that Watt was a timid, retiring personality who left to his own devices would probably have achieved little of practical consequence. Moreover, within a generation of Watt’s improvements, the English engineer, Rchard Trevithick had greatly improved on Watt’s engine by producing high pressure steam engine. It is also true that the very wide ranging patents granted to Watt and Boulton almost certainly delayed the development of the steam engine.

But before steam could play its full role there had to be a revolution in iron production. This was accomplished by Englishmen. Until Abraham Darby began smelting iron with coke made from coal in the early 1700s, iron making in Europe  was an expensive and uncertain business carried on in small foundries using charcoal to fire the kilns (an ironmaker named Dudley claimed to have used coal successfully for smelting as early as 1619 but died without establishing a business to carry the work on).

Compared with coal, charcoal was in short supply. Worse, it did not produce the same intensity of heat as coal converted into coke. Darby and his son solved the basic problem of smelting with coke made from coal. Henry Cort’s puddling process allowed cast-iron to be refined to remove the brittleness. A little later Benjamin Huntsman improved steel making. In the middle of the next century the Bessemer revolutionised steel production to such a degree that its price fell dramatically enough to make steel no longer a luxury but the common material of construction. All these advances were made by Englishmen.

Large scale organisation is also intellectually demanding. If a ready and cheaper supply of iron was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution, so was the very idea of large scale manufactories using machines. Undertakings employing hundreds of men on one site were not unknown before the 18 century – a clothier named Jack of Newbury had a factory employing 500 in Tudor times – but they were very rare. In 18th Century England such enterprises became if not commonplace, at least not extraordinary. By the next century they were the norm.

Industry became for the first time geared to a mass market. Nor was this new method of manufacturing confined to the necessities and banalities of life. Factories such as Josiah Wedgewood’s at Etruria manufactured high quality and imaginative china directed deliberately at the growing middle classes. All the most successful 18th century machines for mass production were developed by Englishmen. Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, James Hargreaves spinning jenny.

Once the first blast of the industrial revolution had passed, the fundamental fine tuning was undertaken by Englishmen, with men such as Whitworth leading the way with machine tools and new standards of exactness in measurement and industrial cutting and finishing. All very boring to the ordinary man, but utterly essential for the foundation of a successful industrial society.

Many vital industries since have originated in England. To take a few, George Stephenson produced the first practical railway (the railway probably did more than anything to drive the Industrial Revolution because it allowed a true national market to operate within England); Brunel issued in the age of the ocean going steamship; William Perkins laid the foundation for the modern chemical industry by discovering the first synthetic dye; the first electronic computer was designed in Britain, after theoretical conception by the Englishman, Alan Turing. (In the previous century another Englishman, Charles Babbage, designed but did not finished building the first programmable machine.)

Alongside the development of manufacturing ran that of agriculture. The enclosure movement was already well advanced by 1700. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was effectively finished. Not merely feudalism but the peasantry were gone. The old, inefficient open-field system was a dead letter. With enclosure came agricultural innovation.

In the eighteenth century we have Jethro Tull, whose seed drill greatly reduced the amount of seed needed for sowing, Robert Bakewell whose selective breeding greatly increased the size of sheep and cattle and “Turnip” Townsend who greatly increased crop efficiency by various mean such as the marling of sandy soil. The importance of such developments cannot be overestimated because the population of Britain rose so dramatically in the next century.

The technological inventions and discoveries made by the English are legion. Box B gives some idea of their importance and range.

Contents of Box B

Thomas Savery (1650-1715). Invented the first commercial steam engine – a steam pump.

Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729). Improved Savery’s engine by introducing the piston.

Richard Trevithick (1771 – 1833). Invented the high pressure steam engine. Built the first steam locomotive.

George Stephenson (1781-1848). Made the railway a practical reality.

Abraham Darby (1678-1717). Developed the process of smelting iron using  coke.

Sir Henry Bessemer, 1813-1898. Devised a process for making steel on a large scale.

James Hargreaves (1722-1778). Invented the spinning jenny.

John Kay (1733-1764). Invented the flying shuttle.

Samuel Crompton (1753-1827). Invented the spinning mule.

Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) Invented the waterframe.

Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823). Invented the power loom.

John Harrison (1693-1776) First to build watches accurate enough to solve the longitude measurement problem.

Edward Jenner (1743-1823). Developed scientific vaccination.

Joseph Lister (1827-1912). Developed antisepsis.

Sir Joseph Whitworth (1803-1887) standardised screw threads, produced first true plane surfaces in metal, developed ductile steel.

Henry Maudslay (1771-1831). Invented the screw-cutting lathe and the first bench micrometer that was capable of measuring to one ten thousandth of an inch.

Joseph Bramah (1748-1814). Invented the hydraulic press.

John Walker (1781- 1859). Invented the first friction matches.

John Smeaton (1724-1792) made the first modern concrete (hydraulic cement).

Joseph Aspdin (1788-1855) invented Portland Cement, the first true artificial cement.

Humphrey Davy (1778-1829). Invented the first electric light, the arc lamp.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Invented the electric motor.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859). Built the first really large steam ships – the Great Britain, Great Western, Great Eastern.

Sir Isaac Pitman (1813-1897). Devised the most widely used modern shorthand.

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802 – 1875). Developed an electric telegraph at the same time as Samuel Morse.

Rowland Hill (1795-1879). Invented adhesive postage stamps.

John Herschel (1792-1871). Invented the blueprint.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) Invented the negative-positive photography and latent image shorter exposure time.

Sir Joseph William Swan (1828-1914). Invented the dry photographic plate. Invented, concurrently with Edison, the light bulb.

Sir William Henry Perkin (1838-1907). Created the first artificial dye – aniline purple or mauveine – and the first artificial scent, coumarin.

Alexander Parkes (1813-90). Created the first artificial plastic, Parkensine.

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857). Worked out the principles of aerodynamics, his “On Ariel Navigation” showed that a fixed wing aircraft with a power system for propulsion, and a tail to assist in the control of the airplane, would be the best way to allow man to fly. Also invented the caterpillar track.

Sir Frank Whittle (1907-1996). Took out the first patents for a turbojet.

Sir Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999). Invented the hovercraft.

Charles Babbage (1792-1871). Worked out the basic principles of the computer.

Alan Turin (1912-1954). Widely considered the father of modern computer science – worked out the principles of the digital computer.

Tim Berners-Lee (1955-). Invented the World Wide Web defining HTML (hypertextmarkup language), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators).

End of contents on Box B

Just a brief sketch

This article is just a brief sketch of what the English have achieved intellectually. There is much which has been either omitted or mentioned too briefly, for example, I have barely touched on the considerable accomplishments in literature, philosophy, history. But there is enough here to show that England has been so far from an intellectual backwater troughout her history that she may be lausibly considered the primary cause of the modern world and its way of thinking and existing. Indeed, without England it is difficult to imagine the world as it is today.

To have produced Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin alone would have been a great thing for any nation, but for England they are merely the cherries on the top of a very substantial intellectual cake. Beneath them sit dozens of others of serious human consequence: the likes of Ockham, Chaucer, Wycliffe, Francis Bacon, Marlowe, Halley, Hobbes, Locke, Gibbon, Priestly, Cavendish, Newcomen, Faraday, Austen, Dickens, Keynes, Turing… ‘Nuff said.

The English must not take their future for granted

England has a truly remarkable history. It was here that Parliamentary government evolved; here that the Industrial Revolution began, here that the only world empire ever worthy of the name was acquired and ruled.  In the arts and sciences  the English can point to the likes of Shakespeare, Newton and Darwin; in martial matters Cromwell, Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson; in goverment the Pitts, Disraeli, Glasdstone and Churchill.  The country has remained unconquered for the better part of a thousand years  and her domestic history is one of remarkable peacefulness when put in the context of  the wider world.  The English are  one of the rare peoples who do not need to exaggerate their history because the reality is sufficient for pride.

But gratifying as our history is, we must never forget that we live in a dynamic universe. The past is but the past and  old glories no guardians of the future. As a matter of urgency the English must learn to resist the incessant insult  to which they are now subject. A nation may be likened to a man. If a man continually accepts insult or engages in  repeated self-denigration, we think him a poor fellow. At first such behaviour is embarrassing. Soon it becomes  irritating. Eventually it breeds a profound contempt and contempt is mother to all enormities. So it is with peoples.  On the simple ground of self-preservation, the English cannot afford to continue to permit the present gratuitous and  incontinent abuse offered by both foreigners and her own ruling elite nor tolerate the suppression of the English  voice.

How may the English reverse the present state? As with all peoples, the English need to be taught their history to give them a psychological habitation. Moreover, the myths of the England haters dissolve readily enough in the acid of fact.  The problem is that there is presently a conscious effort backed by the forces of the state to deny the English a proper knowledge of their history, or indeed any meaningful  knowledge at all. Incredible but true. The attack is two pronged: denigration and a concentration on historical trivia at the expense of the important.

The habit of denigration has a long history. Here is Friedrich Hayek’s description of the left of fifty years ago:

The Left intelligentsia…have so long worshipped foreign gods that they seem to have become almost incapable of seeing any good in the characteristic English institutions and traditions. That the moral values on which most of them pride themselves are largely the products of the institutions they are out to destroy, these socialists cannot, of course, admit. Sdaly, this attitude is unfortunately not confined to avowed socialists. Though one must hope that it is not true of the less vocal but more numerous cultivated Englishman, if one were to judge by the ideas which find expression in current political discussion and propaganda the Englishman who not only “the language speak that Shakespeare spake”, but also “the faith and morals hold that Milton held” seems to have almost vanished. [The Road to Serfdom]

What the left internationalists did not have fifty odd years ago was control of education or a supremacy in politics and the media. They now possess this utterly. The concentration on trivia is of more recent birth and had its roots in the late fifties and early sixties. Prior to then, complaints about an over concentration on “Kings and Queens” history existed, but no one in the academic world seriously suggested that such history was unimportant. That has now gone. Even pupils who have taken A-Level history know next to nothing. Facts and chronology have been replaced by “historical empathy” and investigative skills. Where once pupils would have learnt of Henry V, Wellington and the Great Reform Bill, they are now asked to imagine that they are a peasant in 14th Century England or an African slave on a slaver. The results of such “empathy” are not judged in relation to the historical record, but as exercises in their  own right. Whatever this is, it is not historical understanding. Because history teaching has been removed from historical facts, the assessment of the work of those taught becomes nothing more than the opinion of the teacher. This  inevitably results in the prejudices of the teacher being reflected in their presentation and marking. In the present  climate of opinion within British education this means liberal political correctness wins the day. Thus history  teaching, and the teaching of other subjects such as geography which can be given a PC colouring, has become no  better than propaganda. This would be unfortunate if the propaganda promoted English history and culture uncritically. But to have anti-English propaganda in English schools and universities is positively suicidal. That it is state policy is barely credible.

The extent to which the state has embraced the politically correct, anti-British line is illustrated by this letter to the Daily Telegraph from Chris McGovern when director of the History Curriculum Association, which campaigns against the failure to teach British history fairly or comprehensively:

SIR–The landmarks of British history have become optional parts the national curriculum (report Sept. 10). They appear only as italicised examples of what is permissible to teach.

However, this permission is offered in guarded terms. A guidance letter already sent to every school in the country states: “… we would also like to emphasise that it is very much up to individual schools to determine whether or not to use the italicised examples”. However, there is no such equivocation about teaching history through a host of politically correct social themes. Failure to filter history through such perspectives as gender, race, agent and cultural diversity will be in breach of the law. (Sunday Telegraph 4/12/94).

That was the state of affirs 16 years ago. It  has worsened considerably since. How have we reached this state? The root of it was in the mentality which Hayek noticed fifty years ago, but it  required mass immigration for its realisation as a state policy. Multiculturalism was embraced as a mainstream  political ideal in the late 1970s because politicians did not know what to do about mass immigration and its consequences.  Both Labour and the Conservatives initially embraced the French solution to racial tension, namely integration. But by the end of the seventies integration was deemed by the our elite to be a failure at best and oppression at worst.  Multiculturalism was its successor. Once it became the new official doctrine, the many eager Anglophobic and internationalist hands in British education and the mass media were free to give reign to their natural instincts.

Apart from the denigration and underplaying of English history and culture, the espousal of multiculturalism has had  profound effects on English society. By continually denigrating and belittling the English, ethnic minorities have been encouraged to develop a contempt and hatred for England. It is the most consistent form of incitement to racial hatred within these shores, made all the more dangerous by its espousal by the British state and elite.

The practical effects are the creation of a grievance culture within the various ethnic minorities and a belief that English laws and customs may be ignored with impunity, a belief perhaps best exemplified by the Muslim attack on free expression. The position is made worse in that instance by the existence of the Race Relations Act, which is an attack  on one of the things Englishmen have long prized: namely the right to say what one wants without fear of the criminal law.

If England is to survive as more than a geographical entity, it is essential that the young be imprinted with a knowledge  of the immense achievements of Britain in general and England in particular. This need not mean the creation of a  vulgar, contrived chauvinism for there is so much of  undeniable value in Britain’s past that a fictionalised and bombastic history is unnecessary. For example, why not base GCSE history teaching on a core of the development of the English language, the history of science and technology (with special emphasis on the industrial revolution), the  development of the British constitution and the growth and administration of Empire? Multiculturalism should be  abolished in the schools as a matter of policy.

No nation can maintain itself if it does not have a profound sense of its worth. In a healthy society this sense of worth  simply exists and children imbibe it unconsciously. Our society has been so corrupted by the liberal’s hatred of his own culture that a conscious programme of cultural imprinting is necessary. If it is not done, how long will it be before English children express surprise when told they are speaking English and not American? The corrosion of English society can only be halted if pride of England and her achievements is instilled in the young.

The words of the younger Pitt in 1783 (following the disaster of the American War of Independence) seem peculiarly  apt for our time:

We must recollect … what is we have at stake, what it is we have to contend for. It is for our  property, it is for our liberty, it is for our independence, nay, for our existence as a nation; it is for our character, it is for our very name as

Englishmen, it is for everything dear and valuable to man on this side of the grave.

The English must learn to attend to their own interests for reasons of simple preservation. They may best do this by the creation of an English Parliament to provide England with a political and public voice. Only when that is done, may the liberal censorship of the ordinary men and women of England be broken.

Not as white as they are painted

Robert  Henderson

Those of us who do not share the liberal’s ostensible love of the multicultural mess they have made of modern Britain  will be gratified to hear that  the latest communal outbreak of the Joy of Diversity has brought  the riotin’, lootin, whinin’ folk to their doorsteps.
The riots and lootfests   currently occurring throughout London and other cities  either “blessed” with large black populations or close to those which do have them  – Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Leicester, Bristol and Liverpool – have spread from black ghettos such as Tottenham,  Brixton and Hackney to richer areas such as Lambeth, Ealing, Notting Hill and Chalk Farm.
The last is of particular interest because Chalk Farm abuts the ancestral home of liberal bigots, Hampstead, and the rioters and looters got to the boundary of the Chalk Farm/Hampstead divide.  How the collective population of Hampstead –which is preternaturally white for an inner London borough – must be sighing with dismay that they did not personally  experience so vivid an  outbreak of the “joy”, especially as
they experience so little of it in normal times due to the terrible shortage of
black and  brown  faces  in their midst (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/how-the-well-to-do-liberals-choose-to-live-a-lesson-from-primrose-hill/).

White liberals in Notting Hill  had cause to be  especially excited. According to BBC Radio 5 (the 10.00 pm show 8 August) police warned a householder who rang them to report
looting  to stay inside his home because there were allegedly rioters going about armed with machetes.   Just think of  how he  must have shaken fit to burst  with excitement as they thought of what blacks in Africa generally do with machetes.

Enough of the funnies.  This is serious. Nothing equivalent has happened in Britain  before.  UK Race riots since the late 1950s have been restricted to the ghetto areas themselves and were much less widespread  as a consequence. Nor was there anything like
the scale of  destruction of  property or looting we are presently witnessing.  The widespread use of  arson this time is particularly striking. It would probably be necessary to go back to  the anti-Catholic  Gordon Riots of 1780 to find greater destruction of property in London.  However, the Gordon Riots were genuinely concerned with a particular political issue rather than being primarily an excuse to loot and destroy.

Why has this happened now? Thirty years of pandering to blacks by the British elite in all its guises – politicians, mediafolk, big business,  public servants and  educationalists – has taken its toll.   Blacks have  been taught that two things by Britain’s liberals: nothing is their fault and everything they do wrong  is down to ol’ whitey who just can’t stop oppressing them . On the white liberal side,  they  get their emotional rocks  off by engaging in paroxysms of white  guilt whilst cynically using  ethnic minorities  as a client class, of whom blacks are their unequivocal  favourites.  (The white working class used to be the clients of the liberal left, but that changed in the 1980s when the unions would not play ball with the Labour Party hierarchy and three successive defeats at the hands of Thatcher persuaded most Labour politicians that dumping the white working class was necessary if they were to get into power before they were on their Zimmer frames).

The response of white liberals

Initially, white liberals and blacks  claimed  that looters were protesting about the shooting dead of a black man Mark Duggan by police  in Tottenham on Thursday 4 August 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14459516).This response  was   obvious nonsense  – violent protest is one thing, looting quite another. Unable to write this off as a peaceful political protest gone wrong, Liberals and their black quangocracy  clients (the blacks who are  treated as “community leaders” , those who receive considerable amounts of public money to run “multicultural” projects or  given highly paid publicly funded sinecures) are in a quandary.  They know that these riots  are being conducted overwhelmingly by blacks. They know  that the general public understands this  because of the voluminous media coverage. They realise that to deny the  fact that this is a black event puts them in the position of “Comical Ali” during  the Western attack on Iraq when he denied allied attacks were  getting through  as allied planes bombed the land close behind  him.  But  they  are only too well aware that to admit the truth (that this is a black problem) would  undermine the politically correct  virtual world they have created in which everyone in a position of power or influence  in  Britain has to give lip service at least to the idea that ethnic and racial diversity is a good in itself and infinitely preferable to homogeneous societies.

Faced with this profound difficulty liberals and their ethnic minority clients have taken one of  two paths. The first mode of evasion is to portray the riots as having no racial
context and to rely on the intimidatory effect of decades of multicultural propaganda together with liberal control of the media to allow them to call black white without attracting too much public ridicule.  BBC reporters have been especially addicted to this nonsense by stressing at every opportunity that there are “people of all races” taking part in the riots. The more daring ones emphasise the fact that there are white rioters – it would be interesting to know the national origins of the few  white rioters because  eastern
Europeans  and gipsies in particular  have a liking for theft and mayhem.   Best of all the BBC  (bless their liberal bigot hearts) have repeatedly  described the rioters and looters as protestors. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8690267/London-riots-BBC-criticised-for-branding-thugs-as-protesters.html).

Getting on to BBC phone-ins to point out the black genesis of the riots has been next to impossible. On 7th August I did manage to take part fleetingly  in a phone-in on the BBC
Radio 5 Stephen Nolan programme (10.00 pm -1.00 am). After half an hour of listening to Nolan and his guests chatter happily about the riots without mentioning the racial aspect , I rang to mention  that, try as I might to believe them,  I could not help noticing that  the vast majority of the rioters were black and consequently it was not a general social problem but a black social problem. I attributed the source of the problem to  a near universal sense of victimhood amongst blacks.   I bolstered this latter judgement with the fact that I,  unlike white liberals who almost invariably arrange their lives to live in very white worlds,   have lived for most of my adult life  and live now in parts of London which have a large black  population and consequently I engage daily with blacks, many of them, shock horror! poor and  uneducated.

It took me another forty minutes to get on air,  during which time the programme continued to parade a gallery of  politically correct grotesques that included a Metropolitan Police officer who is a leading light in  the black police association.  When I eventually was allowed to broadcast  my comments provoked outrage from this individual and I was immediately cut off, most frustratingly,   before I could point out to him that he had unambiguously  identified himself as a racist by joining a black-only representative group .

Later in the programme Nolan had as studio guests  Edwina Currie (the one-time Tory Minister) and a retired suffragan bishop by the name of Stephen Lowe. Their job was to review the papers. Lowe castigated the Telegraph for having a long gallery of photographs
showing blacks rioting and looting. He objected to this because – wait for it – the coverage made it look as though this was a black riot.  Hilariously, this earned a stern rebuke from
Currie who repeatedly accused Lowe of bringing race into the equation by mentioning the racially monochrome nature of the Telegraph photos.   Not to worry, the Telegraph made up for this terrible blunder  next day by publishing a series of photos released by the police of rioters. Guess the colour of the first rioter shown. Yes, that’s right, he is white. As was the person in the  third photo. Sadly, the pretence of it being a racially neutral riot could not be sustained and the rest of the 14 photos were overwhelmingly black.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8690951/London-riots-CCTV-pictures-of-suspects-are-released-by-the-Metropolitan-Police.html).   The Telegraph have continued to disgrace themselves in politically correct eyes by printing another series of black villains in their 9 August issue.

