Category Archives: liberal bogotry

What has happened to Emma West?

Robert Henderson

It is now 14 months since Emma West was charged with racially aggravated public order offences after she got into an argument on a tram which led her to make loud complaint about the effects of mass immigration. This was captured by a passenger on a mobile phone and uploaded to YouTube. The details of her arrest and treatment plus a link to the incident on YouTube can be found at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/.

Three times her trial  has been delayed, on the  third occasion in early September last year (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/emma-west-trial-delayed-for-the-third-time/).  No further trial date was set then and to the best of my knowledge none has been set since her last appearance in court. (If anyone has more up to date information please let me know).  On each occasion the delay was ascribed to the need to complete psychiatric reports on Miss West.  It stretches credulity way beyond breaking to believe such reports could not have been completed long ago.

Why has there been this inexcusable and increasingly absurd delay? Despite being put into a high security prison for more than a month (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-2/)  and having the risk that her son be taken into care, Miss West has made it clear throughout that she wishes to plead Not Guilty.    The reason for the delay  probably lies in that plea. The liberal elite rely on people charged with such offences being intimidated into pleading Guilty.  A full blown trial would mean public discussion of the consequences of mass immigration and the ruthless measures which the liberal elite use to suppress such debate.  They  greatly fear that because it would risk the politically correct emperor being shown to have no clothes. .

The facts of the case speak for themselves: the behaviour of the authorities is not compatible with a free society.

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UPDATE 9/1/2013

Miss West was scheduled to come to trial on 2 January,  but the case was adjourned for the fourth time because an unspecified expert was not available.  A new trial date has not been set  ( http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Trial-alleged-tram-racist-Emma-West-adjourned/story-17782550-detail/story.html).

The continuing and ever more absurd delay suggests that the powers-that-be are in a quandary about what to do. It is unlikely Miss West  will change her plea to Guilty after this length of time and the awful prospect for the authorities of a trial in which the official  omerta against speaking honestly about race and immigration will be broken looms ever larger. On the other hand,  if the case is dropped it will be a signal to the public that the liberal elite are afraid of any public challenge to their creed.

Miss West has also been charged with assaults against the police:

“West was also due to appear at Croydon Magistrates’ Court on Monday charged with assaulting two police officers at her home on March 3, 2012.
She denies both charges and the trial has been rescheduled to occur on March 4.” (Ibid)

To the best of my knowledge  this is the first time these charges have appeared in the media.  If the assaults took place  ten  months ago it is a little difficult to understand why the  case has not already been tried as it is magistrate court case or why the case did not proceed on its original January date , which I take to have been 7 January.  It will be interesting to see if it does take place on 4 March. If it does not,  and the Crown Court case on the race-related charges has not been heard by then, it will be a strong indication that the CPS  want the racial abuse case out of the way before she is tried for the alleged  assault.  It could be that it has been kicked down the road simply  to give the  authorities two months to think about whether the Crown Court case should proceed.

The Archers – An everyday story of underclass folk

Robert Henderson

Always a programme to capture the politically correct Zeitgeist, the latest evidence of this is in the extended  space given in both the regular Archers and Archers extra programmes to the underclass, the politically correct version of the old idea of the undeserving or hopeless poor.

The underclass are represented by the  Horrobin family. This being the Archers  the Horrobins are  white (natch) and English (natch). The family members have stereotypical underclass names such as Garry, Tracey and  Donna.  One of the men,  Clive,  is a violent career criminal. Another, Keith, has just been jailed for four years for arson committed on  David Archer’s farm.  Bert ,the patriarch of the family,  is a hopeless inadequate unable to look after himself. He and his son Garry live on benefits.  Donna, the wife of Keith,  also incompetent in the basic management of life falls into the coils of a local loan shark who is violently warned off by her brother-in-law Clive who also robs him.  They are a white liberal’s dream: a family who are white and English and begging for politically correct state interference in their lives.

But it is not only the white English underclass  who are in trouble in Ambridge. Above the underclass storyline in the social pecking order, there is  Ed Grundy is running into ever deeper trouble with his premium milk business. Ed is, guess what, white and English.  He is shown as bizarrely incompetent .  His father Eddie is dropping ever heavier hints that he is finding work  becoming ever scarcer.

Then there is Matt Crawford who is (sigh), white and English. Crawford is a property developer of working-class origins who is regarded by his partner Lilian Bellamy  (white and English) as having driven a tenant from one of his properties to his death by Rackmanesque methods of harassment consisting of widely disruptive and unnecessary repair work in an attempt to get the tenant Arthur and his wife Joyce out of the property.  Arthur obligingly dies.  Lilian blames Crawford and starts an affair with Crawford’s half brother Paul (white and English), and the two engage in all too graphic geriatric sex.

Finally there is Lillian’s son James (white and English),  who has spent the past few months living with his mother and Crawford  after breaking his leg attended by his previously estranged girlfriend Leonie (white and English). James is a 40-year-old mother’s boy forever behaving with all the psychological insight of a five-year-old; Leonie is as a caricature of pretentiousness.

Compare the way in which English characters are depicted with the treatment of the ever expanding numbers of ethnic minorities in the soap opera.  Blacks and Asians are generally represented in what the politically correct imagine is a positive manner. They are always good looking and without exception middleclass.  There is Usha the Hindu solicitor married to the local vicar (I am not making this up). The vicar was previously married to a black Jamaican who died. His “dual heritage” daughter Amy is a midwife with a degree. Amy’s erstwhile black lover was in IT. Brian Aldridge’s daughter Kate is married to a black South African journalist. The latest ethnic character Iftikar Shah is a maths teacher and cricket coach.

All the black and Asian characters are either wooden (for example, Amy) or unwitting stereotypes (for example, Amy’s Jamaican grandmother and Usha’s Hindu aunt) . This is because the white liberals who create the Archers have, being white liberals, next to no experience of blacks and Asians other than the Westernised middleclass ones they encounter. Moreover what contact they do have will probably be in the course of their work not in social settings, because these self-proclaimed disciples of the joy of diversity have a strange habit of ling in very white, very English worlds.  It is always worthwhile  running the Chiles Test over them (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/the-chiles-test-for-white-liberal-racial-hypocrisy/) .  The result is  black and Asian characters speaking in stilted or caricature fashion with the white characters studiously avoiding reference to their racial origins and desperately trying to  ingratiate themselves with the black or Asian character. Dearie me, it is just like the social interaction between white liberals and blacks and Asians in real life.

The depiction of the white working-class including the underclass is equally unreal and for the same reason: the white middleclass liberals in charge of the Archers have no experience of the white working-class.   But instead of the crawling masochistic subordination shown to ethnic minorities,  the white liberal has a mixture of hatred and fear for the white working class: hatred because they do not tow the politically correct line; fear because the white liberal knows the white working-class  were betrayed by the left political class through the engine of  mass immigration and  now stands as a permanent rebuke to the white liberal  for his betrayal.  If the white working-class were realistically depicted they would be,  by the definitions used by white liberals, characters which were racist, homophobic and chauvinist.  None of that appears in the white working-class characters in the Archers, not even in the world of the Horrobins.

