Category Archives: censorship

Is it in the blood?, CMJ and the hypocrisy of the media

Robert Henderson
The long-serving BBC cricket  commentator and journalist Christopher Martin-Jenkins died on Ist January 2013.  The press and broadcasters in Britain were crammed with tributes which veered perilously close to the fulsome.  This was more than a little strange because until the mid-1990s Martin-Jenkins had decidedly non-pc views on foreigners  being selected for the England cricket team  and doubts about the commitment to England of at least one much capped ethnic minority England player Mark Ramprakash. who was born and raised in England.  A selection of CMJ’s comments on the subject of foreigners and Ramprakash are in the second letter to CMJ reproduced below.
To the best of my knowledge none of CMJ’s views of foreigners playing for England appeared in the tributes and obituaries. Not only that when I posted a comment giving details of his non-pc views   on Cricinfo the comment went up but then was taken down. The cricket establishment was very determined that CMJ’s views should be buried.
When my article Is it in the blood? was published in the July 1995 issue of Wisden Cricket Monthly it created a howl of collective anguish from the politically correct British media and some politicians.  Over 50,000 words of criticism and outright crude abuse  abuse appeared in the mainstream press and broadcasters to which I was allowed no opportunity to reply (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/is-it-in-the-blood-peter-oborne-and-the-question-of-englishness/  Because of  this I wrote to CMJ in 1996 asking for his assistance in  bringing my inability reply to public notice. He refused. My letters below give the story.
After I had contacted CMJ he ceased to comment on foreigners or British raised ethnic minority players being selected to England.   The fear of the pc police had got hold of him. But he did not merely stay silent from then on; rather  he towed the politically correct line on the employment of foreigners.
13-November 1996
Tel:0171/387/5018
Mr C. Martin-Jenkins 29 Cavendish Road Redhill Surrey RH1 4AH
Mr Martin-Jenkins,
I enclose an account of my dealings with the media since the publication of ‘Is it in the blood?’
You will doubtless wish to bring the hypocrisy, the self-serving censorship and the general lack of moral sense shown by mediafolk in this matter to the attention of the public through your newspaper and broadcasting outlets.
What is it that mediafolk are always bleating on about? The public’s right know…the Press’ duty to expose immorality in the public interest…? Something along those lines I think.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Henderson
————————————————————————————————————————-
18-February 1997
Mr C. Martin-Jenkins C/O Daily Telegraph London E14
Dear Mr Martin-Jenkins,
Thank you for your letter. You are being naive in suggesting that I approach someone like Charles Moore in an attempt to put my case before the public. Not only have I approached Mr Moore, but the editors of every other national Sunday and Daily, all specialist cricket magazines and the Spectator. All have refused to allow me a word in my defence. Mr Moore did not even have the courtesy to reply to the letter I enclose.
If you want a prime example of the absence of moral sense exhibited by mediafolk in this matter, read the comments about me written by Mathew Engel in the 1996 Wisden after he knew (1) that Frith had lied about his absolute support for my opinions (see letter dated 30/3/94); (2) that the title was Frith’s; (3) that Frith had edited the article and changed its balance and (4) that I had been denied any opportunity for reply. Engel also lied about knowing who I was in his Guardian column of 3/7/95. All this from a man who wrote in the 1995 Wisden:
‘It cannot be irrelevant to England’s long term failures that so many of their recent Test players were either born overseas and/or spent their formative years as citizens of other countries. In the heat of Test cricket, there is a difference between a cohesive team with a common goal, and a coalition of individuals whose major ambitions are for themselves…There is a vast difference between wanting to play Test cricket and wanting to play Test cricket for England.’
And in the 1996 Wisden:
“It is reasonable to believe that not everyone who has chosen to regard himself as English has done so out of any deep patriotic commitment.”
I have asked Mr Engel to explain the difference between his position and mine but he is unable to do so.
The corruption goes far beyond the press, as you will discover from the extended essay I enclose entitled ‘The liberal censorship’. The broadcasters have been every bit as cynically intolerant and self serving as the press – my experiences with the BBC are barely credible. Worse, everywhere I have turned for redress – from the PCC, the BCC, my MP, the judge who presided at the libel settlement hearings, the Bar Council and the Law Society – has been met with same blanket refusal to offer me even the form let alone the reality of justice.
You excuse yourself from publicly revealing my treatment and exposing the misbehaviour of your colleagues by the curious device of stating that you had no obligation to do so because you did not write on the subject of my article. Since when did journalists only feel an obligation to write about matters in which they were personally involved? Moreover, democracy only works if every man defends every other man’s right to free expression.
You also say that you are unconvinced by my arguments. Really, Mr Martin-Jenkins? Here are a few of your thoughts on the subject of national commitment:
August 1990 Radio 2 Sportsdesk (in a tone of profound complaint): “The selectors seem to be obsessed with West Indian born pace bowlers.”
‘Over the weekend both Robin Smith, born and schooled in South Africa and Graham Hick, born and schooled in Zimbabwe, have had their recent form closely analysed. You could easily have made a case for neither being retained for the third Test this week, when Graham Thorpe and John Crawley seem ready. Apart from a debate based purely on cricketing criteria, the latter two have been English since birth. Will not their dedication to the cause of England be that much deeper when they are tied to it by blood as well as money?’ Christopher Martin-Jenkins (CMJ) Daily Telegraph 27/6/94)
May 23rd 1994 Daily Telegraph “… we shall not have a consistently successful England team…until we produce more Goughs; that is to say English born, English bred products of English schools”
‘Tony Greig and Ian Greig, Chris Smith and Robin Smith, Allan Lamb and Graeme Hick, have all used the England cap as a flag of convenience, a point reinforced when the first three left England for Australia on retirement.’ (CMJ Daily Telegraph 10/7/1994)
They [Southern African born England caps] tried their hardest as every England player does, and were more competitive than most. But were they trying to succeed in their cricket careers on behalf of England? Or were they trying to make England win at cricket? (CMJ Daily Telegraph 10/7/1994)
‘Colleagues on this touring party [1993/94 West Indies tour side] have suggested of him …that Ramprakash sometimes seems more at home with West Indian players, that his cricketing hero and chief confidant is Desmond Haynes; that he would be just as happy in the other camp [the West Indies]‘ CMJ Daily Telegraph 16/3/94)
This matter is a general scandal Mr Martin-Jenkins. Are you still unwilling to help me?
Yours sincerely,
Robert Henderson

Well, at least there wasn’t a six-foot dancing penis

Robert Henderson

Prior to the  opening ceremony of the  London Olympics,  the last time Britain put on a taxpayer-funded  entertainment that was  meant  to project the country to the world was on 31 January 1999.  The event was broadcast   from the  Dome (now the O2 Arena)  to mark the new millennium.  True to the politically correct  dicta of the time, the Millennium show  said precisely nothing about British history or culture and was an exceptionally  trite mishmash of  the “we are all one happy global family” variety of painfully right on exhortation and posturing  (see http://wwp.millennium-dome.com/news/news-dome-990916show.htm).  The lowlight of the show was a six-foot dancing penis.

In 1999 the liberal left propaganda concentrated on pretending that Britain’s past had nothing of merit at best or was positively  and unreservedly shameful at worst, while projecting the politically correct wonders of the joyous and fruitful  multicultural and multiracial society they fondly but erroneously imagined Britain was in the process of becoming.

By 2012  the politically correct narrative of Britain had changed.  The brighter amongst the  liberal left had realised that there were  dangers in both crudely alienating  the native British population at large (and especially the English and the white working class) and in allowing state sponsorship of ethnic and racial divisions through multiculturalism.  Consequently, they  began to develop a new narrative.   The liberal left  would present  the British past in terms which  allowed the multicultural message to be  imported into  it, most overtly by the pedantically true but grotesquely misleading claim that Britain has  received immigrants since time out of mind and  non-white immigrants for at least several centuries.  (What the pedantically true statement fails to mention is the small numbers and the nature of the immigration – overwhelmingly  white and European –  until the post-1945 mass influx .)  One  of the most enthusiastic proponents  of the “blacks have always been in Britain” school  is the black Labour MP Diane Abbott  (a history graduate God help us) who wrote a piece for the BBC’s black history month in which contained this gem:  “The earliest blacks in Britain were probably black Roman centurions that came over hundreds of years before Christ.”  (Like Captain Queeg I kid you not – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/dabbott_01.shtml.  For those unfamiliar with British history, let me point out that the first known Roman contact with Britain was in 55 BC  – Julius Caesar –  and the first Roman settlement in Britain -the Claudian invasion –  dates from 43 AD. As for her curious idea that “black centurions” were the likely first black settlers in Britain, I can only guess that she confuses centurion – an officer rank with various meanings in the Roman military –  with the ordinary Roman soldier).  Three  questions arise from Ms Abbott’s concept of British history – how did she obtain a place to read history at Newham College, Cambridge; how did she managed to take a history degree and what does it say about the fruits of positive discrimination, official or unofficial?)

But the storyline that Britain had always been multicultural  and multiracial  has  a gaping practical drawback. The politically correct could fudge present British realities by using their control of the mainstream media to promote the false idea that blacks and Asians occupy a central place in British society by the  gross over-representation of  ethnic minorities as active participants in programmes and as the subject of programmes.  But they could not control the past effectively  because  the overwhelming majority of those standing large in British history were white, Christian  and not immigrants.  Of course, attempts were made to promote the idea that non-whites had produced great British figures, such as the attempt in recent years to present the Victorian  black woman Mary Seacole – as the equal of Florence Nightingale (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/seacole_mary.shtml) . But these efforts were inevitably  puny because there were so few non-whites of note in British history.

Multiculturalist from the word go

The London Olympics were wrapped in the multiculturalist credo from the word go.  The central plank of the bid was that a London Olympics would be multicultural celebration not merely in terms of the competitors,  but through its positioning in London and specifically a part of London which contained a very  large non-white population.  Here is the leader of the bid Seb Coe in Singapore making the final bid for the games:

“… we’re serious about inspiring young people.  Each of them comes from east London, from the communities who will be touched most directly by our Games. 

And thanks to London’s multi-cultural mix of 200 nations, they also represent the youth of the world. Their families have come from every continent.  They practice every religion and every faith.  What unites them is London. “ (http://www.london2012.com/mm/Document/aboutus/General/01/22/85/87/singapore-presentation-speeches.pdf).

The official London Olympics website makes no bones about its mission either:

“It is our aim to make diversity and inclusion a key differentiator of our Games, celebrating the many differences among the cultures and communities of the United Kingdom.

It’s not simply about recruiting a diverse workforce. It’s about the suppliers, the competitors, the officials and the spectators – in fact, everyone connected with the Games, from the security guards to the bus drivers. Diversity and inclusion influence every detail of our Games-time planning, from accessible transport to our Food Vision.” (http://www.london2012.com/about-us/diversity-and-inclusion/)

Danny Boyle

The man given the job of producing  an Olympic ceremony which would accord with  the new politically correct propaganda strategy was Danny Boyle,  the director of,  amongst other films, the heroinfest   Trainspotting and the Indian-sited Slumdog Millionaire.  Boyle did not have to be told what to do because it would be what he would do naturally.  He was  Old Labour temperamentally but  also plugged into the one world politically correct switchboard.

Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically in the light of the  very unTory  nature of the Coalition Government, Boyle was appointed by  the Coalition.  However, as the appointment occurred on 17 June 2010 (six weeks after the Coalition assumed office)  it is reasonable to suppose that the Tory-led Coalition were  rubber-stamping  what the Brown Government had arranged without giving the matter much thought.  Nonetheless the appointment got some ringing  Tory support:

‘Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, said: “The opening and closing ceremonies are the jewels in the crown of any Olympics and Paralympics and are one of the benchmarks against which all games are judged.

“I am very pleased that British directors and producers of such outstanding international calibre and acclaim have given their backing to London 2012.

With their creativity and expertises on board, I’m sure that London’s showpiece events will make Britain proud.”

His sentiments were echoed by the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who said the “brilliant” team had brought together “some of the most imaginative people in the world”.

“The work they have produced over the years has been quite extraordinary, with an impact not just in the UK, but also on the international stage,” he said.

“They exemplify some of the greatest attributes we have – creativity, vision, and intelligence – which will be critical to ensuring shows that are as stunning as they are uniquely British.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10338048)

The multicultural message is reinforced relentlessly by the mainstream British media. Someone drawing their idea of the make-up of the British Olympic team  from British newspapers and broadcasters  could be forgiven for thinking that the team was largely composed of  black and Asian competitors. The truth is rather  different. The Daily Telegraph on 27 July  (2012) thoughtfully provided photos of all 541 British Olympic competitors. There were only 40 black, brown and yellow faces amongst them, less than  8% of the total.  The  small number of black and Asian participants is even more striking  when  taking into account the fact that  blacks and Asians in Britain are on average substantially  younger than white Britons and consequently there are  proportionately far more blacks and Asians than there are white Britons in the age group suitable for the Olympics.

A political opening ceremony

By its very nature the Olympics  opening ceremony should be apolitical because of the vast range of political behaviours and ideologies  which are represented by the two hundred or so competing nations.  No overtly political production could do other than irritate many whilst pleasing few.   It should have gone without saying that that the opening ceremony should have eschewed any ideological message.

Boyle  ignored this imperative wholesale and pumped out the  liberal internationalist message with shards of Old Labour  thinking embedded within it.   The world audience was treated to an idealisation of  pre-industrial Britain fit for a chocolate box being devoured by industrialisation,   toiling workers, suffragettes, Jarrow Hunger Marchers,  the arrival of the Windrush symbolising the beginning of the  post-war mass immigration,  nurses and patients bouncing on beds and dancing to supposedly extol the virtues of the NHS and CND marchers.  Apart from being  politically partisan it was doubly crass because the  overwhelming majority of the foreign audience would not have had a clue about what was going on.   The  British have  an additional beef because they were  taxpayers paying for unambiguous political propaganda which came from only one side of the political spectrum. Judging by phones-ins and comments left on blogs, newsgroups and mainstream media comment boards quite a few Britons cavilled at that.

The  use of cultural references which were unlikely to be anything other than Greek to foreigners went beyond the politically partisan. Who outside of Britain would be likely to understand references to the film Gregory’s Girl  or  had a clue what was meant by  the attempt to portray the significance of the inventor of the World Wide Webb Tim Berners-Leigh  by wrapping him up in a story of staggering banality about British youngsters connecting with each other digitally?  It is pointless when catering for the widest of audiences to make references to national events and cultural artefacts which do not  have  either a wide international currency  or are of a nature which is self-explanatory.

There were also what can only be hoped were  the last throes of Blair’s  “Cool Britannia” , with the celebration of the inane and superficial.  Various British personalities with  international traction were wheeled out: David Beckham,  Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean, Daniel Craig as James Bond, JK Rowling and the Queen as herself, sadly  reduced to the status of a pantomime walk-on.   The idea that going for a night out represented modern British society at its most emblematic was beyond risible.

To understand how inappropriate Boyle’s show was,  imagine an equally politically  partisan and uncritical show put on by a director with non-pc  nationalist sympathies crossed with a religious belief in free enterprise. (This would be  a stupendously improbable event in modern Britain but  do your best to get your imagination to stretch to the Herculean lengths required) .  Such a director might   have started by extolling the British Empire as a great civilising force,  portrayed pre-industrial Britain as a place of poverty  and brutality which was transformed into a much wealthier and more ordered  society by industrial capitalism, created a narrative which  depicted state interference with the economy as disastrous with the nationalised industries of Attlee including the NHS being shown as inefficient and wracked with political activists, treated the dockers’  march of 1968 in support of Enoch Powell  after his  Rivers of Blood speech  resulted in his sacking by Tory leader Ted heath and  the Notting Hill riots as legitimate political protests against mass immigration before ending  with a scene encapsulating the  erosion of freedom in Britain by the  combination of politically correctness   and the vast  opportunities for surveillance offered by modern  digital technology. This last could have Tim Berners-Leigh with his head in his hands as a court sentenced someone to prison for putting out a non-pc message on Twitter.  All that would have been as inappropriate as Boyle’s offering but no more so.

No irony intended

Strenuous attempts have been made to suggest that Boyle was being ironic in his broad  historical commentary with his  portrayal of Britain as being a pastoral idyll before this was rudely disturbed by the  industrial revolution. I wish I could believe he was, but I cannot because this is just the type of sentimental ahistorical pap which a certain type of  left liberal  adores and, even more worryingly, believes. I would not mind betting that Boyle is an fervent admirer of William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement of Victorian England, with its wistful looking back to a non-existent pre-industrial golden age.

Boyle’s  putative historical representation of a blissful agrarian life filled with peasants who were trampled by the grinding face of capitalist engineered industrialisation is  ludicrous to anyone who has any understanding of British and in particular English history.   The peasantry of England had effectively ceased to exist long before the industrial revolution because the very extensive enclosure movements of   the 15th century onwards had  turned huge numbers of peasants off land they worked themselves and forced them  to migrate to the towns,  work as casual labourers or become sturdy beggars.  By the time the industrial revolution  began circa 1700 there was no real peasantry,  the nearest  being yeoman farmers.

The second absurdity is the idea that pre-industrial Britain was a pre-lapsarian paradise. Life in agrarian societies is and was  no bed of roses. Pre-industrial Britain was no exception.  Famines were frequent, both because of  general crop failures and the absence of a system of reliable roads and fast  transport to move food around.   Heavy manual labour was the norm and the production of what we now call consumer goods was small. Sanitation was  poor to non-existent  and cities, especially London,  were death traps because of their propensity to spread diseases.  Medicine  was  so rudimentary that doctors, even those attending the rich, were as likely to kill their patients as not, often with a great deal of unnecessary suffering as  Charles II found out to his cost.   Industrialisation, and its fellow traveller science, eventually changed or at least greatly ameliorated those ills.