The early signs from court appearances resulting from the riots suggest there is something very odd going on when it comes to the application of the law.  As anyone can see from the media coverage,  the vast majority of rioters are black, but the number of those  appearing in court who are white is much  greater than  their proportion of the rioters and looters. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024767/Man-charged-riot-incitement-Facebook-London-rioters-guilty.html#ixzz1UjYYfl00)

I suspect one of two things is happening: either the police have concentrated on arresting white rioters because they  are (1) unlike the black culprits, often not part of a gang of rioters/looters and (2) arresting them does not cause any ethnic mayhem . Alternatively, the police/CPS are deliberately pushing white cases to the front of the queue to give the
false  impression that the rioters are not overwhelmingly black.   The other thing which looks suspicious is the routine showing of black rioters  in groups and whites in what look like cropped photos in which a single person is shown. These could be  extracted from scenes showing one white rioter amongst a crowd of blacks.

The other general  liberal tactic is to blame it all on economics and preferably Tory cuts. This has the advantage of leaving race out of it altogether.   Harriet Harman, a minister in both the Blair and Brown Governments, was sure that this was linked to  the rioting and looting. (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/neilobrien1/100100392/harriet-harman-and-the-intellectual-bankruptcy-of-the-progressive-left/). Mary Riddle, a Labour Party media groupie employed by the supposedly Tory Daily Telegraph,  was in no doubt that the  riots are due to social deprivation in general and the creation of an uneducated underclass in particular: “London’s riots are not the Tupperware troubles of Greece or Spain, where the middle classes lash out against their day of reckoning. They are the proof that a section of young Britain – the stabbers, shooters, looters, chancers and their frightened acolytes – has fallen off the cliff-edge of a crumbling nation.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8630533/Riots-the-underclass-lashes-out.html.

If  Harman and Riddle were correct all poor areas would be susceptible to this behaviour and most of the rioters would be white.  This is not the case. The reality is that the criminality is, as anyone can see from the press and TV, overwhelmingly being perpetrated by blacks. Moreover, the first of the rioting arose in black ghettos.  Most tellingly, no  town or city which does not have a  substantial black population or such a population close by  has seen rioting.  This also gives the lie to the claim from the Conservative side that  the riots are down to the  lax discipline in schools and the undermining  of parental authority  which has produced a generation of youngsters without respect for the law or any authority .

Clearly the causes  of these riots lie in something other than poverty, a lack of school discipline  or poor parenting.   Ostensibly the behaviour is caused by 30 years of our  elite pandering to the black population of Britain by telling them how oppressed they are and how racist Britain is. This has undoubtedly stoked their appetite for victimhood and given
them a belief that they owe nothing to society in general. That gives them the moral release to riot and loot.

The black response to the killing of Mark Duggan demonstrates the difference between blacks and whites. The police in Britain kill very few people compared with virtually anywhere else, not least because they are not routinely armed.  Most of those they  kill are white. Violent protests or protests of any sort rarely if ever occur when the person killed is white because whites still trust the police (just) to behave reasonably . When a  black man is killed it is assumed by blacks that it is tantamount to a murder and violent protest is more often than not the eventual outcome.   It remains to be seen what the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report concludes about the Duggan shooting, but if as has been reported  by the media Duggan had a gun on him it is difficult to see how the police could be criticised for killing him if he either had it in his hand or it was near him and he was reaching for it when he was shot .

But there is a deeper problem. Blacks display the same general type of uncontrolled  behaviour in societies of very different types throughout the world, whether it be where
they are in the racial majority or minority, in an advanced industrial country or one from the depths of the Third World. There is genocide and mutilation  in places such as Rwanda and Sierra Leone; rioting, looting and episodic murder in Britain.  The degree of misbehaviour may vary but  its general type is the same; a lack of self-control  expressing itself in gratuitous violence.

That places the victimhood justification for misbehaviour in Britain in a different light. It is simply a rationalisation of general black social behaviour.  Why do blacks tend to  behave like this?  Part at least of the answer is  probably to be  found in the inferior average  IQ of blacks.  In IQ and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (2002), the British psychologist Richard Lynn and  the Finish economist Tatu Vanhanan  included their  estimations of the average national IQs of 185 states .  They reached the estimates
either by using studies of IQs conducted by others or where these were not available, by extrapolating from neighbouring countries which did have IQ studies.  For example, if the estimate based on studies of country X was 80, a  neighbouring country Y which had no studies would also be taken as 89. In the case of all black African countries  the estimated average IQ  was 69. (http://www.rlynn.co.uk/pages/article_intelligence/t4.asp).

Such a low average black IQ was unsurprisingly greeted by  widespread disbelief and objections were raised  about the validity of the studies used and the practice of extrapolating from other countries where no studies existed .  In 2006 Lynn and Vanhanan published IQ and Global Inequality which addressed the objections and,  while not removing them altogether, did show that  the correlation between the imputed
IQs  and IQ studies of the states in question  made after 2002 were strong (.91) (http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mamcdani/Publications/McDaniel%202008%20book%20review%20IQ%20and%20global%20inequality.pdf).

But even without the African studies and estimates, it is known that black IQs are inferior to those of whites or East Asians such as the Chinese.  The average American black IQ is a well established 85, considerably higher than the 70 of black Africans but still way below the average white IQ of 100. Moreover, black Americans have a large admixture of white genes, so an average IQ between the black African and the white American average IQ is
exactly what would be expected if it is granted that IQ is strongly dependent on genetic inheritance.  It is reasonable to assume the blacks in the US without a white admixture would have an average IQ closer to the 70 estimated  for black Africans.

What is the consequence of such a low average IQ? The first thing to understand is that people with low I Qs are not monsters but simply people who have a different level of
mental competence. They have less capacity for abstract thinking, are more literal minded, live more in the present . In short, they are childlike.  This makes them more susceptible to
irrational and uncontrolled behaviour http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/blacks-the-odd-man-out/).  This could be the root of the strong propensity for violence and a lack of social awareness seen amongst blacks. Other factors such as higher testosterone levels in blacks may also have some effect.

But there could also be another factor in play which is a corollary of the low IQ. Someone with a low IQ  may  find living in an advanced society  extremely stressful because they
cannot cope with the intellectual demands which the society exerts on them. It is interesting that some types of mental illness are linked to low IQ (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/a-low-iq-individual-in-a-high-iq-society/).  This could be part of the reason at least  for the fact that  diagnosis of  mental illness, especially schizophrenia, amongst blacks is high in Britain. It is claimed by some, especially educated blacks,  that this is due to racism within the  British mental health services. This is  difficult to take this seriously in these pc times. If diagnosis of mental illeness was to be skewed by bias it would be more likely to result in fewer diagnoses of mental illness amongst blacks not more. Plausibly, blacks become disproprotionately mentally ill in Britain  simply because they cannot cope.  The paranoia  engendered
by the victimhood fostered by white liberals will not help their mental state either. (http://www.blackmentalhealth.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=154&Itemid=139).

The emasculation of the police

The most chilling thing about reports from the scene of the riots and looting has been the persistent claims of those at the scene but not part of the criminality that there  is either an  absence of any police or where there were any police,  they were ineffective.

If the first riot in Tottenham had been quashed there is a good chance that the others might not have happened or have  been much less serious.  Quashing a single riot should have been within the power of the Met which has more than 30,000 officers, not immediately but within an hour or two after they had re-directed  officers from other parts of London.  Instead the police in Tottenham  stood back and watched the looters  for many hours.

Why have the police been so supine? It  is primarily a consequence of  the injection of political correctness into police officers’ minds with its most potent strand being “anti-racism”. A lesser secondary cause is the ever more stifling culture of “health and Safety” which the police have embraced . (see  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13319812
and http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1997/42/contents). This has resulted in the police putting their own safety before that of the public, a straight reversal of  what used to be the case. Effective  policing system cannot operate on such a basis.

The British elite’s  official pandering to ethnic minorities  goes back to 1965 when the first Race Relations Act (RRA) was passed followed by a second  stronger Act in 1968 which was one of the things which provoked Enoch Powell to make his “Rivers of Blood” speech in the same year. (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/enoch-powells-rivers-of-blood-speech/). A third RRA with considerably more teeth arrived in 1976 which elevated ethnic minorities to a de facto protected status,  not only by  strengthening the penalties for “inciting racial hatred”  but by its provision of  a wide range of  privileges to ethnic minorities in the areas of work, education  and social provision.
(http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/74)

Then came the Scarman report into the Brixton Riots of 1981. Lord Scarman  did not accuse the Metropolitan Police of racism,  but called for the development of community policing, the recruitment of more black officers and laid part of the blame for the riots on social deprivation, particularly the high rate of unemployment in Brixton. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/25/newsid_2546000/2546233.stm)
This began the long march towards  the police policing ethnic minority areas not on the basis of what crime was occurring in them,  but what they could get “community leaders” – who tended to be self-appointed – to agree to and the ascribing of virtually  any black
behaviour to deprivation.

The next and longest  nail in the coffin of rigorous policing of blacks (and ethnic minorities generally) came with the Macpherson report into the death of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence (http://www.archive.official-documents.co.uk/document/cm42/4262/sli-47.htm).  Macpherson accused the Metropolitan Police of being “institutionally racist”, that is racist not consciously but through the prevailing  ethos (“canteen culture”)
within the force, an accusation which was eventually embraced wholeheartedly by the Met followed by all the other UK police forces. Macpherson defined racism and institutional racism as:

‘RACISM

6.4 “Racism” in general terms consists of conduct or words or practices which advantage or disadvantage people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. In its more subtle form it is as damaging as in its overt form.

6.34 “Institutional Racism” consists of the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic
origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’

A  good examination of the ill effects of  the acceptance of the existence of “institutional racism” can be found at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs06.pdf).

Macpherson also provided an absurd and dangerous definition of what constituted racist behaviour which should be investigated:

DEFINITION OF RACIST INCIDENT

12. That the definition should be:

“A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.

‘13. That the term “racist incident” must be understood to include crimes and non-crimes in policing terms. Both must be reported, recorded and investigated with equal commitment.

‘14. That this definition should be universally adopted by the Police, local Government and other relevant agencies.’

This meant that any complainant who was malicious or simply burdened with a sense of victimhood could turn an ordinary crime into one which was racist or even worse turn an incident which had no meaningful criminal content into a criminal act.

Macpherson continued:

‘REPORTING AND RECORDING OF RACIST INCIDENTS AND CRIMES

15. That Codes of Practice be established by the Home Office, in consultation with Police Services, local Government and relevant agencies, to create a comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes.

16. That all possible steps should be taken by Police Services at local level in consultation with local Government and other agencies and local communities to encourage the reporting of racist incidents and crimes. This should include:

– the ability to report at locations other than police stations; and

– the ability to report 24 hours a day.

17. That there should be close co-operation between Police Services and local Government and other agencies, including in particular Housing and Education Departments, to ensure that all information as to racist incidents and crimes is shared and is readily available to all agencies….’

And

‘PROSECUTION OF RACIST CRIMES

‘34. That Police Services and the CPS should ensure that particular care is taken at all stages of prosecution to recognise and to include reference to any evidence of racist motivation. In particular it should be the duty of the CPS to ensure that such evidence is referred to both at trial and in the sentencing process (including Newton hearings). The CPS and Counsel to ensure that no “plea bargaining” should ever be allowed to
exclude such evidence. ‘ (Ibid)

To put the cherry on  pc policing, in 2000 the Blair Government passed the Race Relations
(Amendment) Act . This extended the obligations laid down in the 1976 Act for private bodies such as companies and charities to the police and other public  authorities  so that “ It is unlawful for a public authority in carrying out any functions of the authority to do any act  which constitutes discrimination.   (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/34).

Faced with that battery of multiculturalism supporting law and the ever more fervent support of  the political elite for political correctness,   unsurprisingly  the British police became  paranoid about being seen as “racist”. The “anti-discrimination ” credo has put any officer judged to have been racist – and this might be no more than a bit of banter suggesting that a black officer is difficult to see in the dark  – at the risk of instant dismissal. It has also given a lever for non-white officers with the police to go on the
grievance trail (http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/217239_43_gmp_officers_in_police_racism_claims).
The upshot is that police officers from newly minted constables  to grandees such as chief constables and the Metropolitan police commissioner  have become not only extremely  of what they say,  but reluctant to act forcefully against suspected black  criminals.  This reluctance is particularly marked in situations such as riots where they know they will be  filmed by the mainstream media and  private individuals.

In 1989 the Metropolitan Police changed its title from the Metropolitan Police Force to the Metropolitan Police Service.  Other police forces followed suit.  The change of name is symbolic of the  profound  change in attitude.  The British police moved from being keepers of the peace and catchers of criminals to quasi-social workers crossed with political commissars who are ever eager to enforce political correctness by investigating
any alleged “hate crime” even though the idea of a hate crime only has a spectral
existence in English law.    No absurdity is beyond them  as shopkeeper Gavin Alexander found in 2007 when the police swooped on his shop and took several golliwog dolls into custody (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23389075-police-seize-golliwogs-in-racism-probe.do).

Needless to say, as political commissars the police are less than eager to investigate complaints  which do not fit into the pc regime. In 2001 I made a complaint to the Racial and Violent Crime Squad against the BBC Director-General Greg Dyke who described his own organisation as “Hideously white”.  This met all the necessary criteria for prosecution:  Dyke was a public figure, he headed the largest media organisation in the world and his words indubitably incited hatred against whites.  The police refused to register the complaint let alone investigate it even,  though I persuaded an MP to write to the Met complaining about double standards (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/the-ever-increasing-madness-of-political-correctness/).

The future

The situation is potentially  very serious. Imagine a situation where riots and looting such as these could be called up regularly without an adequate police response. It would be close to anarchy.  This is what we risk. Potential rioters and looters have seen the police reduced to helplessness. They will think they can do it again whenever they choose.

This was flash mob rioting using social networking. Those on a network simply need to wait until they receive a message telling them where  the next meeting point for a riot
is and head for it.  They get their loot and riot, then get another message telling them to move on elsewhere. The police can be run ragged. The same applies to any violent political protest rather than straightforward criminality. Any society can be reduced to chaos if enough people refuse to respect the law.  That is the message which comes out of these riots.

What will happen now? Even if the police could identify them, the numbers  are too great to bring to meaningful justice. Numbers are always difficult to assess where there is a fluid crowd, but the sheer volume  of riots and the length of time they have lasted must mean there have been thousands of people committing criminal acts.  Even if each incident only involved a couple of hundred people it would be easy to run up a figure of 10,000.  Many of the crimes – arson, serious criminal damage, serious theft – would have to carry a heavy prison sentence if  adequate punishment is to be administered.  To  process that number of people through a police investigation, the  Crown Prosecution Service and the courts would be a colossal task. Those who are old enough to remember the Poll Tax fiasco will recall how the magistrates courts became choked trying to process Poll Tax refuseniks.  This would be much worse because the crimes would all go before a jury in the higher
unless a guilty plea is entered.  There would also be the strong likelihood of appeals, something which did not arise often in the case of a refusal to pay  the Poll Tax.
Even if these problems  could be overcome, there would be no obvious place to incarcerate those convicted because our prisons are already so jam-packed everything is done to avoid
imprisoning people and desperate remedies such as letting prisoners out early a frequent resort.

If  people are not brought to justice or are brought to justice without any serious
punishment  resulting , the numbers of those who   are willing to riot and loot
will grow.  This will drag in blacks who have not been willing to loot and riot before.
It will also tempt other ethnic minorities to join in on the basis that if the blacks can get away with it why shouldn’t  they  have some of the spoils. A proportion of whites will also be tempted if they see ethnic minorities getting away with murder.  That is the truly pernicious nature of what is happening:  it continually encourages more disorder.

The point to cling onto is that without the mass immigration of blacks none of this would be happening. If some whites are engaging in the disorder it is only because the black rioters have provided the platform for them to behave in that way.  We can safely say that because rioting to loot just has not happened in British society when there was no large black population here. Nor do we find such rioting happening in areas dominated by native white Britons.

The riots have all taken place in England. The reason is simple: the vast majority
of  post-1945 immigrants have settled in England not the rest of the UK. It is the English who have had to bear the brunt of  mass immigration’s most obnoxious consequences.

What should be done? I suggest this. All attempts by government to appease ethnic minority groups should stop. No more money for community leaders, ethnic based charities or public projects which promote the interests only of minority ethnic groups.  All the laws such as the Race Relations Act and the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000
which give de facto privileges to ethnic minorities and prevent honest objections to immigration and its consequences should be repealed.  The police should be banned from playing the role of political commissars and get back to honest coppering; catching villains
and maintaining order. Institutionalised political correctness should be stripped from public service  and any organisation which receives public money.
Most importantly, politicians and the mainstream media should  stop incontinently  promoting the liberal fantasy of multicultural heaven and recognise that it is not heaven but at best purgatory.

What will the Coalition Government do?   Sadly, the odds must be on more appeasement
of blacks in particular and probably ethnic minorities in general.   Over the past 30 years  vast sums of taxpayers’ money has been poured into appeasing blacks and Asians.   A
good example is the permitting of Housing Associations which, overtly or covertly,  provide social housing for particular ethnic groups (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/).  In addition to spending money, politicians and the mainstream  media have given a grossly disproportionate amount of time and publicity to telling blacks and Asians how valuable they are to Britain.  Like foreign Aid, the attempts to create
a  healthy society by pouring money into alienated and naturally separate communities are doomed. They  simply take the money and attention and then ask for more of the same without becoming any more responsible either individually or to the wider society . They will undoubtedly be coming back for largesse and attention  now and  it is difficult to imagine a political class which has wholeheartedly  signed up to the wonders of diversity  refusing them another hand-out. Perhaps the moving of the Joy of Diversity into the districts inhabited by white liberals will change their  public views  but do not bet on it.  They are well aware of the ill-effects of mass immigration which is the reason they take such care to live in very white worlds themselves.  Provided they can arrange things to keep the immigrants from intruding into their own lives they will probably keep quiet and carry on peddling the same tired multicultural nonsense.

Those who still think that multiculturalism can work need to understand that not only is it more psychologically comfortable for minorities to remain separate, but that it can be advantageous if the host community is soft enough to pander to it.

See also

(http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/the-position-of-minorities/.

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/black-and-asian-cultural-separatism-in-the-uk/

Patriotism is not an optional extra

Robert Henderson

Contents

1. What is patriotism?

2. The roots of patriotism

3. Nations are tribes writ large

4. The importance of a national territory

5. The democratic value of nations

6. What the individual owes to the nation

7.  The liberal internationalist

8. How to move from multiculturalism to patriotism

9 No patriotism, no enduring society

1. What is  patriotism?

By patriotism I mean the sense of belonging to a people, of  owning a land, having a group identity,  of feeling  at ease with those belonging to the group  in a way which meeting  those  outside the group never engenders, of naturally  favouring your  people above foreigners, of knowing that the  interests of the “tribe” must come before that of any outsider. By this  definition patriotism is something which the vast majority of human beings can  understand because it is not an ideology but an innate human quality whose origins lie buried deep within the evolution of social animals.

The only people who may genuinely be unable to understand  patriotism are the severely mentally retarded or those with a personality disorder such as autism which reduces their ability to understand social contexts.  Despite their incessant repudiation of patriotism even latterday liberals understand the pull of patriotic inclinations, although of course they would never recognise the nature of their inclinations.    These drive  them to live in a manner which is directly at odds with their professed ideology. Look at the life of a white liberal and you will find that they overwhelmingly arrange their lives so that they live in
very white, and in England, very English worlds. They do this in two ways. They either live in an area which is overwhelmingly white – the “rightest of right-on”  British folk singers Billy Bragg chooses to live in the “hideously white”  and English county of Dorset – or  reside in a gentrified white enclave created  on the outskirts of an area such as Islington in London  which has a significant ethnic content to its population– the Blairs lived there before moving to Downing Street. The latter tactic allows the white liberal to luxuriate in the faux belief that they are “living the diversity dream”,  whilst in reality encountering little if any  of the “joy of diversity” they are so vocally enthusiastic about.  A splendid example of  white liberal ghettoization is the drippingly  pc TV presenter Adrian Chiles who  described in a BBC programme  The  Colour of Friendship (18 August 2003) how he looked at his wedding photographs which were taken only a few years before and saw to his dismay and  astonishment that it was in the words of the one-time BBC director-general  Greg Dyke “hideously white”.  With a guest list of several hundred he was unable to find a single non-white face staring out at him. The only ethnic  minorities he had equal or extended contact with were those he met at work, who  were of course middleclass and westernised.