The white immigrant characters, the numerous seasonal workers employed on the Aldridge farm and Elona,  the Albanian careworker  cannot aspire to the same status as the black and Asian characters, heaven forfend that they should be seen as the equal of the  Asian  and black minorities, but  they are of course hardworking and in the case of Elona putting forward a case for sainthood at some future time.  (Her husband is Darrell has a criminal record and is (sigh) white and English). One of the seasonal workers obligingly turns out to  be gay and has a fling with Brian Aldridge’s  gay stepson Adam Macey, thus pushing  another part of the Archers’ political correct agenda.

So there you have it, the rules of the Archers’ character game.  Characters who are white and English may  be routinely depicted as incompetent, criminal, unpleasant with at least a proportion of them  at or towards  the bottom of the social pile; white immigrants must be shown as honest workers at worst and saint like at best ; blacks and Asians must always be middleclass and generally admirable.

The Chiles test for white liberal racial hypocrisy

Robert Henderson

In 2003 radio and TV presenter  Adrian Chiles self-indulgently allowed himself  a gigantic wallow in liberal breast beating .  In a long article for the Daily Telegraph entitled  ”Why are all my friends White?”, Chiles expressed his  surprise that he, a white liberal bigot of impeccable anti-racist, multiculturalist  credentials, had no non-white friends and precious little deep social interaction with blacks and Asians:

“ The thought struck me as I was looking through my wedding photos recently: why is it that I have no black or Asian friends? I work with some black people, I socialise with them, but when I looked at the pictures of the 131 guests at my wedding, I was shocked to find that there wasn’t a single non-white face among them. I consider myself a fairly liberal, open-minded chap, so the demographic of my circle of friends was quite troubling. I decided to investigate further, and scrolled down the 99 names in my mobile phone’s memory, to find that there is only one black person on the list – a television producer whom I work with.

 “ It’s not that I haven’t come into contact with many black or Asian people during my life. I grew up in the West Midlands, which is home to the largest non-white communities outside the capital. And I now live in Hammersmith, a decidedly multi-racial area of west London. Yet, when Petal Felix, the aforementioned producer, came to visit me to discuss the possibility of making a documentary on the very subject that was causing me such concern, I was horrified to realise she was the first black person who’d ever been to my house. “

Faced with this traumatic (for the politically correct) disjunction between the  quasi-religious utterances about the enriching qualities of racial and ethnic diversity in a society and claims that “race is just a social construct” that people such as Chiles routinely make,  he  embarked on a series of exquisitely exciting (for a modern white  liberal) exercises in masochism as he explored the very white, very English world he inhabited and in all probability still inhabits. (The absence of non-white faces in Chiles’  wedding photos is made all the more enjoyable for normal, that is, politically incorrect people,  because his then wife Jane Garvey, who is currently employed by the BBC as the presenter of the feminist propaganda vehicle Woman’s Hour,  is an especially devout disciple of political correctness).

“We decided to make a film – The Colour of Friendship [for the BBC]  – that would attempt to find out whether mine was an isolated case or not; and whether 21st-century Britain really is a multi-cultural melting pot, or – if we’re brave enough to admit it – still a largely segregated nation.”

Chiles worked with an all black team whilst  making his programme. He finds being in the racial minority disconcerting:  “As a white, middle-class male, very rarely have I found myself working in a minority – until now. This time, the producer, executive producer, researcher and camera crew on this documentary were all black. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable with the situation and grew increasingly defensive about it, although I was unable to articulate exactly why…”

Chiles  takes the all black TV crew  to a Pakistani–run pub in West Bromwich (the area in the English midlands where he grew up)  which he still  regularly frequents and fondly imagines is an example of unalloyed multiculturalism in action. Much to his horror when they arrive he finds “the punters in the Sportsman turned out to be 95 per cent white. The only Asians in there were staff, serving beer and curry to groups of white blokes.”   His liberal fantasy world has overcome reality.

Throughout the programme Chiles is constantly putting his liberal foot in it.  When he recounts a story about how his wife could not say the word black when giving a description of someone his black producer Petal tells him that it “is typical behaviour for white people who don’t mix with black people. For God’s sake, it’s perfectly all right to call black people black!”    At one point he uses the term “half-caste” and is covered in liberal horror when he is told “mixed-race” is the polite word these days.  Most traumatically for Chiles  (and hilariously for the politically incorrect),  he meets  Simon Darby of the West Midlands branch of the British National Party. Unsurprisingly, Darby complains that whites cannot celebrate their whiteness. This leads  to the ultimate horror for a white liberal of being suspected by Petal of wanting to celebrate his whiteness: ”Petal and me into a furious argument when he asserted that it is no longer possible to celebrate “whiteness” in Britain.

  I wondered aloud why it would be quite reasonable for Petal to say publicly that she was proud to be black, while for me to say that I was proud to be white would cast me, in some people’s eyes, as either a football hooligan or a Nazi.

  “So are you proud to be white?” Petal asked me.

  “Actually, no.” I shouted back, startling an elderly woman, who was struggling past with her shopping. “I just want to know what the difference is.”

In addition to these embarrassments Chiles  constantly encounters  the physical reality of racial and ethnic division. He visits Handsworth,  and Hagley,  towns  stuck in the middle of the heavily black and Asian settled West Midlands and discovers Handsworth is almost entirely non-white and Hagley almost entirely white.

He also addresses racial separateness at the individual level when he meets  Nigerian Didi Anolue who tell him she is “looking for a husband – specifically, a black Nigerian. She rules out marrying a white man, which sounds fine coming from her.

 “But how would it sound if a white woman in Stourbridge declared she’d never marry a black bloke, I wondered. It would sound terrible. But what’s the difference?”

At the end of his Odyssey Chiles seeks answers to his questions:

“ If anyone would be able to answer my growing list of questions, it would be Dr Robert Beckford, who runs the Centre for Black Theology at the University of Birmingham. He told me the reason I am unable to assert that I’m proud to be white (not that I’d want to) is that “the language of whiteness has been appropriated by the far Right”, and it has to be taken back from them before people like me can understand what it means to be white and engage in a sensible debate about race. And another thing, he said: “Everyone’s always studying Afro-Caribbean culture or Asian culture. Why isn’t anyone studying white culture?”

  Until that happens, I might never find out why I have no close black or Asian friends. But, whatever the reason, I don’t think it necessarily makes me a bad person.”

The answers to Chiles’ questions

Chiles  should not be surprised at what he finds  because all he is displaying is normal human behaviour, namely, a selective preference for those who most resemble him.  This is called assortative selection and is a trait widely found throughout the animal kingdom.

The strength of assortative selection in humans can be seen most easily in mating  patterns. Even in such racially and culturally mixed areas as inner  London, the number of mixed race relationships is remarkably small  considering the apparent opportunities on offer. Indeed, the fact that  there are shared external physical differences which cause human beings  to classify people by race testifies to the general reluctance of humans  to mate with those who radically differ from them in physical to mate with those who radically differ from them in physical  appearance.

There are also differences in mating patterns where mixed race  relationships occur. Women are more likely to take a mate of a different  race than men and the higher the socio-economic class, the less likely that a mixed race relationship will exist.