Nor is it true that the industrial revolution was simply a catalogue of cruelty and social dislocation. Great entrepreneurs of the early industrial revolution such as Josiah Wedgewood and Matthew Boulton  took a pride in the fine condition of their factories and later industrialists such as Titus Salt built model villages for their workers.  Moreover, even where conditions were extremely poor in rapidly growing industrial centres such as 19th Century  Manchester,  on which Friedrich Engels reported so vividly in the 1840s in his The Condition of the Working Class in England ,  there is no firm evidence that they were qualitatively worse than the conditions  experienced in cities before the coming of the mills and factories.  Nor was pre-industrial  agrarian labour a sinecure, with most of the work being strictly manual.  Imagine cutting a field of corn with scythes.

Boyle’s physical depiction of bucolic pre-industrial England  had all the authenticity of a Christmas scene in one of Harrod’s windows.  Not only were all things bright and fully sanitary, there was a cricket match of truly howling anachronism.  The cricket played in Boyle’s  fantasy was modern cricket, with modern pads and bats, wickets with three stump and bails  and overarm bowling,. The cricket  played in pre-industrial England had batsmen  with curved bats, no protective equipment, wickets with two stumps and bowlers delivering the ball underarm.    Boyle’s cricket match also carried forward the idea of Britain as a multicultural land way back when because the bowler was black, a sight as rare as a unicorn in the  seventeenth, or being generous, the  eighteenth century .

The relentless political correctness

The politically correct propaganda did not end with overt message of the various events.  It continued with the personnel. Take the  nine bearers of the Olympic Flag:   Ban-ki Moon, the United Nations secretary general , the runner Haile Gebrselassie , Muhammad Ali ,  Leyma Gbowee, a Nobel peace prize winner credited with ending the civil war in Liberia,  Marina Silva, who has fought against the destruction of the rainforest,    musician Daniel Barenboim, Sally Becker, known as the Angel of Mostar for her work rescuing  children from war-torn Bosnia,  Shami Chakrabarti  the director of human rights body Liberty and  Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, the black teenager whose murder in 1993 led to the Metropolitan police being accused of “institutional racism”.    All fitted in with the liberal internationalist  Boyle theme, both in terms of  what they were noted for and their multicultural nature.  The racial and ethnic breakdown of the nine is five black, two Asian and two Jewish. The last three on the list represented Britain: a Jew, an Asian and  a black.

I mention this not because I think there should be no ethnic and racial diversity on display in such events. Indeed, it is inherently appropriate that they are. But it is a matter of proportion. Boyle’s show was unashamedly slanted towards the politically correct credo and the selection of flag bearers was emblematic of this bias, a bias which completely excluded the large majority of the British population who do not belong to ethnic or racial minorities. It also excluded the wider mainstream European populations and their offshoots in the New World and Australasia. Far from being that favourite modern liberal word “inclusive”, Boyle was excluding vast swathes of humanity. 

Chakrabarti coyly worried whether her inclusion might  be thought politically correct by bravely overcame her qualms because “… if, like me, you believe internationalism can be for people and values, not just corporations and military alliances, how can you resist sharing the optimism of Boyle’s ambition?” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9436921/London-2012-Olympics-Shami-Chakrabarti-had-doubts-over-flag-honour.html)

The inclusion of Muhammad Ali amused me as it always does. He has  totemic status amongst liberals , yet this is a man who,  until he became non compos mentis , was an unashamed anti-white racist who disapproved mixed racial sexual relationships and was happy to lend  his name to the Nation of Islam, a group led by  men such as Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan – see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/muhammad-ali-and-the-white-liberals/.

The British media and politicians

The fare  Boyle   offered up was not to Tory MPs’ taste , but there was precious little public dissent by politicians from the mainstream media view that Boyle’s show  was generally a triumph. Good examples  of the crawlingly  uncritical media response can be found within a supposedly conservative newspaper  at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html.

There were apparently rumblings behind the scenes in Tory ministerial ranks about Boyle’s politicisation of the ceremony, but these came to nothing:

“  In one account of the meeting Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, was said to have scored the ceremony just four out 10, a claim his spokesman denied last night.

Mr Gove was also said to have objected to the absence of Winston Churchill from the ceremony.

According to this version, Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, was also sceptical about some of the scenes, while Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was said to have intervened to defend Boyle and to have told her colleagues it was unfair to judge the ceremony in such a crude way…” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/london-2012/9435509/Ministers-pushed-for-changes-to-opening-ceremony.html)

Just one Tory MP, Aidan Burley, spoke out publicly against the  political nature of the Boyle’s show. For this he has been roundly attacked by not only his own party leader and politicians of all colours,  but by the  mainstream media  with calls for his expulsion from the Tory Party. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/28/olympics-opening-ceremony-multicultural-crap-tory-mp).Small wonder in the ideologically claustrophobic world of politically correct Britain that there was little open criticism from public figures.

Amongst the media Prof Mary Beard ,  Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, took the pc biscuit with her “ I liked ‘that kiss’ too – the split-second clip of two female characters from Brookside, the 90s soap opera – and what it achieved. What a great way to get the first gay kiss onto Saudi Arabian TV.”  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/9434563/London-2012-the-experts-view-of-the-Olympic-opening-ceremony.html).

She went on to give the standard multicultural line on Britishness:

“ Governments are always complaining that we don’t feel proud to be British. They wag their fingers at us and instruct us to feel patriotic. But it’s a rather punitive approach to history and to identity – with all that checklist of Kings and Queens we’re supposed to know, and the nasty insinuation that you aren’t a ‘proper’ Brit unless you’ve read The Faerie Queene, or Merchant of Venice, or whatever.

Strikingly, Danny Boyle actually showed us that we are proud to be British.

It wasn’t a parade of majesty; the only monarch who featured was our own dear Queen. But instead of one official version, the stage made room for all sorts of people and many different narratives.

 It recognised all kinds of things that people care about – from Amy Winehouse to CND marches – and it let them into the story as symbols that can stand for Britain, and have played their own part in shaping our history. It was a really alert reading of what matters to people in Britain today – from JK Rowling to the NHS – and because of that Boyle managed to inspire pride where finger-wagging governments have failed.

He was able to play with the great symbols of Britain in a way that was both ironic and supportive; that takes a special gift. There are many different sorts and styles of histories. This wasn’t a competition with the Jubilee, which brought us pomp and majesty, this was something different: the people’s story.”

So there you have, it was “the people’s story”, a phrase as redolent of the bogus as  Blair’s description of Princess Dianna as “the people’s princess”.   Back in the real world,   opinion poll after opinion poll says what really matters  to the British today are mass immigration and its consequences,  the economic mess we are in and our membership of the EU.

The blind alley of Britishness

The claimed promotion of Britishness by the show was bogus for two reasons.  Even at its strongest Britishness was not a natural nationality. But in the aftermath of the second world war it did have a certain overarching reach throughout the four home nations and a continuing emotional pull for countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand.   A mixture of mass immigration from all ends of the Earth,  the religious promotion of multiculturalism by the British elite, the devolution of political power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  and  the weakening of links with  the old dominions caused by Britain’s entry into what is now the EU have killed Britishness as a functional concept.  Liberals left still cling to it because it is the fig-leaf which covers the consequences of mass immigration and to a lesser extent  of devolution.  Immigrants reluctant to call themselves English call themselves British, although that is usually a hyphenated British such a black-British or Pakistani-British. Pro-unionists insist that everyone is British. What Britrishness no longer represents is the native inhabitants of Britain.

But what Boyle gave the audience  in his parade of was not even this bogus  Britishness . He gave them  Englishness. Not an honest Englishness of course, but Englishness as filtered through the grossly distorting prism of political correctness.  The rural pre-industrial idyll could only have been England with its cricket and soft  greenness.  The industrial revolution scenes are set in an English context with Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Not only that but the industrial revolution  began in England and spread outwards: all the important early industrial advances took place in England: the invention of the steam engine , the smelting of  iron using coke,  the various machines which mechanised the cloth industry,  the great  factories of Wedgewood  and Boulton  and later the railways which utter transformed the distribution of  goods and people.  The personalities such as Daniel Craig, David Beckham, JK Rowling and the Queen are all English by birth and upbringing.

An appropriate show

What would have been an appropriate Olympic show for the world audience? There was a truly gaping  open goal for Boyle  to shoot into. All he had to do was narrow his focus and produce a show based on Britain’s immense contribution to the foundation and formulation of modern sport, including her considerable influence on the founder of the modern Olympics ,   Pierre de Frédy, Baron de Coubertin.  Apart from being highly appropriate this would have been something unique because no other country could have done  it  because they do not have the sporting history.

The show could have begun with a general  run through of the games and sports which originated in Britain – football, cricket, rugby union and league,  lawn tennis, golf, badminton, squash, table tennis, snooker – those which were derived from  British games  such as baseball and American and Australian football ,  and the strong hand of other pursuits such as rowing and horse racing which although not unique to Britain appeared as organised  sports very early in Britain.

Having established the British sporting foundations,  the show could go on to examine the  role played by Britain in establishing large scale spectator sport which could run from the 18th century  with cricket and horseracing to the 19th century with the coming of the railways opening the way to sport becoming national and then international as first the four home countries of the UK – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales played one another at football and rugby then other countries as the 20th century came while   England and Australia became the first Test playing cricketing nations to meet.  The theme of Britain taking sport to the world could have been expanded with reference to the Empire and the considerable efforts made by private organisations such as the Marylebone Cricket Club to spread individual sports and games.

Having laid out the sporting DNA of Britain, the show could conclude with the long standing idea of Olympic games  in Britain,  drawing first on the  Cotswold  Olipick Games  of Robert Dover which began in 1612 and ran,  with a break during the English civil war and Protectorate, until 1852.  A modern revival began in 1965 (http://www.olimpickgames.co.uk/).  This would be followed by Dr William Penny Brookes’  Wenlock Olympian Games http://www.wenlock-olympian-society.org.uk/olympian-games/index.shtml and the subsequent formation, by Brooks and others  of the  National Olympic Association in 1865 (which continued to 1883) with the first  National Olympic games being held in  1866 (http://www.tiger2.f2s.com/JohnHulleyMemorialFund/national_olympian_association.shtml ).

The extent of Brookes influence on the modern Olympic movement  was recalled by Juan Antonio Samaranch when  president of the International Olympic Committee . He visited Much Wenlock in 1994 and laid a wreath at Brookes’ grave and in a speech said  “I came to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brookes, who really was the founder of the modern Olympic Games.” (http://www.shropshiretourism.co.uk/much-wenlock/).

What does the opening ceremony tell us?

The extent to which the media and politicians have fallen into line with the Boyle politicking demonstrates the success the liberal left have had in acquiring the levers of power and working them ruthlessly.  Whenever a highly contentious subject provokes little public debate you may bet your life on it being the consequence of the suppression of one side of the debate. It is no wonder that in present day Britain so little public opposition to the nature of Boyle’s show should have occurred.  Politicians and people with access to the mainstream media know only too well that to go against the politically correct tide is to invite serious trouble.

The real message of the Olympic opening ceremony is simple: the liberal internationalist triumph is at its zenith.  As things presently stand no one with contrary views can get a fair public hearing or most of the time any public hearing at all because the mainstream media censors such views severely.  The British people, and especially the English, are left with no means to control their own country in their own interests.  They are simply spectators of their own destruction.

Courage is the best defence against charges of racism

Robert Henderson

The trial of Emma West on two racially aggravated public order charges which was scheduled for 11 June has been postponed until 16 July to enable further psychiatric reports to be prepared. (http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Emma-West-race-rant-trial-moved-July/story-16346869-detail/story.html).

As Miss West was charged over six months ago and has been  brought before courts several times,  it does seem rather strange that psychiatric reports need to be prepared now, especially as it was made clear months ago that she was being treated for depression when the events took place and had taken a double dose of her normal medication on the day of the alleged offences, both of which were of obvious utility as defences or mitigation. If they were going to be used by the defence surely psychiatric reports would have been made long ago. Had Miss West suddenly decided to plead guilty that could explain it, but there is no evidence that she has changed her plea. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that she  has stood firm on her intention to plead not guilty That would make her a decidedly rare bird amongst those who have found themselves arraigned in Britain on criminal charges merely for expressing non-pc views about mass immigration and its effects in general or for challenging the politically correct elite ideology in a particular instance where they have become embroiled in a dispute with someone who is black, Asian or a white person who claims ethnic minority status. Such a plea would also be a most unwelcome development for those who have brought her to trial.

The British liberal elite relies on fear to drive the enforcement of their totalitarian doctrine of political correctness, of which multiculturalism and “anti-racism” form the central part. The political elite – backed and aided by their auxiliaries in the mainstream media, public service, academia and the ethnic minorities themselves,  with big business tagging along provided the globalist and laissez faire tune is played by the politicians  – create and feed on that fear in various ways. They pass laws which make employers vulnerable to claims of racial and sexual discrimination; make the loss of a job, especially in publicly funded jobs, commonplace for those judged to have committed a politically incorrect “crime!” and criminalise dissent from those in the native British population who repudiate the idea of mass immigration as a good and lament the willful tainting of what was until the 1950s a remarkably homogenous population.

The political elite and their auxiliaries have been very successful to date in controlling dissent both through the creation of fear and the willing collusion of the mainstream media who happily accept the restrictions of Acts such as the Race Relations Act (9176), the 1986 Public Order Act and the Race Relations Amendment Act (2000) whilst proclaiming their belief in free expression. But the trick, like all acts of censorship and propaganda, only works while alternative views are excluded from the public fold.

What every liberal knows in his or her heart of hearts is that the creed they supposedly live by is no more than an aspiration and the reality of the time they live in is that human beings generally do not wish to live according to the dictates of political correctness and, most particularly, are naturally antagonistic to the idea that homo sapiens is just one big happy species without any meaningful innate or ineradicable cultural differentiation.  This means that any breach in the public censorship of politically incorrect ideas represents a potent danger for the British elite. They realize that if the truth is told about both the consequences of  mass immigration and the feelings of the native British towards it, the pack of ideological cards will tumble down, just as it did in the Soviet Union where the discontinuity between the political rhetoric of a communist paradise with equality, bumper harvests and every increasing industrial production contrasted fantastically with the miserable material lives of the Soviet masses and the brutal repression and ever more absurd Marxist-Leninist dogma.  In the case of the liberal regime in Britain, the equivalent absurdities are the liberal’s insistence that mass immigration had been a most wondrous boon bringing huge economic benefits and marvelous cultural enrichment while the large majority of the native population saw, often at first hand, the reality of the “cultural enrichment” as areas were effectively colonized, crime, especially violent crime, committed on an industrial scale by immigrants and their descendants, traditional British freedoms rapidly eroded in the name of multiculturalism and protest against the effects of immigration criminalized.

The elite fear of the public contradiction of the politically correct narrative on race and immigration  may have caused the postponement of Emma West’s trial to either prepare the ground to get her to change her plea to guilty or have her declared unfit to plead, the latter being the ideal result for the authorities because it would allow her to be represented as mad. This would fit beautifully with the liberal idea that only the mentally ill can hold non-pc views.

Until the last few years there have not been many prosecutions for inciting racial hatred or allied crimes. Instead, the British elite have relied on visits by the police to people who have had the temerity to put golliwogs on sale in their shop or make some mildly non-pc comment which has got into the media. It is very rare that charges have been brought, not least because the “crimes” they are supposedly investigating are often difficult to identify under existing laws. But an eagerly complicit British media has made sure that such action by the police is given great publicity.  This has laid the foundation for the general fear now present amongst the native British of voicing or even being associated with someone who voices a politically incorrect opinion, a fear symbolized by the almost inevitable “I’m not a racist” disclaimer when someone ventures to express mild concern about immigration or the behavior of a particular ethnic minority or even, because the “anti-racism” disease has become hideously virulent, a criticism of any person drawn from a pc protected group.

In the past few years more and more cases have ended up in court, two of the most recent being the jailing for 21 weeks of Jacqueline Woodhouse for behavior similar to that of Miss West and the Swansea U student Liam Stacey, who was jailed for 56 days after making comments deemed to be racist on Twitter (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/prison-for-merely-speakingnon-custodial-sentences-for-sustained-physical-attacks/). Both played the liberal game of Maoist-style confession which did them no good at all.

Sadly, very few native Britons in the past forty years have pleaded not guilty when charged with racially based offences. They have allowed themselves to be either intimidated into pleading guilty or on the rare occasions when a not guilty plea has been entered, gone along at their lawyers’ insistence with either a technical defence, for example, claims that they were wrongly charged or the evidence used was inadmissible , or a defence which does not say they had the democratic right to say or write whatever it was they said or wrote, but only challenges the charges on the grounds of what the words meant in the context of the law, for example, in the case of charges under section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act were the words insulting, viz:

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he— .

(a)uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or .

(b)distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, .

with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked. (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64).

The liberal elite fear anyone who pleads not guilty, even if it is on grounds, such as those just described, which do not challenge  directly the basis of the multicultural fantasy. This is because any contested trial brings into the public fold a dissenting voice and , consequently,  demonstrates  that the law is being used in a way which is incompatible with either a free society or a democracy, because it is inherent in the concepts of both a free society and a democracy that any opinion must be allowed to be argued or by definition the society is neither free nor a democracy.