The ease and near universality of understanding of  patriotism sets it apart from ideologies such  as Marxism and liberal internationalism.  The majority of the followers of any ideology with a large number of adherents  will have little understanding  of it, either because they are intellectually lazy or because they lack the  intellectual wherewithal to master the creed. Few Marxists have ever had  a grasp of such ideological niceties as the
laws of dialectics and even fewer modern  liberal internationalists understand  the relationship of  laissez faire economic theory  to historical economic  reality.   The tendency for those who ostensibly support  an ideology to be ignorant of it beyond the grasping of a few ideas which can be reduced to slogans is greatly inflated where, as has happened with political correctness, it becomes the  ideology of  the ruling elite.  In such circumstances people  give lip service to an ideology ,  even  if they neither understand its theoretical basis or even agree with it out of  expediency, whether that be driven by fear or ambition.

The majority of believers in any ideology  are in the position of the laity in Western Europe  before the Reformation when the universal use of the Latin Bible and Latin in church rites meant that the vast majority of the population were left at the mercy of a clerical elite who simply told them what to believe, whether or not it was  sanctioned by the Scriptures. Such people will chant the slogans and support  the intellectual leadership of their movements not because they understand and  are convinced by the ideology, but because  they have  nailed their emotional  colours to  a group.  Ironically, they are tapping into the same  innate traits which create tribes and nations.  The problem is they are creating something which is evolutionarily destructive because it drives them to attempt to destroy the natural formation of human groups through bonds of cultural and racial similarity.

Compare the  situation of the follower of an ideology with that of those who respond to the all of patriotism as defined above. They cannot be so easily or routinely hoodwinked and manipulated by the few, because almost everyone instinctively understands what it is to be patriotic. It does not need to be explained to them.  Whatever the behaviour arising from appeals to patriotism it is not undertaken out of ignorance. Of course, the  ways in which people respond to  their innate feelings  need not be either pretty or moral,  for at its extreme appeals to the emotions and thoughts which come with patriotism may lead to attempts at genocide.  However, even in such extreme circumstances,  the tribe or nation attempting genocide is at  least behaving in a way which is congruent with human biology  and the survival of the group, although an  attempt at conquest or genocide which goes wrong may severely damage or destroy the aggressor.

2. The roots of  patriotism

The sense of being separate, of belonging to a discrete group with identifiable characteristics is a necessary part of being human because Man is a social animal. Social animals have two universal features: they form discrete groups and within the group produce hierarchies – although both the group and the hierarchy vary considerably in form and intensity. Human beings are no exception; whether they are hunter-gatherers or people populating a great modern city they all have a need to form groups in which they feel naturally comfortable.

Why do social animals form discrete groups rather than treat all the animals of their species which they encounter as being part of the group? Part of the answer surely lies in competition for territory, food and mates and the  limits placed on any species by their environment.  For example, it would be impossible for lions to exist in much larger groups than they do because of their heavy food demands. Moreover, once the group size is established it is not possible for a species to suddenly change its size because the behavioural template will have been set to accommodate the size which exists.  Man is possibly the exception to this rule, but  it could be argued that humans only learned
how to form larger groups very slowly and that where larger groups form today, for example, villagers moving off the land to the cities in developing countries,  this is simply  the extended consequences of the long, painful steps towards extending the human group size.

Some animals, most notably insects, fish and birds, successfully form very large groups. However, the  form of their association  or their degree of social integration  differs from  that of primates  (and arguably mammals generally). Social insects rely for their organisation on what are in effect  simple  automated responses through such triggers as
chemical releases. Fish and birds may form large groups, most probably because it affords them evolutionary  goods such  as greater protection from predators or easier access to mates,  without  engaging in much social support for one another beyond being together. Birds  may assemble in large groups only when they migrate.

The most highly developed social animals amongst mammals such as primates and wolves do far more than simply congregate.  They develop patterns of behaviour which require active and complex  cooperation between members of the group.  Such behaviour may of itself place limits on the size of a group by the behaviour being dependent  upon the mental capacity of the animal.   For example, it could be that a pack of  wolves can only be the size it is because anything substantially larger would  be impossible for the mind of the animal to comprehend or for behaviours which are essentially automatic to operate within.

There is also the question of mating strategies and the  raising of offspring. Sexually reproducing social animals have to evolve strategies to maximise reproduction for the individual whilst preventing competition for mates amongst males becoming so intense it threatens the viability of the group.  Probably the most common method of achieving this amongst social mammals is to have a dominant male; frequently  a sexually mature male who occupies the position of the oriental despot with his harem, for example,  the gorilla.
This of itself means that that the group must be clearly defined with males from outside excluded. But even where there is a looser social arrangement which permits different males within the group to not only co-exist but share the females , as is the case with the chimpanzee,  there is still a sense of possession amongst the males at least and hence the need for a defined group.When a species has moved to social animal status,  behaviours that intensify group behaviour such as the recognition of members of the group by scent will make the exclusion of outsiders  ever more rigid. It is also probable that amongst the most advanced social  mammals that the individual animals have sufficient mental awareness to become, just as humans do, accustomed to the behaviour of the members of their particular group and that becomes a  major part of maintaining the group identity.
Animals generally hate novelty so it would make evolutionary sense for them to prefer those individuals with whom they have grown up to strangers.

Man is the exception to the rule of group size in as much as over the past 10,000 years or so humans have shown themselves capable of  creating groups of vast size . This is plausibly attributable to the mental capacity of humans being sufficient to overcome the organisational  which thwart the increase in group size of other social mammals.  But this ability to increase group size massively has only occurred in recent human existence. Human settlements where people are counted in thousands rather than dozens or hundreds have a history of less than 10,000 years and even today most human beings live in small communities.   From paleontological and archaeological evidence, historical accounts of how people lived  and  the example of  tribal peoples living today, we can reasonably deduce that the natural size of human groups living  without the ability to generate their own food supply through farming is a few hundred at most.   Importantly, although  Man can now live in larger communities,  he is still in evolutionary terms equipped to live in small groups. This means that the innate tendencies which lead social
animals to set limits to the group  are alive and well.

That leaves the formation of hierarchies to be explained. For animals other than Man the answer is I think simple enough, only by forming hierarchies can social groups cohere. Animals vary considerably in their physical and mental qualities. Observe any animal, even the simplest single cell organism, and differences between individuals within the species will become apparent. Some are more vigorous than others, some unusually large, some abnormally small, some more adventurous and so on. Individuals will also vary in physical capacity and behaviour by age and, in sexually reproducing species, sex.

Solitary animals compete for existential goods through direct competition with other members of their species, something they do through methods such as such as scent marking of territorial boundaries and serious fighting . When an animal is social, differences in individual quality and the urge of each individual to survive have to be resolved by something other than the methods used by solitary animals because the animals live in close proximity. Competition for desirable goods still occurs, most notably
competition for food and mates, but normally within behaviours which are not fatal to other members of the group or behaviours which are so disruptive as to threaten the survival of the group. Moreover, the development of such behavioural restraint  provides the possibility for  behaviours to develop  which  make the individuals of the group dependent  upon one another, for example, the hunting strategies of  the wolf which
requires the adult members of the pack to display a very considerable degree of cooperation.  The development of  such behaviours probably reinforces the tendency
towards hierarchy. The upshot of these various social accommodations  is the formation of different social niches into which individuals with different qualities ad histories fit.

Consider what would happen if hierarchies did not exist. There would be constant conflict within the group because no individual would have cause to defer to another except from fear of physical harm.  Fear is a blunt and very limited instrument of social control, whether it be of humans or animals. It is a strategy more suited to the solitary animal than the social one. Group behaviour is a compromise between the immediate advantage of the individual and the diffuse advantages derived from group activity. The compromise is given structure by hierarchies, whether that be a fixed biological distinction by sex or caste (for example, social bees) or a transient one due to the age of an animal. Hierarchies are
built on the differences between individuals and the more rigid the hierarchical structure the greater will be the selective pressures to produce individuals in the right proportions to fill the various social niches within the group.

Hierarchies also make sense in terms of the development of social animals. Social animals are descended from asocial animals. The movement from asocial to social animal is presumably akin to the evolutionary process whereby a parasite is converted to a symbiotic partner. It is a process of gradual behavioural accommodation.

Social animals on the bottom rung of the social animal ladder may do little more than associate together at certain times. The next rung up and the animal frequently associates with others of its kind. One more step and the animal forms more or less permanent groupings. And so on until we reach the ultimate social animal, Man.

The gradual evolution of social behaviour of itself points to the need for hierarchy, because at each stage of the evolution the natural overtly selfish behaviour of the original solitary animal has to be modified. That modification will only come through natural selection working on behavioural traits which favour more complete socialisation.

What about human beings? Are they not capable of breaking the biological bounds which capture animals? Does not their immense intelligence and possession of language place them in another category of being? Could Man not simply decide not to behave in a non-hierarchical manner? The fact that human beings have never done so is of itself sufficient evidence for all but the most ideologically committed nurturist to decide that human
beings cannot do it in practice and to conclude that the forming of hierarchies is part of the human template. However, to that fact can be added another, the dominance-submission behaviour which every person witnesses daily not merely in positions of formal dominance and subordination such as the workplace, but in every aspect of social life.

Societies which consist of various human groups that  see themselves as separate  from each other disrupt the creation of a healthy hierarchy. Instead of there being a single hierarchy within an homogenous group (defining homogenous as a population in a discrete territory  which sees itself as a group), there are  hierarchies formed within each group and a further overarching hierarchy formed from the various groups themselves
with  each group hierarchy competing within the population as a whole.

The nature of the competition between the groups will depend on the relative  proportions each forms  of a population and the history of each group.  The subordinate groups within the society will feel that they are there on sufferance and  be suspicious and fearful of the dominant  group and constantly  worried that any  other minority group is outcompeting them.  A majority population which has been  dominant  in all respects within the territory will take some shifting from its position of supremacy,  but the influx of substantial numbers of outsiders will nonetheless create insecurity and  resentment amongst the dominant population. In such circumstances no individual , whether of the dominant or subordinate group(s), feels entirely  secure because there is constant tension between groups. Most importantly for the wellbeing of the society, there is no common bond of trust between people sharing the same territorial house.

3. Nations are tribes writ large

Nations are tribes writ large. They are remarkably durable. Empires invariably fall but a nation is timeless and can be only be utterly destroyed only through an act of genocide. Even the loss of a homeland – the most traumatic loss any nation can sustain – does not destroy a people as the Jews have emphatically shown for nearly two thousand years.

A shared faith or political ideology does not make a nation.  Muslims may claim to be one people, but the reality is very different as the continual strife between Muslims bears witness. Not only is there the major division between Shias and Sunnis, Muslim dominated states of the same ostensible branch of Islam are often hostile to each other, while Muslim terrorists/freedom fighters (take your pick) willingly kill fellow Muslims – women and children included – in large numbers.

Similarly, Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union and Red China may have maintained the fiction to the bitter end of the Soviet Bloc that the international proletariat was as one, but the substantial deviations between their ideologies and the viciously repressive measures they used to deny their own proles contact with outside world (and hence with the rest of
the proletariat) told another tale.

Today, the doctrine of liberal internationalism pretends to a universality of human experience and commonality which is refuted every day by the manifold social, ethnic and racial strife throughout the world. It is an ideology which wishes the world would be as it says rather than asserts that this is the world as it is or would be under given conditions.

Nations are organic growths. They cannot be constructed consciously as the “nation-builders” of the period of European de-colonisation fondly imagined and their liberal internationalist successors today continue to at least pretend to believe. Nations are developed through the sociological process of establishing trust within the group. This only happens when others are recognised as belonging naturally to the group. That does not mean that every member of the nation is seen as equal as an individual, whether for
reasons of personality, ability or social status, but it does mean they are accepted automatically as being part of the nation. An English duke may have little if any social contact with the English working man, but each would instinctively recognise the other as English because despite their social distance they fall within the recognised template of what it is to be English.

Nor is the sense of group solidarity and empathy  restricted to nations. As David Hume noted  over two centuries ago when he reflected on how we respond to people in different circumstances: “An Englishman [met] in Italy is a friend:  A European in China [is a friend] ; and perhaps a man [of any origin] wou’d be belov’d as such, were we to meet him in the moon.” ( A Treatise of Human Nature Book II section 2 (A Treatise of Human
Nature).  The same forces which create tribes and nations are at work here as the individual seeks, in the absence of members of his tribe or nation,  those who are closest to his tribe or nation.

Just as a nation cannot be consciously created the individual cannot decide in anything other than the legal sense that they are this or that nationality. A man may decide to become a British citizen through an act of will but he cannot decide to be English. That is because being English is the consequence of parentage and upbringing, something over which the child has no control. It is the unconscious imbibing of a culture something
visceral.

Most vitally, to be part of the tribe or nation a person has to be accepted without thinking by other members of the nation as a member of the nation to be of that nation. That is why the claims of English men and women to be Irish, Welsh or Scots are both forlorn and ridiculous. As the English film director Stephen Frears wittily remarked of the very English actor Daniel Day-Lewis “I knew Daniel before he was Irish”.

Like it or not, the upbringing of these wannabe Celts has made them English. Not only do they think like the English, understand English mores without thinking and are armed with a library of English cultural references, they have a personality which falls within the English spectrum. Put them in a room with foreigners or the Celts they wish to be and they will be taken for English. Such people cannot be anything but English, because only by being raised in a society where you are accepted without question as being part of the nation can the person become part of a nation. An Englishman who wishes to claim that he is a Scot cannot realistically  do so because he lacks the cultural imprinting of a Scot. It is not something which can be faked.

4. The importance of a national territory

A national territory is essential to the well-being of the nation. The fate of the Jews after they lost theirs is a cautionary tale for anyone who believes otherwise. The ideal is a territory which is controlled entirely by the nation, a population which is overwhelmingly comprised of people who are authentic members of the national “tribe” through their parentage and upbringing. The prime example of such a state is the pre-union England, which was the first true nation state.

The next best choice is for a nation state containing different peoples who each have de facto their own national territory. Britain is a first rate example of such a state, with the four home nations – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – each having their own territory.  Simply having a land in which you form the majority on the ground is a great consolation and benefit . That applies even to a people such as the Kurds whose land is  divided between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Being the dominant population they have both the reassurance of their demographic  control of the territory – boots on the ground – and the consoling possibility of converting that demographic dominance into political control in the future.

The Jews are an oddity. Until the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948 they had been without a homeland for nearly two millennia. They neither controlled a territory in their own right nor were the dominant people in a land. Because of that they were able to convert their religion into a cultural suit to be worn by all adherents in a way that Islam and Christianity or any political ideology never could. Denuded of their own land, they could neither be oppressed by an invader nor oppress others by invasion. They could
not exercise state power. All they had left was cultural power, whether that be intellectual or economic. The consequence was that Jewish culture rather than the possession of a homeland became the primary or even sole psychological focus of  Jews.

As a consequence of the history and  evolution of Jewish society, there been a strain within Jewry since the foundation of a modern state Jewish state was first seriously mooted  in the 19th century that has been hostile to the formation of such a state,  because the Jewish culture which they valued was the product of not having a country to call their own and consequently would become tainted if Jews had a homeland, that Jews would become like other peoples.

Although this mentality has a certain intellectual attraction, it condemns Jews to perpetual insecurity. Although Jews have successfully developed a culture built upon the need to accommodate themselves as a minority within majority non-Jewish populations whilst maintaining a strong ethnic identity, the absence of a territory which they control has meant that their history for the past twenty centuries has been an unhappy one, punctuated regularly by abuse from the majority populations with whom they co-existed,
abuse which ranges  from everyday discrimination to attempts at genocide. This abuse is the consequence of the disordering of the hierarchy humans need, the consequences being what at bottom is a battle for territory.

5. The democratic value of nations

Politically, nations are immensely valuable because the nation state is the largest political unit which allows any meaningful democratic control. Indeed, it is arguable that representative government at the national level is the only real opportunity for serious democratic control, because representative bodies below the national level are always subject to a national government. Supra-national authority signals the end of democratic control. More of that later.

Only in a country where there is a sense of shared history, culture and communal interest can representative government function, even in principle, as a conduit for the interests of the entire population. In a country which is riven by ethnic and racial difference representative democracy invariably deteriorates into a mass of competing groups all struggling for their own advantage. Policy making and its execution becomes fragmentary and it is impossible to construct a coherent approach to promoting the common good. In a nation state with a large degree of homogeneity the political process is concentrated instead upon policies which affect all, or at least the overwhelming majority, of the people. For example, before post-war mass immigration fractured Britain, the great political questions were ones related to class. Policies were put forward  which either were intended to better the situation of the working class or to resist change.  Whichever side a person
was on in that debate, they had no illusions that political policy was designed to meet the situation of the British people as a whole. Today political policy in Britain  is at best a juggling act between the competing ethnic and racial groups and at worst  a deliberately  conspiracy amongst the political elite to suppress the interests of the native population to accommodate those of  minority groups formed over the past 60 years  by incontinent mass immigration.

Once a country’s sovereignty is breached through treaties which commit countries to bow to the will of supra-national bodies , as has happened with the constituent countries of the EU, democratic control withers on the vine because mainstream politicians of all stamps begin to formulate their policies within the context of what the supra-national body allows not in the interests of the country. Eventually, a situation is reached, as has been reached in the case of the EU, where all parties with an opportunity for power sing from the same policy hymn sheet. At that point representative government becomes a shell and democratic control is gone because there is no opportunity to vote for any party which will change matters. That is so because the grip of the existing elite is so tight on all the levers of power, most importantly the mass media, that no new party can even get a serious hearing.

Where the form of government is parliamentary, the difficulty is enhanced by the fact that very large numbers of candidates must stand to both be taken seriously and have any chance of forming a majority. This imposes an immense organisational and economic burden on the new party, not least because the party will lack experienced politicians as candidates and party bureaucrats. Add in things such as first-past-the-post voting in
individual constituencies and the deposit of £500 for each candidate which is at risk of being lost in the vote does not reach 8% of the total, and the British system is just about the best armoured against new parties gaining a foothold in government as any in the world.

Democratic control is vitally important to maintaining the integrity of the nation. There is only one general political question of importance in any society, namely, how far can the masses control the abusive tendencies of the elite? Elites as a class are naturally abusive because it is in the nature of human beings to be selfish and to look for their own advantage and that of those closest to them. That does not mean that no member of an
elite will break ranks and go against their class interest. What it does mean is that an elite as a whole will not change its spots , not least because the sociological shackles are too strong for most of those members of the elite who might be tempted to go against their class interest will be dissuaded from doing so because of the group pressures within the elite, for the elite will develop a “tribal” sense of their own, with those outside the elite seen as a separate social entity.

The less democratic control there is over the elite , the more the elite will engage in behaviours which are detrimental to the coherence of the “tribe” as a whole because the elite will seek their own advantage rather than that of the nation.  Before the rise of the nation state, the abuse was generally much in evidence because elites commonly took the form of monarchies and subordinate rulers in the forms of territorially based aristocracies presiding over territories which contained various national/ethnic groups, the members of which were seen as subjects not part of a national whole. The common and deliberate policy of such elites was to “divide and rule”. Territories were also frequently subject to changes of ruler through conquest, a change of royal favour (in the case of subordinate rulers), inheritance or marriage contracts. In such circumstances there was little
opportunity for the masses to exercise any form of control over their rulers because there was no unity of feeling or sense of commonality amongst the peoples they ruled and the sense of “tribe“ was localised.  It is noteworthy that arguably the most dramatic popular rising in Europe during the mediaeval period took place in England (the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), the one large kingdom in Europe at that time with a broadly homogenous population and a territory which enjoyed meaningful central Royal control.

With the creation of the nation state there arose the possibility of democratic control. The creation of a sense of nation within a single territory responsible to a single ruler in itself provides the circumstances whereby dissent can be focused and power and influence removed from the monarch and diffused to an ever larger part of the population. That is
precisely what happened in England , with first the gradual accretion of powers by Parliament , especially over taxation, then with the development of Parliamentary government after 1689 and finally with the extension of the franchise from 1832 onwards. By the beginning of the 20th century a large degree of democratic control had been established because the elite were working within the nation state, were dependent on a mass electorate and were having to produce policies within a national context. That control lasted until the early 1970s when the elite found another way of breaking it by moving politics from the national state to a supra-national power, the EU. Once that
was done, the abusive tendencies of the elite could re-assert themselves, as they have done in spades.

6. What the individual owes to the nation

Membership of a nation places a natural duty on the individual to support the nation. Patriotism should be viewed as a matter of utility, an absolutely necessity for the maintenance and coherence of a society. The idea that a society can survive which is merely a collection of deracinated individuals has no basis in history or observed human behaviour today.

It is a very great privilege to be unambiguously part of a nation, for it is the place where you automatically belong. Just as a family is the place where most people can find automatic support so is the nation. In fact, the nation is even more reliable than a family because no one can remove the nationality which has been imprinted into a person while a family can reject a member. In an advanced country such as Britain membership of the nation state is valuable indeed, for materially at least it is still (just) a fully-fledged
life support system.

That which is valuable needs to be defended, because what is valuable is always envied by others and will be stolen if possible and destroyed if not. The state recognises this by expecting its nationals to fight to protect the national territory against an overt invader. The principle can be extended to other things such as opposing mass immigration (a surreptitious form of conquest) and defending the nation’s vital industries.