These selective tendencies are very powerful.  In  Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner  cite a study made of a  US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84).  The site is one  of the  largest  in  the US and the data examined  covered  30,000  people equally  divided  between San Diego and Boston.   Most were  white  but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The  questionnaire the  would-be  daters had to  fill  in  included  a question  choice on race as “same as mine”  and “doesn’t matter”.   The study  compared  the responses  by white would-be  daters  (those  from non-white were not analysed) to these  questions with the race of  the emails  actually  sent soliciting a date.   The result  in  Levitt  and Dubner’s words was:

“Roughly  half of the white women on the site  and  80  percent  of  the white men declared that  race  didn’t  matter to them. But the response data tell a different story  The white men who said that race didn’t  matter sent  90  percent of  their e-mail  queries  to  white women. The  white women who said race  didn’t  matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

 “Is  it  possible that race really didn’t  matter  for  these  white women and men and that they simply  never  happened  to browse a non-white date  that  interested them?”

 Or,  more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter  because they wanted to come across  especially  to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?”

In short, around 99% of all the women and 94%  of all men in the sample were  not  willing  to  seek a  date of a  different  race.   How  much stronger  will  be  the tendency to refuse to breed with a  mate  of  a different race? Considerably greater one would imagine.

The effect of social and economic differences is that the higher up the  social scale a white person is, the more likely they are to have meaningful social contact with non-whites. Moreover, the contact they  do have is almost entirely with middle-class and very westernised blacks and Asians.

The truth which “white middle class liberals” like Mr Chiles find disconcerting is that they are much more likely to live in a very white world than the white working class whom they  both despise and fear.

 The Chiles Test

Chile provides the answer “ The only thing I know for sure is that, in this multi-racial society, many middle-class whites have much less meaningful contact with black or Asian people than they would like to think. If you don’t believe me, check your wedding photos and your address book.”

If the Chiles test is based on non-white faces in  wedding photos, arguably the most potent indicator of social interaction, it is a fair bet that most white liberals would score perilously close to zero.

What did Chiles learn from his experiences? That the liberal fantasy  of multiculturalism and multiracialism is just that, a fantasy and a most dangerous one because of the fractured society it produces? Don’t be silly the man’s a white liberal. At the time the programme was broadcast Chiles announced  to the  Birmingham Evening Mail that he “hopes his three-year-old daughter Evie will marry a black or Asian man one day (Aug 18 2003  Graham Young).

Chiles’  ignorance of the realities of racial and ethnic difference or a refusal to acknowledge them,  is summed up in that wish. He fails utterly to understand that the conflict in heterogeneous societies is not merely between white and non-white,  but amongst  non-whites of different types and those of the same race but different origins, for example, in Britain blacks with West Indian ancestry  are often at daggers drawn with blacks from Africa.  He makes the mistake, which itself is an unconscious form of racism as defined by modern  liberals, of lumping all non-whites together.

If his daughter does marry a “black or Asian man”   she will not be decreasing racial  and ethnic tension in Britain but increasing it, because the greater the heterogeneity the greater the mistrust and tension between racial and ethnic groups occupying the same territory.

The “wrong” sort of indoctrination (for the Left)

Robert Henderson

An unnamed (because they did not want the children identified) Rotherham couple experienced in fostering  have had three of their charges peremptorily  removed by Rotherham social services (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/9700001/Foster-parents-stigmatised-and-slandered-for-being-members-of-Ukip.html). The reason? The couple are members of  the United Kingdom Independence Party  (UKIP) which opposes  further wholesale immigration including that from the EU and multiculturalism.  These policies were  deemed racist by Rotherham social services:

‘They [the fosterers] were told that the local safeguarding children team had received an anonymous tip-off that they were members of Ukip.

The wife recalled: “I was dumbfounded. Then my question to both of them was, ‘What has Ukip got to do with having the children removed?’

“Then one of them said, ‘Well, Ukip have got racist policies’. The implication was that we were racist. [The social worker] said Ukip does not like European people and wants them all out of the country to be returned to their own countries.’

The fact of UKIP membership was enough to damn the foster parents as unsuitable to raise three East European origin children because according to  Joyce Thacker, the council’s Director of Children and Young People’s Services, the UKIP couple could not meet the children’s  ”cultural and ethnic needs”.  Despite the fact that the UKIP couple had been exemplary foster parents  for a number of years. After being removed from the UKIP foster parents the children were split even though they are siblings (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9704964/Ukip-fostering-row-children-were-split-up-when-removed.html). The claim  of meeting the children’s “cultural and ethnic needs”  is made even more absurd by the fact that the UKIP couple were foster parents trusted to take in children in an emergency,  a fostering status which often resulted in the  foster periods being short.

Since the story about the Rotherham foster parents broke a UKIP candidate has come forward to say that she was not allowed to be a volunteer with the children’s charity Barnardos because of her UKIP connections:

A row over two UKIP members having their foster children removed took a new twist last night when another woman claimed she had been barred from looking after children because she was a party candidate.

Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, condemned ‘another appalling case of discrimination’ after former district nurse Anne Murgatroyd said she had been prevented from volunteering as a mentor for young adults by leading children’s charity Barnardo’s….

Responding to a Mail on Sunday reporter, she wrote: ‘I’d almost gone through their process and been accepted when I told them I’d be standing for UKIP in locals . . . They checked with managers, discussed it, couldn’t accept me due to issue of multi-culturalism.

‘Their rationale was that because UKIP opposes multi-culturalism it would not be appropriate for me to mentor young people coming out of the care system. My argument was that, yes, I do oppose forced marriage and female genital mutilation and family killings but that does not make me unsuitable to befriend young people.’ (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2238037/UKIP-leader-fury-member-banned-Barnardos-caring-children.html#ixzz2DDOYxVs1).

These two cases suggest that within the social work world, whether state funded or charitable, UKIP have been placed on some sort of black list. This is positively sinister because once agents of the state, whether directly employed or subcontracted labour in organisations such as charities, are allowed to make political judgements in their work anything potentially goes,  including the imposition of blanket bans on those belonging to parties deemed not to be within the ideological Pale of the public servant or organisation.

What Rotherham Social Services and Barnardos are both saying  in effect is that only those signing up to an uncritical political correctness can be considered for participation in childcare socialwork.  However, that is not entirely correct because,   as we shall see,   UKIP’s policies on immigration and multiculturalism are not radically different from those of  the Conservative  Party; neither are they  a million miles from those of Labour.  To the best of my knowledge there is no example of a member of the Conservative or Labour Parties  being denied participation because of their attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism.  The implication of this is that UKIP is seen as a fringe party with limited power which  can be excluded with few consequences , while the power, influence and money at the disposal of the major  parties makes them too hot to challenge – it is also worth remembering that the funding for social services and much of the funding for major charities comes from the taxpayer so those in socialwork have a vested interest in keeping mum about the parties which do or potentially will allocate the taxpayers’ money.

The double standards are further seen in the complaint of the politically correct that UKIP members would indoctrinate the children with UKIP beliefs. But these people are more than happy to tolerate the indoctrination of children with their own views. There are no calls to  prevent the politically correct, purveyors of multiculturalism, Marxists and  Internationalists from adopting and fostering.  The politically correct deem these to be the “right” kind of indoctrination.

What UKIP, the Conservatives, Labour and the BNP say about immigration and multiculturalism

This is UKIP’s immigration policy including its position on multiculturalism:

• End mass, uncontrolled immigration. UKIP calls for an immediate five-year freeze on immigration for permanent settlement. We aspire to ensure that any future immigration does not exceed 50,000 people p.a.