If someone charged with politically correct “crimes” puts forward a defence that the laws under which they are charged are illegitimate because the laws are tyrannical and destructive of both freedom and democratic participation, the problem for the liberal elite is much amplified because it nakedly reveals their hypocrisy. Whilst happily using and tolerating the use of power appropriate only for a totalitarian state,  the official liberal line is that they are the most wonderfully moral and tolerant people in the world who find any form of discrimination or imposition of values obnoxious. Any person who wished to mount a forthright defence on the grounds of free expression and democratic participation would be  crying that the Emperor had no clothes.

The other very damaging possibility(for liberals) would be if a defendant argued that a failure to apply the law regarding racial incitement, threat, insult and so on equally rendered the law both morally null and legally incomprehensible, because it was literally impossible for any individual to judge what was and what was not illegal.  This would be very simple to do because there are many glaring examples of blacks engaging in racist abuse of whites not being judged to have committed racist crimes – two prime examples can be found in http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/prison-for-merely-speakingnon-custodial-sentences-for-sustained-physical-attacks/.

To these instances of double standards  can be added the vast numbers of incitements to racial hatred against the native white population of Britain by politicians, the mainstream media, academics and ethnic minority spokesmen who insist that Britain is a racist society because its native white population is racist. These not only attract no attention from the police but no condemnation by politicians or the mainstream media. ( I referred Greg Dyke when Director-General of the BBC to Scotland Yard  after he referred to the BBC staff as “hideously white”, a clear incitement to hatred against whites and especially potent because of his public position. Scotland Yard refused to open an investigation).

This brings us back to the question of why Emma West has been referred for psychiatric reports. The authorities have already done their best to intimidate her. After Miss West’s arrest she was held on remand “for her own protection” according to the court in Bronzefield Prison, the nearest to a high security Category A prison in England, a prison which has housed amongst others the mass murderess Rosemary West. They did this despite the facts that  (1) she made no request for protection nor was any firm evidence of serious threats to her safety produced.and (2) she has a three year old son to look after. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-2/)

Despite these intimidating experiences and the danger that her son may be taken from her by social services, Miss West still appears to want to plead not guilty. If she is resolute in that, her best way of winning her case or, quite possibly ,having the case dropped before it comes to court , is to fight the charges on the  grounds that they are an affront to free expression and democracy.  Miss West should also add the double standards in applying the law to the embarrassment she can cause the liberal elite. If she relies on a defence or mitigation based on her history of depression or the medication she took, it is unlikely to save her from conviction or provide much by way of mitigation because she has pleaded not guilty. There would be every chance she would go to prison and/or lose custody of her son.

What I recommend to Miss West is good advice to anyone who is arrested for a “racial crime”.  Make it clear from the moment you are approached by the police that you will plead not guilty on the grounds that free expression is a necessity in a free society and to engage in the democratic process.  There is a fair chance they will not even caution you, let alone try to bring you to court because the last thing the British political elite want are large numbers of trials with the defendants pointing out that the liberal emperor has no clothes.

Easy to say, difficult to do  I can hear people saying.. That is true. Being brave in such circumstances is deeply difficult, even for those  in political parties which have some public profile and base their politics on politically incorrect ideas of race and immigration.  In 2005 the leader of the BNP Nick Griffin emailed me to ask whether I would appear as a witness in a court case in which he was appearing as a defendant to charges of .  I had never met, spoken to or exchanged emails or letters with the man before his email arrived, nor had any dealings with him after our 2005 exchange of emails.

Griffin contacted me because Tony and Cherie Blair, quite bizarrely, attempted to have me prosecuted, and failed dismally, under the Malicious Communications Act during the 1997 General Election. Those interested in the case can find a summary at http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/when-tony-and-cherie-blair-tried-to-have-me-jailed/. He wanted me to give evidence which showed political tampering with the justice system.  This I agreed to do because Griffin was “the subject of both a  political law and a political prosecution.” . I wrote a detailed note which both laid out what evidence I could bring and my advice about how he could best run his defence.  Griffin accepted this then did precisely what I had warned him against doing, namely, letting his lawyers run a defence which did not defend the principle of free expression. Griffin was found not guilty but that verdict left him with a problem he cannot shake off. By allowing the defence he did, he tacitly accepted the legitimacy of the laws under which he was charged. I include the relevant exchange of emails with Griffin at the end of this article.

If the leader of a political party with enough support to justify the odd media appearance cannot be brave, why should the ordinary person be brave?  If the arguments about the value of free expression do not convince, consider the fate of  those who have been brought before courts in recent times. Jacqueline Woodhouse and Liam Stacey pleaded guilty and made the most abject public apologies. It did not save them.  They were both sent to prison for merely speaking in a country where burglars commonly do not receive a prison sentence  until their third or fourth conviction and violent assaults by blacks on whites receive community service, for example, . http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p.

Nor will the effects of meekly pleading guilty be over after your court appearance is done and your sentence served.  You will probably lose your job and find it difficult to get another one.  If you are in higher education you will probably be excluded from the university, either temporarily or permanently.  Even if you do complete your course, your job prospects will be blighted because prospective employers will have somewhere in their minds a memory of your trial and the publicity surrounding it. Depending on your social circumstances, you may find yourself socially ostracized if you are middle class or be an object of fear to anyone because you will carry the label “racist” around with you and that will make you seem dangerous to most people regardless of their private views on race and immigration. In short, pleading guilty is never going to be an easy way out.   At worst, if you are going to pick up a criminal record and possibly a prison sentence, you can  keep your self-respect intact by fighting the case on the grounds of freedom of expression and the right to tell the truth about the most profound act of treason, the permitting of mass immigration.

——————————————————————-

My correspondence with Nick Griffin  

To:                      Philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk

Subject:              a crack at Blair?

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:     19 June 2005 21:24:02

 

Dear Mr Henderson

It occurs to me that there’s just an outside chance that something you have on Blair and his cronies (and/or the BBC) might just be able to be worked in to my defence against Race Act prosecution in Leeds Crown Court later this year.

The problem, of course, is making a connection so that the judge would rule such material relevant and admissable, but if you have anything that you think could possibly fit the bill, and which you would like to see given a very public airing in full view of the national media, then please drop me an email at your convenience.

Yours sincerely

 

Nick Griffin

British National Party

————————————————————-

To:                      BNP Chairman

Subject:              Re: a crack at Blair?

From:                  Robert Henderson <philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk>

Date:     21 June 2005 13:45:35

OK. Just answer me one question for the moment. Do you want to frighten Blair and co into dropping the prosecution or do you positively want the case to go ahead so you can use it as a political platform? I

don’t care which it is but I would need to know before we go any further.

RH

———————————————–

To:                      Robert Henderson <philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk>

Subject:              Re: a crack at Blair?

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:                   21 June 2005 15:58:02

Option a) would be marginally better because then we can always get a bite of cherry b) at a later date by going head-to-head with their proposed Islamophile ‘law’.

N

—————————————————————-

To:                      BNP Chairman

Subject:              Suggested action you should take

From:                  Robert Henderson <philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk>

Date:     04 July 2005 17:11:57

 

Dear Mr Griffin,

I have had a good think about your request. In principle I am willing to help you and those being prosecuted with you. I do this simply because you are the subject of both a political law and a political prosecution. However, I must insist on one thing: that you all are entirely honest with me.

You say you ideally wish to frighten Blair and co out of the prosecution. What I am going to suggest will both serve that purpose and also provide a good skeleton for your defence if you get to court.

Your tactics

 

I suggest the following:

1. Call the Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith

Calling Goldsmith would be legitimate simply because he is both a politician and the man who took the decision to prosecute. You should argue that there is no proper separation of powers and consequently no fair judicial process. The Human Rights Act provides for a fair judicial process. There should be grounds to challenge the prosecutions on those grounds alone, i.e., that the judicial process is unfair.

More particularly, you can argue that he should be called as witness on the grounds that the prosecution has been undertaken for political not judicial reasons and without any consideration of the public interest.

There is public evidence that Goldsmith does allow his politics to colour his legal judgement. He changed his mind over the advice he gave to Blair on the legality of theinvading Iraq. On 7th March 2003 Goldsmith was doubtful about the legality of the war without a second UN resolution – his opinion has now been published. By 17th March 2003 he was telling Blair there was no problem without a second resolution. Goldsmith has never explained satisfactorily why he changed his mind in the space of ten days.

You should also argue (1) that the law itself is incompatible with democracy and (2) that there is a great public interest in not prosecuting, because the people being prosecuted represent a political party which is both acting within the democratic rules and has significant electoral support. You should further argue that the Human Rights Act protects both freedom of speech and democratic political activity.

2. Call Blair as a witness. The justification for this would be the collusion by Blair and Goldsmith over the Iraq advice and Goldsmith’s change of opinion. If you get permission to call Goldsmith it would be difficult for the court to refuse the calling of Blair.

3. Challenge what is meant by racially inciting. Get them to define it. Introduce examples of racial incitement by ethnic minorities. The Koran is a particularly good source of embarrassing quotes – I send you a selection by separate email.

4. Accumulate examples of ethnic abuse of whites which has not been prosecuted. If you know of whites who have made complaints to the police of racial incitement by blacks or Asians against whites which the police have failed to investigate or the attorney-general failed to prosecute, introduce these into evidence to show that Goldsmith or his predecessors are not even handed. I send you examples of complaints I have made which have not been investigated let alone prosecuted.

Calling people as witnesses

If you call someone as a witness you cannot cross-examine them. This puts considerable restrictions on what can be asked and the manner of the questioning (although a decent barrister should be able to get most of what he wants out of a witness even under those circumstances). Where a witness is reluctant – and the likes of Blair and Goldsmith would do everything they can to avoid being called – you can make application to the court for them to be treated as a hostile witness. If granted, this allows them to be cross-examined in all but name. Even allowing for the political pressure on the court, I doubt if any judge would fail to rule that they were hostile witnesses.

Your legal representation

Those labeled as racists generally have a problem with legal representation, both in getting it at all and in the nature of the representation when it is found. Barristers in particular have a habit of distancing them from their clients with words along the line of “My client is a vile racist but that does not mean he is guilty”. Consequently, it is vital that you give written instructions to both your solicitor and counsel forbidding such behaviour and laying out clearly how you want your defence conducted.

Remember, you instruct your lawyers, not they you. Once they have accepted your instructions they are bound to obey them r resign from the case. However, the courts look very unfavourably on counsel resign in criminal cases, so once you have got your instructions accepted there is a good chance they will be followed.

Lawyers generally will kick up about a client who wishes his  instructions to be followed – they are often the most arrogant of people who take the view that the conduct of the  case has damn all to do with the client. But you must face them down on this.

Representing yourself

In extremis, i.e., no one will take your instructions,  represent yourself. I would normally be very loth to  suggest this because there is a great deal of truth in the legal maxim that a man who has himself for a client has a fool for a client, but as it is a political trial it could be your best course of action.

If you do take this course, you should prepare yourself by producing schedules of questions. These should be primary and supplementary questions in this fashion:

Primary Question: Lord Goldsmith, did you discuss the case  with any member of the Labour Party before making your  decision to prosecute?

Secondary questions.

If Goldsmith answers YES ask: Which member or members did  you discuss it with?

If Goldsmith answers NO ask: Did you discuss the case with  any member of the Labour Party after making your decision to  prosecute?

In short, your schedules must anticipate as far as is possible the responses a witness will make.

Questions to witnesses should be “closed” wherever possible,  i.e., the questions should permit only a yes or no answer.

There are some questions which must be asked which will not allow a yes or no, for example, in the demonstration  questions above there would obviously come a point where you  would be forced to ask a question along the lines of “What  did you say to X”. If Goldsmith admitted that he had spoken  with a Labour Party member before he decided to prosecute,  you would probably need to ask such a question, although if  you are cross examining you could keep suggesting scenarios  to the witness, e.g., “Did you say Y to X?”.

My involvement with the Blairs

I am assuming that you have familiarised yourself with the  detailed case from my website.

I can say as a matter of objective fact that Blair is at the  least very wary of me. There is first the amazing fact that  Blair and his wife were willing to get involved in a criminal  prosecution involving me during the six most important weeks  of Blair’s life – the 1997 election campaign. The killer fact  for them is that they did not go to the police when I sent  them the letters but only after I circulated to the media the  letters and the replies I had received from their offices.

Second, is the remarkably experience I have had with the  police since 1997. I made various formal complaints against  the Blairs and the Mirror in 1997 and several since  due to  various attempts in internet  newsgroups  to incite  violence against me.  against me.

Normally such complaints would be dealt with by a detective  sergeant. To date I have dealt with a Det Chief Supt (head  of the Met’s Dept of Professional Standards, a very powerful copper indeed), a Scotland Yard Det Supt and two Det Chief  Inspectors. All came to my home when I requested it. That such senior officers have been assigned to my complaints  shows that the police and Blair are colluding when it comes  to dealing with me.

Consequently, if the authorities think you will be putting  me in the witness box, they will probably chicken out.

The best public document relating to me to wave at them is  the EDM put down by Sir Richard Body, viz:

On 10 November 1999, Sir Richard Body MP, put down this  Early Day Motion in the House of Commons:

That this House regrets that the Right honourable  Member for Sedgefield [Tony Blair] attempted to persuade the Metropolitan Police to bring criminal  charges against Robert Henderson, concerning the Right honourable Member’s complaints to the police  of an offence against the person, malicious letters and racial insult arising from letters  Robert Henderson had written to the Right  Honourable Member complaining about various  instances of publicly-reported racism involving the  Labour Party; and that, after the Crown Prosecution Service rejected the complaints of the Right  honourable Member and the Right honourable Member  failed to take any civil action against Robert  Henderson, Special Branch were employed to spy upon  Robert Henderson, notwithstanding that Robert  Henderson had been officially cleared of any  illegal action.

Yours sincerely,

 

 

Robert Henderson 4 7 2005

——————————————————————

To:                      Robert Henderson <philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk>

Subject:              Re: Suggested action you should take

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:                   05 July 2005 13:31:35

Of course. Thanks – though I usually tell lawyers that I think Will Shakespeare had the best idea about how to deal with them, and generally they take it well as they know deep down that they’re parasites.

N

Liberals in a multicultural denialfest

Robert Henderson

Nine Muslim men living in Rochdale Lancashire – eight from Pakistan and one from Afghanistan – have been convicted of  various offences arising from what  is coyly  described as “street grooming” , but whose honest description would be at best the forced prostitution of girls under the age of consent  and at worst  repeated gang-rape often accomplished when the girls were too drunk to know what was happening. . (The girls were all under the age of  16 -the British age of consent for intercourse – and abuse began when some were as young as 13).

Strikingly,  every one of the  47 girls identified as being the subject of abuse by the gang were white. Cue for liberals to dash into a  frenzy of terrified make-believe as they desperately tried  to convince themselves and the public that vicious and sustained abuse of  exclusively white girls by Asian men  had no racial motivation.   Thankfully there have been some  honourable exceptions in the mainstream media to this wilful self-delusion,  for example, Allison Pearson of the Telegraph  pointed out the absurdity and  dishonesty of  the denial of racism in pithy fashion:

“Nine white men are found guilty of grooming young Asian girls, aged between 13 and 15, whom they picked up on the streets of London. The girls were lured with free fish and chips before being raped or pimped as prostitutes. One Asian girl from a children’s home was used for sex by 20 white men in one night. Police insist the crimes were not “racially motivated”.

Imagine if that story were true. Would you really believe that race was not a factor in those hateful crimes? Do you think that, despite conclusive DNA evidence from a girl raped by two men, the police would have hesitated to press charges because the suspects were white and it could make things a bit sensitive in the white community? Would the Crown Prosecution Service have refused to prosecute, allowing the child-sex ring to flourish for three more anguished years?’ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/allison-pearson/9254651/Asian-sex-gang-young-girls-betrayed-by-our-fear-of-racism.html)

The tactics of liberal denial

Any normal human being would have no problem in seeing  the very obvious racial element  in the case,   but white liberals have found no difficulty in calling black white.  Some, such as the ineffable Asian MP Keith Vaz , opted for simple denial: “ Right at the start of this trial the BNP were outside demonstrating saying that this was a race issue. I do not believe it is a race issue.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9253978/Keith-Vaz-says-child-sex-ring-case-not-race-issue.html).

A real gem came from the lips of the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester whose force investigated the case:

‘…following the trial at Liverpool Crown Court, Greater Manchester Police’s Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood, said: “It just happens that in this particular area and time, the demographics were that these were Asian men.

“However, in large parts of the country we are seeing on-street grooming, child sexual exploitation happening in each of our towns and it isn’t about a race issue.”’ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9263050/Claiming-Rochdale-grooming-not-about-race-is-fatuous-Trevor-Phillips.html).  A more exquisite example of the religiously pc state senior police officers in Britain have reached would be difficult to find.  I urge  anyone who believes that  there is nationwide “street grooming”  proportionately undertaken by whites to try to find evidence for this. I should be very surprised if they can come up with such evidence. If it did occur one may be sure that it would be given massive prominence by the media and produce hordes of examples when the subject is Googled.   When I tried Googling  it drew a blank.

The more sophisticated  amongst the liberal deniers have turned to the well tried and tested liberal left ploys of claiming  that the perpetrators  were not true Muslims and  putting up a smokescreen through the creation of a false equivalence between white and non-white sex offenders.  Here is Aljazeera playing the “not true Muslims” card:

“These men convicted in Rochdale may have been nominally Muslim, but they were clearly not practising the true essence of their faith. Many so-called “Muslim criminals” (as identified by the media) are in fact people who might drink, take drugs or engage in other practices considered haram [“forbidden”]. Individuals who commit abuse are abusers, full stop.” (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/201251371618264468.html).