Patriotism becomes less intense as the size of the group   increases, a fact noted by David Hume: “But when society has become more numerous, and has encrease’d to a tribe or nation, the interest is more remote; nor do men so readily perceive , that order an
confusion follow upon every breach of these rules , as in a more narrow and contracted society.”  (Book II section 2 A Treatise of Human Nature).  But that does not mean it becomes diluted to the point of having no utility. It simply means that patriotic feelings are not as immediately strong as those which attach to family and friends.  Perhaps more exactly, patriotism is not called upon with the same frequency  as the emotions which attach to those whom we regard with personal affection.  The latter feelings are constantly with us,  constantly being called upon. Patriotism on the other hand, is intermittently required to preserve the integrity of the tribe or nation. But it is always there in the
background guiding our  behaviour from thinking it natural that immigrants are excluded from our territory to supporting a national sporting team.

Being patriotic by my definition does not mean constantly and stridently asserting a nation’s achievements and superiority to other nations. It simply   means looking after
the national interest in the same way that an individual looks to their own interest.

7. The liberal internationalist

Liberal internationalist ideology is diametrically opposed to what Nature has decreed. It states that homo sapiens is a single species whose atoms, the individual human being, are interchangeable. For the liberal internationalist discrimination is the dirtiest of words and a word which he interprets to the point of reductio ad absurdum.

That is the theory. In practice, the liberal internationalist complains of discrimination only when it effects those whom it includes within the protective embrace of political correctness. Those outside that embrace may be abused and vilified. Most perversely this attitude frequently results in members of a majority actively discriminating against their
own people. Nowhere is this behaviour seen more sharply than in the attitude of the British elite towards the English to whom they deny any political voice – a privilege granted to the other parts of the UK – and actively abuse them by representing English national feeling as a dangerous thing.

The liberal left internationalists may have made truly immense efforts to portray nations as outmoded relics at best and barbarous survivals from a less enlightened past at worst, but despite their best (or worst) efforts they have not changed the natural feelings of people because these feelings derive from the general biological imperative common to all
social animals: the need to develop behaviours which enhance the utility of the
group.

But if an elite cannot destroy the naturally patriotic feelings the people they rule, they can severely taint and shackle  them by suppressing their public expression through the use of the criminal law, for example, laws against the incitement to racial hatred which are interpreted  as applying to any dissent from the politically correct position on race and immigration  and civil law penalties such as   extortionate payments for unfair dismissal
through racial discrimination which, curiously, only ever seem to apply to members of  ethnic minorities. To this they add the ruthless enforcement of their liberal-left ideology throughout politics, public service, academia, the schools, major private corporations and the mainstream media.

So successful have liberals in Britain been in their censorship and propaganda  that rarely
does any native dissent about immigration and its consequences enter the public realm, while it is now impossible for anyone to occupy  a senior position in any public organisation or private organisation with a quasi-public quality, for examples, charities
and large companies, without religiously observing the elite ideology which has solidified into what is now called political correctness. The consequence is that people have developed the mentality common in totalitarian regimes that certain feelings, however natural, are somehow now out of bounds and dangerous and consequently should be the subject of self-censorship. People still have the feelings but they are withdrawn from public conversation and increasing from private discourse.

It is important to understand that even the most vociferous liberal does not believe in his or her heart of hearts that humanity is a single indivisible entity whose atoms (the individual) are in practice interchangeable. They wish it was so but know it is not so. However, the ideologically committed continue to live in hope that minds and behaviours can be changed by what they are wont to call “education”, for which read indoctrination. The rest go along with the idea because it has been built into the structure of the elite and the doubters prize ambition and their membership of the elite above honesty.

It is of course impossible to consciously force someone to be patriotic,  but there is no need to because the natural instinct of human beings is to be patriotic. All that needs to be done is to remove the constraints placed on national expression by the liberal internationalists and these natural instincts will re-assert themselves . That can be done by the political elite changing their tune towards a defence of the nation and the nation state. Let the political rhetoric alter and the public mood will swing towards the patriotic. The underlying strength of patriotism can be seen in the case of England. Despite being denied any national political voice and incontinently abused by the British elite,   whenever a national sporting  team representing England takes the field the support is immense.  Come the football World Cup and vast numbers of the flag of St George appear on everything from flagpoles to cars. Let England win the Rugby World Cup or cricket’s Ashes and great crowds fill the streets of London as they teams go on a celebratory parade.  Whenever an England side plays abroad they are joined by astonishing numbers of  English men and women.

8. How to move from multiculturalism to patriotism

All treaties which restrict the power of a government to act in the national context must be thrown away. In the case of Britain that means leaving the EU and repudiating treaties such as the UN Convention on Refugees and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The institutionalisation of political correctness within public service must be destroyed, both by dismissing all those employed explicitly to enforce such views (who are de facto political commissars) and by repealing all laws which both provide powers for officials and those which restrict free expression. I say political correctness in its entirety because the various strands of political correctness support each other, most notably in the general attack on “discrimination”. Leave anything of the “discrimination” culture intact and it will be used to bring in multiculturalism by the back door. It would also require many of the de facto political commissars to be left in office.

Public office, both that held by politicians and officials, should be restricted to those with four grandparents and two parents as nationals born and bred. This should be done to prevent any lack of focus because of the danger of divided national loyalties.

Mass immigration must be ended. Immigrants in a country illegally should be removed in short order where that can be done. Where possible, those legally in a country who cannot or will not assimilate fully, should be re-settled in their countries of their national origin or the national origin of their ancestors or in other countries where they will be in the racial/ethnic majority. Those who are in a country legally but who do not have essential scarce skills which cannot be supplied by the native population, should be sent back to their countries of origin – there would be few from countries who could not be returned because they would be definitely identifiable as coming from a country and few countries will refuse to receive one of their nationals even if they do not have a passport.

A written constitution is a must because otherwise any change to remedy matters will be vulnerable to easy reversal. Such a reversal could be thwarted, as far as these things can ever be thwarted, by placing a bar on what a government may do. That should include prohibitions on the signing of treaties which restrict national sovereignty and mass immigration, provisions for the protection of strategic industries and the restriction of
public office to born and bred nationals and a clear statement that the nation state exists to privilege its members over those of foreigners. Most importantly, there should be an absolute right to free expression for that is the greatest dissolver of elite abuse and general chicanery. Milton understood this perfectly: ‘

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the   earth, so truth be in the field [and] we do injuriously  by  licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength.  Let  her
and falsehood grapple;  who ever knew truth put to the worse,  in a free and open encounter…’ [Milton – Areogapitica].

9. No patriotism, no enduring society

The value of patriotism is its ability to produce social coherence and an enduring and discrete population . Without patriotism a country becomes no more than a geographical expression and is ready prey for colonisation by overt conquest through force or covert conquest through mass immigration.

Liberal internationalists have ends which are directly in conflict with patriotism. They seek the destruction of nation states and the subordination of nations to a world order ommanding a single human society .  A particularly crass example comes from the TV
broadcaster I mentioned earlier, Adrian Chiles:

“I want all the species to marry each other so that in 300 years’ time we are all the same colour.

“White people can’t talk about whiteness without sounding racist. I would love my daughter to marry an Asian or black man. “http://icbirmingham.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0100localnews/content_objectid=13305960_method=full_siteid=50002_headline=-Asian-for-Aide-s-girl-name_page.html#story_continue

The  ends  of liberal internationalism are predicated on the demonstrably false premise that diverse populations will live not merely as peacefully and productively as homogeneous ones , but produce stronger and, by implication, more enduring societies . The internationalists have no rational grounds for believing this , for the whole experience of human history and the world as it is today is that diversity of race and ethnicity in the same territory equates to violence and social incoherence. There is literally no example of a diverse society which has not suffered serious ethnic strife, whether that be outright racial war or chronic social disruption such as riots and the production of ethnic ghettos which become de facto no go areas.

Ironically, the invariable consequence of mixed populations is not as liberals would like to believe, a diminishing of aggressive national/tribal sentiment but an inflation of it. A people secure in its own territory does not need to engage in constant national expression because nothing threatens it: a people in a mixed society must constantly do so because
all the ethnic/racial groups are necessarily in conflict because of the need for each to compete for power and resources for their own group.

Because Man is differentiated profoundly by culture, the widely accepted definition of a species – a population of freely interbreeding organisms sharing a common gene pool – is unsatisfactory. Clearly Man is more than an animal responding to simple biological triggers. When behavioural differences are perceived as belonging to a particular group by that group as differentiating members of the group from other humans  they perform the same role as organic differences for they divide Man into cultural species. That is how homo sapiens should be viewed, as an amalgam of species and subspecies who require their own territories to maximise peace . In addition such societal differentiation probably  drives  the evolution of Man . A good example of  the latter would be 18th century England and the Industrial Revolution. Would that revolution have occurred if England had not been a very homogeneous society which suffered very little immigration from the 14th century onwards?  Probably not, because large-scale immigration or conquest by a foreign power would have radically changed the nature of England.

The Liberal internationalists’ belief  that human beings are interchangeable social atoms who may live as readily in one society as another is a recipe for national suicide. Patriotism is not an optional extra.

The complete Joy of Diversity columns

Note: These are the complete Joy of Diversity columns published in Right Now! Magazine between January 2005 and December 2006. Sadly, the magazine has now ceased publication.

The columns provide snapshots of the truly mad world which political correctness has created. Robert Henderson

——————————————————————————

‘In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Reform, in London, Mr Blunkett defended the historically high levels of immigration under Labour, which had “enriched every aspect of British life”.’ Daily Telegraph, July 8, 2004

January 2005

Welcome to the new column. It will certainly be diverse, jam-packed with the exciting doings of all those elements in society our liberal bigot friends tell us are such a positive and essential part of NuBritain. Does that mean this will be a column to cheer the hearts of such diversity-drooling gentry as David Blunkett? Happily no, for it will contain all those facets of diversity which go strangely unmentioned by those who are forever telling us how grateful we should be for the consequences of the mass post-war immigration. It is in short, a column to have Outraged of Islington reaching for his AppleMac keyboard and the Guardian letters page email address.

Now what was it our Home secretary said? Ah, yes, that immigrants have “…enriched very aspect of British life” Mmmm… now let me see; high immigrant crime, high immigrant unemployment, high immigrant benefit dependency, increased Race Relations Industry, the passing of oppressive laws to silence and disadvantage the native white population, the colonisation of parts of the country until they are no longer culturally part of Britain…. yep, we really have been “enriched”.

Let us have a closer look at the parts of our society which this column will cast a regular eye over. Take crime. Ethnic minorities enrich the lives of the boring old law-abiding, hard-working, native white population with a quite disproportionately large contribution to murder, rape, mugging and fraud (think BCCI, think Asil Nadir, think Robert Maxwell). So enriching are the black population in this sphere that approximately 15 per cent of the male British prison population is black, despite the fact that blacks comprise only two or three per cent of the population according to the last census.

Obviously that is ol’ whitey discriminating against them when it comes to prosecutions. Well, obvious to the liberal bigot mind and their client “ethnics” who have climbed on the victimhood bandwagon. To anyone with knowledge of our courts, the not-so-small matter of persuading a jury might seem to be a pretty good guarantee that the vast majority of guilty verdicts resulting in jail are correct.

Not wanting to seem stick-in-the-muds in the crime stakes, Asians are rapidly coming up on the rails, especially on the criminal gang front. Take the case of the Glasgow teenager, Kris Donald. At the age of 15 Kris was kidnapped by an Asian gang and then tortured to death. The trial of those accused started this week. Not heard much about it? Unsurprising as the mainstream media has been remarkably coy in reporting it. Compare and contrast with the Stephen Lawrence circus which rolls ever onward.

Then there is the disproportionate large immigrant take up of welfare, both in legitimate benefits and fraudulent ones. Strange how the group which are always being extolled as putting more into the British economy than they take out should be so much more dependent on the taxpayer than the native population.

From the point of view of ethnic minorities, benefit fraud is best considered as an additional income to compensate them for the ills, often imagined, suffered by their ancestors at some distant date at the hands of “honkey”. Nigerians are especially enriching in this area, but other ethnics do their bit especially in employments such the London Rag Trade where “working and drawing” is the norm.

Those unsatisfied with the “benefit supplement income” can enter the “Employment Tribunal Racial Prejudice Lottery”. In practice, only non-whites can normally enter the lottery, although in theory it is open to all. The game is entered by a black or Asian shouting “Racism” whenever they encounter any criticism, failure to be promoted, the sack for incompetence or even a failure to get a job. The “wins” are satisfying large, sometimes running to more than half a million pounds. And it costs absolutely nothing to enter.

The white liberaln who misrule us and obsessively extol the virtues of diversity have a curious lack of trust in the general population sharing their view. To this end they have enriched our society by passing laws such as the Race Relations Act to intimidate the native population into keeping quiet about their incomprehensible (to the liberal bigot mind) lack of enthusiasm for the way Britain is being diversified.

These laws are bolstered by the “anti-racist” (in reality anti-white racist) mentality which dominates public life and includes politics, public service, education and, most importantly, the media. The long-term growth of the mentality was greatly amplified by the Macpherson Report into the black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s death. Since then, there has developed a positively Maoist culture of public admission of fault by senior public servants. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner started the ball rolling immediately after the report was published by accepting the idea of “institutionalised racism”, a strange concept whereby individuals behaved in racist ways despite not being individually racist. Since his splendidly pc example, all other police forces, the NHS, the fire service and the prison service have made their public confessions.

Strangely, those who profess the greatest liking for diversity show a very marked tendency for living in very white worlds. Take the BBC broadcaster Adrian Chiles. Last year he looked at his wedding photos and found, much to his display, not a single black, brown or yellow face amongst the 100-odd guests. Yet Mr Chiles assures us that he is absolutely delighted with all the diversity he sees about him. We must of course take him at his word, hoping only that he actually encounters some diversity in the future.

But of course the greatest joy of all is that we are now experiencing the highest level of immigration ever, otherwise known as conquest by other means. As Mr Blunkett has said “there is no natural limit to immigration” all diversity fans may rest easy in their beds.

Sadly for those stick-in-the-muds who just don’t want to be enriched, they can expect ever more joy in the future, with more murders, muggings, rape, benefit fraud and de facto privileges for “ethnics”, all wrapped up in the double standards of politicians and the media.

March 2005

Diversity buffs have been positively bloated with enrichment in the past few months. Indeed, there has been so much of it that even the most enthusiastic liberal bigot could scarcely complain.

They were not deprived even on Christmas Day, when the Queen in her Christmas message (which is her own choice of words not the Government’s) told her subjects “there is so much to be gained by reaching out to others – diversity is a strength, not a threat” (Daily Telegraph 26 12 2004), a ringing slogan to go with “Freedom is slavery, war is peace and ignorance is strength”, the Party’s prime slogans in 1984.

The Queen of course lives in a very white, very English world. Isn’t it strange how what is supposedly so desirable – diversity – is studiously avoided by those who claim that a racially and culturally mixed society is the best of all possible worlds in which to live? Abraham Lincoln used to challenge pro-slavers who claimed slavery was good for slaves with the unanswerable “What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?” The same challenge is tailor-made for the white purveyors of the joys of diversity.

The national media and politicians have been up to their censoring tricks. In June 2004 a 15-year-old white schoolboy in Glasgow, Kris Donald, was abducted by Asians who bundled him into a car and drove off at high speed. The abduction was witnessed by a friend of Kris’ who was with him at the time and whose abduction was also attempted. Kris’ body was later found bearing the marks of a terrible beating and active torture, including setting him alight whilst still alive. During the trial in November it was ruled that the killing was racially motivated.

The actual killing was more horrific and calculated than the murder of Stephen Lawrence, yet the murder and trial were minimally reported in the British media. Only one conviction for murder was obtained at the trial (of an Asian Muslim). The Home Office put its shoulder to the pc wheel and refused to apply for the extradition of three further suspects who fled to Pakistan. (http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=846582004).

The “religion of Peace and mercy” has been showing its appreciation for Britain in other ways. In December, Albanians Taulant Merdanaj and Elidon Bergu were jailed for 18 years and nine years for trafficking women for exploitation (Daily Telegraph 24 12 2005), while Manzoor Hussain was jailed for ten years for raping and indecently assaulting a girl aged 13 at the mosque where he worked (Metro 23 12 2004). With all this Muslim “joy” about, Labour minister Mike O’Brien showed where his priorities lay by writing in The Muslim Weekly “Ask yourself what will Michael Howard do for British Muslims. Will his policy aim to help to Promote Palestine? Will he promote legislation to protect you from religious hatred and discrimination?” (Daily Telegraph 7 1 2005). Some might think a British minister would be better employed thinking about protecting native Britons from Muslims.

Speaking of which, our past and present Home Secretaries has been attending to our liberties in their usual conscientious fashion. Thwarted by the Lords in his attempt to introduce a Religious Hatred Act a year or two ago, David Blunkett, in between playing Blind man’s up-the-duff, decided to have another go. His successor, Charles Clarke, has promised to force the measure through. Watch this space for developments. Not wishing to be left out of the multicultural fun, violent and persistent demonstrations by hundreds of Sikhs in Birmingham managed to close a play, Behzi, by young female Sikh playwright, Gupreet Kaur Bhatti (Daily Telegraph 20 12 2004). The forced closure of the play, which deals with immoral goings including a rape and murder set in a Sikh Temple, was greeted with a near complete silence from all parts of the British political mainstream.

Remember the bad old evil days fifty years ago when there were hardly any blacks and Asians in Britain? What a fool’s paradise we lived in then with no racial conflict, where free expression was taken as read and there were no ethnic fifth columns actively hostile to this country.

To understand just how lucky we are to be living today, we should heed Yasmin Alibhai Brown. In a recent Evening Standard column Brown Alibi (as I prefer to think of her) declared of racism amongst children “… most British children have changed profoundly, particularly those lucky enough to live in mixed cities like London” (Evening Standard 5 1 2005). I can’t help wondering if “lucky” is the word which would come first to the lips of most of those living in the midst of all this diversity.

But it has not been all torture, murder, child-rape, people trafficking, censorship by violence and threats and active encouragement to ethnic separatism by the Government. The CRE is always busy attempting to reduce the morale and operational efficiency of the police. They will be cheered by a letter from an unnamed retired Met police officer in the Standard recently who wrote:” The atmosphere on the issue of racism and discrimination had become so suffocating that I was afraid to open my mouth. Senior officers were denied promotion if they rocked the boat” (London Evening Standard 16 12 2004). What goes for the police goes for any public body these days, namely, a poisonous atmosphere, vast amounts of time wasted on multicultural awareness training and monitoring and a regular diet of industrial tribunal lottery cases.

How goes the  conquest by other means? For those whose palate is jaded by reams of Home Office statistics showing a positive army of foreigners descending on Britain by the day, a tasty novelty. The Office for National Statistics has just announced that Mohammed, in its various forms, has entered the top ten boys names in Britain (Daily Telegraph 6 1 2005).

Here’s a potent thought to end with. The Canadian columnist Mark Steyn recently defined multiculturalism as “a suicide cult conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own”. (Daily Telegraph 11 1 2005).

May 2005

In the past two months there has been the usual rich diet of individual ethnic mayhem to choose from – a gang rape here, a murder there – but the big general issues have loomed especially large and I’ll look at them this time around.

Let’s begin with immigration aka conquest by other means. The surreptitious elite-sponsored colonisation of our country has been going on for more than half a century, but rarely has the treason of it all been seen quite so nakedly as it has been recently, as the numbers rise inexorably and the politicians’ lies swell accordingly.

Driven by the pending general election, both NuLabour and Tory have been “getting tough on immigration”, talking boldly of quotas and points systems for skilled staff, whilst coyly failing to mention that our membership of the EU means that no significant control can be exercised because some 400 million legal EU residents have the right to live and work in Britain. And, boy, are they coming! Following the recent EU enlargement, NuLabour claimed that approximately 13,000 would come when the barriers went down. In fact, 133,000 registered under the Workers Registration Scheme in the first 8 months (D Tel 23 2 2005). God, but not NuLabour, knows how many have not bothered to register.

The sham of the “hard talking” was excruciatingly demonstrated by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. Only days after Blair had promised strict controls under an Australian-style points system, Clarke told Labour activists: ” We want more migration, more people coming to study and work. We want more people coming to look for refuge”. (Metro 15 2 2005). The real choice for voters is simple: NuLabour offer unlimited and actively encouraged mass immigration; the Tories offer barely limited mass immigration.

Race realism amongst the liberal elite is growing apace. The egregious and fantastical “war on terror” constantly pumped by Blair and senior police officers, and the growing belligerence of separatist sentiment amongst certain ethnic minorities, has resulted in a significant shift in what is permitted by the pc gentry. What was gross racism to the liberal bigot mind a year or two back, now passes without comment. Consider the novelist A N Wilson writing after the Court of Appeal judgement that the Muslim schoolgirl Shabina Begum was wrongly denied the religious garb of her choice by her school. Under the headline “I’m ashamed to say it – those headscarves give me the creeps” Wilson wrote:”…the sight of these ‘extremist’ Muslim women, often swathed totally,gives me the creeps every time I see it. I feel that something alien tomy way of life has been allowed to sneak in. These feelings are based entirely on ignorance, but they are there” (Evening Standard 4 3 2005). Talk about having your liberal bigot cake and eating it by both letting out his real thoughts and masochistically thrashing himself for having such thoughts.