• Regain control of UK borders. This can only be done by leaving the European Union. Entry for work will be on a time-limited work permit only. Entry for non-work related purposes (e.g. holiday or study) will be on a temporary visa. Overstaying will be a criminal offence

• Ensure all EU citizens who came to Britain after 1 January 2004 are treated in the same way as citizens from other countries (unless entitled to ‘Permanent Leave to Remain’). Non- UK citizens travelling to or from the UK will have their entry and exit recorded. To enforce this, the number of UK Borders Agency staff engaged in controlling immigration will be tripled to 30,000

• Ensure that after the five-year freeze, any future immigration for permanent settlement will be on a strictly controlled, points-based system similar to Australia, Canada and New Zealand

• Return people found to be living illegally in the UK to their country of origin. There can be no question of an amnesty for illegal immigrants. Such amnesties merely encourage further illegal immigration

• Require those living in the UK under ‘Permanent Leave to Remain’ to abide by a legally binding ‘Undertaking of Residence’ ensuring they respect our laws or face deportation. Such citizens will not be eligible for benefits. People applying for British citizenship will have to have completed a period of not less then five years as a resident on ‘Permanent Leave to Remain’. New citizens should pass a citizenship test and sign a ‘Declaration of British Citizenship’ promising to uphold Britain’s democratic and tolerant way of life

• Enforce the existing terms of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees until Britain replaces it with an Asylum Act. To avoid disappearances, asylum seekers will be held in secure and

humane centres until applications are processed, with limited right to appeal. Those seeking asylum must do so in the first ‘designated safe country’ they enter. Existing asylum seekers who have had their application refused will be required to leave the country, along with any dependants. We oppose any amnesties for failed asylum seekers or illegal immigrants.

• Require all travellers to the UK to obtain a visa from a British Embassy or High Commission, except where visa waivers have been agreed with other countries. All non-work permit visa entrants to the UK will be required to take out adequate health insurance (except where reciprocal arrangements exist). Those without insurance will be refused entry. Certain visas, such as student visas, will require face-to-face interviews, and UKIP will crack down on bogus educational establishments

• Repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In future British courts will not be allowed to appeal to any international treaty or convention that overrides or sets aside the provisions of any statue passed by the UK Parliament

• Reintroduce The ‘Primary Purpose Rule’  (abolished by the Labour Government),  whereby those marrying or seeking to marry a British citizen will have to convince the admitting officer that marriage, not residence, is their primary purpose in seeking to enter the UK

• End the active promotion of the doctrine of multiculturalism by local and national government and all publicly funded bodies

• Ensure British benefits are only available to UK citizens or those who have lived here for at least five years. Currently, British benefits can be claimed by EU citizens in their arrival year (http://www.ukip.org/content/ukip-policies/1499-immigration-ukip-policy).

Most of those policies are either formal Conservative policy or have considerable traction within the Parliamentary party.  In the case of multiculturalism David Cameron since becoming Prime Minister has repudiated it for its fracturing effect on society(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994 State multiculturalism has failed).  Here is the official  Conservative Party policy on immigration:

 IMMIGRATION

We are restoring order to our immigration system to bring annual net migration down to the tens of thousands – rather than the hundreds of thousands we saw under Labour – by the end of this Parliament. We have capped economic migration, reformed the student visa system, and we’re changing the family visa rules. We have made reforms at our borders, to ensure they are safe and secure.

The bigger picture

• Our annual limit on non-EU economic migration will not only help reduce immigration to sustainable levels but will protect those businesses and institutions that are vital to our economy. The new system was designed in consultation with business. Employers should look first to people who are out of work and who are already in this country.

• A properly controlled and regulated student visa system is a crucial component of our policy to reduce and control net migration. That is why we have radically reformed student visas to weed out abuse and tackle bogus colleges. And our reforms are starting to take effect: in the year to June 2012, there was a thirty per cent decrease in the number of student visas issued compared to the year to June 2011.

• We welcome those who wish to make a life in the UK with their family, work hard and make a contribution but a family life must not be established here at the taxpayer’s expense. To play a full part in British life, family migrants must be able to integrate – that means they must speak our language and pay their way. This is fair to applicants, but also fair to the public.

• The Government’s priority is the security of the UK border. The right checks need to be carried out to control immigration, protect against terrorism and tackle crime. We are maintaining thorough border checks. And despite those robust checks, the vast majority of passengers pass through immigration control quickly. http://www.conservatives.com/Policy/Where_we_stand/Immigration.aspx

The Labour Party do not have an up to date  immigration policy on their website  but their 2010 manifesto stated:

5.2 • Control immigration through our Australian-style points-based system, ensuring that as growth returns we see rising levels of employment and wages, not rising immigration, and requiring newcomers to earn citizenship and the entitlements it brings. http://www.labour.org.uk/uploads/TheLabourPartyManifesto-2010.pdf

The Labour leader Ed Miliband said this in April 2011 to explain why Labour lost the 2010 election:

“I think the problem is that we lost trust and we lost touch particularly in the south of England.

“I think living standards is a big part of it; immigration is a big part of it. I think maybe a combination of those two issues.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/8462411/Ed-Miliband-immigration-lost-Labour-votes.html

Even if the three parties’ policies are not exactly the same there is much overlapping. Moreover the objections of Rotherham Social Services and Barnardos were  on the general grounds of finding  opposition to immigration and multiculturalism objectionable, so the exact detail of the objections is irrelevant.

UKIP may not be at the top of the politically correct pantheon of  secular devils, but the British National Party indubitably is. The BNP’s current policy on immigration is:

– Deport all the two million plus who are here illegally;

 – Deport all those who commit crimes and whose original nationality was not British;

 – Review all recent grants of residence or citizenship to ensure they are still appropriate;

 – Offer generous grants to those of foreign descent resident here who wish to leave permanently;

 – Stop all new immigration except for exceptional cases;

 – Reject all asylum seekers who passed safe countries on their way to Britain. (http://www.bnp.org.uk/policies/immigration)

That goes  substantially further than UKIP, the Conservatives and Labour.  Nonetheless,  if  Conservative  and Labour party spokesmen were asked to comment on what should happen to illegal immigrants, foreigners who commit crimes or whether citizenship should be removed from those with dual nationality who commit serious crimes,  I doubt whether any would say illegal immigrants  should be allowed to stay, foreigners who commit serious crimes should not be deported or British citizenship should not be taken from foreigners who have gained it and gone on to plot  terrorist attacks on this country.

As for the rejection of  asylum seekers who have passed through safe countries,  Britain has a legal right to do this under the various treaties which cover asylum.  Nor could there be any objection in principle to the use of payments to voluntarily repatriate people because the government has been happy enough to pay failed asylum seekers to leave Britain in the recent  past (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1572669/Row-over-payments-to-failed-asylum-seekers.html) and http://www.irr.org.uk/news/the-politics-of-voluntary-returns/.

It would be difficult to make a case for the BNP policy on immigration being so utterly different from that of the Conservative and Labour parties that the party  deserved to be  treated differently. As for the BNP’s rejection of multiculturalism, that is no different in principle from that of the Conservatives and UKIP.  Multiculturalism is something you either  support or oppose.  It is a general policy not one of specific detail being simply a belief that different ethnic/racial groups should be able to follow their own ancestral cultural norms.  Beyond that It does not stipulate what the relationship between the groups  should be.