Compare the Rochdale offences with the sex offences committed by Roman Catholic priests. Would anyone want to argue the priests  were only nominally Catholic? I rather doubt it.

Not to be outdone the Guardian sternly advised that “The defendants in question are at most nominally Muslim. Practising Muslims certainly aren’t supposed to have sex with children.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/08/asian-sex-gangs-on-street-grooming?newsfeed=true)

The Guardian managed to be both dishonest in its refusal to address the fact that not only the Rochdale case,  but the large majority of this type of group abuse in Britain is conducted by Muslims, and  profoundly wrong when it claims “Practising Muslims certainly aren’t supposed to have sex with children.” Girls of the age used by the Rochdale groups and younger are taken as wives – not merely betrothed – in the Muslim world  and Mohammed himself did took wives at a very young age,  the latter being especially important because Mohammed is the model of the Muslim man.

The false equivalence ploy consists of comparing apples with oranges  and ignoring the widely differing numbers of whites – and Asians – especially in this context  Muslims Asians – in Britain.   Here is an example:

“Martin Narey, former chief executive of children’s charity Barnardo’s, said there was “troubling evidence” that Asians were “overwhelmingly represented” in prosecutions for street grooming and trafficking of girls in towns such as Derby, Leeds, Blackpool, Blackburn, Oldham and Rochdale.

He told BBC Radio 4′s Today programme: “That is not to condemn a whole community, most Asians would absolutely abhor what we have seen in the last few days in the Rochdale trial, and I don’t think this is about white girls.

“It’s sadly because vulnerable girls on the street at night are generally white rather than more strictly-parented Asian girls, but there is a real problem here.”

Mr Narey, who is [also]  a former head of the prison service, added however that sex offenders were “overwhelmingly white” and that there was evidence that those guilty of online grooming were “disproportionately white”. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9253978/Keith-Vaz-says-child-sex-ring-case-not-race-issue.html).

Narey  begins by comparing  the apples of  the girls repeatedly gang-raped  by the Rochdale group  with the oranges of  sex offenders in  general, an utterly meaningless comparison because sex offences  in Britain can be anything from someone downloading anything deemed to be sexual images of a 17 year old girl  to the rape and murder of a toddler. He goes on to state  ‘that there was evidence that those guilty of online grooming were “disproportionately white”’.    This is a claim made by quite a few  people commenting on the case in the media, for example, by Jane Martinson in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/may/09/rochdale-grooming-trial-race). She  cites her source as the  CPS’ Violence against Women and Girls 2010/11 report (http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/CPS_VAW_report_2011.pdf).

What the report actually says is this:

“Ethnicity

In 2010-11, 75% of VAWG  [Violence against Women and Girls] crime defendants  were identified as belonging to the  White British category and 79% were categorised as White (as in the previous year). 6% of defendants were identified as Asian, and a further 6% were identified as Black, similar figures to the previous year . Over half of victim ethnicity was not recorded, so is not reported on within this report. “

As  the population of the UK is around 90% white,   the representation of whites is certainly disproportionate,  disproportionately small that is.   It is also interesting to note that the ethnicity of the victims was not routinely recorded and  consequently no figures  are given in the report  for this aspect of the crimes. Could it be that the percentage of white victims is disproportionately large because blacks and Asians  concentrate on white women and girls?

Apart from the misrepresentation of the statistics,   there is the ignoring of  the degree of  the offence.  It is one thing to be sexually abused by a single person , quite another to be gang-raped regularly.   The Rochdale abusers were engaged in the most serious category of sex offences.  Try as I might, I cannot find a case of white men acting in a conspiracy to persistently abuse under-age girls in that fashion.  Nor, perhaps most tellingly, can I find any example of white men gang-raping non-white under-age girls or of individual white men abusing non-white under-age girls.   I can also vouch for the fact that, at least as it is reported in the mainstream media,  sexual abuse of non-whites by whites in Britain  is extremely rare.  For nearly two years I wrote a column entitled The joy of diversity for the  magazine  Right Now! now sadly defunct.  The column dealt with the ever growing ethnic minority criminal mayhem being wreaked on Britain.  To do this I kept a cuttings file  which included  all the serious sexual crimes committed by blacks and Asians.  I also kept a  cuttings file of all the similar  crimes committed by whites.  There was a steady stream of sexual offences by blacks (particularly) and Asians , many of them committed against whites. I  only  once came across a  case involving a white attacker  and a non-white victim.

In the days  following  the claims that there was no racial element to the crimes was increasingly challenged, although  what people thought constituted the racial element was almost invariably a cultural explanation rather than a true racial one.  Trevor Phillips, the black chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission,  eventually joined this new bandwagon  after remaining silent for a week:

“Anybody who says that the fact that most of the men are Asian and most of the children are white is not relevant – that’s just fatuous.

‘“These are closed communities essentially and I worry that in these communities there are people who knew what was going on and didn’t say anything, either because they’re frightened or because they’re so separated from the rest of the communities they think ‘Oh, that’s just how white people let their children carry on, we don’t need to do anything’.”

He said it was important also that the role played by the authorities in the area was properly investigated.

“If anybody in any of the agencies that are supposed to be caring for these children – schools, social services and so on – took the view that being aggressively interventionalist to save these children would lead to the demonisation of some group because of the ethnicity … then it is a national scandal and something that would need to be dealt with urgently,” he said. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9263050/Claiming-Rochdale-grooming-not-about-race-is-fatuous-Trevor-Phillips.html).

Phillips’ intervention is especially interesting because he has a habit of playing what might be described as the liberal’s controlling non-pc card when the absurdities of political correctness become dangerously glaring.  He never becomes honestly non-pc,  just non-pc enough to distract from whatever pc absurdity is threatening to become a focus for serious dissent amongst native Britons.  Had Phillips been unambiguously honest in this case he would not have waffled on about “closed communities”  or  attributed their general silence on the subject to a contemptuous “Oh, that’s just how white people let their children carry on”.  Instead he would have asked why  the “communities” were closed or questioned exactly how those in these “communities” could have honestly  believed that the sexual exploitation of under-age girls, some as young as 13, was acceptable. He would have asked why all the girls were white rather than being drawn from vulnerable girls of all races.  If Phillips had been really daring he would have raised the  most difficult question of all, namely, in what sense are ethnic minority groups meaningfully  British if they see themselves as so culturally separate from the British mainstream that they will happily accept the abuse of young girls drawn from the native white population?

The crimes were objectively racist

The objective facts of the case say the  Rochdale  crimes were racially motivated.  It was white girls who were exclusively chosen.  If the choice  of  girls  had not  been  decided by race, ethnicity or religion, a mixture of races and ethnicities  amongst the victims would be expected.  The culprits could have chosen Asian girls, including Muslims from their own ethnic group .  If they  had decided they would not use Muslims – although making  that choice would have fallen within the definition of racism that is presently used – but everyone else was fair game,  they could have gone after non-Muslim  Asians from the Subcontinent  such as Sikhs and Hindus, Asians of far Eastern ancestry and  black  as well as white girls.

The claim commonly made by  Asians  that Muslim girls or Asian girls generally  are strictly controlled by their families  whereas white girls  are not and consequently white girls are targeted for abuse  simply because they are available and Asian girls are not on offer  will not stand up to scrutiny. Most, possibly all, of the white girls abused in the Rochdale case were in local authority care or from seriously troubled homes .  These were girls who had effectively been left without any adult  guidance or supervision. There are substantial numbers  of black and Asian  girls in the same position Moreover, because  ethnic minorities  in Britain are overwhelmingly  concentrated in the large urban areas  rather than distributed  throughout the country as is the case with whites,  the likelihood of vulnerable black or Asian girls being available in or close to the areas where Asian abusers live is high. This is the case with the Rochdale  abusers, Rochdale being part of Greater Manchester which has both a large and variegated non-white population.

There is also the contemptuous  attitude Muslim men often have  towards white women to bring into the equation. Here is Allison Pearson again:

“I spoke to Mr Danczuk [the local MP]  yesterday, and he strenuously disputes claims that this is a one-off case, or even a recent phenomenon. The grooming of white girls by a small sub-section of the Pakistani community was being discussed in Blackburn council 15 years ago. Recently, the MP was outraged when male relatives of the accused in a similar child-sex case came to his constituency surgery to ask for support. “They spoke about white women in an exceptionally derogatory way. I nearly threw them out.”

Danczuk’s reported comments also demonstrate  the most shameful  aspect of this affair: the persistent refusal of the authorities – everyone from the local politicians and  the council care workers to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)  – to  honestly address the complaints of sexual abuse because of a fear of being thought racist and most probably a fear , at least at the political level,  of having such an incendiary topic – immigrants targeting white British girls  for forced sex – brought before a  public who are already deeply concerned with the effects of mass post-war immigration. Tellingly, the CPS prosecutor who  overturned the original CPS decision not to prosecute was a Muslim Nazir Afzal, whose race and ethnicity protected him from charges of racism.

Complaints have been heard from non-Muslim Asians  whose origins lie in the Indian subcontinent – primarily Sikhs and Hindus –  that  media description of the Rochdale gang as Asian  is misleading because it  tars all Asians with the same brush when it is only Muslims who  were involved and are  rumoured to be involved in other similar instances of abuse. They may have a point. Despite assiduous use of search engines I cannot find any instances of Sikh or Hindu gang grooming of  girls. Interestingly, in my searches  I  came across Hindu and Sikh complaints from 2011 that Sikh and Hindu girls are being targeted by Muslims:

“January 11, 2011

Poush Shukla Saptami, Kaliyug Varsha 5112

Amritsar (Punjab): A day after UKs’ former home secretary Jack Straw blamed some Pakistani Muslim men for targeting “vulnerable” White girls sexually, UK’s Hindu and Sikh organizations also publicly accused Muslim groups of the same offence.

Straw, in an interview to the BBC recently, had said, “…there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men…who target vulnerable young white girls…they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care … who they think are easy meat.”

Feeling emboldened by Straw’s statement, UK’s Hindu and Sikh organizations have also come in open and accused some Pakistani men of specifically targeting Hindu and Sikh girls. “This has been a serious concern for the last decade,” said Hardeep Singh of Network of Sikh Organizations (NSO) while talking to TOI on Monday.

Sikhs and Hindus are annoyed that Straw had shown concern for White girls and not the Hindu and the Sikh teenage girls who have been coaxed by some Pakistani men for sex and religious conversion.

“Straw does other communities a disservice by suggesting that only white girls were targets of this predatory behaviour. We raised the issue of our girls with the previous government and the police on several occasions over the last decade. This phenomenon has been there because a minority of Islamic extremists view all ‘non believers’ as legitimate targets,” said director NSO Inderjit Singh.

Targeted sexual offences and forced conversions of Hindu and Sikh girls was not a new phenomenon in the UK, said Ashish Joshio from Media Monitoring group. 

“This has been going on for decades in the UK . Young Muslim men have been boasting about seducing the Kaffir (unbeliever) women. The Hindu and the Sikh communities must be commended for showing both restraint and maturity under such provocation,” he added.

Hardeep said that in 2007, The Hindu Forum of Britain claimed that hundreds of Hindu and Sikh girls had been first romantically coaxed and later intimidated and converted by Muslim men. (http://www.hindujagruti.org/news/11088.html).

This strikes me as  differing in type from the abuse of white girls described in the Rochdale trial, because the Sikh and Hindu girls seem to have been recruited for conversion  with sex used a  tool to achieve this rather than simply using  the girls as sexual vessels.  Nonetheless, if the report is true –I say if because of the considerable animosity between Muslims and Sikhs and Hindus and the general appetite amongst ethnic minorities for parading their victimhood means  it is best to be cautious about the veracity of the claims – the reported behaviour does display the same contemptuous mentality towards women shown in the abuse of  the white victims in the Rochdale case.

The reported behaviour  of  one of the Rochdale defendants, a 59-year-old man who was not named for legal reasons, most probably because naming him would have identified a minor involved in the case,  during the court hearing  gives  a flavour of the mentality which both drove them to commit the crimes and to excuse themselves:

“The man seen as the ringleader, a 59-year-old who cannot be named for legal reasons, was jailed for a total of 19 years for conspiracy, two counts of rape, aiding and abetting a rape, sexual assault and a count of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.

The defendant was previously banned from court because of his threatening behaviour and for calling the judge a “racist bastard”.

Simon Nichol, defending, earlier said his client did not wish to attend the sentencing hearing and had ordered the barrister not to put any mitigation before the judge on his behalf.

“He has objected from the start for being tried by an all white jury and subsequent events have confirmed his fears,” Mr Nichol said.

“He does not take back any of the comments he has made to your honour, to the jury, or to anyone else in the court during the course of the trial.

“He believes his convictions have nothing to do with justice but result from the faith and the race of the defendants.

“He further believes that society failed the girls in this case before the girls even met them and now that failure is being blamed on a weak minority group.” (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/crime/arrogant-to-the-end-as-rochdale-child-sex-ring-leader-snubs-sentencing-of-racist-court-7727757.html).

So there you have it, in his mind it was not him but society which is  to blame – and by implication white society and nothing to do with his part of the UK population –  and the only reason he was being tried and convicted was racism on the part of ol’ whitey.

The nature of Islam

The predominance of sub continental Muslims in this type of crime raises a question, what is it that makes them and not non-Muslims  from the same region  commit this type of crime?   It could be that this type of crime is committed by, for example,  Sikhs and Hindus, but there does not appear to be any evidence for it). If that is the true situation it could be that Islam itself encourages the mentality  displayed by the Rochdale offenders  to develop.

The Koran makes no bones about the subordinate position of women by

1.  Sanctioning polygamy – up to four wives  for any Muslim man, although  Mohammed was given a special dispensation to have an unlimited number  and had a reported nine wives plus slave-girls :

“Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives whom you have granted dowries and the slave-girls whom Allah has given you as booty; the daughters of your paternal and maternal uncles and of your paternal and maternal aunts who fled with you; and the other women who gave themselves to you and whom you wished to take in marriage. This privilege is yours alone, being granted to no other believer. (Sura (chapter):  The Confederate Tribes).

2.  Explicitly saying women are subordinate to men:

“’Men  have authority over women because  Allah  has  made  the  one superior to the other,  and  because   they  spend  their wealth to  maintain  them. “(Sura   ‘Women’). 

3. Sanctioning the corporal punishment of wives by husbands:

“Good  women are obedient.  They guard their unseen  parts  because Allah guarded them.  As for those from whom  you fear disobedience,  admonish them and send them  to  beds  apart and beat them.”  (Sura   ‘Women’). 

4. Allotting a lesser portion of any inheritance to women than is allotted to their male relatives:

“A male shall inherit twice as much as a female…”  (Sura   ‘Women’). 

5. Enforcing  Islam onto non-Muslim women if they wish to marry a Muslim:

“’You shall not wed pagan women, unless they embrace    the faith. A believing slave-girl is better than an  idolatress…’ (Sura ‘The Cow’).

6.  The idea of slave-girls as sexual toys  given by Allah as rewards to the faithful as in the passage cited in 1 above:  “the slave girls whom Allah has given you as booty…”

The general attitude  towards women in the Koran is epitomised by the scorn poured on Arab  pagans who worshipped female deities  and Angels who were the daughters of Allah : “Would Allah choose daughters for himself and sons for you?”  (Sura Ornaments of Gold).

The quotes are all taken from the Penguin English translation by N J Dawood, a native Arabic speaker.

It is easy to see how  any Muslim, even a white western convert, would have difficulty in subscribing to the idea of sexual equality if they were sincere in their faith.  There is not for the Muslim the luxury of re-interpreting the Koran  at will as modern Christians do with the Bible,  because it is the literal word of God  transmitted to Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel.  There are disputes within Islam about how the Koran and supporting texts such as the Hadith should  be interpreted,  but this is generally interpretation  of what  a particular passage or practice means in literal terms  – a good example would be the punishment for adultery which is given at different points  in the Koran  as stoning to death and flogging: the interpreter of the Koran has to decide which is the correct punishment not whether there should be a physical or indeed any punishment for adultery.  Consequently, unlike  mainstream Christianity in Britain, there can be no convenient shrugging off of passages in the Koran  incompatible with modern Western society because they are deemed to be either  unimportant expressions of the social state of former times rather than the core beliefs of the religion  or, more fancifully,  by claiming that they  were not meant as  literal instructions to the faithful.  It is also a  fact that the Koran gives much less scope for plausible “fudging”  of  inconvenient passages (for liberals)  than the Bible,   because it is  both much shorter with fewer contradictions and is, for  Muslims, a  transmission from God  through a single man rather than being a collection of writings -drawn  from many sources, times , places  and people  – working out a religious destiny, as is the case with the Bible.

Any Muslim man would be faced with a dilemma if he wished to adhere strictly to the Koran whilst living in a Western society  because the Koran instructs him to behave in ways which run strictly counter to the values of Western society, including the position of  women.  It is true that  there is  Islamic tradition which require Muslims in countries which are not Islamic to abide by the laws of the society in which  they live, but there is no central Islamic authority which gives such traditions the force of universal  application such as exists with the Catholic church.  Alternative interpretations are handed down by different Islamic authorities.  A Muslim could quite  reasonably  choose an interpretation which suited strict Islamic observance in a non-Islamic country , arguing that it was what the Koran  required and to do any other would be the act of a poorly observant  Muslim.