The CRE in the shape of the ineffable Trevor Phillips has been keeping its end up as per usual in the institutionalised racism stakes. Trevor’s latest wheeze has been to suggest that black boys should be educated in all black, all male classes because black boys continue to do horrendously badly academically, even compared to black girls. The real primary reason is simple: the substantially inferior IQ distribution of black boys, which is inferior even to that of black girls. Not, of course, that this has been mentioned by any media commentator on Phillips’ suggestion. But even here race realism has raised its head. Take Allison Pearson writing in the Evening Standard about black academic underachievement: ” In the past black leaders have been …oddly reluctant to discuss the way black parents fail teachers by giving them boys to educate who are hostile and undisciplined. More than half of Afro-Caribbean boys are brought up by single mothers…after the age of six a boy needs a bloke around.” (ES 9 3 2005)

The CRE has also given birth to a report on race training in the Met Police by a former DPP, Sir David Calvert Smith QC who writes:”There is a real potential for ‘backlash’, particularly amongst white officers, and race equality training remains far more ‘politicised’ and sensitive than the delivery of other types of training.” (D Tel 9 3 2005)

But the report has also admitted defeat on the absurd targets for ethnic recruitment set in the wake of the Macpherson circus. These insisted that all police forces reached a certain level of “ethnicity” regardless of the population of their areas. Police forces such as those in almost all-white Cumberland and Cornwall were left scratching their heads. Now, police forces are merely required to recruit ethnics in accordance with their proportion in the local population. Diversity fans will be heartened, however, by the fact that being a British citizen is no longer a requirement for recruitment to the police and as a consequence the Met Police now has officers from 37 nationalities (Evening Standard 18 2 2005).

All the talk about the need for special treatment for Blacks and Asians has raised what might be called the “Apartheid problem”. Under the title “Who is black? Don’t ask a policemen” Sean Thomas recounted his experiences (Sunday Telegraph 13 3 2005) when he asked various bodies in the race-relations game what exactly constituted being black.

The Runnymede Trust refused to give an answer. The CRE claimed at first it was self-declaration but had no answer when asked what would happen if “someone declares themselves to be black, but is actually a Welsh-speaking redhead from Anglesey?” The Metropolitan police began by saying it might go by such indicators as skin colour or hair type, but eventually retreated behind the bureaucratic barricades with “we go by what the Home Office tells us”. State sponsored race classification anyone?

July 2005

Such has been the sheer volume and inventive variety of black criminality in the past two months – a touch of cannibalism here, a tad of conspiracy to murder a child “witch” there – I was sorely tempted to make this column a “Black Violence Issue” to set against the “Black History Years, Months, Weeks, Days” to which we are so regularly treated. But the rare event of a general election having just occurred, I shall reluctantly leave the “Black Violence Issue” for another not-too-distant day.

The British political system has long been looked on as a model of incorruptibility. No longer. Why? Well, it is ostensibly because the Blair Government has introduced postal voting on demand with no meaningful safeguards. But postal voting is really a symptom rather than a cause of the disease. A lax system would not matter if it was used only by those with a tradition of honest voting, which is what the native British have in their political DNA. Alas, because of the sixty-year long act of treason which is mass immigration we no longer have the luxury of a homogeneous population.

Widespread postal fraud was first indubitably proved during the last local elections. These resulted, most exceptionally, in challenges being made to council ward results in Birmingham. The election commissioner who heard the challenges, Richard Mawrey QC, found for the challengers and memorably described the evidence of electoral fraud was such that it “would disgrace a banana republic.” (Daily Telegraph 4 May 2005).

All those responsible for the Birmingham fraud cases were (1) Asian, (2) Muslim and (3) Labour supporters. Complaints of widespread fraud were made during the general election and many police forces are reputedly investigating complaints – the Daily Telegraph reported 17 forces doing so on 9 May 2005. Place your bets now on the ethnic background of those who are being investigated.

There was an hilariously non-pc general election constituency battle in Bethnal Green, east London, between two of the most pc politicians in the country. The seat was held by the Labour MP Oona King. This lady scores remarkably high on the pc scale, being black, female and Jewish. Short of coming out as a lesbian and developing a fashionable disability, she could not be more a la mode in these liberal bigot times. Alas, as a faithful Blairite and pantingly eager supporter of the war, she was persona non grata with the mainly Bangladeshi Muslims who have colonised the area over the past 25 years and who now form around half of the electorate in the constituency.

King was faced by frantically right-on George “friend of Iraq” Galloway, a man who once greeted Saddam Hussein with the stirring words: “Sir, I salute your courage, strength and indefatigability” (Evening Standard 7 April 2005). Galloway, a one-time Labour MP expelled by the Party a year or so back, considers the Iraq invasion to be a war crime and consequently went down a treat with Muslim voters. Standing for the risibly named Respect Party (Yo, man!) he won, overturning a Labour majority of more than 10,000. Muslim bloc vote anyone?

During the campaign Galloway was asked how he felt about standing against one of the only two black women MPs in the Commons. Heroically George answered “Oona King voted to kill a lot of women in the last few years…Many had darker skins than her.”

If Galloway showed himself a devotee of racial grading by skin colour, so did King. It was a case of send the right election pamphlet to the right ethnic group. She issued one leaflet to wards within the constituency which were overwhelmingly Muslim extolling all she had done for Muslims in the past Parliament. She issued another leaflet to white dominated wards with the references to Muslims removed (Evening Standard 26 4 2005).

For one group of voters the election was literally a waste of time. Worse, it was sinful. For the Muslim Saviour Sect, voting is the sure way to hellfire. The Sect engaged in the most strenuous canvassing of politicians, including most deliciously George Galloway and Oona King. George “friend of Islam” Galloway was taken prisoner, denounced as “a false prophet” and jovially warned that a gallows was being erected to hang him. (Evening Standard 20 4 2005). Gratifying indeed for a politician to discover in such a personal way the esteem in which he is held by the ethnic group he has championed so long and hard.

Oona King, alas, had to content herself with having her tyres slashed, her car pelted with eggs and abuse (including “Yid”) shouted at her.

Another great election rib-tickler was the claim that the Tories were “getting tough on immigration”, a claim which is a self-evident nonsense while Britain remains a member of the EU (350 million EU residents have the right to settle here.)

Worse, as the son of an immigrant and a member of an “ethnic minority”, Howard presented NuLabour and their liberal bigot friends in the media with an open goal into which they kept kicking him with cries of “racist!” and “hypocrite” . That was to be expected. They were joined by unnamed “senior conservatives” and the odd big Tory donor such as Michael Spencer (Evening Standard 9 5 2005), all of whom claimed that immigration had been overplayed. After the election, John Bercow, a Tory MP who was once a shadow frontbencher, decided to speed-up a Tory handcart already hurtling towards Hell by declaring that Howard’s focus on immigration was “at best obsessive and at worst repellent” (Daily Telegraph 13 5 2005). Sadly, in the present state of the Tory party, that also was to be expected.

September 2005

Four bombs, more than 50 dead and 700 injured – welcome to Londonistan on the 7 July 2005!

After the bombings the French newspaper Le Figaro described London as “the European fiefdom of European Muslim fundamentalism”(8 July 2005).

It is indeed. Foreign governments, especially France, have been complaining for years that the European HQ for Islamic fundamentalism is London while our Quisling elite – quislings in the service of internationalism – publicly insisted that those complained of were all jolly good Muslim chaps and chappesses who wouldn’t hurt a fly, whilst privately desperately hoping that Britain would be protected from Islamic terrorist attacks by its status as the prime “safe house” in the developed world for Muslims who have the temerity to take the tenets of Islam at face value, ie, kill all unbelievers who resist and conquer the entire world to place it under the black banner of Islam.

The failure of Blair is clear but no government has clean hands. The one-time Tory cabinet minister David Mellor writing in the Evening Standard on 11 July told of his inability when Michael Howard was Home Secretary to get Howard to promise to monitor foreign alleged Muslim terrorists in Britain. Mellor ended with “But for years now, successive Home Secretaries have downplayed the overwhelming evidence that today’s militants are dangerous. Not only have we allowed the mad mullahs to stay and spew out their hatred; we have paid them social security. We have lost control of our borders.”

One of those benefiting from this lax policy is Hani al-Siba’i of the London-based al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies. He celebrated our hospitality after the bombing with “The term civilians does not exist in Islamic law….People are either Dar Al-Harb [the non-Islamic world, the world of conflict] or not….If al-Qaida indeed carried out the act, it is a great victory for it…It rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud.”(World Net Daily 12 7 2005).

The shameful tacit agreement between Muslim fanatics and successive British governments – “You let us live here and we’ll not attack Britain” – was upset by the recklessness of that perpetual adolescent Tony Blair, whose mindless support for Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq acted as the immediate primer for the bombings. But behind Blair’s inexcusable criminal error lies a greater and more fundamental fault: the permitting of the mass immigration of unassimilatable peoples since 1945 which has driven alien wedges into our once homogenous and settled society. The present equation is beautifully simple: no Muslims in Britain = no homegrown Muslim terrorists.

After the bomb blasts the purveyors of multiculturalism at first clung desperately to the idea that the bombers were foreign. Most excitingly for liberal bigots, the Metro (11 July 2005) reported that unnamed British intelligence officials “are investigating the possibility that a gang of white mercenaries was hired by al-Qaeda to carry out the attacks”. When faced with the fact that three of the four bombers were British born and raised Asians – the fourth was a Jamaican born Briton – the liberal bigot community evinced shock, collectively saying “Who would have thought it?” Just about everyone other than a liberal bigot is the answer.

The bombings engendered a truly horrific outbreak of competitive political correctness. Just as the more bonkers and egotistical mediaeval clerics boasted that they were “the most humble and miserable of all”, a motley gallery of senior coppers, the media and above all politicians vied with one another to be “the most politically correct of all”. The watchword was “Don’t, just don’t… mention the religion”.

Assistant Deputy Commissioner Brian Paddick of the Metropolitan Police took first prize for officially burying his head in the ethnic sand. At a press conference on the same day as the bombings he told the world the words “Islamic and terrorist don’t go together”, (Daily Telegraph 9 7 2005).

Close behind the Met came the BBC with their decision to excise the word terrorist from their website because it was just too, too upsetting Muslims (Daily Telegraph 12/7/2005). Just to make sure no one got the “wrong” idea about the bombings, the BBC also cancelled the 9 July broadcast of the Radio 4 drama serial Greenmantle, a John Buchan book of 1917 which deals with a German-Islamic plot during the Great War.

The prime concern for politicians was to insist hysterically variously that the bombers and their ilk were “not true Muslims”, “only a tiny minority of Muslims” and “99% of Muslims are law-abiding, hard-working chaps, as British as they come”. I suggest they disabuse themselves of this fantasy by (1) referring to the Guardian opinion poll of 15 March 2004 which reported that 13 per cent of British Muslims supported terror attacks on the US – the same percentage said they might become a suicide bomber if they lived in Palestine, and (2) by reflecting on the many extremist Muslim web sites which are avidly used by British-based Muslims.

Even for the “tiny minority” liberal bigot understanding was at hand. The bombers were “obviously” not to blame. They were either the victims of other (interestingly always non-British) men who had brainwashed them or responding to the institutionally racist society (in the liberal bigot’s mind) which is Britain.

On the other side of the story, Muslims filled the airwaves with the absurd claim that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam and were contrary to the Koran, despite the Koranic verses which invite attacks on non-Muslims such as that of Sura (chapter) entitled Repentance: “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal vigorously with them. Hell is their home,” while Muslims who personally knew the bombers insisted that they were all splendid fellows full of charitable impulses who would not have hurt a fly, claims which had curious echoes of the myth of the Kray Twins in the East End (Ronnie and Reggie? Diamond geezers. Loved their mum. Couldn’t do enough for you).

Gradually a voice or two of elite dissent was heard. The Daily Telegraph leader of 14 July insisted that Britain must “…resist the idea that British citizens owe a greater allegiance to the global ambitions of a religious sect…”, while Tory MP Boris Johnson writing in the Daily Telegraph on the same day identified the problem thus: “The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants….many Britons have absolutely no sense of allegiance to this country or its institutions.” All true enough. But fear not, ol’ whitey is to blame. Who is primarily at fault in Johnsons’ eyes? Why, damn me, if it isn’t the one British politician of the past 50 years who has told the truth about immigration, Enoch Powell. According to Johnson “the problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade [The so-called Rivers of blood speech], but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration. In the wake of Powell’s racist foray, no one had the guts to talk about Britishness…” So there you have it, Enoch Powell is responsible for the mess we are in because he didn’t realise that our entire political class both then and since would utterly lack courage.

Powell’s 1968 speech was not racist or intemperate (it was forthright, no more). Here is its opening passage: ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”’

Well, no politician after Powell would talk honestly about mass immigration. And the problem is growing. Blair swore blind during the last general election campaign that he had absolutely no idea of how many people were in the country illegally. (Less than two months later the Home Office has come up with an estimate of those in the country illegally of 370,000-570,000.)

Every mainstream British politician is terrified by the bombings. But their greatest fear is not the physical damage, horrific as it was. Rather, our politicos fear they are about to lose control. They know that they and their predecessors over the past 60 years have engaged in an act of the most fundamental treason by forcing mass immigration onto the British people. They have only been able to do this by their monopoly of the state’s power and in collusion with a mass media long dominated by those who share their liberal internationalist outlook. By these means the native population’s dissent has been stifled and censored.

What our elite cannot pretend is that the present situation could not have been foreseen. Powell’s 1968 speech contains a series of remarkably accurate predictions about the consequences of immigration for the native population, not least what we now call “anti-racism” and political correctness. Powell placed too little emphasis on ethnic solidarity, but the only important development he did not foresee was the rise of Islam as a revolutionary force. The passage which perhaps best shows Powell’s prescience is this:

“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one way privilege is to be established by act of parliament [the 1968 Race Relations Act] ; a law which cannot, and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions. “

All the focus is currently on Muslims, but any large ethnic group in any society which either will not or cannot integrate to the extent of being indistinguishable from the native population potentially offers a similar threat. The behaviour of British Sikhs in 2004 in closing down a play of which they disapproved shows the dangers. The frightening truth is that our elite have created an army of fifth columns since 1945.

November 2005

For decades the liberal bigot line has been that everyone in UK possessed of a black and brown face or an “ethnic identity” was every bit as loyal and committed to Britain and its constituent countries as the native white population. Any suggestion to the contrary brought heroic outbreaks of liberal bigot posturing as they solemnly told us that an Asian woman from the subcontinent, who could not speak English and lived entirely within her ethnic group knowing nothing of English culture, was just as English as the Englishwoman born and raised in England whose whole being was impregnated with English culture.

This shrieking nonsense was holed below the waterline by the bombers of July. The liberal bigot response has been to engage in the futile task of trying to square the circle of the ghettoised society which is modern Britain with a belated recognition that a society can only have cohesion if there is a shared national identity.

My favourite amongst the cascade of resulting intellectual incoherence comes from a report by Vince Cable for the “Think Tank” Demos (http://www.politics.co.uk/domesticpolicy/demos-abandon-multiculturalism ). This sternly said that Britain must toss aside multiculturalism and – wait for it – replace it with a “multiple identity”, consisting of a recognition that people in Britain belong to different “communities” based on race, ethnicity, and religion.

I have turned this concept upside down, placed it back to front, laid it flat on the floor and it still looks like multiculturalism to me. And what is to bind this disparate population? Well, it is “a strong commitment to the rights of the individual and law and order”, in short the liberal bigot fantasy of a “rational” non-tribal society made flesh.

Close behind Cable, and scoring considerably higher on the guffaw scale, comes the ineffable Trevor Phillips. Through CRE research, Trevor has discovered (shock horror) that “most white people do not have a non – white friend, while young Asian and black people have almost exclusively Asian or black friends” (Sunday Times 18 9 2005). Damn me, who would have thought it! Anyone living in the country apart from the strange ethereally silly creatures of the CRE.

The truth of Trevor’s words was illustrated in the Sunday Telegraph (31 July) where Sir Max Hastings wrung his hands over never having had a Muslim (and precious few blacks and Asians of any kind) to his dinner table. He assured his readers that he really must have such people around his dinner table in the future.

Of course, the Muslims (and other ethnics) that Hastings may invite to his dinner parties will be of the educated, middleclass Westernised kind. Sadly, he will never know the joy of living in an area where he is in the racial minority, of sending his children to a school where they are the only white child in the class and the head boasts “We have 133 languages spoken here”, of having his wife and children routinely intimidated by gangs of ethnic youths or caught in the gun crossfire of ethnic gangsters. He will never live in a council Tower block where his family are the only white tenants or find the only local shops have all become Halal.

These, of course, are the conditions which have been forced on the white working class by people such as Sir Max who have supported mass immigration and extolled the joys of diversity.

One of the 7 July bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan could have put Trevor and the liberal bigot fraternity generally right about the desirability of multi-ethnic mixing and nation building. A videotape message he left behind was broadcast by Al-Jazeera and included the words “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters” (Daily Telegraph 2 9 2005).

Anyone following the London bombings from the British media might be forgiven for imagining that London is an overwhelmingly non-white city and that the victims were predominantly non-white. In fact, the large majority of victims were white and British – from the details provided by the Daily Telegraph (22 7 2005), the dead divide into 30 white British, 5 white foreign, 3 from Turkey or the near East, 3 Mongoloid Asians, 5 subcontinental Asians and 4 blacks.

This media distortion of racial reality is routine. Crowds for England football and Rugby games are solidly white. Crowds for England Test matches are the same unless England are playing an Asian side. The London crowds which gathered for the Rugby World Cup winners and the Ashes victors were overwhelmingly white. Ditto the London crowds following the death of Diana and the funeral of the Queen mother. Despite the objective whiteness of the crowds, they are mysteriously transmogrified into multicultural events by the media.

One of the great entertainments of the summer was watching mediafolk desperately pretending that the Ashes cricket series had gripped “people of all races and beliefs”. C4 were so desperate at the Oval Test that they were reduced to showing a single black face in the flats overlooking the ground. The crowds were so uniformly white that I started a “Spot the black or Asian face in the crowd” competition on the Web. Sadly for the liberal bigot community it went un-won.

Talking of the Ashes crowds, Yasmin Alibhai Brown decided that the English fervour over their Ashes win was the worst kind of nationalism (Daily Telegraph 13 9 2005). Indeed, the games were so mono-racial it is a wonder that Brown Alibi and the likes of Trevor Phillips did not claim that they were illegal because the sides, the commentary teams and the crowds were all “hideously white”.

Occasionally race realism even infiltrates the BBC, albeit unintentionally. A white Geordie convert to Islam, Ibrahim Hewitt, let the cat out of the bag when he was interviewed on the Radio 5 Simon Mayo programme (23 8 2005). Hewitt runs a private Islamic school in Leicester, the city in Britain with the largest ethnic content to its population. Questioned on one of the BBC’s favourite fantasies – Leicester as a beacon of multicultural harmony – Hewitt replied “Leicester is not a multicultural city but a city of multi-ghettos.”

January 2006

Liberal bigot hearts were all of a flutter in October as yet another (sigh) race riot…er… festival of diversity erupted in Birmingham. But this was a festival of diversity with a difference: it was blacks fighting Asians. Cue the blackest liberal bigot dismay, because ONLY WHITES ARE RACIST. What on earth were they to do? Simple: deny reality and blame it on ol’ whitey.

Truly heroic attempts were made by the media and our politicos to pretend that it was not a “race riot”. Rather, we were told, it was the natural outcome of the poverty in which ol’ whitey wickedly keeps blacks and Asians. Most inconveniently from the liberal bigot standpoint this explanation ignored one glaring fact: there are vastly more poor whites in Britain than poor blacks and Asians and the poor whites do not riot.

Alas, quite disgracefully, the blacks and Asians in the area would not play with the liberal bigot propaganda ball. Instead they told a story built around black and Asian stereotypes now legally forbidden to white lips: thieving, idle blacks and money grabbing Asians.

As the days went by more honest reporting appeared which made it clear that the area was waiting to racially explode because blacks are resentful that most of the retail businesses in the area, particularly the shops stocking black-centred products, had all been taken over by, guess who, Asians. Idi Amin, thou should be living at this hour.

Blacks claimed that the immediate cause of the riot was the gang-rape of a 14-year-old black girl by a mob of Asians after she was caught shoplifting in an Asian shop. (Blacks complaining about gang-rape eh? Excuse me while I stop laughing.) The girl was never identified and (chortle) it was claimed she could not make a complaint because she is a failed asylum seeker who feared deportation (you couldn’t make it up). The local police and immigration authorities cringed dutifully and said the putative rapee could come forward without worrying about her immigrant status, but all to no avail. Whether she actually existed is a very moot point.