The broader question

The broader  question raised by the Rotherham  case is why it is thought an unquestioned good that children brought up in this country should be raised in a way which will make them see themselves as separate from the native population.   If a child is to grow up, live and work as an adult in a country , which is probably what the children involved in the Rotherham case will do,  the  security and life chances of the child will be best secured by assimilating as completely as possible not by remaining separate from the native population.  To deliberately set a child apart from the native population by insisting that they are brought up by those deemed culturally compatible  (which is often social worker code for being of the same race) is to generate suspicion on the part of the native population of the  outsider and paranoia on the part of the outsider that he or she is always under  threat from the majority.  That is healthy for no one.  It is a recipe for racial and ethnic conflict./

Where does the extreme political correctness in public bodies come from?

The political correctness of public bodies is not accidental.   Legislation such as the Race Relations (Amendment) Act  2000 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/34/section/1)which lays a duty on public bodies to not only be non-discriminatory but to prove they are being so, have institutionalised political correctness with  arguably the rightness of multiculturalism as its core belief.   Such laws should be repealed because they entrench a political creed in law.

Another buttress of institutionalised political correctness is the   use of organisations such as Common Purpose (CP).  ( It is interesting that  Joyce Thacker,  Rotherham council’s Director of Children and Young People’s Service  is  reported to be a Common Purpose  graduate  – http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100191270/rotherham-hislop-common-purpose/).  CP represents itself as a leadership training organisation which is something of an oddity in itself.  It is very successful in persuading public bodies to send staff for this “leadership training”  for which COP is paid millions a year.  Courses  are offered for people aiming to become leaders to those who are already well up the ladder of their career path.

 Here are a few passages from the COP website which positively shout the message of political correctness:

“Leadership resources

Common Purpose is interested in all aspects of leadership – when, what and how people choose to lead, and how they become better at it. We are also interested in all leaders, from all backgrounds; people at the beginning of their careers keen to develop their leadership potential to those looking to use their leadership skills in retirement.”  (http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/resources).

“We value diversity and constantly strive to provide equality of opportunity as an employer and in the provision and delivery of all our activities. We positively encourage applications from all sections of the community and are working hard to ensure that our courses and services meet the requirements of people with disabilities.

Why do we do it?

What underpins all Common Purpose courses is a belief that society benefits from people of all ages, backgrounds and cultures working together to help guide and shape the future of their organisations and communities. This is best achieved when leaders are able to realise their full potential, through broadening their horizons and establishing firm roots in their communities.” (http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/about/what-we-do)

No one opposed to political correctness, either wholly or in part, could take part in such a course honestly or willingly. ( For an extensive list of CP “graduates” and the positions held by them go to http://cpexposed.com/graduates).  The  aims of CP  and the courses  offered bear a strong resemblance  cadre training in the Marxist-Leninist mould.  It is probable that the ever growing political correctness in public service is to a significant degree engineered by the CP graduates who may act as a kind of freemasonary as well as promoting the idea as individuals.  There is consequently  a very strong case for banning any public servant from attending its courses.

What else can be done?

David Cameron may have spoken against multiculturalism and promised to legislate against the practice of social workers of placing children for  adoption  (and fostering) based on racial and cultural compatibility.  But he has not done this after several years in office.  Until this is done social workers  and their ilk in not-for-profit  bodies such as charities will continue to promote the politically correct and multicultural and nothing-else- will- be permitted message through their control of who is allowed to participate in their work.  There needs to be a specific legal bar to taking the political views of would be adopters, foster parents, volunteers and, indeed,  social workers themselves into account when deciding on adoption or fostering, recruiting volunteers  or employing people to engage in childcare social work.

That does not mean that  individuals should never be disbarred from such positions because of their views, but the views for which they are deemed unsuitable should be their own and not those  attributed to the person simply because  they show sympathy for  a political party, ideology or movement.   Nor should views be a disqualification unless they are directly relevant to the position sought, for example, someone espousing the view that the age of consent should be abolished who was seeking to become a foster parent might reasonably be considered unsuitable to look after children.    Opposition to immigration or multiculturalism should  not be grounds  for the thumbs down; nor should a belief in an open door immigration policy and multiculturalism result in rejection.  Finally, it should always be remembered that the behaviour of people is often at odds with their political and moral views.   Behaviour is a surer guide to the character of a person than what they say.

That those in the childcare department of Rotherham Council knew that what they were doing was dubious at best and illegal at worst is shown by their attempts to silence the couple involved; their failure  to confirm in writing the reasons for the children’s removal despite repeated requests from the couple and their refusal to publish the results of their internal inquiry into the matter. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9706739/Ukip-fostering-row-mafia-council-told-us-to-keep-quiet-say-parents.html).

The attitude of the local Rotherham politicians is illustrated by Josephine Burton, a cabinet member at Labour-run Rotherham metropolitan borough council. She told a member of the public  “It may be advisable to wait until you have a better understanding of fostering and the current legislation that surrounds it, before wading in to pass judgement.” (Ibid).  No apology by the council has been offered to the couple involved.

Political speech and action in Britain: What is legally permitted ?

Robert Henderson

Free speech is a very simple concept: you either have it or a range of permitted opinion, the  scope of  which can be altered at any time (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/free-expression-or-permitted-opinion-that-is-the-choice/).  Sadly and dangerously, not only is free expression in Britain unavailable,  but  the range of permitted opinion is becoming ever narrower . This is a consequence of the  totalitarian ideology that is political correctness becoming   embedded ever deeper into the British power  structure through laws both criminal and civil and the  control of the mass media  by the politically correct. Great swathes of political opinion are deemed criminal or at least grounds for excluding their holder from not only mainstream politics but public debate.     It is no longer possible to engage in political activity without fear of prosecution, loss of employment (especially in publicly funded jobs) or  of being the subject of a media hate campaign.

British political parties can no longer be what they want to be

The most fundamental  denial  of democratic political action in a Parliamentary system  such as that of Britain  is to refuse a  party the right to recruit as it chooses.  It is the most fundamental  breach because,  if a party cannot recruit freely and stand whatever candidates it chooses in elections ,  it is barred from any chance of taking part in a government or having a significant voice in opposition  on its own terms.    By controlling party membership the policies of a  party are determined.  This is the position in modern Britain.

It is no longer possible for a party wishing to stand candidates in British elections to choose who shall be its members and candidates or determine what are  its fundamental beliefs. This was made clear by a court ruling of  Judge Paul Collins in  March 2010:

“The British National party was plunged into chaos yesterday, weeks before the general election, when a court ordered it to remove central beliefs and policies about race from its constitution.

In a landmark injunction at the Central London county court, a judge found that the BNP’s membership policy remained discriminatory, even after a direct whites-only clause was removed last month.

The judge, Paul Collins, ordered the BNP to remove two clauses from its constitution as they were indirectly racist towards non-white would-be members.

The party also remains banned from signing up new recruits until it satisfies Collins it has changed the constitution, although it said last night that applications to join were being processed again.

In a further blow to the party’s election hopes, it was ordered to pay an estimated £60,000 in legal costs. The bill could rise to £100,000 when its own legal fees are included.

While one offending clause is largely an administrative matter – a requirement that all new members agree to a vetting visit from BNP officials, something the judge found could intimidate non-white applicants – the other spells out core beliefs.

This is a requirement for members to believe in the “continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration.

The BNP last month voted to remove a direct bar on non-white members after a legal challenge from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The government equalities watchdog then challenged the revised constitution on the grounds that ethnic minority Britons could still not subscribe to the party’s beliefs without “denying themselves”.