That would the case of a sincere devout Muslim. But the fact that the Koran gives specific authority to behave in ways, including the  physical chastisement of women ,  which are incompatible with a secular society  such as modern Britain  means it  also gives a green light to less honest  or sincere Muslim men to do what they will with women  simply because it suits their purposes and carnal desires.

It might be objected that men who are not Muslims in many societies have similar ideas on the condition of women.   Most dramatically, the existence of “honour killings”  of women who do not conform to  patriarchal customs  is widespread amongst Sikhs and Hindus and the casual treatment of women by black men is legendary.  But what these non-Muslim men do not have is a religious sanction for such behaviour.  There is a good deal of difference between custom, powerful as that can be, and explicit permission from God, which is the most potent of emotional intoxicants and sanctions.   There is also a qualitative difference between “honour killings” where a female member of the family  goes against  the cultural norms of the ethnic group by , for example,  forming a relationship with someone who is not a member of the group or refusing to accept an arranged marriage,  and taking young girls who are outside the group for sexual abuse.  In the case of the “honour killing”, the act is directed against someone within the group and is intended to preserve the cultural norms of the group. The taking of girls from outside the group is simply the satisfying of sexual desire.

The  age of the girls abused may also have something to do with Islam.  As mentioned previously, girls of the age of those abused by the Rochdale defendants are frequently married in the Muslim world.  In addition, the Koran’s sanctioning of slavegirls  as sexual toys  given by Allah “as booty” to deserving Muslim men may also come into play. It would not be that massive an emotional  stretch for a Muslim man to see white girls as a modern version of slavegirl booty.

There is something else in Islam which may have contributed to the crimes.  The Koran is extremely aggressive towards non-Muslims and makes no bones about the fact that Muslims are the chosen people of Allah. Here are a few example quotes:

‘As  for the unbelievers,  the fire of Hell  awaits  them.  Death shall not deliver them,  nor shall its               torment be ever lightened for them.  Thus shall the  thankless  be  rewarded.’  (Sura ‘The  Creator’).

‘Prophet,  make  war  on the  unbelievers  and  the  hypocrites and deal vigorously with them.  Hell  is their home.  (Sura ‘Repentance’).

‘When the sacred months are over slay the idolators  wherever you find them. Arrest them,  besiege them, and  lie in ambush  everywhere for them.’  (Sura ‘’Repentance’).

 ’Because of their iniquity, we forbade the Jews the  good  things  which  were  formerly  allowed  them;  because  time after time they debarred others  from  the  path of Allah;  because they practice usury  –  although they were forbidden it – and cheat  others  of their possessions.’ (Sura ‘Women’).

The final quote is especially telling because the Jews are one of the peoples of the book who are supposedly given special protection under Islam.

As with the subordination of women, the fact that the Koran – which is the literal word of God for Muslims –  explicitly and repeatedly  states that Islam  and its adherents are above the rest of humanity will feed the idea that Muslims in non-Islamic countries should both remain separate from the majority population and have the right to use members of the population who are not Muslim in a manner which they would not countenance for their fellow Muslims.

How ideologies fail   

The reason why this type of racist abuse  has been allowed to grow is the ever more paralysing effect   political correctness  and its component  multiculturalism has on British society.  Whites, especially white Britons,  have become at best deeply afraid and paranoid about doing something which could get them held up as a racist and at worst have succumbed to the incessant politically correct propaganda so that they believe ethnic minorities are in some curious way granted dispensation from the dictates of both traditional Western morality  and, ironically,   the supposedly essential  maxims of political correctness.  The most grotesque example of the mentality I can think of is the case of a young white girl Rhea Page who was attacked by four Somali  girls whilst walking with her boyfriend. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p).   The attack was vicious and sustained – it can be viewed at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgIN4kBsNRg –  and the Somalis were  screaming “white bitch” and “white slag yet the judge ruled there was no racist motive and  also refused to jail the Somalis on the grounds that they had taken alcohol which was not part of their culture.

What will happen now? There will be  further action by the police and the CPS on the type of offences exposed in Rochdale – further arrests have already been made (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9261748/Arrests-made-in-second-Rochdale-sex-grooming-scandal.html), but  the question is not whether one or two more trials will be held as tokens  but whether the grip of political correctness  can be loosened.  It is just possible that this is happening already without any conscious decision being made to do so by those with power.

Secular ideologies never  stand the  test  of time if they become the elite ideology.  Marxism is the classic example,  both because of the scope of its ostensible implementation and the length of time it existed, or  arguably still exists in the case of China and North Korea. Such ideologies  fail because they never accord with reality. They may have some truths but  all seriously clash with what is.  This means that those dependent on the ideology have to revise either the reality to accord better with reality or tell lies to cover the gap between the ideology and reality.

Ideologies are also revised to fit the ambitions of individuals and the circumstances of particular societies.  These often further remove the ideology from reality. The first great Marxist revision was the denial by Lenin  that  the proletarian revolution could only take place when a large  degree of industrialisation had created an industrial proletariat. The second great revision was Stalin’s acceptance that “socialism in one country”  had to replace the  internationalist  credo of Marx  for at least a period of time.   To those breaches in Marx’s  system was added the ever growing corruption of the Soviet elite and the demoralisation of the people.  The upshot was that Soviet propaganda became ever more absurd as the reality of Soviet life jarred ever more with fictitious official reports of soaring harvests and industrial production.  This growing discord between what Soviet citizens experienced and what they were told was happening was an important  agent  in the fall of the Soviet Union.

Political correctness is divorced from reality more emphatically than any other dominant secular ideology of the past century.   Marxism, even in its revised Leninist and Stalinist  forms,  at least appealed to a widespread  human desire for equality of material condition and social status, or at least a desire for no great inequality.   Even  at its most pure political correctness asks human beings to deny vitally  important natural human behaviours  by pretending that no distinction can be meaningfully or morally be  made between races, ethnicities, cultures,  religions, sexes or sexual  behaviours.  It seeks to treat all members of homo sapiens as interchangeable, sees  the continuing idea of nations as pernicious and insists that no element of the universal and natural human trait of tribalism be countenanced.

The pure version of political correctness would be very damaging and seriously divorced  from reality. But the version of political correctness that actually exists is not pure and is a political recipe for widespread political unrest. It applies double standards when dealing with different racial and ethnic groups and has been reduced to no more than a means of privileging some groups over others. As those who are privileged are invariably the minorities and those disadvantaged  invariably the majority native populations,  the lies needed to produce  an official narrative in  accord with political correctness become ever more implausible  – the Rhea Page case and the attitude towards the Rochdale  defendants  are stark  examples – and the anger within the majority native populations grows.  There is a growing possibility that at least the multicultural part of political correctness may come tumbling down under the weight of its own fantastic absurdity.

Politically incorrect film reviews – Outlaw and Made in England

Nick Love and Shane Meadows, two directors of white workingclass origin who like nothing better than to tell the world how much they empathise with the white workingclass world they grew up in. In pursuit of this they make films such as Football Factory (Love) and 24/7 (Meadows). As films their products are watchable but they are also profoundly dishonest. The problem is that both Love and Meadows have donned the liberal bigot coat of many pc colours and the white workingclass world they show is robbed of one essential ingredient: an honest portrayal of the racial friction between workingclass whites and black and Asian immigrants and their descendents.

The dishonesty takes one of two forms: race is either completely ignored (Football Factory) or the story is skewed so that (1) non-white characters are included in an attempt to show workingclass whites and nonwhites “living in harmony” and (2) to allow some of the white characters to be represented as racist boneheads and some to display a white liberal’s appreciation of “the joy of diversity”. Outlaw and Made in England display these latter traits.

Outlaw could have been an English taxi driver. It has a first rate cast which includes Sean Bean, Bob Hoskins and Danny Dyer. The story is of a group of men who form a vigilante gang in response to the supposed crime wave politicians are always feeding the populace. Bean as the leader of the vigilante group gives a dynamic charismatic performance as a workingclass northerner Royal Marine just returned from Iraq to London. . The rest of his gang bar one are entirely plausible, being white and working class Londoners. The “bar one” is a posh black QC who supposedly joins the group because his wife is killed by gangsters on behalf of a Mr Big whom the posh black QC is prosecuting for the Crown. The killer is inevitably white.

The sheer improbability of this scenario – white workingclass lad, posh black QC – alone made the film ridiculous. The clunking political correctness makes it wearisome : the Hoskins character (a serving detective) fawns over the black barrister whom he is part protecting part driving around, utterly robs Hoskins of his normal upfront bluntness, while the rest of the gang never think to say “’ere, what’s this posh black geezer doing with us?” The clear message of the film is that this is that race is utterly unimportant and that everyone no matter what their background is perfectly happy to muck in together and violent crime is really a white thing – none of the characters the gang attacks is non-white. The film is worth seeing for one reason as a film – Bean’s performance.

Made in England is rather more subtle. Here we have a skinhead gang in Lincolnshire around the time of the Falklands (1982). The gang , led by “good guy” Woody ( Joe Gilgun) adopt an eleven year old boy Shaun (Thomas Tugoose) whose father has been killed fighting in the Falklands. The gang, despite being skinhead, has a black member (natch). Meadows attempts to justify this improbable scenario by claiming that the roots of the skinhead phenomenon lay in white boys taking a liking to black music in the late sixties. Whether that is true or not, by the early eighties skinhead culture was resolutely anti-immigrant and the existence of a gang of skinheads who not only have a black member but never mention race even when the black member is not with them, is improbable in the extreme.

All goes along swimmingly in a multi-culti fashion until an ex-con Combo (Stephen Graham) returns from prison and tries to take over the gang and inject a racial element into it. He merely splits the gang between himself and Woody. Bingo! We have the “good” skinheads (Woody) and the “bad” skinheads Combo and the trite little pc agitprop piece is then played out to show how the “bad” skinheads are violent thickos and not at all representative of England while the “good” skinheads are the real English deal, all bubbling with enthusiasm for “the joy of diversity. The film ends clankingly with the Shaun symbolically tossing his flag of St George into the sea. Despite its agitprop by numbers nature, this film does have some very strong performances from the main actors, especially Tugoose who gives one of the great child actor performances.

The PC lesson to draw from the two films is simple: the white workingclass’ real problem is not race or immigration or a lack of national expression it is their social circumstances.

Leveson Inquiry – Wanted- people who have had their evidence ignored

The Leveson Inquiry are refusing to use my evidence of press, PCC and police misdoing. They will not even take up the matter of Piers Morgan’s perjury before them despite the fact that I have given them a letter from Morgan to the PCC  in which he writes “ The   police  source of our article (whose  identity  we have  a  moral obligation to protect) gave  us  the  detail of the  letters  that  we  then published.”  (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/piers-morgan-lied-to-the-leveson-inquiry/) . My  latest exchange of emails with the Inquiry is below.

I am in contact with a published  author who intends to expose such behaviour by the Leveson Inquiry.  He would like to hear from anyone else who has submitted evidence to the Inquiry and believes that it has been excluded for illegitimate reasons, for example, because   it would cause political embarrassment or require criminal proceedings to be taken against those with power, wealth or influence.

Anyone who wishes to expose such refusals should email me on anywhere156@gmail.com and I will forward them to the writer.

————————————————————

RE: FTAO Kim Brudenell – UrgentWednesday, 15 February, 2012 13:02

 From: “Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team” <Solicitors.Team@levesoninquiry.gsi.gov.uk>Add sender to ContactsTo: “‘robert henderson’” <anywhere156@yahoo.co.uk>, “Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team” <Solicitors.Team@levesoninquiry.gsi.gov.uk>

Dear Mr Henderson

I write to confirm that your submissions are currently being considered by the Inquiry.  In relation to the letter from Mr Morgan, I would be grateful if you would confirm if you have a signed copy, and if so, please send a signed hard copy to the Inquiry.

 At this stage, we do not require a formal statement from you.
In relation to your final question, re how and when to make a complaint to the Metropolitan Police, I understand that you spoke to Ms Brudenell yesterday and she advised you that you may make a complaint to the Police, if you wish.
Kind regards

Sharron Hiles

————————————Miss Sharon Hiles, Asst. solicitor to the InquiryLeveson Inquiry Royal Courts of Justice StrandLondon WC115 February 2012

Dear Miss Hiles,

I supplied the Inquiry with a photstat of the copy of Morgan’s letter on 28 November –see copy covering letter below. The letter and enclosures were sent by recorded delivery. I am most concerned that you do not appear to have this in the file with the submissions I have made. Please re-check your records and let me know whether you have my letter of 28 November and all the enclosures listed in it. If not I will supply you with duplicates in person.

The copy of Morgan’s letter I sent to the Inquiry is written on the Mirror letterhead and has the PCC stamp on it showing they received the letter 20/10/1997. Morgan has not signed it but it was pp’ed, presumably by his secretary or PA. I cannot decipher the name of the person who pp’ed the letter, but the fact that it is on Mirror letter-headed paper and has been treated by the PCC as being from Morgan removes any doubt that it was from him.

As for my conversation with Miss Brundenell on 14 February, we agreed that I would not make a complaint to the police about Morgan until I have received written answers to the questions I raised in my email to her of 27 January. In case you do not have this I enclose a copy.

Please reply by return.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

————————————

Leveson Inquiry

Royal Courts of Justice

Strand

London WC1

28 November 2011

Dear Lord Leveson,

As promised in my email of 25 November (hard copy enclosed) , I send you hard copies of the following documents:

– Piers Morgan’s letter to the PCC dated

– Mike Jempson’s correspondence with the PCC

– The Mirror story of 25 3 1997 entitled

– The front page of the Mirror 25 3 1997 which advertised the story

– The Daily Record story of 25 3 1997

All the copies are of the original documents.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

————————————

RE: FTAO Kim Brudenell – Urgent

Wednesday, 15 February, 2012 17:40
 From:
“Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team” <Solicitors.Team@levesoninquiry.gsi.gov.uk>

Add sender to Contacts

To:”‘robert henderson’” <anywhere156@yahoo.co.uk>, “Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team” <Solicitors.Team@levesoninquiry.gsi.gov.uk>

Dear Mr Henderson

Thank you for your prompt response and for clarifying the position.

Having considered the letter and Mr Morgan’s evidence to the Inquiry, we do not propose to take this matter any further. The relevant part of the transcript relates to questions regarding payments to police. This is not the same issue as a newspaper receiving information for which no payment had been made. It is a matter for you whether you wish to refer your concerns to the Metropolitan Police.

I can also confirm that in this regard the Inquiry do not require a formal statement from you. We have the other submissions you have sent, however, if you wish to submit anything further regarding press intrusion, as the Chairman suggested you could when you applied to be a Core Participant, you may do so. This will be considered by the Inquiry although you may not necessarily be called to give evidence.

Yours sincerely

Sharron Hiles

————————————

Miss Sharon Hiles,

Asst.  solicitor to the Inquiry

Leveson Inquiry

Royal Courts of Justice

Strand

London WC1

15 February  2012

Dear Miss Hiles,

Your latest email is decidedly odd from beginning to end.  To start with the obvious , why should you assume that the Mirror did not pay for the information?  Morgan does not mention payment but  it does not follow from that there was no payment. In fact, by far the most likely explanation for the provision of the information to the Mirror is payment by the Mirror to the police officer.  Why have you  assumed the police officer was not paid? Give me a plausible reason why a policeman would  without payment supply such information .

The other thing which makes no sense in your last email is context.  Even if you did not have the copy of Morgan’s letter in your  file containing my submissions, you had the text of  Morgan’s letter  before you sent your previous email  asking me whether I had a signed copy of the letter. Consequently, it makes no sense for you to now abruptly tell me that the Inquiry will not proceed because  “This is not the same issue as a newspaper receiving information for which no payment had been made.  “  If you honestly believed that you would not have asked me whether I had a copy of Morgan’s letter with a signature because it would be an irrelevance.

You are also objectively wrong when you claim that if no payment was made the matter does not fall within the Inquiry’s remit. Let me remind you of what the Leveson Inquiry website gives as part of the remit:

•Module 1: The relationship between the press and the public and looks at phone-hacking and other potentially illegal behaviour.

•Module 2: The relationships between the press and police and the extent to which that has operated in the public interest.

Even in  the exceptionally unlikely event  of no money changing hands,  the recipient of the information and the police officer would have committed an offence under the Official Secrets Act.  (The initial recipient was the Mirror’s chief crime writer Jeff Edwards; someone I suspect may well appear before the Inquiry at some point). It was also a breach of the Data Protection Act.

There is also another side to this matter. The police were supposed to investigate the Mirror admission of receiving information illegally but failed to meaningfully  do so as they concluded their “investigation”  without interviewing anyone at the Mirror, the details of this non-investigation I have already supplied to the Inquiry. That is a prima facie case of perverting the course of justice.

Finally, the consequences of the supply of the information and the Mirror’s use of it was severe  because  I suffered more than a decade of harassment, the details of which I have already supplied to the Inquiry.

All of that puts the matter  firmly within the remit of both module 1 and 2.   That removes your stated reason for not proceeding with the matter.  If you have another ground for refusing to use the information please let me know ASAP. 

You have ignored the request in my previous email for you to confirm that the material I supplied on 28 November by recorded delivery is in your possession.  Please let me know whether you have found these documents.