Inter-ethnic minority violence is actually common in Britain, Regular gang battles take place between variously blacks, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in places as disparate as Bethnal Green and Slough. Not that one would know this from our mainstream media which has long been most conscientiously censoring the race of those who misbehave, unless, of course, the culprits are white.

Diverting as it was, Birmingham proved to be a mere sparkler in the ethnic firework box compared to the very large banger which went off in France a few weeks later. Muslim rioters made merry first in Paris and then in cities and towns throughout France, gaily burning everything in sight provided it belonged to ol’ whitey . As I write this, the Gallic festival of joy has been running for nearly three weeks, curfews have been declared and one third of the French riot police, the CRS, have been garrisoned in the most excitingly diverse areas (Daily Telegraph 14 11 2005).

Diversity fans will not be surprised that Britain now has a black Archbishop of York, because since Blair took office blacks and Asians have been pushed into positions of public influence in numbers out of all proportion to their representation in the population. The very lucky winner in this pc lottery is John Sentamu, a Ugandan. I say very lucky because the chances of any priest becoming Archbishop of York are vanishingly small and the chances of one of the very few black bishops being promoted on merit to the second most powerful position in the Church of England next to non-existent, there being so many white English bishops as candidates. The answer of course is that such appointments are acts of patronage rather than appointments strictly on merit.

Sentamu is routinely described as “an outspoken critic of racism” (e.g. Daily Telegraph 9 10 2005). The white liberals who roost in the upper reaches of the Church are doubtless waiting for him to accuse the C of E of being “institutionally racist”, to which accusation they will doubtless respond with hysterical squeals of masochistic delight.

At least the prison service is one public institution which need not worry about lacking diversity. Around 10,000 out of a UK prison population of 85,000 are foreigners and no less than 160 nationalities are represented – Jamaica proudly heads the list with 2039 inmates (Daily Telegraph 26 10 2005). To these may be added the 15 per cent or so of the prison population who are British born blacks while a growing number of British born Asians are readily taking to a life of crime.

A study commissioned by the Commission for Racial Equality into “Britishness” showed with unforgiving clarity the commitment and loyalty of all those “British” and “English” blacks and Asians we are always hearing about from our elite. The most telling passages are:

“In England, white English participants identified themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness was associated with great historical and political achievements, but only amongst white participants (whether from England, Scotland or Wales), not those from ethnic minority backgrounds” (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). In short, blacks and Asians actively reject Englishness and have no interest or conception of what is encompassed by British history and traditions.

Unreason formally entered the English legal system when the High Court overturned a Home Office decision to refuse to extensively consider the asylum claim of a Nigerian woman called Ebun Ajbaje. (Daily Telegraph 27 10 2005). The grounds for Ms Ajbaje’s claim? Why, if she goes back to Nigeria she is stone-cold certain that her relatives will use black magic against her. The Home Office quite scandalously decided such a claim was “bound to fail” and summarily refused it using the new “fast track” asylum method. Let us hope they’ll know better next time.

March 2006

Lest we forget. Just to make sure we infidels had got the message of 7/7, i.e., Muslims will not be satisfied until the black flag of Islam flies over Downing Street, the leader of the bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan spoke from the grave in a valedictory video thoughtfully provided by al Qaeda: “[Muslim leaders in Britain] seem to think that their responsibility lies with the Kafiris [unbelievers] instead of Allah so they tell us ludicrous things like we must obey the law of the land. How on earth did we conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?” (Evening Standard 16 11 2005.)

The benefits of diversity crop up in the most unexpected quarters. Anne Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley recently published a report on recessive gene disorders created by inbreeding amongst British Pakistanis. Around 30 per cent of the UK recessive gene birth defect total comes from Pakistanis who account for 3.4% of UK births, unsurprising as the Daily Telegraph (16 11 2005). reported “It is estimated that 55% of British Pakistanis are married to their first cousins…in Bradford, more than three quarters of all Pakistani marriages are believed to be between first cousins”. Ms Cryer, in whom race realism is engaged in a mortal struggle with political correctness, bravely concluded that “They [Asians] must look outside the family for husbands and wives for their young people.” One can only marvel that she has not had a visit from the police.

The journalist Jonathan Freedland let us all into a secret: “The only true ghettos in Britain are white: like Berwick-on-Tweed with a 99.6 per cent white population, or Barnsley 99.1 per cent white, or the Prime Minister’s beloved Sedgefield, 99.3. These areas are not merely “sleepwalking to segregation”: they’re already there.” (Evening Standard 17 11 2005). So there you have it, to the liberal bigot mind for an area of Britain to remain what it has always been, i.e., white, is forming a ghetto. Truly surreal.

Doubtless in time liberal bigot demands will come for immigration to Britain to be restricted to non-whites until “Britain resembles the world” and the native population is in the small minority. Come to think of it, it may not even be necessary for such demands because the conquest of Britain by immigration continues apace. The think-tank Migrationwatch has collated figures issued by the Office of National Statistics. These show that 124,000 out of 640,000 births in England an Wales in 2004 were to foreign born mothers, roughly one in five. (Daily Telegraph 5 1 2006). Of the rest, a significant proportion will have been to native born blacks and Asians.

Multiculturalists may rest easy in their beds that mass immigration will continue for the foreseeable future. The NuTory leader, David Cameron, launched his leadership by announcing that immigration is “very good for Britain” (Daily Telegraph 19 12 2006). The three major British parties now have the same official immigration policy, i.e., a commitment to the most fundamental form of treason there is, the wilful colonisation of one’s own country by mass immigration.

Shameron has generally been competing very strongly in the pc stakes. Our quisling politicians love nothing more than pretending that taxpayers’ money is their own while they claim moral kudos as they use it for their own vanity projects. Shameron’s present vanity project is “Make poverty history”. Britain, he says, is simply not doing enough, despite the fact that currently the taxpayer is bilked to the tune of £4 billion a year for “Aid”, a figure which will rise to £6 billion pa by 2008 – that is £100 for each man, woman and child in the country .

Media double standards were forthrightly on show with the murders of Anthony Walker (black) and Chris Yates (white). Walker was killed by two white youths. The murder was immediately labelled racist by the police and treated as such by the court which gave heavier sentences as a consequence. The evidence for it being racially motivated were reports by witnesses of racial comments being made before the attack. Vast amounts of media coverage of both the trial and of the family was given.

Yates was killed by an Asian gang. Witnesses heard the gang boasting that they had killed a white man and saying “that will teach an Englishman to interfere in Paki business” (Evening Standard 23 11 2005). Clearly it was racially motivated. Despite this the case got minimal coverage before and during the trial. The judge bizarrely decided the attackers were not racially motivated – and consequently gave out much lighter sentences – because after they had killed Yates, the gang non-fatally attacked and abused a black and an Asian. This is a howling non sequitur, for it does not follow that because two out of three attacks were not racist the other was not racist. How interesting that the judge by implication assumed that Asians do not harbour racist feelings towards blacks or to Asians of an ethnicity other than their own.

But not all members of the liberal left are irredeemably thick or dishonest. Anthony Browne, for long a lone leftist voice raised against mass immigration, launched an attack on political correctness in a Civitas publication The retreat of reason: Political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain. He sees pc as “a heresy of liberalism” (p.2) in which “a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument” (p.6) to produce a “dictatorship of [putative] virtue” which drives out all contrary opinion.

Spot on. Political correctness is literally a totalitarian creed, for it both enters every aspect of life – anything can be presented in terms of multiculturalism or sexual equality – and allows only one “right” opinion on anything.

June 2006

Local elections in May meant that our politicians thoughts turned temporarily to the electors. Modern politicos always find this a distasteful task but this time they were unreservedly appalled at what they saw. A YouGov poll (21 4 2006) Daily Telegraph) showed that seven per cent of voters were willing to vote BNP while twenty four per cent had considered doing so.

Faced with white voters turning in despair from the multiculturalist monolith that is the British political mainstream, all the major parties flew into a panic. They even reached for (part) of the truth. The employment Minister Margaret Hodge, who is the MP for Barking, found the light of realism suddenly shining into her mind: “They [the white voters] can’t get a [council] home for their children, they see black and ethnic people moving in and are angry… When I knock on doors I say to people ‘are you tempted to vote BNP?’ and many, many, many – eight out of ten of the white families – say ‘yes’”. (Sunday Telegraph 16 4 2006).

Contrariwise, the Tories refused to let reality impinge on their minds. David Shameron was on particularly fine NuTory form during the local elections. Determined not to be outdone in the multiculturalist stakes, he resolutely put political correctness before party and nation with his truly grisly “I hope nobody votes BNP. I would rather people voted for any other party.” (Daily Telegraph 24 4 2006).

In the event the BNP with only 13 candidates took 11 council seats in the Barking and Dagenham wards and ended the local elections with 44 seats nationwide. Hodge was blamed by the local Labour Party for providing the BNP with “the oxygen of publicity” (Daily Telegraph 5 5 2006), a tacit acknowledgement of how any party outside the British mainstream is viewed by our political elite, i.e., they have no business existing.

The liberal bigot fraternity were shaken but only allowed reality into their heads only so far. They acknowledged the social problems and resentments of the white working class, but refused to see that these were symptoms not the disease itself, namely, mass immigration aka invasion and colonisation.

Blairite hack Rachel Sylvester wrote “Voting for the BNP is about rage rather than race” (Daily Telegraph 18 4 2006), black Labour MP Dianne Abbot was certain that race in the context of housing was “a red herring” (Evening Standard 18 4 2006), while Frank Field, the Labour MP once given the task of “thinking the unthinkable” about social policy by Blair, was absolutely certain that “This is not about race, immigration and bogus asylum seekers” Daily Telegraph 204 2006.

The grotesque scale of our ongoing immigration and the absolute lack of any meaningful controls, was officially revealed by Graham Roberts of the Nationality and Immigration Directorate (part of the Home Office). Mr Roberts is in charge of “Enforcement and Removals” (chortle). He told the Commons home affairs select committee that the Directorate had no estimate of people in Britain illegally, no figure for the number of failed asylum seekers who had not been removed and could not even say how many people had been told by his office to leave the country. (Daily Telegraph 17 5 2006).

The shape of English things to come if nothing is done to stop the literally mad level of current immigration can be seen from the composition of primary schools. In 1996 11 pc of children in English primary schools were from ethnic minorities: in 2005 18.7 pc were (Daily Telegraph 28 April 2006). If this rate of increase continues more than 50% of children in English primary schools will be from ethnic minorities by 2226 and in all probability the English will be a minority in their own land before 2050.

Even non-white immigrants are beginning to see the light. George Alagiah the Sri Lankan BBC Newsreader concluded “Some of today’s immigrants aren’t interested in making Britain their home. They see it as a place they can live – but their real ties remain with their homelands.”Sunday Telegraph 23 4 2006.

Just so. Criminality is high on their list of lucrative activities to pursue whilst here. In April the Home Office was forced to admit that since Labour took office in 1997, 1023 foreign criminals convicted of crimes serious enough to warrant a prison sentence have been released at the end of their sentences without being considered for deportation – many were cases where the judge had recommended they be deported at the time of their sentence. These included murderers and rapists. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to resign and, even after weeks of frenzied activity in an attempt to round up the released prisoners, the new Home Secretary John Reid had to admit that 446 could not be traced (Daily Telegraph 16 5 2006).

The nastiest ethnic crime to hit the front pages involved a couple of first generation immigrants. It was the trial of those found guilty of the rape, torture by burning, beating and murder of the white 16-year-old Mary Ann Leneghan and the rape, torture, beating and attempted murder of her 18-year-old white friend who was the main witness at the trial (the girl was not named during the trial for legal reasons). The gang consisted of five blacks and an Albanian immigrant (29 4 2006 Daily Telegraph). One of the blacks, Rashid Musa, was an immigrant who had been allowed to stay in Britain after being jailed for rape and burglary (Daily Telegraph 26 4 2006). Strangely, there was no suggestion from the police, the court or the media that this was a racist attack.

Quite shockingly, the police so forgot themselves on one occasion that they classified the petrol bombing of Asian shops by a black man as racist (Reuters 30 4 2006). Dearie me, have the long years of indoctrinating Her Majesty’s finest with multiculturalism been for naught? They haven’t even learnt the most basic rule of political correctness: ONLY WHITES ARE RACIST.

August 2006

“We’ve done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren’t other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness. People feel happier if they are with people who are like themselves…” Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) chairman Trevor Phillips on the BBC programme The Happiness Factor .

Out of the mouths of babes and race relations functionaries. Of course this is not an honest admission that heterogeneous societies are a bad idea: note the “like to live in a comfort zone” implying that this is weak and self-indulgent behaviour. For people such as Phillips, the admission of what every human being knows in his heart of hearts – that people prefer their own – is merely an acknowledgement of how things are not how they will always be. Faced with the unfortunate facts of human nature the answer for the liberal bigot is always “more education is needed”. The fact that “more education” has never succeeded in changing human nature is simply evidence for the liberal bigot that “even more education is needed.”

But let us not look a gift horse in the mouth. Apart from being an hilarious Peter Simple character made flesh, our Trevor also has a genius for letting the racial cat unintentionally out of the bag. During a speech in which he peddled the routine multiculturalist line that racial tensions were being stoked by the “far right” and that more race riots could be expected, the CRE chairman suddenly let slip “Everyone thinks it’s going to be in the northern towns but it could be anywhere.” (Metro 26 5 2006). So there you have it, according to the CRE chairman the whole of the country has become a racial tinderbox.

Some white liberal bigots have got the wind up sufficiently to drop any pretence at multiculturalist waffle. Take the novelist A N Wilson: “We can see that, quite literally, Europe is being invaded before our eyes… There is only one policy which will work, the cruel Spanish one of repatriation…While the politicians of three generations have failed all of us by fearing to be labelled racist, they have allowed the effective dismantling and destruction of our civilisation…” (Evening Standard 19 5 2006).

Of course, as with the followers of all ideologies, some liberal bigots have been left behind and are still forlornly spouting the classic multiculturalist line. In early May Telegraph hack Alice Thomson ventured the opinion (3 5 2006) that if Britain followed America’s recent lead and had a day’s strike by immigrants “You would have to be living in a yurt and eating nettle soup in the middle of the country not to be affected. From the moment you woke up and tried to turn on the radio and television you would realise something was wrong. Most cab drivers taking presenters into studios are immigrants.” Some cruel souls might think broadcasting studios bereft of liberal bigot presenters would be something of a plus.

The reality is that if such a strike took place the large majority of native Britons would notice very little was happening because most parts of the country still do not have large immigrant populations and the jobs which the multiculturalists are always telling us cannot be filled with indigenous workers are, strangely, filled by just these people in most of the country.

The start of the football World Cup brought forth the usual forest of St George’s flags and the now traditional crowd of Anglophobe Celts and quisling members of the English elite equipped with their jolly cries of “English racism” at the first public sign of English national sentiment. The starting gun for the Anglophobe charge was fired by headmistress Karen Healy of Birches Head High School in Stoke who first banned the flag from her school and then belatedly accepted it after a flood of criticism swept over her. The worst World Cup related Anglophobe incident occurred in Scotland where seven-year-old Hugo Clapshaw was punched on the head in an Edinburgh park for the “crime” of wearing an England shirt (Daily Telegraph 22 6 2006).

The police went off on a jolly jaunt in June when they raided a house in Forest Gate in London after receiving a tip off that its occupants were making a chemical bomb hidden in a jacket for a suicide bomber to use. The house was raided, two brothers, Abul Koyair and Abul Kahar, were taken into custody, one of them after being shot in the shoulder by the police. The house was taken apart. Nothing was found… except œ30,000 in cash (16 6 2006). Splendidly thrifty fellows these Muslims.

The two brothers were released without charge. The police swore blind that their informant was considered reliable and hinted the chemical bomb might have been moved. The public as usual were left in the dark.

Whether or not the informant was generally reliable and did or did not give the information believing it to be true is sadly beside the point. The dangerous truth is that MI5 and Special Branch do not have, and cannot have, the resources to deal with a British Muslim fifth column numbering several million.

In the wildly improbable event that Britain runs short of home-grown terrorists our quisling elite (quislings in the service of liberal internationalism) have made certain more can come from abroad. The Man charged with reviewing Britain’s border security, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, has concluded that our border controls are paper thin because of a woeful lack of staff: “This kind of manpower weakness is no discouragement to terrorists….This is still a cause of complaint by Special Branch officers. The adequacy of staffing at HM Customs and Excise at ports of entry of all kinds is an important matter.” (Daily Telegraph 20 6 2006).

October 2006

Elites only have one settled principle – to do anything necessary to maintain their power and privilege. A splendid example of the principle in action is the growing race realist talk amongst our liberal bigot ruling class. Note I say talk, for our elite have not yet moved from rhetoric to action, nor will they do so if they think they can get away with rhetoric alone. Nonetheless, the rhetorical shift has been dramatic, a fact maverick leftie Rod Liddle neatly nailed in the Sunday Times (27 8 2006) with his article “How right wing the left sounds after its moment of racial truth”.

Ruth Kelly, the female impersonator who rejoices in the Orwellian title of Communities Secretary, caught the new mood, viz: “We have moved from a period of near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness… We must not be censored by political correctness.” (Daily Telegraph 24-25 8 2006). Dontcha love the “We must not be censored by political correctness” from a member of a government which has done more than any other to enshrine it as the secular state religion? Even better is the shrieking lie that “We have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism…” The only near uniform consensus on multiculturalism has been the overwhelming feeling amongst native white Britons that it is a hated instrument of the elite designed to suppress their interests and culture whilst promoting those of the immigrant minorities.

Ms Kelly is now all for integration. Sadly, there is little good news on that front, but I can bring her one heartening story courtesy of Johann Hari of the Evening Standard. He reported, with a shed-load of liberal bigot angst, that large numbers of black and Asian women are shock horror! devoted to skin-lightening products. When asked why, the little minxs failed miserably to follow the standard pc script and replied “I just feel better”, “I feel more confident” and “I get more men checking me out” (Evening Standard 28 7 2006).

The latest chapter in the sordid act of treason which is post-war mass immigration was opened with the Government’s admission that around 600,000 immigrants from the new EU states have arrived since 2004. This splendidly robust figure compares with the measly pre-EU enlargement Home Office estimate of 13,000.

Race realism is even extending to the economic effects of immigration. Having sworn blind that it did not place undue pressure on our infrastructure or reduce the job opportunities and lower the wages available to native Britons, politicos are now singing a different tune. The ex-Tory Cabinet minister Peter Lilley writing in the Sunday Telegraph (27 8 2006) admitted that immigrants increased overall GDP but reduced GDP per capita and described claims that Britain is generally short of labour as “nonsense”, correctly attributing labour shortages to poor pay, shortages which vanished when pay was raised, as has happened in the case of nurses.

Boston (pop 50,000) in Lincolnshire knows all about EU immigration. This town was the lucky recipient of the artistic endeavours of an American Jordan Baseman who made a video about an anonymous woman who is one of 5,000 Portuguese immigrants who have descended on Boston in recent years. The woman, who is not seen but is simply heard off camera, whines about the hostility of the native population who she gaily describes as “ignorant people who are jealous of the fact that I have a job and they don’t”. (Daily Telegraph 19 08 2006). How outrageous of the good folk of Boston to be angered by a foreign influx amounting to 10% of their population which takes jobs from locals.

But it isn’t only jobs which immigrants take from Britons. Lucky Chistian Bola, 18, arrived here three years ago from the Congo and sought asylum and managed to gain a much sort-after place at one of London’s few remaining grammar schools, Latymer. He gained this prize after his local vicar David Bolster expressed the opinion that Bola “could benefit from studying at the school.” (Evening Standard 18 08 2006). Unkind folk might think one of our own people studying in his place would have benefited the country rather more.

The enemy within storyline has been as strong as ever. Two months ago we had the Forest Gate fiasco: in August an alleged plot to blow up airliners on the north Atlantic run appeared over the horizon. As I write 12 young British-based Muslims have been charged in relation to the plot, most with conspiracy to murder (Daily Telegraph 23 8 2006), with another 8 are still being questioned.

Sometimes I wonder why Muslims bother with terrorism in Britain when the British establishment is so eager to embrace their more advanced Islamists. Take the Foreign Office, Its chief adviser on Islamic affairs is one Mockbul Ali, 26, one-time political editor of the newspaper of the Union of Muslim Students. Soon after 9/11 Ali wrote in that paper “If you are not white, you are most likely to be liberated through bombings, massacres and chaos.” (Sunday Times July 30, 2006).