Collins ruled in favour of the commission, ordering the BNP to remove the offending clauses by Monday afternoon or face potential legal penalties.

The EHRC head of legal enforcement, Susie Uppal, said: “Political parties, like any organisation, are obliged to respect the law and not discriminate against people who wish to become members.”

The BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, said the decision “opens a very dangerous door. It’s a huge change to the unwritten constitution of Britain. The judgment has given a government-appointed, taxpayer-funded quango the rights to change the aims and objectives of political parties.” The costs award would “have some effect” on the BNP’s election campaigning, but it would not be significant, he added.

Griffin said he had already amended the constitution so the clauses were removed from membership criteria. He insisted, however, that the beliefs about immigration and race would remain, even if members did not have to officially sign up to them. “It won’t make any practical difference to us. But it’s hugely symbolic,” he said. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/12/bnp-racist-membership-rules-outlawed).

The judge’s ruling means that the BNP cannot in principle prevent those from ethnic minorities or the white “antiracist” political left  from joining the party with an intent to sabotage it. In addition, the policy of the party has been changed in the sense that its ostensible core values are no longer core values because their acceptance is no longer  required  of members.  Nor is it clear whether the BNP could legally refuse membership to anyone  because,  if it cannot insist that members must  support the  ‘”continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration’,  prospective members could believe and advocate  anything with regard to race and immigration,  including demands for Sharia law and the abolition of immigration controls. Such a person  out to sabotage the  BNP could accept the rest of the party’s political platform , much of which is, ironically,  shared by the mainstream parties, to prevent membership being denied on any other  ideological ground.   More banally, the BNP could be forced to take people who would deliberately try to disrupt its administration.  There would also be greater opportunity for leftist agent provocateurs to join the party to engage in violence or crude racist language to reinforce the liberal elite’s portrayal of  the BNP as no more than a group of hooligans always on the verge of  criminality.

In the present political climate it is also probable  that any person  refused BNP membership who belonged to an ethnic minority or was native white Briton and came from an “antiracist” background,  would find the courts likely to support  any action they brought for damages against the BNP on the grounds that they had been discriminated against  because of their race, ethnicity or a refusal to accept the BNP “core beliefs”.  It is not inconceivable that if such suits were brought,  the EHCR (http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/) might climb on the  “anti-discrimination” bandwagon again and obtain  a further court order banning further recruitment or even making the collection of subscriptions from existing members illegal until  the refused applicants for membership  were accepted.  The reduction ad absurdum of Judge Collins’ ruling would be a court ordering the BNP to accept someone as a member who was patently not suitable to be a member.

The danger for any party which cannot decide its own membership by requiring members to adhere to the fundamental principles for which its stands  is that it could,, and most probably would,  quickly become a meaningless political shell.  In the case of the BNP suppose   numbers of  the political left and ethnic minorities large enough to swamp the existing BNP membership applied for membership.  If the BNP had no way of refusing them membership,  the party could soon be  captured over by the incomers who could overthrow the leadership and change the party’ policies utterly.

That is the way only the BNP is being treated at present , but any party could find themselves in the same predicament if their policies do not meet with the approval of those in power. At present the powerful  are disciples of political correctness,  but   politics can move very rapidly and no one can be certain that their politics will not become the target for criminalisation and marginalisation.  Moreover,  where an ideology is involved, the ideology can alter  so that what was acceptable within it  to a follower may well become unacceptable when it changes. A good example comes from modern liberalism.  Until around 1980 the liberal left approach to the consequences of  mass immigration to Britain was assimilation; in a year or two it switched to multiculturalism, a very different thing which has strong similarities, at least at the conceptual level,   to the idea of separate development in Apartheid South Africa.

The Electoral Commission

Successful court challenges by the ECHR are not the only legal obstacle to political parties deciding their own policies. There is the Electoral Commission to contend with.   A political  party which wishes to put up candidates in a  UK election has to register with the Commission.  That registration is not automatic and can be refused if the name or emblem is deemed  “obscene or offensive “ . (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/107694/to-names-rp.pdf).  It is all too easy to see anything non-pc being refused by the Commission who would inevitably point to the many legal restrictions which already exists  on what may be said legally and use those as the basis for a refusal to register.

There are also some prohibited words in the Electoral Commission’s lexicon which could not be used at all or in certain formats which could curtail political expression  in the registration of parties, for example, English Party is forbidden under category 2 words (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/107701/doc-prohibited-rp.pdf) .

The Returning Officer  (who supervises the administration of an election) can also refuse  a party label on a ballot paper if they deem it inappropriate.

In view of the political dominance of  the political correct and the expressed attitude of official bodies such as the ECHR  and the courts towards party membership and the values of a party which challenges political correctness, it is reasonable to assume  that any party which transgresses the politically correct limits would fail to be registered by the Electoral Commission  or pass the scrutiny of the Returning Officer, for example, parties called England for the English or the Anti-Immigration League.   It might even prove impossible for parties in the Celtic Fringe to run under banners such as The English in Scotland or Protect the English in Wales

Independent candidates

Independent candidates do not need to register with the Electoral Commission. However, this has the disadvantage for candidates of not being able to described themselves as anything other than Independent  on the ballot paper (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0009/83169/UKPGE-Nomination-Forms-Final.pdf ).   To use any other label candidates  have to pretend to be a party and  register themselves as such with the Electoral Commission  with all that entails  in time, money (there is a £150 registration fee) and organisation .  It also leaves  them open to the same pc objections to labels as genuine parties. Indeed,  the censorship  of candidate descriptions  is likely to be  even more wide ranging than for individuals pretending to be a party than for  genuine parties , because the banning of an individual candidate would be far less likely to attract media attention or  result in  court action to challenge any ban because the refused candidate would be unlikely to have the wherewithal to challenge the refusal. .

The Electoral Commission also control what are known as third party campaigners . These are individual or corporate bodies (including registered political parties)  who can be campaigners in support of parties, individuals or policies without being candidates in an election.  (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/105936/intro-campaigner-npc.pdf)

There are a considerable and growing number  of elections in the UK  – Westminster, local government, devolved assemblies, elected Mayors and  police commissioners .  Consequently, the Electoral Commission  has  the potential to exercise a very powerful influence on British politics through determining what parties are called.

Laws to silence opinion

In addition to the restrictions imposed on  candidates,  political speech, writing  and action (for anyone) is  heavily circumscribed by a depressingly large number  of laws which,  whether originally  intended to suppress  political views or not , are being used to censor views deemed to be non-political  with ever increasing frequency.   he  most likely to be applied  is  the 1986 Public Order Act sections 4 and 5 and the Communications Act 2003 section 127.

“Public Order Act 1986

Section 4 Fear or provocation of violence.

(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.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is distributed or displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the other person is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

(4)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or both.

4 A Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the person who is harassed, alarmed or distressed is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(a)that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or

(b)that his conduct was reasonable.

(4)A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

(5)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or both.]

5 Harassment, alarm or distress.

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

(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the other person is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(a)that he had no reason to believe that there was any person within hearing or sight who was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress, or

(b)that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or

(c)that his conduct was reasonable.

(4)A constable may arrest a person without warrant if—

(a)he engages in offensive conduct which [F2a] constable warns him to stop, and

(b)he engages in further offensive conduct immediately or shortly after the warning.

(5)In subsection (4) “offensive conduct” means conduct the constable reasonably suspects to constitute an offence under this section, and the conduct mentioned in paragraph (a) and the further conduct need not be of the same nature.