Why have you behaved in this way? Here is a scenario for you. Either you or your superior decided the best way to avoid taking action on the clear evidence of the Mirror receiving information corruptly from the police and  Morgan’s subsequent perjury was to cast doubt on the authenticity of Morgan’s letter by raising the question of whether his signature is on it.   When you received my email telling you that I had already supplied a copy of the Morgan’s letter to the Inquiry, you either found the copy I sent in November or you accepted that the details of the letter  I supplied made it impossible to go down the authenticity of the letter route.  That prompted  the strikingly sudden – only hours before you were ostensibly giving every indication that the material would be used  – and woefully feeble excuse that because you assumed no money was paid – an assumption best described as irrational based on the circumstances-  the matter was  outside of the remit of the Inquiry. In short, the story being told is incoherent and fractured. As a one-time Inland Revenue investigator, that  behaviour strikes me as the product of panic. Who made the decision not to proceed?

The best way of testing behaviour is always to ask how would it appear to a disinterested audience.  You and your colleagues need to ask yourself how your failure to use then potent  information I have supplied – not just the Morgan letter but the serious misbehaviour of  the press, the PCC and the police which involved me directly –  would appear to the general public.   I think it a fair bet that most people without a vested interest would conclude that the Inquiry has refused to use the evidence for reasons other than its relevance and that the most likely reason would be the involvement of powerful people, most notably the Blairs.

If the Inquiry does not use the information I have provided,  I  shall make that failure  a very public matter indeed by using the multiplicity of web-based media now available.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

—————————————————-
RE: FTAO Kim Brudenell – UrgentThursday, 16 February, 2012 15:20

From: “Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team”Add sender to ContactsTo: “‘robert henderson’”, “Leveson Inquiry Solicitors Team”

Dear Mr Henderson

Thank you for your email the contents of which are noted.

I can confirm that I do have a copy of your letter of 28 November and enclosures.  I can also advise that the legal team to the Inquiry made the decision not to take this matter any further.

Kind regards

Sharron Hiles

—————————————————-

Miss Kim Brudenell

Solicitor to the Inquiry

Leveson Inquiry

Royal Courts of Justice

Strand

London WC1

18 February  2012

Dear Miss Brudenell,

Please answer these questions:

1.  Who had ultimate responsibility for making the decision not to investigate Piers Morgan’s  admission  to the PCC of the  Mirror’s illicit receipt of information from the police?  I want a name not an obfuscating answer such as “the legal team to the Inquiry “.   Where there is a hierarchy, as there is within the Inquiry, the decision is not made by a group but the person in charge.

2. Who had ultimate responsibility for deciding to ignore Morgan’s perjury before the Inquiry?  Again I want a name.

3.  Did Lord Leveson see the  Pier’s Morgan’s letter to the PCC before the decision to act upon my evidence was made?

4. Has Lord Leveson had sight of any of  the evidence I have submitted to the Inquiry?

5. If Lord Leveson has had sight of any of the evidence I have submitted to the Inquiry,  when did this happen?

6.  Sharron Hiles confirmed in her last email to me (16 February)  that the Inquiry has received the original documents , including the Piers Morgan’s letter to the PCC on the Mirror letterhead , which I sent on 28 November .  At what date and time were these found by  those reviewing my evidence  to the Inquiry?

7.  What was the basis for Sharron Hiles claiming categorically that the Mirror had not paid for the information?

8. If the Inquiry believes that the Mirror did not pay for the information, what motive or motives does the Inquiry believe could have led a police officer to risk his career and criminal prosecution for no reward?

9. Regardless of whether the Mirror paid for the information,  the illicit receipt of information from the police – both the police officer and the Mirror employees involved in receiving and using it committed serious criminal offences under the Data Protection  and Official Secrets Acts  –  the misbehaviour falls indubitably within the remit of both modules I and 2 of the Inquiry.  It is also very serious misbehaviour. That being so, why did the Inquiry refuse to proceed  with the matter?

10. Miss Hiles’ first email to me on the 15 February was sent at 13.02 pm .  In it she writes “I would be grateful if you would confirm if you have a signed copy, and if so, please send a signed hard copy to the Inquiry”.  That clearly implied that Piers Morgan’s admission and perjury was being taken seriously and that the only serious stumbling block might be the absence of proof that Morgan was responsible for the letter.   By the  time Miss Hiles second email of the day was sent at 17. 40 pm the question of whether I had a signed copy vanishes.  Why did it become suddenly unimportant in the     In the 4 hours  38 minutes between the two emails?

You can of course  refuse to answer these questions either in part or at all, Miss Brudenell, but as an experienced solicitor I am sure you are aware that a refusal to answer questions in circumstances where it is entirely reasonable to have them answered can be damning is evidence of itself.  Indeed, that is what the revised caution is based upon.

I would appreciate an early answer.

Yours sincerely

Robert Henderson

—————————————————-

Leveson Inquiry: Robert Henderson’s application for core participant status

The Leveson Inquiry- Note on the Directions Hearing 25 1 2012 in Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice

Robert Henderson

I attended a directions hearing  for the decision on whether I would be designated  a Core Participant.  I shall not be Core Participant (unless I can somehow persuade Lord Leveson  otherwise), but I could be a witness.

Regardless of whether or not I end up as a witness, the hearing was far from being a waste of time.   I was able to put my case  before a sizeable number of people (probably 50), including  lawyers  representing various people  who have been mistreated by the media, other applicants for core participant status and members of the public, some of whom were  mediafolk.  In addition, the negligent  and superficial way the applications for core participant status were treated showed the Inquiry in a bad light.

Leveson began the proceedings by blithely announcing that he had not read any of the submissions  for core participant status.  Consequently, he made his decisions purely on the oral testimony given at the hearing by the applicants for core participant status.   This was not only odd in itself,  but became doubly so when placed in the context of the advice given to Core Participant applicants before the directions hearing:

“Dear Sir
You have made an application for Core Participant status for module 2. The Chairman will consider your application at the directions hearing which is listed for 2pm on Wednesday 25th January.  It is not necessary for you to attend the hearing, but you may do so if you wish.  If you do propose to attend, please let me know by 2pm on Tuesday 24th January.
Regards
Sharron “

If an applicant had chosen not to appear, it is probable their application would have been dismissed without their submission being considered.

Leveson  further hamstrung  the applicants by saying that he would not get into the detail of individual cases. I did manage to overcome this restriction  but as a method of proceeding it was absurd for an inquiry into press misbehaviour. The final shackle he  put around the applicants was the  danger of  jeopardising   legal action outside of the Inquiry.  Although there was no question of sub judice  because no charges had been brought, I decided not to name  the ex-editor who had committed perjury before the Inquiry by denying any knowledge of receiving information illicitly from the police.  I did this because  I wish Leveson to refer  to the police the perjury, the receipt of information illicitly from the police and the failure of the police to investigate meaningfully the receipt of information illicitly given by a police officer and illicitly received by the ex-editor and his staff.   If I submit the complaints the likelihood is that the police will repeat their behaviour and refuse to investigate meaningfully or at all.  Nonetheless, if I do not get a positive indication from Leveson I shall submit the complaints.

Despite all these seeming grave handicaps to free expression I managed to get a good deal of embarrassing material  into my testimony.  This included the Blairs’ attempt to have me prosecuted in 1997 (that produced a real murmur); the Mirror’s libelling of me and failure to offer me any right of reply and  the PCC’s abject failure to deal with my complaints honestly .  I also, without giving names,  described the perjury of the ex-editor, his admission of having received information illicitly from the police and the police’s refusal to meaningfully investigate the ex-editor’s admission that he had received information illicitly from  the police.  I emphasised that the Inquiry had been in possession of all these facts for more than a month and that if I was not to be a core participant I certainly wished to be a witness.

All that ensured that there are now substantial numbers of people who know that the Leveson Inquiry  has facts which by definition must fall within  the ambit of the Inquiry. Leveson himself acknowledged that  the receiving of illicit information from the police was  indisputably pertinent.

After the hearing  I discussed my situation with the Chief Solicitor to the Inquiry Miss Kim Brudenell.  I got her to agree to a number of actions.  These are:

1. to ensure that my submissions are brought to the notice of Lord Leveson.

2.  to advise me if a formal witness statement  is required after you have reviewed what I have already submitted.

3. to advise me  when and  how  the evidence I have of  the ex-editor receiving  information illicitly and his subsequent perjury before the Inquiry should be  reported to the Metropolitan Police.  I am  willing to make the complaint myself, but  I think it would be most appropriate for the this to be done  under the auspices of the Inquiry, not least because the perjury was committed at the Inquiry. (I wrote to the Inquiry on 22 December advising Lord Leveson of the perjury).

4.  to  advise me when and  how the failure of the Metropolitan Police to meaningfully investigate my complaint to them that the ex-editor had admitted receiving information illicitly from the police – the investigating officer told me that no one at the paper  had been interviewed – should be reported to the Metropolitan Police as a complaint of a perversion of the course of justice.

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

Piers Morgan lied to the Leveson Inquiry

Piers Morgan lied to the Leveson Inquiry  (20 12 2011) when he claimed he had never illicitly received  information from the police when Mirror editor.   I can say this categorically because he admitted doing so in a letter to the PCC in 1997 when he wrote “”The  police source of our article (whose identity we have a moral obligation to protect) gave us the detail of the letters that we then published”.  Had the information been given to the Mirror legitimately there would have been no reason not to divulge the informant’s name because the only way information can legitimately be given to the media by the police is if it is done on an attributable basis.  Here is the full text of the letter with my comments interpolated in the square brackets marked RH:

FROM THE EDITOR

By fax (0171-353 8355) & by post

16 October 1997

Your ref: 970738

Christopher Hayes Esq

Press Complaints Commission

I Salisbury Square

London

EC4Y 8AE

Dear Mr Hayes

Mr Robert Henderson

I refer to Mr Henderson’s complaint as outlined in his letter of 23 September.

As you are aware, we have been in contact with Mr Henderson for some time due to his propensity to bombard individuals and this office with correspondence. [RH Translation: Mr Henderson sent more than one letter because the Mirror refused to reply].

There are certain irrefutable facts that escape emphasis in Mr Henderson’s correspondence.

Far from ignoring any of his correspondence we have written to him on the 20 May, 22 July and 6 August. [RH The letter of 20 May merely said he was not going to enter into correspondence. The other two letters were from his legal department in response to Subject Access Requests I made under the data Protection Act]. We have consistently made it clear that we have no intention of entering into any further correspondence with him.

Be that as it may I will address his concerns:-

In essence, the basic “sting” of the article, of which he complains, was that he had been sending numerous insulting letters, some with racist undertones, to Mr and Mrs Blair which had been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration.

Mr Henderson himself admits that he sent Mr and Mrs Blair at least thirteen letters. I have no way of directly knowing of the content of those letters because I have not had sight of them. However, clearly they sufficiently concerned Mr Blair’s office to be passed to the Crown

Prosecution Service [RH The CPS said as soon as they saw the letters that they were entirely legal] and I think the Commission is perfectly entitled to draw an adverse inference on the contents of those letters as a result of that referral.

I cannot accept Mr Henderson’s explanation for writing to Cherie Blair.

To do so was clearly designed to intimidate.

In Mr Henderson’s draft article “Moral Simpletons Target Innocent Man” the bile that he shows on the second page of that article clearly illustrates his capacity to insult in his letters to Mr and Mrs Blair [RH an absurd deduction. What I wrote to the Mirror says nothing about what I wrote to the Blairs] (to the extent that they be referred to the Crown Prosecution Service). I would also refer the Commission to Mr Henderson’s gratuitous reference to a “Blaireich”.

He also admits to expressing his disgust (we can only guess in what terms) of the decision of Mr and Mrs Blair not to send their son to a school whereby a white schoolboy was, apparently, murdered by five other boys (and that that murder was racially motivated). [RH This was the Richard Everitt murder].

The police source of our article (whose identity we have a moral obligation to protect) [thus the police informant behaved illegally by supplying the information] gave us the detail of the letters that we then published. Nothing that Mr Henderson writes has convinced me that the article was anything other than accurate.

Perhaps one can get a flavour of his correspondence with Mr and Mrs Blair by examining the final sentence of his draft article in which he states “It was a cargo of ancient male gonads”.

The Commission may be aware (I am attempting to get hold of the article) that the article of Mr Henderson’s that appeared in Wisden’s Cricket Monthly in 1995 gave rise to an extraordinary amount of controversy and resulted in Wisden paying substantial libel damages to the Cricketer, Devon Malcolm, whom the Commission will be aware is a coloured fast bowler for England. As I understand the matter, and Mr Henderson will correct me if I am wrong, the article implied that coloured players will not try as hard when playing for England as white players. [RH The article put it forward as a possibility, no more].

I have discussed the legal position with the newspaper’s solicitor, Martin Cruddace [Cruddace is a proven liar. He made a declaration to my Subject Access Request under the Data protection Action to the effect that the Mirror held no qualifying documents. Eventually after I had done some detective work, he had to admit that the Mirror had a small matter of 118 pages of documents relating to me], and he has assured me that the law has recently developed whereby words (be they written or spoken) can constitute assault if the pattern of those words is such as to make the recipient of them either anxious or ill. It has developed as a reaction to the former impotence of the law on stalking. [RH: No person in the UK has been convicted of such a crime. The definition of GBH has been extended to non-physical abuse such as abusive phone calls but it requires a psychiatric illness to be proved to be caused by the alleged abusive behaviour. Mere emotions such as fear do not qualify. The failure of the police to consider such a course and the CPS’ immediate definition of the case as “NO CRIME” shows that my letters were entirely lawful] .The law has therefore developed since the publication of the dictionary reference on which Mr Henderson relies.

I cannot accept that the taking of the photographs of Mr Henderson, given the clear public interest concerning the subject matter of The Mirror article, could possibly constitute harassment under the Code.[RH it was an unequivocal offence because the photographer took the photograph within my property].

I am most concerned not to waste any further time in dealing with Mr Henderson’s complaint but, naturally, if the Commission wishes me to address any further matters then I will endeavour to do so.

However, I hope that the above is sufficient to convince the Commission that the basic “sting” of the article is accurate and that Mr Henderson’s complaint ought to be dismissed.

Yours sincerely

Piers Morgan

I obtained the letter from the PCC after I made a complaint against the Mirror following their publication of extraordinarily libellous story about me.   The details of that episode  can be found at http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/the-failure-to-charge-piers-morgan-with-illicitly-receiving-information-from-the-police/

The Leveson Inquiry  has had a copy of the letter for a month together with my submission relating to it and other matters. The text of my submission to the Leveson Inquiry is at http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/the-leveson-inquiry-the-blairs-the-mirror-the-police-and-me/ . The fact that Leveson refused to confront Morgan with the letter and the failure to call me as a witness despite the startling evidence I had  provided to them  is clear evidence that the Inquiry will not be pressing the mainstream media hard. At worst it will be no more than a Government PR exercise.

Apart from Morgan’s lie to the Levenson Inquiry, there is a tremendous story of political misbehaviour which surrounds it

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/when-tony-and-cherie-blair-tried-to-have-me-jailed/

It isn’t a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of globalism

Robert Henderson

Contents

1. Turning a blind eye

2. What is capitalism?

3. Globalisation and the developed world

4. The suppression of dissent

5. The developing world

6. The loss of  national control

7. The undeveloping world

8. Supra-national  politics

9. Just another outbreak of an old  disease

10. Unemployment as a barometer of an economic system

11. Capitalism in a protected domestic economy

1. Turning a blind eye

Amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth from all parts of political mainstream over the ongoing  economic crisis  its prime cause goes unmentioned.   Free market capitalism, which has been accepted , whether enthusiastically or resignedly, by Western elites for the past quarter  of a century  as the only economic theory worthy of support, is being questioned.  Even some of its firmest adherents are questioning whether  there has been  too much freedom of individual  action in the economic sphere. Some mainstream commentators who write for resolutely “free market” supporting newspapers  like  the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, are even beginning to wonder if capitalism is in a crisis from which it may not recover:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2022993/Capitalism-crisis-80-years-ago-banking-collapse-devastated-Europe-triggering-war.html#ixzz1aUJrGGaG

and

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8814560/If-capitalism-does-fail-the-alternative-is-far-far-worse.html

Those coming from the left are unsurprisingly joining in the “end of capitalism” rhetoric (http://www.marxist.com/world-capitalism-in-crisis-1.htm). What you will not find are many  if any  mainstream politicians and economic  commentators  addressing the real source of the crisis:  the cloying and uncritical embrace of the internationalist creed  which we call globalism by Western elites, especially those in Britain and the USA.

Before I turn to the ill  effects of globalism there is the tricky  matter of defining capitalism needs to be addressed, because  there is a case for saying that capitalism is a state of theoretical  purity which does not exist in the real world.

2. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is seriously difficult to define because it shares so much with economic systems which are not considered to be capitalist.  For example, if the state undertakes an  economic activity such as providing healthcare in an organisation such as the NHS or nationalises the railways and coalmining are they capitalism in action? After all they employ capital,  land and labour, the three  factors of production in classical economics and provide goods and services to the public just as a private business would do.

What do  state enterprises  lack which private business has? The entrepreneur? Well, most large companies are not run by entrepreneurs but corporate administrators.   The profit motive?  Perhaps, but what about state enterprises which consistently make profits for the taxpayer such as the Post Office in Britain while it had a monopoly?  Freedom of action?  Private enterprises are heavily constrained by law and state regulation in every developed economy and state organisations are often granted a remarkable operational freedom.   The risk of going bust if they do not perform? Any state enterprise can in principle be ended or privatised  while private companies when they are large enough  have a good chance of being rescued by taxpayers,  vide the banks in the present financial crisis.  An absence of private money?   State businesses frequently draw  all or much of  their income from  payments they receive from the general public in return for goods or services,  for example, nationalised  energy companies .  Moreover,  many  companies which are classified as private enterprise organisations draw all or much of their income from  taxpayer funded contracts. Then there are the not-for-profit organisations, especially the charities, which increasingly  act as sub-contracted arms of the state as they draw much of their income from the taxpayer  and the rest of their income from donations. Individual and corporate. How should  they be classified?  Part of capitalism? Part of the state? A separate class of economic actor altogether?  It could be any of the three options.