Kieran Keenan discovered what it is to be a native white Briton in Britain 2006. A history graduate, Mr Keenan had the temerity to apply for the post of trainee museum assistant at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Alas, his skin-colour disqualified him. A Brighton and Hove Council political apparatchik explained helpfully that it was “positive action” which is legal because it is “lawful to offer training only for people of a certain racial group or to encourage people from that group to apply” (Daily Telegraph 13 7 2006). Strange how such “positive action” is never offered to the native white population in areas such as the law, medicine, the BBC, the CRE and professional football and cricket, in all of which they are grossly under-represented.

December 2006

As this is sadly the last issue of Right Now! I am going to give no more than a nod to the big issues such as the fundamental act of treason which is post-war immigration and the various fifth columns we have within our country and instead try to cover some of the ground I wished to cover into previous columns but couldn’t because of pressure of space.

The biggest omission has been insufficient on honest-to-goodness non-political crime – sadly, I never managed to fit in the promised “black violence special” (what a column that would have been!)

British governments no longer publish general crime statistics by race. In their absence, the best that can be done to get at the truth is to monitor media reports and this is what I have done. For each two month period between issues of Right Now! I have kept two files of press cuttings. One file related to immigration and one to anti-social behaviour by immigrants and British-born ethnics.

The sheer volume of the cuttings was an eye-opener. For a subject which we are forever being told by the liberal bigot elite “is not a major issue with the British public”, the mainstream media do seem to devote a startling amount of space to immigration, while the representation of immigrants and British-born ethnics in reports of anti-social behaviour ranging from horrendous noise to murder and gang-rape is so grossly disproportionate to their representation in the population as to verge upon the comic.

Judged by the files I kept, crimes such as rape, murder, serious assaults and mugging are overwhelmingly committed by black men. One crime – the rape of a woman of a different race from the rapist -appears to be an almost exclusively a black and Asian crime (predominantly a black crime). Overwhelmingly, it was white women who were raped in such cases. Gang-rape of white women by blacks and Asian was not uncommon while gang-rape by whites is very rare indeed – I could find no instance of a white gang raping a black or Asian woman. Gun crime is overwhelmingly a black crime, a fact reflected in the existence of Operation Trident unit in the Met Police which deals with black-on-black killings.

Asians lag behind black men in the violent crime stakes, although they are coming up strongly on the rails, particularly in the field of “honour killings”. Nonetheless, the favourite crime Asian crime still seems to be fraud.

By way of comparison I kept a cuttings folder for a two month period for murder, manslaughter, rape and GBH committed by native white Britons and separated the immigrant and British-born ethnics instances of such crimes to another file. The native white Britons file ended up thinner than that for immigrants and British-born ethnics.

Another very difficult statistic to get hold of is the cost of “diversity” action within public bodies. Occasionally the veil is lifted as happened with the Met Police. The Evening Standard reported (27 10 2006) that ‘last year alone œ187 million – six per cent of the Met budget – went on “equality and diversity training”‘. It is a fair bet that most of the money will have gone on race-related work because of the Met’s religious desire to “make the force look like London”.

The other major issues which have been under addressed are gipsies and the over-representation of blacks and Asians in public employment. Gipsies are important because they represent a long established group with Britain, yet they behave as though the rest of the population is their prey. This behaviour is simply explained: it is the tactic of the nomad, namely despoil an area of resources then move on. Moral: any group, native or immigrant, which feels they are outside the moral bounds of the society they are physically within will feel entitled to behave badly to those outside the group. That is why multi-racial/ethnic societies are always a disaster: there is no shared sense of moral commitment to the whole of the population.

The widespread over-representation of blacks and Asians in public employment is epitomised by the BBC. The Beeb publicly boasts that they have a target for 12.5% of their staff to come from ethnic minorities. That is an over-representation of around 50% based on the last census in 2001. Leaked minutes from a BBC internal discussion meeting showed that even BBC staffers thought they were unbalanced – the erstwhile BBC political editor Andrew Marr was minuted as saying that the BBC is an “organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people.” (Daily Telegraph 27 10 2006).

My purpose in writing the JoD has been twofold. The first was to provide a counterblast to the perpetual deluge of multicultural propaganda which tells us how lucky we are to have had our country turned from a monocultural desert to a blooming garden of ethnic diversity, a lie on a par with Stalin’s claims to have created a new socialist heaven on earth.

My second reason was to show that it is still possible in Britain to write about race and immigration in the most forthright way without running foul of the law. I have ensured that all the candidates likely to initiate a complaint to the police about my column have had sight of it, from Trevor Phillips at the CRE to the most pc of journalists and politicians. None of them has tried to have me prosecuted.

There is a lesson in that: race-related police action and prosecutions will only normally be taken against those whom the authorities think can be intimidated and who will, consequently, not speak out against their mistreatment. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of police investigations of these indubitably political crimes do not result in prosecution, their real purpose being to intimidate the general public into self-censorship. Stand firm and there is very little chance of being prosecuted for inciting racial hatred.

If anyone wishes to continue publishing the column please contact me at anywhere156@yahoo.co.uk.

The column below was written for the May 2006 issue. This was never published because the May 2006 Right Now! was moved to June 2006 for which I wrote a new column.

Being a liberal bigot means living a life of constant disappointment as resolutely non-pc reality rudely intrudes into their pc fantasy world. By far the most inconvenient reality at the moment is Islam. Sadly, while liberal bigots ever more frenziedly chant their mantra “Islam is a religion of peace”, Muslims amuse themselves by giving them the lie direct.

In February the followers of the religion of peace and mercy were in fine voice on the streets of London. They were marching against the supposed insult to Islam of cartoons featuring Mohammed published in Denmark. Gaily they skipped along with banners bearing jolly messages such as “Behead those who insult Islam”, “Massacre those who insult Islam”, “Butcher those who insult Islam”, “Slay those who insult Islam”, “Behead the one who insults the Prophet”, “Europe you will pay, your extermination is on the way”. One fine fellow, Omar Khayam, a criminal out on parole (you couldn’t make it up), added to the festive outing by dressing up as a suicide bomber (Metro 7 2 2006).

The police did their pc duty and made no attempt to stop the placards being carried and, just to make sure the demonstrators were not harassed by wicked whites, provided a strong escort as the demonstrators marched. They did make two arrests – of white non-Muslim counter-protestors who carried placards with one or more of the Mohammed cartoons. The police also attempted to prevent press photographers taking photographs of the demonstration and threatened to arrest at least one person who had the temerity to ask why the police were not arresting the placard bearers calling for murder. (Sunday Telegraph 5 2 2006).

The Metropolitan Police’s spokesman immediately after the demonstration gave no indication of any investigation of those with the banners, but merely “explained” the reluctance to arrest demonstrators by citing public order fears (as Rachel Sylvester put it: “One law for the bloodthirsty: another for the tolerant” – Daily Telegraph 6 2 2006). Eventually the police set up an investigation, but only after vigorous protests in the mainstream media, from the public (500 separate complaints were eventually made to the Met) and, perhaps most importantly, a statement by the Tory Home Affairs spokesman, David Davis, viz: “Clearly some of these placards are incitement to violence and, indeed, incitement to murder – an extremely serious offence which the police must deal with and deal with quickly. Whatever your view on these cartoons, we have a tradition of free speech in this country, which has to be protected. Clearly, there can be no tolerance of incitement to murder.”(The Sunday Telegraph of 5th Feb 2006).

The demonstration consisted of hundreds of people, many of them carrying banners inciting violence and murder. By mid-March all of three protesters (Daily Telegraph 16 3 2006) had been arrested by our fearless boys in blue and charged with incitement to murder and the incitement of racial hatred.

No such reluctance about arresting and prosecuting two members of the BNP, their leader Nick Griffin and an activist Mark Collett. They were tried in January on various counts relating to racial insult and incitement. The trial ended with half the charges being swept aside through not guilty verdicts and the others left undecided because the jury was hung.

Only a few hours after the end of the trial word came that the prosecution would be seeking a re-trial on the hung charges, a quest which was satisfied most expeditiously with the re-trial set for October. The trial and re-trial required the agreement of the attorney-general, a member of this Labour Government. The head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions Ken MacDonald, is a Labour supporter. It warms the heart to know we have such a disinterested justice system.

The BNP two were charged with offences which resulted from speeches made at meetings of BNP members and only became public property because the BBC placed an undercover reporter Jason Gwynne within the BNP, who secretly recorded them for later broadcast by the BBC. Grotesquely, part of the charges against Griffin concerned his accurate forecast of suicide bombings in Britain, a prediction which came horribly true on July 7 2005. The worst that could be said about the speeches was that some of the language was crude.

Abu Hamza, aka Captain Hook, was brought to book for ten years of inciting racial hatred and various acts of violence including murder. Hamza received seven years at Her Majesty’s pleasure despite his defence counsel, Edward Fitzgerald QC pointing out the embarrassing fact that “It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper 0,,174-2001006 00.html.

Dr Frank Ellis of Leeds University (who is well known to readers ofRight Now!) has been enjoying the attentions of some of what Aubron Waugh delighted in calling Mrs Williams’ unemployables. Twenty years ago they simply went on the dole: now they go to university.

Frank gave a long and forthright interview to Mark Kennard, the editor of the university student paper the Leeds Student. The interview included reference to Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanan’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations, a book in which the authors compute the average IQ of black Africans to be 70, the level which is recognised in Britain as constituting mental retardation. Cue for the regulation “anti-racist” rentamob squealing for Frank’s dismissal. (As I write – March – this has not happened.)

The interesting thing is that Frank was merely repeating what any psychologist specialising in intelligence testing will take as a given: that blacks have a much lower average IQ than whites and that whites have a less dramatically lower average IQ than Asians of the Chinese racial type. Strangely, no one ever complains about the higher Asian average IQ.

Human accomplishment and the English

Robert Henderson

In  his  book  “Human  Accomplishment”   the  American  Charles  Murray
calculates  the  contribution  to  civilisation  made  by   individuals
throughout  history  up until 1950.  To give his calculations  as  much
objectivity  as possible he measures  the amount of attention given  to
an  individual   by  specialists in their  field in   sources  such  as
biographical  dictionaries – put crudely, the greater the frequency  of
mention and the larger the space devoted to an individual,  the  higher
they score.

Murray  quantifies   achievements  under  the  headings  of   astronomy
(Galileo  and  Kepler  tied  for  first  place),  biology  (Darwin  and
Aristotle),  chemistry (Lavoisier),  earth sciences  (Lyell),   physics
(Newton  and  Einstein),   mathematics  (Euler),   medicine   (Pasteur,
Hippocrates  and  Koch),   technology  (Edison  and  Watt),    combined
scientific (Newton), Chinese philosophy (Confucious), Indian philosophy
(Sankara), Western philosophy (Aristotle), Western music (Beethoven and
Mozart),  Chinese  painting  (Gu  Kaizhi  and  Zhao  Mengfu),  Japanese
painting  (Sesshu,  Sotatsu and Korin),   Western  art  (Michelangelo),
Arabic  literature,  (al-Mutanabbi) Chinese literature (Du Fu),  Indian
literature  (Kalidasa),   Japanese  literature  (Basho  and  Chikamatsu
Monzaemon), Western literature (Shakespeare).  

Objections have been made to Murray’s methodology such as the fact that
many  of the great achievements of the past,  especially in  the  arts,
have  been anonymous,  which give it a bias towards the modern  period,
and    fears that it has a built-in Western bias –  the  representation
of  non-Western  figures in the science  and technology  categories  is
minimal.   Nothing can be done about anonymity – it is  worth  pointing
out  that the majority of those heading the categories lived  at  least
several  centuries  ago  – but  Murray  substantially   guards  against
pro-Western  bias with the breadth and number of his sources and it  is
simply  a fact that science and advanced technology arose only  in  the
past few centuries and that both are essentially Western  achievements.
It  is  also noteworthy that Murray’s  method only places  one  of  his
fellow   countrymen  at  number  one  in  any  category    (Edison   in
technology).  If  any bias exists it is unlikely to  be  conscious.  At
worst,  Murray’s  findings  can be seem as a fair  rating   of  Western
achievement.

The list of those heading the various categories (see second  paragraph
above)   suggests  that  Murray’s method is pretty  sound  despite  any
possible methodological  shortcomings,  because those who come top  are
all men of extreme achievement.  There might be arguments over  whether
Aristotle should take precedence over Plato or Kant,   but no one could
honestly argue that Aristotle was an obviously unworthy winner of first
place in the philosophy category.

Of the 13 categories which  can include Westerners (they are  obviously
excluded  from  non-European  literature  and  art),   Englishmen   are
undisputed firsts or share  first place with one other in four: biology
Darwin   with  Aristotle;   Physics  Newton  with  Einstein;   combined
scientific  Newton  alone;  Western literature Shakespeare  alone.   No
other  nation  has  more  than two representatives  at  the  top  of  a
category.  The thirteen Western including categories have a total of 18
people in  sole or joint first place.  England  has nearly a quarter of
those  in first place and more than a quarter of the 15 who  are  drawn
from the modern period, say 1500 AD onwards.   

Apart  from those coming first,   the English show strongly in most  of
the Western qualifying categories (especially in physics – 9 out of the
top 20, technology – 8 out of the top twenty – and Western literature).
The  major  exceptions  are   Western art  and   music,  where  English
representation  is mediocre.   I think most people who think about  the
matter  at  all  would feel those  cultural  strengths  and  weaknesses
represent the reality of English history and society.     

The fact that England shows so strongly in Murray’s exercise  gives the
lie  to  the common representation of the  English  as  unintellectual.
Moreover,  there is much more to human intellectual accomplishment than
the fields covered by Murray,  most notably the writing of  history and
the social sciences,  areas in which England has  been at the forefront
throughout the modern period: think Gibbon,  Macaulay,  Herbert Spencer
and Keynes. 

English intellectual history is a long one.  It can reasonably be  said
to  begin  in  the early eighth  century   with  Bede’s  Ecclesiastical
History of the English,  which amongst other things firmly  establishes
the  English  as  a people before England as  a  kingdom  existed  (“At
present  there  are  in Britain…five languages  and  four  nations  –
English, British, Irish and Picts…” Book One).  

In the late ninth century comes Alfred the Great,  a  king  whose reign
was  one  of  constant struggle against the Danes,   but   who  thought
enough of learning to teach himself to read as an adult and then engage
in  translations  into Old English of  devotional works  such  as  Pope
Gregory’s Pastoral Care,   Bede’s Ecclesiastical History  and Boethius’
The Consolation of Philosophy.

From Alfred’s reign  comes the Anglo-Saxon Journal (ASJ),  a work  also
written in Old English.  (There are nine  surviving versions written at
different  places,  eight of which are in Old English with the odd  man
out being in  Old English with a Latin translation).   The journal   is
a  history/myth  of  Britain and a narrative  of   the  settlement   of
Anglo-Saxons  within it  until the time of Alfred and then  a  putative
record of and commentary on the great events  of English life from  the
time  of  Alfred until the middle of the 12th century  (like  all  such
medieval works the veracity of the ASJ is questionable, but at worst it
gives a flavour of the mentality of those living at the time). The work
is  unique  in  medieval Europe for  its scope  and  longevity  and  is
particularly  noteworthy  for  the  fact that it  was  written  in  the
vernacular throughout the three centuries or so of its existence,  this
at  a time when the normal language for  writing in Western Europe  was
Latin. 

The    Norman   Conquest   subordinated   the   English    politically,
linguistically  and socially  for the better part of three   centuries,
but  it  did  not kill English  intellectual  endeavour.   Those  three
centuries  of oppression saw the emergence of  many of the ideas  which
were later to produce the modern world.  John of Salisbury   produced a
work  on politics (Policraticus 1159)  which was “the first attempt  in
the  Middle Ages at an extended and systematic treatment  of  political
philosophy”  (G  H Sabine A History of Political Theory p246)  and  one
which  argued  for  a form of limited monarchy  and  the  overthrow  of
tyrants,  views  given  practical English  expression  in  Magna  Carta
(1215). The period was also noteworthy for the strong showing of annals
and histories,  most notably those of Eadmer (Historia Novorum  or  The
History of Recent Events – it covered the  period 950-1109),  Henry  of
Huntingdon (Historia Anglorum or  History of the English 5BC-1129)  and
Matthew  Paris (Chronica Majora).   In addition,   the Common  Law  was
formed,   English  became  once  more  a  literary  language  (Chaucer,
Langland),   John  Wycliffe  laid  the  intellectual  roots   of    the
Reformation and,  perhaps  most impressively, ideas which were later to
provide the basis for a true  science emerged.    England was the mother of the modern world.

To have produced Shakespeare,  Newton and  Darwin alone would have been
a  great  thing for any nation,  but  for England they are  merely  the
cherries  on the top of a very substantial intellectual  cake.  Beneath
them  sit dozens of others of serious human consequence:  the likes  of
Ockham,  Chaucer,  Wycliffe, Francis Bacon, Marlowe,   Halley,  Hobbes,
Locke, Gibbon, Priestly, Cavendish, Newcomen, Faraday, Austen, Dickens,
Keynes, Turing… ‘Nuff said.

The development of the franchise in England

Serious  disquiet  with the  Commons’ electoral  qualifications, provisions  and practices began  in  Elizabeth’s reign and reached  its highest  pitch,  prior to the 1640s, during the years 1621  to  1623.

The discontent  was provoked primarily by the situation  in  the  boroughs rather  than  the  counties,  Since 1430,  the  county electorate had  been  restricted to the  forty shilling  freeholder,  which qualification had become  almost sacrosanct  by  the end of  the sixteenth century  –  only  one  proposal before  the  1640s (in  1621) was made to  raise  or  lower it. Tudor  inflation  had  greatly  lowered the barrier  it  represented (40 shillings  in  1600 was worth perhaps 15  shillings  at  1430 values)  and it  is  reasonable to  suppose  this   considerably  increased the  rural electorate.  Also,  there  is  evidence to suggest that the  qualification  was not always  enforced and some county electorates may have had a very broad manhood franchise indeed prior to 1640.

Borough  franchises  were anything but  uniform. In  some the whole ‘commonalty’ (all  householders)  or even  all  ’potwallers’  (men  with  their own hearths) voted.  In others the  vote  was restricted  to all taxpayers  (‘scot and  lot’),  freemen of  the  town, or those in  possession of burgage  property. In extreme cases the vote might  be restricted to the ruling  corporation.  Such discrepancies of  representation  were  aggravated  by  a distribution of  borough  seats  which  took insufficient account of the demographic changes of the past two centuries, during which  time  England’s  population  increased very  substantially, especially  during the 16th century, perhaps  by as much as a third. These facts  prepared a well mulched   political soil  for  agitation  for  more equal borough  representation, both in terms of the breadth of the franchise  and in the number of seats.

Tudor  monarchs,  not unnaturally, did  not favour larger electorates.  The existence of  ‘rotten  boroughs’  was a  source of patronage and, if  the monarch could  control the oligarchies who  returned the MP, a  means of  reducing   opposition  to  the  Crown. As  there was a significant  number  of such boroughs,  this was no small advantage to the monarch.

The  attitude of  Parliament to the franchise was mixed.  The Lords had  a similar interest to the Crown  in  distrusting broad  franchises.  The peers  often  effectively  controlled  seats in the Commons.  They also had a natural inclination to  deny  the  ‘commonality’  any voice in  the  affairs  of  the  kingdom. Conversely, it  was  obviously in the Commons’   interest  to  increase  electorates, where such increases  reduced  the Monarch’s’ and the Lord’s  opportunities for  patronage.

There  is particular  evidence that  the  Puritans favoured larger electorates,  at least in so far as it suited  their own  purposes. At  Warwick in 1586 Job  Throckmorton  was  elected after he  threatened  to invoke the right of  the ‘commonality  to vote. In  1587 John  Field  remarked  to  colleague  ‘seeing we  cannot  compass these  things by  suit or dispute,  it is the multitude and  people  that  must bring the discipline  to  pass which  we  desire.’  (J.H. Plunb.  The Growth of the electorate 1600-1715).  As Puritans displaced many court  nominees  and  the  creatures  of  aristocrats,  this  is significant  in view  of the  attitude of  the  Commons towards  electoral  qualifications between  1621 and  1628.

By  1621, the  Commons had gained  the  right  to  decide disputed  elections  and to revive lapsed borough  seats  and  even make new creations,  The  tendency  until 1628 was  to  decide in  favour of wider  franchise  and to allow  all the  ‘commonality’ to vote. At Bletchingly (1624) and Lewes  (1628)  ‘all the inhabitants,’  were  to  be   electors’,  and  at  Cirencester (1624)  all ‘resients:’.   In the  case  of Pontefract in 1624  a general  principle   was formulated:

‘There being  no certain custom  nor prescription,  who should be  the  electors and who  not, we must have recourse to  common right which,  to  this  purpose was held  to be, that more than  the freeholders only ought   to  have  voices  in  the election,  namely all  men,  inhabitants, householders  resient within the borough.’ (J.H, Plunb. The  Growth  of  the  electorate 1600-1715).

Further, in the case of Boston  (1628) it was asserted that the election of burgesses belonged by common right  to  the commoners and  only prescription  or  ‘a  constant  usage beyond all memory’ could rob them of this.  (K.  Thomas,  The  Levellers and the Franchise p.62).