(6)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale.6 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/section/4

The  Communications Act 2003

Section 127 Improper use of public electronic communications network

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

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2)A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b)causes such a message to be sent; or

(c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

In addition these Acts  may be deployed :

Malicious Communications Act 1988 section 1 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/content  as amended by Section 43 Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/16/contents

Postal Services Act 2000 section 85 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/26/contents).

There may be other laws which are used to specifically hamper free expression which is deemed politically incorrect, ,  but those I have cited give the flavour of the current powers available to those with power in Britain to intimidate the public and  control public debate.  They all have one very dangerous thing in common:  the Acts  are so broadly drawn that they are an open invitation to those with power  to shut down dissent.  The idea that people can assign an objective value to words  such as menacing, threatening, abusive or insulting  is simply wrong. Even more to the point, if words or images may be deemed criminal because they are merely abusive or threatening,  anything contentious to the mind of another could be held to be criminal.

In addition to the considerable restrictions on free expression  already described,   there are  civil  laws  allowing actions for libel and slander,  court orders prohibiting the publication or public discussion of specific subjects (breach of which risks imprisonment for contempt of court), restrictions placed by the Official Secrets Act  (which applies whether or not a person has signed the Act) and criminal offences relating to  obscenity,  blasphemy and  libel (the last three are so rarely used they are practically obsolete,   but  they are live laws which could be utilised if no other law would do).

Nothing non-pc is safe

Where does all this leave us?   The problem is that no one can be sure what would be treated as criminal by the police and the prosecuting authority the Crown Prosecution Service.   A person could look at non-pc speech and writing which has not resulted in prosecution and words which  has been resulted in criminal charges and try to analyse what will be deemed officially beyond the Pale  but be none the wiser.  That is for two reasons: first, the boundaries of  what is deemed  criminal are constantly expanding especially with reference to “hate speech”  and, second,  there is no consistency  in the investigation and prosecution of similar statements.

A  few examples to demonstrate the difficulty in knowing what is likely to result in police action.    Negro was the polite word for a black person  for two centuries .  Gradually over the past half century it was superseded by black, African-American, Afro-Caribbean or even African as blacks asserted their identity. But negro continued to be used.  It was not  considered a racist term, although a bit old fashioned in much the same way that homosexual rather than gay now seems slightly anachronistic. In 2011 the Liverpool FC forward Luis Suarez   (white) repeatedly referred to the Man U fullback Patrice Evra (black) as a negro, (actually its Spanish equivalent negre). This resulted not in criminal charges but disciplinary action by the Football Association who fined and banned him for eight matches for racial abuse (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/liverpool/8969738/Liverpools-Luis-Suarez-guilty-of-racially-abusing-Patrice-Evra-live.html).  Although there was no police action, the message the Suarez case sent to the public was negro is now a term of racial abuse which could result in action being taken against its user.  If another case comes to public notice I would be most surprised if at the least a  police investigation is not begun even if  no criminal charges are brought. That would be par for the course in these cases.  A  word is mysteriously deemed unacceptable, there is liberal media outrage and a little down the line the police act against someone who has used it. Frequently the police investigation does not result in charges but the publicity of the police involvement serves to intimidate the public.

The next word describing the race of a person which is likely to be ratcheted  up from polite term to criminal will probably be coloured. This is even more ludicrous than the outlawing of negro as a racial epithet. It is simply a description as innocuous as white.  That it was not considered anything more until recently  can be seen from the title of the American organisation for promoting black interests  the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  Despite this history  the Scottish football pundit Alan Hansen  ran into trouble after  using it in 2011 and was forced to offer an abject apology to save his job. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/dec/22/alan-hansen-black-footballers-coloured)

Now let us move forward to a recent case which did result in criminal charges.  BNP member Michael Coleman has just been give an eight month suspended sentence with 240 hours of community service (unpaid work) for publishing racist articles on his blog:

“ The 46-year-old was reported to police after two blogs he wrote in response to last summer’s London riots appeared online.

In them, he said the riots were a perfect example of ‘the difference in personality, perceptions and values of people of the darker races and ourselves’.

And he accused Stoke-on-Trent City Council of ‘flooding this city with Muslims and blacks, a complete population replacement programme. Darkies in, whites out’.

Police were called by Labour city councillor Joy Garner, below, who had been asked to read the blogs by a member of the public. (http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/Stoke-Trent-BNP-leader-Michael-Coleman-guilty/story-16839343-detail/story.html).

Leave aside the word “darkies”  for the moment. Coleman’s message is a straightforward political protest against  the most profound act of treason which is the permitting of mass immigration. If he was convicted for that protest it is unambiguous censorship for political purposes.  The prosecution is sending the message to the public that complaints about  immigration and its consequences  is being criminalised.

If it is solely “darkies”  which has led to the conviction,  and the report does not suggest that it is,  then the-powers-that-be through the courts and prosecution authorities are controlling language in a manner reminiscent of the Soviet Union or Red China.  “Darkies” may again be an anachronistic term , but it was never considered racist as such when it was widely used. Often it was bestowed on someone black in the same way that a man called white would end up being called “Chalky”.

Even liberals are beginning to get uneasy about the way that day after day new cases as  threats of prosecution or actual prosecutions are applied to people in situations which appear ever more extreme. Take  Brendan  O’Neill of  the Daily Telegraph on Coleman.  He pays ritual pc obeisance to  the “horror” of Coleman’s views and the use of “darkies”, calls him a moron, but then writes

“The councillor who kick-started the legal action against Coleman said something very interesting – he said the reason Coleman had to be punished and turned into a criminal for writing those blog posts is because the views they expressed are “not acceptable to the overwhelming majority of local people”. That is true; the vast majority of Britons find racist ideas and language disgusting. But are we really going to start threatening with imprisonment people who express opinions that the “overwhelming majority” consider to be unacceptable? Will that include radical political views, edgy social arguments, harebrained religious beliefs? The fact that in Britain in 2012 a man has been given a suspended jail sentence and 240 hours’ community service for saying something that is offensive to the “overwhelming majority” should give us all serious pause for thought, and make us ask what gives us the right to slam Putin’s Russia for likewise banging up punkish singers who, according to polls, also offended an “overwhelming majority” of Russians.” (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100183130/darkies-is-a-disgusting-word-but-people-shouldnt-be-given-suspended-jail-sentences-for-saying-it/).

Of course, the “vast majority of Britons” do not find what liberals now call racist ideas and language disgusting (effectively any preference for one racial, national or ethnic group over another) . Many might not feel comfortable with the word “darkies”, but the “vast majority of Britons ” will have varying degrees of sympathy with the idea that mass immigration has changed the country for the worse and is a form of colonisation.   But such expressed thoughts would now appear to be illegal. The case of Emma West  falls into this category.  Miss West was recorded on a camera phone  during a tram ride complaining  to a racially mixed group of passengers about the effects of mass immigration. There was a bit of effing and blinding but there was no gross racist abuse , just a complaint that her country had been utterly changed through mass immigration (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state).   She was arrested after the video was placed on YouTube, held against her will in a top security prison (the authorities claimed it was for her own protection even though Miss West  said she did not want to be protected) and is being subjected to an unconscionable delay before she is brought to trial – it is already 11 months since she was charged, the case has been adjourned three times and no new trial date set (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/emma-west-trial-delayed-for-the-third-time/).