To all those blurrings  of the distinction between private enterprise and public  service must be added  the  macro-economic fact that  all developed economies have a massive part of their GDP in the hands of the state.  The mixed economy is a fact of all reputedly capitalistic economies.  Does that render the idea of capitalist society redundant?   In a sense it does. The broad  differences  in developed  (and increasingly the more advanced of the developing countries)  is in the degree to which state control and ownership is balanced against private enterprise.

There are of course qualitative  differences in the application of the law as it affects the economy and the nature of the control which is exercised over the economy by the state,  especially in areas such as the banking system and the ability of foreign companies to operate. For example,  while countries such as Britain and the USA  allow vast swathes of their economies to be purchased by foreign countries, China will often in practice only allow foreigners in on the basis of joint ventures with Chinese firms. (http://www.booz.com/media/uploads/Making_Partnerships_Work.pdf ) . Nonetheless, there is a general similarity in the economies in as much as all are a mixture of public and private and all permit some degree of government interference and direction of  the market.

Despite the difficulty of definition  the term capitalism is not without utility. There is clearly a difference between a company which acts on its own behalf  without state direction or assistance and a nationalised industry. Parts of mixed economies are capitalist if by that is meant private companies which  operate without  deriving any part of their revenue from the taxpayer,  have management free to act  within the general restraints  of the law  without  state direction  and  which operate on the principle that they stand or fall on  whether they can at least break even.  The companies which receive  taxpayers’ money, especially those which rely on the taxpayer for  only part of their income,  also  have much  of the aspect of a pure private enterprise business in that they will in practice dictate how things are done, the public body funding their work being essentially in the position of a customer who merely sets ends not means.  Capitalism is a spectrum of behaviours  rather than  a clear-cut behaviour.

It is important to understand that  free trade does not equal capitalism. Free trade is   simply the exchange of goods, services and capital between countries. It says  nothing about the circumstances in which these things  are created. These  can be anything from  a command economy to the economies in which free enterprise is most dominant.

3. Globalisation and the developed world

Globalism equals destabilisation.   Until  the financial crash of 2008 the globalists argued that ever increasing free trade generally and the internationalisation of financial markets in particular  increased  economic  and  international  stability by  spreading risk more widely  (which reduced the cost of credit and consequently increased economic activity ) and by that by making countries ever more interdependent  the likelihood of international conflict  was ameliorated.  In fact, both ideas were pipe dreams and the exact reverse  of what globalism actually creates.

There are two  central elements of globalism. The first  is the end (or at least considerable diminution) of protectionist practices. Domestic  economies in the developed world are stripped of  great swathes of their economies, including strategically important ones such as coal mining and steel making, by the removal of protectionist barriers such as quotas, embargoes and tariffs. This  results in either entirely foreign imports  from low-wage economies such as China driving out the necessarily higher priced goods made in the developed nations or businesses in the developed world throwing in the towel and off-shoring their production of goods and services to low-wage economies.    To that is added in much of the developed world the banning of state aid and intervention  by both  treaties  and the domestic laws and rules imposed by national governments in thrall to an uncritical belief in  laissez faire economics and small government.

Getting rid of protectionist barriers and privatising state owned industries  massively reduces opportunities  for employment for the native populations of the  developed countries.  This creates greater competition for jobs which reduces wages and other conditions of employment and   increases insecurity of employment.  In some instances,  as occurred with Britain in the 1980s,  the opening up the domestic markets  to imports results in the  most dramatic and socially damaging of economic traumas,  structural unemployment, which lays waste the primary sources of employment of  large areas , the effects of which carry down the generations.

The second central element of globalism, the free movement of peoples across borders, amplifies these consequences  of free trade  and adds other destabilising  effects.  Mass migration of labour inevitably  goes from lower-wage economies to higher wage economies because there is no incentive for those in higher paid economies to take a run-of-the-mill-job in a lower-paid economy. In a addition,  developed economies offer not only higher wages but also many non-monetary benefits such as those provided by a fully-fledged welfare state which are absent in developing economies.

Mass migration allows employers to radically cut wages in the higher-wage economies and greatly increases competition for most  jobs, especially those which require little training or skill.  The difference in cost of living between the immigrant’s country of origin (low)  and the developed country they go to (high)  are important. Immigrants, whether unskilled or skilled,  are willing to work in such jobs for mediocre pay and live in poor, cramped  accommodation because they know that they will be able to  save a few thousand pounds in a year or two . They can do this even if by  living honestly by paying tax. But  often they  will  be paid cash- in-hand (no deductions for tax) ,  and live in in a  squat (the taking over of someone’s house or flat without permission and living there rent free.   Many will work  while they are claiming unemployment benefits.   If they have saved four or five thousand after a year or two,  this  will be enough to buy a house or flat in their own country  where prices are a fraction of what  they are in a developed country.  (Give Britons the chance to save  the price of a house or flat in Britain by working for a couple of years in those conditions in a foreign country and you are likely to be trampled in the rush).

As more and more immigrants come to developed economies, the position of the native worker worsens. This is  because  not only  are there are more people chasing jobs, but also because native employers increasing rely on gang masters and other recruiters  who are foreign and only  want to  employ  foreigners (frequently foreigners from their own country:  in the following  case it was a Bulgarian employing Bulgarians http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/277363/Workers-are-fired-for-being-British). Sometimes employers deliberately exclude  native workers by insisting that those employed speak a foreign  language in the workplace, for example,  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1257784/Biggest-Asda-meat-supplier-excludes-English-speakers-instructions-given-Polish.html ).

In Britain many employers excuse their recruitment of foreign workers  on the grounds that they either cannot get native workers to apply or that  those who do apply are unqualified for the job.  As the vast majority of the British jobs being taken are low or non-skilled  and there are now millions of native  Britons desperately seeking work of any kind, this must be an excuse in most instances  (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/878903-500-queue-for-just-20-sales-assistant-jobs-at-new-poundland-store#ixzz1b85oCrLr)

Even in the case of skilled workers there is discordance between the claim of lack of skilled applicants and the numbers of skilled British workers unable to find jobs. For example, there are  large numbers of doctors and nurses trained in Britain who cannot find posts in Britain,  while at the same time the NHS is recruiting heavily from abroad. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/no-need-to-speaka-da-english-in-the-nhs/).  More generally,   new British graduates are finding great difficulty in getting both appropriate jobs and, increasingly, any job at all (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8283862/Graduate-unemployment-hits-15-year-high.html).

All of that suggests that British employers are favouring foreigners for reasons other than they give. The most plausible causes are lower pay and inferior conditions being accepted by immigrants, the greater ease with which immigrants can be sacked , especially those who are here illegally,  and the possibility of bribes being paid, especially by foreign agencies, gangmasters using foreign labour and people traffickers,  to those recruiting for British employers to persuade them to choose immigrants over native workers.    An example would be where a public service employer uses a foreign agency to recruit abroad.  The agency will receive a hefty fee from the public service employer for each foreigner recruited and  that fee will be  split between the agency and  a corrupt recruiter in the UK.   There is also a natural disincentive for native workers to seek work where they would be in the ethnic minority in their own land, for example, if you are English imagine working a factory where the common language is Polish or Hindi even if it is not a requirement of the job that the language is spoken.

These various  practices mean large swathes of employment become effectively closed to the native population. The extent of the problem in Britain can be seen from one stark statistic: out of two million new jobs created under 13 years of the last  Labour Government 1.8 million went to immigrants (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325013/Migrants-took-9-10-jobs-created-Labour.html)

The removal of protection for the domestic market, off-shoring and mass immigration has meant that material inequality has grown considerably in the developed economies  over the past quarter of a century as the wages of those competing with immigrants has fallen and unemployment has risen, including an army of long term unemployed.   The countries showing the greatest growth between the haves and the have nots  have been the USA and Britain, arguably the two countries most committed to globalism. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/18/bronx-manhattan-us-wealth-divide).

But there is much more to globalisation than the creation of material inequality. Mass immigration does not just create competition for jobs. It means there are more people seeking housing, healthcare, benefits and  education .   This further increases insecurity and resentment amongst the native population, especially amongst the poor because  they  are the ones most reliant on the welfare state  and consequently  are the people most likely to be in direct completion with the immigrants.

More generally, there is the natural resistance to large numbers of foreigners  settling in an area. Any  sizeable  influx of immigrants is never evenly spread. Immigrants in large numbers congregate  in self-created ghettoes which radically changes the nature of the area they settle in. This  arouses resentment amongst the native population, most fiercely  and poignantly by those directly affected, but as immigrant numbers grow massively, increasingly  amongst the native population generally,  regardless of whether people live in areas of heavy immigration.   The concern is not primarily that the immigrants provide completion for jobs, houses and social services , although those are important triggers of resentment, but anger at territory being  effectively conquered by  immigrants (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/part-of-england-has-been-invaded/)

4. The suppression of dissent

Those consequences  would be enough to condemn globalism as a political creed , but there is much more to be set in the debit column of its balance sheet.

Because native populations in the  richer countries  are increasingly disadvantaged and angered at the effects of  immigration, the elites who have permitted it and are committed to globalism have to control the resentment and anger. Politicians  do this in various ways. They use  their power to prevent any honest  opposition to  mass immigration and its consequences by  passing laws which criminalise  the native population if they express  dissent to the policy. They create other  laws which in practice privilege immigrants, for example,  the British Race Relations Amendment Act  2000 which forces all public bodies in the UK to prove they are not discriminating against racial and ethnic minorities. They  use their ready access to the mass media to incessantly  push the “multiculturalism is good” message  and  force it  in school curriculums – in Britain there is barely a subject untouched by its taint, even those subjects such as physics, chemistry and maths which you might imagine would be immune can be taught from this ethnic perspective or that ethnic perspective (Islamic maths anyone?)

Companies which rely on public contracts and charities have to play by the same multicultural rules as public service organisations  and large public companies whether  or not r they are reliant on public contracts in practice do so voluntarily.  As an overarching deterrent, all employers are liable to be taken to Employment Tribunals if someone claims racial discrimination relating to dismissal, unequal treatment or the failure to get a job and risk unlimited awards against them if a complaint against the employer is upheld.

The  multicultural message and the intimidation of dissenting views is religiously supported  and underpinned  by the British  mass media , the members of  which  all publicly subscribe to the idea that racial discrimination (by which they mean any preference for any racial or ethnic group not approved of by the politically correct) is the ultimate evil  and as a consequence are only too willing to conduct a hate campaign against anyone at whom the cry “racist” is directed and ensure that anyone with a dissenting voice is kept from public view.

The consequence of this wholesale  enforcement of the multicultural dogma is that anyone in Britain who expresses  an opinion which suggests that mass immigration and its consequences are less than the quickest path to social Nirvana runs the risk of penalties which range from losing their job (especially if the person works in the public sector) to being imprisoned  for inciting racial hatred.

As for the economic aspects of globalism, Western political elites  and their allies in the media and other positions of power and influence have overwhelmingly  bought into the idea of free trade, at least to the extent that they have been willing to agree to greatly reduced protectionism. Those who would vigorously oppose the idea of out-of-control  laissez faire economics at home and abroad have been  almost entirely censored out of the public picture.  On the odd occasions when some brave soul breaks the censorship and puts forward in public complaints about mass immigration reducing wages or taking jobs and scarce housing or the export of jobs to the developing world ,  these are squashed by the media proponents of globalism with mantras such as  “It’s inevitable because we live in a  global world” ; “It’s market forces”;  “We have to compete globally”.

5. The loss of  national control

On top of all this is piled two  things, the loss of control  of national governments over finance and the signing up of nation states to treaties which emasculate democracy by granting powers to supra-national bodies that should rightly belong to individual states.  The  most striking example of this is the EU, where the nations of the European Economic Area  (over 30  of them) are bound to the so-called four freedoms;  the free movement of goods, services, finance and  people.

The failure to control the banks and their ilk is  a direct consequence of globalism.  The political elites in the developed world have been  driven to not interfere  with the major players in finance by ideology,  self-interest (think of all the cosy post-politics sinecures  in private business  senior politicians acquire) and  fear  (they are terrified that if the banks are not pandered to economic catastrophe will follow). To those bars to  sane financial policies can be added  the interference of supranational  bodies  such as the EU. The existence of such bodies has meant  that even if national governments  had wished to behave responsibly by restraining the bankers’ excesses, they could not have done so because it would have been judged to be anti-competitive by a supra-national body such as the EU competition Commission.

The upshot of this development was frighteningly reckless finance industry business models based on selling mortgages to those who could not possible afford to service them, the development of exotic derivatives such as Collateralised Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps and the relentless gearing up of their debt to deposits ratio. This last practice resulted in even supposedly  staid financial institutions such as British building societies getting  into serious trouble  because they became dependent on constant and massive recourse to short term wholesale borrowing , something which froze once the financial panic of began in earnest in 2008.

If banking had remained primarily a national matter, as it was until the late 1980s before the sudden explosion of computers and the embrace of laissez faire economics ,  the damage caused would have been minor compared to what has occurred  even if banks had been allowed to engage in the unsafe practices described in the previous paragraph.  There would have been both far less scope for credit expansion and,  where bank  failures  occurred, they would have almost certainly happened sooner than they did under a globalised system because there would be far fewer  places for a bank in trouble to go to try to borrow to put off the evil day of insolvency. Most  importantly, the  national  financial institutions would have been smaller  and  less able to cause mortal damage to the national economy and would not have had the potential to undermine the international financial system.  In addition, if banking is kept within national boundaries it can be much more readily supervised. Once  it expands beyond a national single jurisdiction, as it does with the EU,  meaningful government supervision and control becomes utterly  impossible.

6. The developing world

Those are the ills of globalisation from the standpoint of the developed world.  But the developing world and the remnants of undeveloped and still undeveloping world are not left unscathed by globalisation.  The developing world experiences an aggregate increase in wealth as it takes manufacturing and service industries from the developed world and improves its infrastructure. But these improvements come at great human cost.  Traditional ways of living are disrupted. Vast numbers flood from the countryside to the towns where they live and, if they are lucky, work in miserable conditions. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8818059/100-million-Chinese-farmers-to-move-to-city-by-end-of-decade.html)

Many  find their material conditions  (but not necessarily their psychological state)  improve, but far more are actively disadvantaged by the changes.  If they remain outside the cities people find their  areas being  denuded of many of the most able and vigorous people who leave for the cities; their land being taken with little or no compensation  for infrastructure projects such as dams, railways and factories and their way of life becoming less and less sustainable.  Those who go to the cities for work find their lives are worse than they were before in terms of the conditions they have to endure and subject to great job insecurity . Even in the more developed of the developing Asian countries, where most of the world’s population now lives, there is  a great chasm between the  haves and the have-nots.

Although offshoring production and opening up their markets to  imports from low-wage economies are  disruptive for the developed world and  potentially dangerous  because it puts  them to an increasing extent in the hands of foreign powers , it also  bound the likes of China and India into a dependent embrace.  As the economies of the developing nations  grow they will increase their domestic demand and the capacity and willingness  to satisfy it which  will make them less dependent  on international markets. But that is a fair way in the future.  At present the developing world  is reliant to a very heavy extent on exporting to the developed world.

Countries such as China are also massive  holders of sovereign debt of Western countries, especially of the USA. These  two things mean that the developing economies  are affected by the present depression (let us give it its proper name)  in the developed world,   which is reducing demand for the products of the developing world and,   in the case of countries with large sovereign debt holdings, at risk of losing vast amounts of money.   It is also by no means clear that the financial systems of the developing nations are sound, even if they have not suffered from the same ills as the developed world’s financial  sector.  For example, China is constantly having to patch up bankrupt [projects and organisations (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/8821094/Chinas-debt-spree-returns-to-haunt.html).

7. The undeveloping world

The part of the world which is not seriously  industrialising also suffers from the destruction of traditional ways of life with nothing adequate replacing them.   Again there has been a flight from the countryside to towns and cities, although in this instance it has not resulted in large-scale  industrial or even substantial  commercial development.   The only winners are those who have tapped into  the funds controlled by the elite who dispense the vast amounts of foreign Aid and the income from foreign companies for mineral rights  to those they favour, whether that be through the award of government jobs or  through straightforward corruption.

Many have been displaced by the demands of foreign countries, especially those extracting raw materials.  Countries have abandoned their traditional agriculture and turned to farming to produce food and flowers for the developed world.  A growing practice is for countries in the developing world, especially China, to buy or lease  large amounts of land in undeveloped countries to produce food for the country which has purchased the land.  It is a kind of  imperialism,  but imperialism without any sense of moral obligation to the ruled.

All of these practices mean that much of the undeveloped world, primarily black Africa, live their lives in conditions which range from abject poverty  to perpetual civil war.  Although I would never pretend that living under colonial rule is unreservedly palatable,  it can bring order and  where the colonial power develops a sense of moral obligation to those it rules, as happened with British officialdom in the final century of the Empire,  it can prevent  serious abuses.   What most of these countries currently have is the worst of all worlds,  deeply corrupt native elites  who sell their countries to the highest bidder, whether that selling being in the guise of gaining aid or commerce, and foreigners exploiting their people and land. There is no check  on abuse.