It  is  true that when the Commons revived  or  created  borough seats,  they  concentrated,  as  the  Tudors  had done, on  small  towns  to  promote  their  own  advantage. But, even so, they  granted ‘scot and  lot’  franchises in  every  case (except  Weobley)  which meant that  even small  towns such  as Great  Marlow  or  Hilbourne Port had  electorate of around 200.

Bills were introduced to regulate electionsand standardise,the franchise  in 1621,  1623, 1625, 1628  and 1640, The  1621  Bill is of  particular  interest  because it proposed that the 40/- freeholder  qualification   be  increased  to  £4 and to admit  £10 copyholders  by  inheritance.  The  borough proposals add no more  than  the  various decisions  on individual  cases (in  fact  even  less), for electors were to  be  freemen except  where they  numbered  less  than  twenty-four, in which  case all  inhabitants not  in  receipt  of alms were to  be included,

In 1640  the  franchise was raised  again  by  Sir  Simonds  D’Ewes. It was he who first  uttered the idea  later made famous  by  Rainsborough ‘that the poorest man  in  England ought  to  have  a voice, that it was the  birthright  of  the subjects  of  England and all  had voices  in the  election of Knights  etc. previously.’  (K.  Thomas,  The Levellers and the Franchise p.63).

In  1641  a  bill had reached second reading but  was  then lost. D’Ewes  favoured its contents except  that he  ‘desired  that  whereas it  was provided in the  bill  that  none that  took alms should  have voices in  elections, which  I well  allowed, we  would likewise  provide that no more monopolizing  elections  might be  in cities and boroughs, that  all  men resients might have voices.’(K. Thomas, The Levellers and the Franchise p.64)

It is  also  noteworthy, both  for  its  own  sake  and the  part  it  played  in  Leveller  literature, that  many believed  that  the  Statute of  1430  had  disenfranchised  people.  William May, in 1621, said ‘Anciently,  all  the  commonality had  voice, but because such a multitude made the election tumultuous,  it was after reduced to freeholders’.  

The  religious radical William  Prynne  put it even  more plainly,’Before  this Petition  and Act  every  inhabitant and  commoner  in  each  county had voice in the election  of Knights,  whether  he  were a freeholder  or  not,  or  had  a  freehold only of one  penny, six  pence or  twelve pence by the  year  as  they  now claim of late in most cities  and boroughs where popular   elections are  admitted’  (K.  Thomas,  The Levellers and the  Franchise p.64). 

It  is a sobering  thought  that  if  the  Statute  of 1430 did disenfranchise large numbers  of  county  electors,  the  county  franchise  may  have  been  wider  in  medieval  England than it was to be again before the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  conceivably  wider  than the  Franchise before the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

What  of the  position of those deemed to  be dependents: the  servants, wage-earners and  almstakers? Resident household  servants were generally  considered beyond  the  electoral pale,  although  ‘servants’ were  said  to  have voted in  the Worcestershire  county election  of  1604.   Wage-earners  certainly did so, for those  in the ‘potwaller’   and  ‘scot  and  lot’ constituencies  were granted  the    right  to  vote. Almstakers were  excluded  in the 1621   and  1640 bills,  yet at  Great  Marlow  in 1604  77  of  the  245  voters  were said to be almstakers, nine of them   inmates of  the almshouse.  In 1640 the  right  of  the Bember  inmates  to vote  was said to have  been  sustained and in 1662 the St.  Albans almsmen were said to have ‘had  voices time out of mind’.

It  is  clear from all this that those  who  promoted the  radical or democratic cause in  the 1640s,  most particularly  the Levellers,  did not enter  untilled ground.  There  are  also three  points  of  particular  interest.  First, the  Commons, or at  least an  influential part  of  it,  was not unduly  disturbed  by the  prospect of an enlarged  electorate. Second,  those deemed to be dependent such  as  servants  and almstakers  –  were included on  occasion  in the  franchise long  before the  Civil  War.  Third, that there existed even gentlemen (such as Sir Simonds  D’Ewes) who had an active and unambiguous democratic  spirit.  The latter point is particularly pertinent because the  chief  Leveller,  John Lilburne,  was also of  gentle-birth,  albeit  ”small gentry”, a fact he never ceased to emphasise. Clearly,  democratic  ideas  and feeling were  not foreign  political  bodies suddenly introduced by the Levellers and others in the  1640s.

After ferment of the Civil Wars and their aftermath had quietened, the voices of those who sought a broad franchise (especially the Levellers) faded and the Restoration in 1660 placed the franchise  in aspic until 1832 when the Great Reform Act granted a franchise much narrower than that envisaged in the 1640s, with about one in six adult men being enfranchised. Indeed, the years between the Restoration and  1832 saw a squeezing of franchises as rotten boroughs with minute numbers of electors increased and the populations of the new great urban developments such as Manchester and Birmingham went largely enfranchised. The 1832 Act removed the most glaring examples of rotten boroughs and allocated seats to places such as Manchester).  

In 1867 the Second Reform Act enfranchised around two in five adult men, still well short of that demanded in the 1640s. The third Reform Act of 1884 doubled the electorate. This produced the breadth of franchise wanted by the mainstream democratically inclined advocates in the 1640s. (There were those who would have gone further).  

All 19th century electoral reform was based on property qualifications and women were excluded, although ironically before the 1832 Act women arguably had the right to vote because the gender of voters was not laid down. The 1832 Act altered that by referring to males not persons.  (http://www.historyofwomen.org/suffrage.html). It was not until the 1918 Representation Act that full manhood suffrage at the age of twenty-one was granted and women aged thirty were definitely enfranchised. The final Act of full adult suffrage did not occur until 1928, although the qualification was not reduced to its present age of eighteen until 1969.

England and the rejection of violence

Why was England so different from other countries in its political, social and economic  development?  How was it that only in England did parliamentary government evolve and the one and only bootstrapped industrial revolution arise?  Perhaps much of the  answer  lies  in the fact that the English, in comparison with any other large nation, have long been wonderfully  adept  in dealing  with the central  problem  of human  life –  how  to live together  peaceably.  A  Canadian  academic, Elliott Leyton,  has  made  a study of English  murder through  the centuries in his book Men of Blood. Leyton finds that the rate of English  (as  opposed  to  British murder) is phenomenally  low  for a country of her size  and industrial development,  both now  and for centuries past.  This strikes Elliott  as  so singular that he said  in  a recent interview “The English  have  an antipathy to murder  which borders  on eccentricity; it is one  of the great  cultural oddities of the modern age.” (Sunday Telegraph  4 12 1994).

 This  restraint  extends to warfare and social disorder. That is not to say England has been  without violence,  but rather that  at any point in her history the level of  violence  was  substantially lower than in any other comparable society. For example,  the  English Civil War  in the  17th  Century  was, apart from the odd inhumane blemish,  startlingly free of the gross  violence common on the continent of  the  time  during the 30 Years War,  where the sacking and pillage of towns and cities  was  the norm. A particularly notable thing,  for civil wars are notorious for their brutality. 

The  way  that  England  responded  to the  Reformation  is instructive. She  did not suffer the savage  wars of religion which  traumatised  the  continent  and  brought  human calamities  such as the  St Bartholomew Day’s  Massacre  in  France  in 1572,  when thousands of French  protestants  were   massacred at the instigation of the French king. 

It  was not that the English did not care deeply about  their  religion,  rather that they have been, when left to their own  devices,  generally loth to fight their  fellow  countrymen  over  anything.  English  civil  wars  have  always  been essentially  political affairs  in which the ordinary  person has little say, for the struggles  were either dynastic or  a clash  between Parliamentary  ambition and  the  monarch.  Even the  persecution of  the  Lollards  in  the late fourteenth  and fifteenth centuries and the persecution  of Protestants  under Mary I had a highly political aspect.  The former  was a vastly disturbing challenge to the  established social  order  with men being told,  in so many  words,  that   they could find their own way to salvation and the latter  an  attempt  to  re-establish not merely  the Catholic  order  in  England,  which had been overturned since the time  of  Henry  VIII’s  breach  with Rome,  but also what amounted to  a  new  royal dynasty with Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Even the prohibitions on Catholics and non-Conformists  after the  Reformation had a fundamental political basis  to  them, namely, they were predicated on the question of whether  such people be trusted to give their first loyalty to the crown.

The treatment of foreigners

Compared with  other  peoples,  the  English  have been noticeably restrained  in their treatment of other  peoples residing  within their country.  A few massacres of  Jews  occurred before their expulsion from England in 1290,  but from that  time  there has not  been  great slaughter of a minority living within  England. Since  1290  there  have been occasional outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence. During the Peasants’  Revolt  London-based Flemings  were  murdered.  In later times an anti-Spanish “No Popery”  mob was  frequently  got up in London and he influx of Jews and Huguenots in  the 17th and 18th centuries caused riots,  one so serious in 1753 that  it  caused the repeal of a law naturalising  Jews  and Huguenots.  But  these riots did not result in great  numbers of dead, let alone in systematic genocidal  persecutions of any  particular group.  Most notably,  the English  fonts  of authority,  whether  the crown, church  or  parliament,  have   not incited let alone ordered the persecution of a particular  racial or ethnic group since the expulsion of the Jews.  They  have persecuted Christian groups, but that was a matter  of  religion  not  ethnicity, the  Christians  persecuted  being  English  in the main. The only discrimination  the  English  elite  have formally sanctioned against an ethnic group for  more than half a millennium was the inclusion of Jews within  the  general  prohibitions passed in the half century  or  so after  the Restoration in 1660 which banned  those  who  were  not members  of the Church of England from holding  a  crown  appointment such as an MP or election to public offices  such  as that of MP.

This comparative  lack of  violence  can plausibly be seen as the ground for England’s maintenance and unique development of a Parliament and  the development of the rule of law a  consequence  of England’s political  arrangements. From that sprung the gradual erosion of monarchical authority. Put those three developments together and there is arguably the ground upon which first a great commercial edeifice was built followed by industrialisation.  

But even if that is the immediate cause of English development it does not explain why  the English become  exceptionally peaceable within their own territory.  One could argue that being an island helped, not least because England has not been subject to a forced foreign conquest  from the continent  for the better part of a millennium. However,  England has suffered a good deal of inter-nation warfare within the British Isles, especially with Scotland. She has also fought many a campaign around the world, both as England and later under the banner of Great Britain. It is not that the English are or have been naturally timid.  

Perhaps the fundamental answer to English peaceableness  lies in the fact  that the English enjoyed a level  of  racial and cultural  homogeneity  from very early on.  Long  before  the English kingdom existed Bede wrote of the English as a single people.  The  English have never killed one another  in  any great  quantity  simply  because one part of  the population  thought  another  part was in some way not English.  That is the best possible starting point  for  the establishment of a coherent community. 

The  favoured  liberal  view of England is  that  it  is  the mongrel nation par excellence.  In fact,  this is the  exact opposite of the truth.  The general facts of immigration into England are these. The English and England were of  course created  by  the  immigration of Germanic  peoples.  The British  monk, Gildas,  writing  in  the  sixth  century, attributed  the  bulk  of  the  Saxon  settlement  to the practice  of  British leaders employing  Saxons  to protect   the Britons from Barbarian attacks after Rome withdrew around   410  A.D.  The English monk Bede (who was born in  A.D.  673)   attributed  the origins of the English to the Angles,  Saxons   and  Jutes who came to England in the century  following  the   withdrawal  of  the  Romans at the  request of  British  war leaders.

Archaeological  evidence suggests that  substantial  Germanic settlement in England had a longer history and  dated  from  the  Roman  centuries, perhaps from as early  as  the  third  century.  What is certain is that in her formative  centuries  following  the  exit  of  Rome, the  various invaders  and  settlers  were drawn from peoples with much in  common.

They  were  the  same  physical type, there  was  a  considerable similarity of general culture, their languages  flowed from a common linguistic well. When the Norsemen came they too brought a Teutonic  mentality and origin. Even the Normans were Vikings at one remove who, if  frenchified,  were not  physically  different  from  the English  nor  one imagines utterly without  vestiges  of  the  Norse mentality.  Moreover, the number of Normans who settled  in England immediately after the Conquest was small, perhaps as few as 5000.

After  the Conquest,  the only significant  immigration  into England for many centuries were the Jews.  They were expelled  from England in 1290. There was then no really large  scale  and  sudden immigration from outside the British Isles  until  the flight of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict  of Nantes (which granted limited toleration to the  Huguenots within France) in 1684 by Louis X1V.

There was other immigration in the period 1066-1650, but it was  small and highly selective. Craftsmen of  talent  were  encouraged particularly in the Tudor period. Italian families  with  trading and banking expertise (such as it was in  those days) appeared  after the expulsion of  the  Jews.  Foreign  merchants  were  permitted,  but for much of  the  period  on sufferance  and  subject  to  restrictions  such  as forced  residence within specially designated  foreign quarters. 

The  upshot of all this is that for six centuries  after the Conquest  England was an unusually homogeneous country,  both racially  and culturally. This is reflected in the  absence since  the  Norman Conquest of  any serious regional separatist  movement within the  heart of English  territory. There  has been meaningful resistance  at  the periphery  – Cornwall,  the Welsh marches and the  far north,  but  even that  has  been  effectively dead since the sixteenth century. Englishmen have fought but not to create separate nations.

The unusual restraint of the English  is also shown in their dealings with foreigners  abroad. England did not routinely go in for sack and pillage as was common on the continent and occasional massacres  often occurred in special circumstances,  for example,  Cromwell’s in Ireland happened in   aftermath of a  massacre of Protestants in Ulster in 1641 and the fear that Ireland would be used as a springboard for a Royalist invasion of England.

Nowhere was the restraint seen more emphatically than in the Empire. If  a people were forced to become part of an empire, the British Empire was indubitably the one to join. There were of course outrages committed in the Empire’s name,  but there was no general policy of  cruelty and, for the final century of the Empire’s existence, official British policy towards the colonies was that the interests of the natives should come first.  

If  the  theory that a homogeneous population long occupying a territory without suffering foreign conquest results in greater social restraint  is correct,  this may have  a profound implication.  Assuming that personality is substantially innate, natural selection will act upon the type of personality which is best suited to the environment. It could be that the native English are, on average,  genetically better suited to live in a society in which politics are decided by peaceful transfer of power and business and personal disputes are mediated through the law.   On top of any genetic propensity is added the culture of restraint which has developed from the genetic propensity over the centuries.

Should it be true that the English have a unique genetic national shape and  a culture which uniquely plays to that genetic national shape, then mass immigration will weaken both by introducing both different genetic types an competing cultures.

English liberty and the weakness of state power

There  were  two  great  sources  of  general  authority in  mediaeval  England.  The Church was  one,  the  other  was  the  Crown.  The mediaeval English man and woman had no great regard for either. This robust contempt for authority and the inability of either  priest or king to exercise enough power to quell it allowed the English to develop a mentality which was not customarily subordinate.

The English who  people the  pages  of Langland and  Chaucer show  a  mediaeval England where commoners  would  not  as a matter of  course  willingly  touch their forelock or  allow their lives  to  be circumscribed by those with social status. Later,  Shakespeare’s lowlifes and the characters in Ben  Johnson’s  Bartholomew Fair  often  show a rumbustious lack of deference  for  their social betters. It is improbable in the  extreme  that  the  worlds depicted by these authors  would  not  have  reflected  the  societies in which they lived. Traits  were  exaggerated for dramatic effect doubtless,  but the  cultural  story  they told was fundamentally rooted in the  England  in  which they wrote. 

Langland’s Piers Ploughman is especially interesting  because the  work begins  with  a  catalogue of  the  people  who inhabited  the  world he knew (Prologue – The plain  full  of people).  Here are the worldly and the devout,  the high  and the  low.  The cleric and the noble  jostle  with  minstrels, tramps, beggars,  merchants,  tradesmen, and  the  honest  ploughman who  tills  “the  soil  for  the  common good”.   Langland’s clerics are often corrupt,  the nobles capricious,  the merchants avaricious, the workmen  shoddy and cheating in  their  work,  the beggars dishonest and the minstrels  bawdy,  but  they  are  balanced  by  honest  men  in  their  various  callings. In other words, it is a world not so different in  terms of human personality to that we inhabit.

Before the Reformation the English were renowned throughout  Europe  for their anticlericism – a good  example  of  this attitude  was the response to Sudbury’s  warning  to  Wat  Tyler’s  rebels  that  England would  be  put  under  an  interdict  by  the Pope if he was harmed. This was  met  by hearty  laughter followed  by the grisly  dispatch  of  the unfortunate  cleric soon afterwards,  whose head  did  not  part  from his shoulders  until a goodly number of blows  had  been struck. 

The contempt in which many of the servants of the Church were held can be seen in both John Wycliffe’s complaints against clerical abuse in the latter half of the 14th century and in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and William Langland’s Piers  Plowman, both written  in the same century in  which the  Peasants’  Revolt took place. Both works  are full  of jibes  at fat illiterate priests and cheating  pardoners  who  peddled absolution from sins with their indulgences sold  for money.  

Wycliffe’s doctrine  contained the fundamental ideas  which were  later realised internationally in the  Reformation.  He questioned  the reality of transubstantiation  (the  Catholic belief that the  bread  and wine  at Communion turn literally into  the  body  and blood  of  Christ), he attacked  the authority  of  the pope, he  railed against the  abuses  of  simony and indulgences. He advocated a bible  in  English  and either he or his followers, the Lollards,  produced a complete  translation  before  the end  of  the fourteenth century.

Implicit  within  Wycliffe’s  thought was  the democratic spirit,  because  it is a short intellectual step  from the  belief  that  each man could be his  own mediator with  God to  the idea  that he should have a say in his earthly  life.  The Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries both promoted this individualist mentality in matters both sacred and profane and weakened the power of the Church as a source of authority in competition with the monarchy.

If the English were derisive of  their priests, they were, as the Peasants Revolt showed, even less enamoured of the Crown with its tax collectors  and the widespread existence of serfdom. But in truth the hand  of the mediaeval  state as embodied by the monarch was  remarkably light by  modern  standards,  especially  so  during  the century  long  struggle of  the houses  of  Lancaster and York and partly  because  mediaeval kingship  was of necessity  very limited in what it could  do administratively  because of a  lack of funds,  the power  of the  peerage,  primitive  technology, poor  communications, administrative  naivety  and  a radically  different view  of what  government and society should be – apart  from  looking after  his own privileges and estates, kings were expected to defend the land,  put down rebellions,  provide legal redress through the royal courts, maintain the position of the church and  lead in war against other  rulers. And that was  about it.  

But  there was also a further check on the  monarch.  Perhaps the  most  important practical  adjunct  of  this  desire  for  freedom,  has  been that  the  English  long  hated  and mistrusted  the  idea of a standing army as the  creature  of tyrants.  The  English were eventually content  to  have  the strongest  navy  in the  world because it could not  be  used against them, but  a substantial  army  was not accepted as reasonable until the  experiences of the  Great War accustomed  men to  the  idea. Soldiers  were held in contempt before then.  “Gone  for  a soldier” was  little better  than “taken for  a  thief”. The  needs of  Empire produced more ambivalence into  the  English view of soldiers  as Kipling’s poem “Tommy” shows:  “Oh, it’s  Tommy this an’  Tommy that, and chuck him out the brute! But  it’s ‘Saviour of ‘is country’  when the guns begin to shoot.” But the old resentment, fear  and  contempt remained  until  the  stark democracy of experience in the trenches during the Great  War  tempered the English mind to tolerance of the soldier.

Because  of  a lack of a large standing army,  English  kings were ever dependent on the will of others,  be it  their  nobles,  parliament or the gentry.  Even the most practically tyrannical  of English kings,  Henry VIII, was most careful to use Parliament to sanction his acts. 

The  consequences  of  this  weakness  was  that power  was localised.  Incredible  as it may see  today,  the  practical governance  of  day-to-day  life  in England until  well into the  nineteenth  century  lay  largely  in  the  hands of private gentlemen  occupying the post of JP,  whose  powers were much greater than they  are  today.  Indeed, the central state  impinged  very  little  on the  ordinary  Englishman  before 1914.  George Bowling, the hero of George Orwell’s “Coming  up for air” reflecting on  how  the arms  of the state  touched an honest citizen before  the  Great War  could think only of the registration  of  births,  deaths and  marriages and the General Post Office.

By  keeping the king dependent upon the will of  others,  the English ensured that a despot  such as Louis  X1V could not  arise in  England and in so  doing  underwrote their general liberties. Without that, it  is  improbable  that parliamentary government (as  opposed  to  a  parliament) would have arisen.  England would  almost certainly have been  involved in many debilitating wars  for  the aggrandisement of  the  king. In those circumstances it is  unlikely  that England as a modern state would have arisen. 

The inability of English monarchs to create  an absolute monarchy on the lines of Louis XIX’s France is a reflection of the independent spirit of the English and their natural instinct for liberty.