8. Supra-national  politics

There is a special subset of internationalism, the advanced supra-national body  comprised of nation states which has the nature of a federal government even if it does not have that formal structure.      The EU is the only organisation  which comes close to meeting  that description at present ,but it provides a warning of how such groupings can display the ill-effects of globalism together with some novel features of their  own.

Member states  of the EU have to allow unrestricted  migration within the EU (to be pedantic, within the European Economic Area which includes the likes of Norway and Switzerland as well as the EU) and accept the loss of other great swathes of sovereignty  ranging from  the economic (competition, the making of trade treaties) to the social  (the conditions of work, health and safety).

Most dramatically for the world in general,  17 of the 27 EU states have signed themselves up to the Euro. This  was a criminally reckless enterprise because it married massively disparate economies such as the German and Greek without creating a central executive with the powers of a nation state.  This meant that the controlling and guiding body for the Euro, the European Central Bank, was unable to do  such essential things for a supra-national currency as determine tax regimes throughout the Euro area and move money from the richer to the poorer Euro members .   These errors were compounded by  the failure to implement what  powers existed to impose financial discipline on the Euro members such as  the restriction on the size of  member states budget deficit.  Unsurprisingly,  the Euro eventually ran up against reality and for the past eighteen months the currency’s situation  has looked ever more dire as Greece, then Portugal, Spain and Italy looked candidates for a default as they found it more and more expensive to borrow  on the international markets to cover their budget deficits  and service their national debts, something exacerbated as their  tax bases shrunk during the depression .   In October 2011 the poison looks as though it might even encompass France and Germany.

The ill consequences of the formation of the Euro stretch  far beyond its members.  The constant delay in coming to a conclusion as to what should be done to deal with the Euro crisis, whether that be the wholesale or partial break-up of the Euro or a  decision for the Eurozone to go for full fiscal integration including massive movements of money from the rich members to the poor (the only thing which might rescue the Euro), has created uncertainly throughout  the world and has  significantly worsened an already dire world economic situation.

The Euro crisis has  also sucked in countries from outside the Eurozone to help fund the vast sums needed to bail out the Republic of Ireland and Greece.  This affects the  non-Euro members within the EU and those  from outside the EU who are liable to provide IMF loans.  Countries such as the UK have had to pay  both towards the EU stabilisation fund and the IMF loans.

The lessons from the EU (so far) are that far are that such supra-national bodies amplify the general problems of globalism, especially the loss of democratic control, and add the joker of grand  follies such as the Euro which have massive effects beyond  the supra-national body.

9. Just another outbreak of an old  disease

Globalisation should not be seen as a completely new phenomenon,  although its modern extent and scale  is novel, not least because of the ceaseless march of digital technology and the encouragement, or at least toleration, by Western elites of mass movements of people from the poor to the rich world .   From an historical perspective it is simply the latest example of  the laissez faire  economic ideology capturing  elites and becoming the dominant ideology.

Laissez faire economics has its roots in the late 18th Century when Adam Smith made himself its John the Baptist with his Wealth of Nations (The Invisible Hand playing the role of God’s avatar).   In comparison with those who became his disciples in the  following century,  Smith  was responsible and restrained,  acknowledging that there  were things such as the provision of roads which only the state could undertake and economic areas such as armaments which should as a matter of national prudence be kept in public hands.   His followers such as Richard Cobden, John Bright and David Ricardo In the 19th century knew no such restraint and wanted little if any state interference in the economy at home or abroad.

The consequence was that Britain was tied to the idea of free trade  from the 1840s until the First World War intervened in 1914. During that time the rest of the then advanced world  practised protectionism while Britain outside of the Empire did not.  This resulted in Britain’s dominant economic position in the world in 1850 deteriorating  badly by 1914, with the GDP  of the USA and Germany then  exceeding that of Britain. The years 1840-1914 were a period of great economic  instability in Britain with frequent booms and bust, frequent bubbles, bank failures  and great damage being done  to Britain’s self-sufficiency, most particularly in food.  It was also a period when British industry became deficient in many of the new major industries such as chemicals, despite having been leaders in the early days of those industries.   This was  the outcome of an economy which was allowed to evolve without any state guidance or initiative.  Come  war in 1914 and Britain found itself  dangerously dependent on  imports of not only food  but other vital materials and products, a dependency made  all the more problematic with the development by Germany of efficient submarines to prey upon boats bring the imports to Britain.

Nonetheless, the period  1850-1914 saw a very considerable increase in global transactions and movements of peoples.  This was a consequence of the  development of the railways , the steamship, the Telegraph  and vastly improved roads and the existence of the  various European  empires  (including the Russian) which allowed much free movement of people and goods within the bounds of each empire.

But although this was a form of globalism,  its pernicious social and economic effects were greatly  ameliorated  (at least for the developed world)  by the fact that so much of the world was controlled by the European empires.  The mass movement of peoples occurred  within the colonial possessions not between the colonial possessions and the colonial power’s homeland.   Politics was still contained within the nation state.  The developed countries, with the exception of Britain,   still thought  their national advantage was to be gained by protectionist measures.  Even Britain did not completely buy into the idea of free trade  because legal preference was given to trade within the Empire

A World war and the Great Depression  killed off the laissez faire creed as the elite British and British imperial ideology  for 50 years.  The European Empires were dismembered  and the Soviet and Chinese communist blocs created .   Protectionism ruled (even the European Economic Community, as the EU was then,  did not  greatly change the picture  because it was small to begin with and the radical measures such as the single market  were for the future).

After the second World War it was, for  the developed world,  an era of great stability.   There was no war in Europe worthy of the name, the nearest approaches to it were  several uprisings against Communist rule;  such serious wars as the West became involved in – most notably Korea and Vietnam – were either wars of  choice not necessity  or native uprisings at the fag-end of European colonialism like the British fight against communists in Malaya and  the French retreat  from Indo-China and Algeria.

In this protectionist world  the economies of the United States and Europe  did not shrink or stagnate. Just as the economies of those which practised protectionism in the nineteenth century  grew,  so did  those of the developed world grow between 1945 and 1980. It is a myth that only laissez faire economic policies produce strong growth.  Britain was an exceptionally  interesting case because the Attlee government of 1945-51 undertook arguably the most radical programme of nationalisation ever seen outside of the Communist world and British governments of all formal colours followed what were essentially social democratic policies domestically until the election of Thatcher in 1979

Most tellingly, after 1945 there was no general serious economic crisis until the early seventies when  two extraordinary events occurred. In 1971  the USA unilaterally collapsed the Bretton Woods system which  imposed discipline on the world’s freely exchangeable currencies by   pegging the dollar to the gold standard and the other currencies to the dollar at fixed prices. This  introduced the destabilising volatility of floating exchange rates into the world’s economic system. In  1973 the  oil producers’ cartel OPEC  doubled  oil prices. But even these  considerable shocks  did not knock the world economy over ; they merely made  it stagger.  It took the advent of Thatcher and the American neocons  to drive the economies of the developed world into a world of ever increasing make-believe where their politicians kept on saying how things were getting economically better, that countries such as Britain could become post-industrial and live off service industries alone.  The insanity of that mentality can be starkly seen now as unemployment has remained stubbornly high  in the developed world, something exacerbated by the present depression but not  created by it.

10. Unemployment as a barometer of an economic system

Unemployment is arguably the prime barometer of the social utility of an economic system. It was very low in Britain until the early seventies running along at 2-3%  (http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf). Even at the end of the 1970s its was low compared with what it has been since globalisation took off. In 1979 the Independent Labour Organisation (ILO) count  of those seeking work  without necessarily being signed on for unemployment pay  was 1,528,000 and the figure for those signed on for unemployment pay was 1,064,000. (http://www.york.ac.uk/res/ukhr/ukhr0405/tables&figures/04%20004.pdf)

In Britain in 2011 the official ILO  survey figure in August was 2,566,000 (8.1% of all economically active).  Those actually signing on for unemployment benefit totalled 1,597,200. (http://www.parliament.uk/topics/Unemployment.htm).  However, that is not the true figure because there  were 2.58 million people claiming long-term sickness benefit  (Incapacity Benefit and its 2008 successor Employment Support allowance)   in February 2011.  (Perhaps even more staggering there were 5.8 million working age benefit claimants).  (http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/index.php?page=statistical_summaries).

In 1979 the long-term sick figure stood at  720,000  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1042141/60-long-term-benefits-claimants-work-admits-minister.html). It stretches credulity beyond breaking point that there are there are some 1.8 million more people of working age who are too ill to work indefinitely in 2011 than 1979.  The reality is that much of  the 2.58 million will be disguised unemployment.

During the 1980s the Thatcher Governments adopted a policy of moving people off the ever growing unemployment register (those claiming unemployment benefit peaked at over 3 million in 1986) and onto the long-term sick count, where they often remained more or less permanently because much of the unemployment was structural (a consequence of deliberately destroying much of Britain’s extractive and manufacturing industry)  and the unemployed simply had no jobs to go to.  The policy was  carried on by  the Tory and Labour Governments which followed Thatcher.

How much of the 2.58 million now on the long-term sick register are really just unemployed?  As it is only those of working age (16-65) who are part of the statistics, it is difficult to see why the real figure would not be similar to that of 1979.  The population has grown since 1979 by a few million so let us say that 1 million are the  genuinely long-term sick.  Add the other 1.58 million to the ILO figure for 2011 and the unemployed rises to over 4 million. To that figure can be added  those who now stay on at school until they are 18 (in 1979 far fewer did) and the vast increase of university students (from around 13% in 1980 http://www.le.ac.uk/economics/to20/greenaway03.pdf to around 40%  in 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1584495/Labour-sticks-to-50-per-cent-university-target.html). It is difficult to give exact figures here but it would probably push the true figure of unemployed in the UK in 2011 up to around the 5 million mark.

As an example of how globalisation brings instability, both economic and social,  Britain is probably the prime example among developed nations.  All it has brought to Britain is seemingly permanent mass unemployment.

It would be argued by the Thatcherites and their ilk that the high level of employment in the post-war period was due to overmanning, especially in the nationalised industries.   That has some truth in it, although the extent of the overmanning is exaggerated by modern neo-liberals.  It is also a question of what service is given. Much of the supposed overmanning of the nationalised industries was really a matter of giving a superior service to that which is given by the nationalised industries after they were privatised  and manning levels drastically reduced.

But even if it is allowed that there was substantial overmanning  in the post-war period that does not necessarily mean it was not of social and economic benefit. What needs to be considered is the overall picture of society where such overmanning exists.  It ensures that  most people in a society are employed. That  creates social stability by giving people a routine in their lives, by ensuring that people are bound into society , by giving them a sense of purpose and most importantly a feeling of security so they can plan for the future, something particularly important when it comes to starting and raising a family.

That was essentially the situation in the period 1945-1979. People felt secure in their jobs, housing was cheap and plentiful, not least because the massive council housing programme of the  1950s and 1960s, the NHS had been created  and  perhaps most importantly a single adult wage was enough to support a family.

Compare that with what we have today.  People in Britain are increasingly insecure. If they have jobs they fear that they will lose them. If they keep their jobs there are pay freezes or wage reductions. The unemployed seek desperately for jobs – any jobs – but find they are competing with dozens or even hundreds of people for unskilled work. It is difficult in 2011  to support a family on a single adult average wage. Housing,  both bought and privately rented , has become obscenely  expensive  – If the average house price in 2011 was  the same in real terms as the average house price in 1955 it would be less than £40,000 (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/the-vicious-poison-in-the-british-economy-is-the-outlandish-cost-of-housing/).  It is a recipe for rabid insecurity and the fuel for renewed class hatred and racial and  ethnic strife.

The dirtiest secret of all in this matter of overmanning under the social democratic regime of the post-war years  or the supposedly more efficient workings of laissez faire since 1980, is that the British government has developed a universal subsidy for employers. It is tax credits which are paid to people in work on low pay (the definition of low pay has been somewhat elastic being up to £60,000 until recently but it is still at £41,000 –  http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/taxcredits/start/who-qualifies/what-are-taxcredits.htm#8).   Hence, the taxpayer is in effect  paying employers to take on labour, rather than, as used to be the case, the taxpayer paying the employee by funding more generously manned  nationalised industries than were strictly required.

The true cost of unemployment  is rarely calculated.  For example, where structural unemployment occurs, as with the coal mining closures in Britain, large numbers of people are  lost to work for many years, not infrequently for life. The cost to the taxpayer in maintaining long-term unemployment is immense, as is the psychological cost to the unemployed individuals and their families.  Even where those made redundant get new jobs they are rarely as well paid as those which have gone. Often precious skills are lost to the country when an engineering company closes or offshores its production. These factors  are  rarely if ever built into cost-benefit analysis of the loss of employment.  British government contracts are a good example. They are frequently awarded simply on the basis of who offers the lowest price. A recent example of this is the awarding of a multi-billion pound contract to Siemens rather than the British-based Bombardier for trains for the Thames Link.  (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-14019992).  If skilled people cannot find appropriate work in Britain, they go abroad.

There is also a general economic benefit from having people in jobs, drawing regular wages and feeling secure: it helps maintain aggregate demand because people  both more confident about spending and , because the money and the spending appetite is spread throughout the population the rate of circulation of money is kept high which stimulates economic activity.

11. Capitalism in a protected domestic economy

If it is not  capitalism but free trade  and the mass movement of people across national borders which causes instability what is the solution?  WE could remove those practices and societies, but then what?

If  capitalism was  allowed free rein in the domestic economy  but free trade and mass immigration were not, would that be the ideal regime?   Capitalism in the domestic market  would certainly have the capacity for damage if there was no state support for the poor, the sick, the disabled  and the old in the form of ensuring that there was sufficient  housing,  healthcare , educational opportunity, pensions for the old  and support in times of unemployment and  illness within the reach of the poor.

There are also things which should remain in public hand as a matter of  policy either because it would dangerous for them to be  in private hands  (the armed forces, police, justice) or because they can only operate  efficiently as a monopoly  (the post office) or are a natural monopoly (roads, railways).

Perhaps most contentiously there is a strong case for nationalising banks,  both because of their potential  to wreak havoc in an economy and because their nationalisation would return control over the money supply, as far as it can ever be controlled  to national governments.  Nationalised banks should also make a handsome profit to for the taxpayer because it would  next to impossible not to regularly make large profits  if they  eschewed the reckless practices of the past generation. (There would of course have to be very strong  constitutional bars to politicians debauching the currency.)

But even if banks were not nationalised, they would be much easier to control within an economy operating within national borders  with national politicians committed to the idea of nations not internationalism. For example, national governments could ban any financial instrument which created confusion between lender and borrower, creditor and debtor.  They could cap the amount of sovereign debt held by a bank.  They could insist upon minimum deposits and maximum multipliers of wages for mortgages.  Restrictions on lending to foreign borrowers could be introduced.

The existing banks are of course operating internationally and it might be thought that all they would have to do is  shift their entire operations out of any national territory which tried to control them.   There are two good reasons why they would not want to do that. First, banks may be international in their trading, but often they still have much or a majority of their  business in a particular country, normally the country of their origin. That would make it difficult to shift their operations because they would have to be willing to  kiss goodbye to a large part of their business if the  national government of a country where they had much of their business was   serious about controlling them.  Any national government could simply say, all right you won’t play ball with us, we shall not let you trade in this country.. The second reason is the fact that banks rely on governments underwriting them to a large degree both in terms of guaranteeing deposits and by  Central Banks acting as lenders of the last resort.  There are not that many countries which can safely offer such guarantees.  That would make the threat of leaving somewhat hollow.

Provided that all  things are done – welfare, nationalisation, protection, control of the banks  –   allowing free enterprise to generally organise most  things economically within the nation state is the best way of proceeding.  If a general  protection for strategically important parts of the economy such as farming and energy production are put in place, a judicious use of quotas  for a wide range of necessary goods  implemented  (says, 75% of all necessary goods to be home produced)  and mass immigration is outlawed,  there is little harm  that capitalism (or private enterprise if you prefer) can do .On the credit side of the ledger, there is  undoubted great utility in  having a self-organising  part of the economic system which satisfies human ambition and efficiently delivers goods and services where the ability to pay is either not an issue or the good or service is not a necessity.  This  would cover  the large majority of economic activities,  because much of the welfare provision would come in the form of money to the claimant and this would then be spent to purchase food, clothes and so on provided by private enterprise.  There is also an argument that it is healthy for a society to have large numbers of people who are capable of taking charge, making their own decisions. One of the problems the countries of the Soviet bloc had after the USSR split and  the communism fell was the lack of people who were capable of taking charge, of creating new businesses or even doing jobs which required initiative.

The alternative to capitalism is states running command economies.  These do not have a happy record. Much better to allow a properly  controlled capitalism to do most of the job of meeting most human needs.

Will the elites of  developed world wake up and see that globalism is the problem? Not from choice because they have nailed their colours to the internationalist banner. But fear of what is happening  in the world they have created – growing class feeling, racial  and ethnic strife and increasing material deprivation and insecurity  – may drive them to bite the bullet. Let us hope that happens before it is too late.

See also

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-wages-of-globalism/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/a-sane-alternative-to-globalism/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/market-economies-and-the-illusion-of-choice/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/does-the-welfare-state-corrupt/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/public-service-and-private-enterprise-what-do-we-mean-by-efficiency/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/another-day-another-lethal-financial-derivative/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/the-consequences-of-an-end-to-mass-immigration/

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/does-free-trade-deliver-greater-prosperity-the-lessons-of-economic-history/