One last case. The England and Chelsea footballer John Terry was charged with racially aggravated public order offences when he was alleged to have  called the black QPR defender Anton Ferdinand “a f**king black c**t” during a Premiership match between Chelsea and QPR in 2011.  Terry’s defence was that he had not called Ferdinand that but thought Ferdinand had accused him  of using the words and said  to him “I didn’t call you a  f**king black c**t”.

A court accepted this version and found him not guilty in July this year, but that was not the end of the matter. Once again the Football Association (FA) acted and effectively tried Terry on the same charges, found him guilty and  fined him heavily and banned him for four matches. ).  That of course is simply a sporting body  and not a court making the judgement, but it at best creates a public mood of fear of saying anything contentious which could possibly be construed as racist. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/chelsea/9568184/John-Terry-found-guilty-of-racially-abusing-QPRs-Anton-Ferdinand-in-FA-hearing-and-handed-four-match-ban.html). Moreover, it  was  a very sinister development because Terry was adjudged guilty by the FA regardless of the context of the words he uttered. The FA found that the uttering of words to deny having said them  with an intent to abuse  is an offence if the words are deemed racist.  Most dangerous. It could in principle mean that a writer of fiction could be held to be racist because he creates a racist character.  Improbable? Well, as luck would have it the author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has just run into trouble for doing precisely that.  In her first adult novel  The  casual vacancy  she has  a Sikh woman portrayed in unflattering fashion by a character  who is a racist. Sikhs in Britain are up in arms threatening to stop it being sold in India and possibly banned in Britain because it portrays a Sikh unfavourably (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9580177/First-Middle-England-now-Rowlings-novel-upsets-Sikhs-as-well.html).

There is a further problem with the increasing numbers of prosecutions being undertaken for alleged racially-aggravated offences. The prosecuting authorities and the courts do not operate an even-handed approach. The most outrageous example I have come across is the treatment by four Somali girls of a white woman Rhea Page. The Somalis viciously attacked Miss Page  -a video of  the attack can be found here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p. Despite the fact that Somalis were screaming “white slag” and other racist terms at her,  the judge found the attack was not racially motivated and, amazingly, did not impose  prison sentences on the Somalis.

Despite the uncertainty and double standards , it is reasonable to think that the following would leave a party or individual open to criminal prosecution :

1. Any statement which claimed  that mass immigration was an unalloyed ill.

2. Any statement which claimed that the permitting of mass immigration is the most fundamental form of treason.

3. Any statement which claimed that mass immigration is a form of conquest by means other than force of arms.

4. Any statement which advocated the forced expulsion of immigrants.

5. Any statement which claimed that an ethnic or racial minority has cultural values and practices which are incompatible with British society.

6. Any statement which claimed that a racial or social minority commits more crime than the native British population.

7 . Any statement which claimed that a religion favoured by an ethnic minority  is  antipathetic to British society.

8. The use of the words black, brown or yellow  as an adjective where it is attached to a statement which is critical of a person.

9. Any statement claiming or suggesting that there are biological differences between races which mean that different races have innately different capacities.

Race is undoubtedly the prime driver of prosecutions for simply expressing opinions,  but  increasing  police attention is being given to statements about homosexuals (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1270364/Christian-preacher-hooligan-charge-saying-believes-homosexuality-sin.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2206108/Daniel-Thomas-Footballer-posted-homophobic-Tweet-Tom-Daley-charged.html)) and recently there have been swelling attempts to bring abuse of the disabled into the police investigation net.  Words judged to be insulting to women are, as far as I can discover,  as yet not the subject of police action, but give it time and surely they will be because any person with a public voice who makes comments which deviate from the pc line that women are just like men is likely to be shouted down by the liberal media and its cronies.

But it is not only overtly politically incorrect statements which have attracted the attention of the police and the courts. Once it is allowed that words deemed insulting or upsetting can be criminalised, nothing but nothing is beyond the reach of the law. In the political sphere this can stop criticism of a politician. Recently it was revealed that two MPs and two peers reported twitter abuse to the police (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9558464/Two-MPs-and-two-peers-go-to-police-over-Twitter-abuse.html).  The revelation of these attempts by politicians  to have members of the public investigated by the police resulted in this  statement by Jeremy Browne, the junior Home Office minister: “The Government are not seeking to criminalise bad manners, unkind comments, or idiotic views.”

But he went on: “The Government are reforming measures to tackle antisocial behaviour, regardless of whether it occurs offline or online.

“To continue to support professionals to help and protect victims, we are introducing simpler and more effective powers that, where appropriate, agencies can use flexibly to deal with antisocial individuals who cause misery and distress to others.”

The Crown Prosecution Service is drawing up the first guidelines on social media abuse, following concerns that too many people were being prosecuted for making one-off offensive comments that were intended to be funny and not directed at specific individuals.

I think we can all see where that is goings, straight down the path to censorship of political complaint.  The  present  reality is any statement whether  spoken, written or  broadcast which is not anodyne and written in cautiously polite language  potentially puts its creator at risk of prosecution.

All of  these assaults on free expression are taking place when the politically correct have a stranglehold on British society through their control of  the state and the mass media. No political party which radically challenges the pc creed has any chance of being in government or any likelihood of gaining  a seat in the Commons.  Yet the strangling of contrary opinion is becoming ever fiercer.  Imagine what they would do if a political force which did unambiguously  oppose political correctness looked as though it might gain seats in the Commons.

No free expression, no democracy

In a true democracy there can be no restriction on speech because the full range of political opinions and policies must be available to be debated and implemented.   Equally importantly if is the ultimate guarantor of freedom. Authoritarian states can only survive if  free expression is crushed.  Make free expression an absolute  legal right and no dictatorship could be  established; bring free expression into a dictatorship   and it will dissolve the dictatorship.

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

Anybody putting forward a case for censorship needs to explain why  they cannot let “truth and falsehood” contend .  I have never met anyone who could provide a meaningful reason.  Their arguments are always once removed from the issue of free expression: its denial is always justified in terms of the imagined hurt, whether to feelings or violence,  the disapproved of words will cause not on the grounds that the words are true or false.

The Leveller leader John Lilburne never ceased urging people  in his struggles with the Parliamentary leaders in the English civil war to resist tyranny with the words  “What they do to me today they may do to you tomorrow”. That is a maxim for all people of  any time who wish to remain free.

 

 

 

http://ics-www.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=ks&folder=13&paper=130

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BNP ‘whites-only’ membership rules outlawed

 

Judge agrees with human rights watchdog that British National party’s rewritten criteria for joining are still racist

Peter Walker

The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2010

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

The British National party was plunged into chaos yesterday, weeks before the general election, when a court ordered it to remove central beliefs and policies about race from its constitution.

In a landmark injunction at the Central London county court, a judge found that the BNP’s membership policy remained discriminatory, even after a direct whites-only clause was removed last month.

The judge, Paul Collins, ordered the BNP to remove two clauses from its constitution as they were indirectly racist towards non-white would-be members.

The party also remains banned from signing up new recruits until it satisfies Collins it has changed the constitution, although it said last night that applications to join were being processed again.

In a further blow to the party’s election hopes, it was ordered to pay an estimated £60,000 in legal costs. The bill could rise to £100,000 when its own legal fees are included.

While one offending clause is largely an administrative matter – a requirement that all new members agree to a vetting visit from BNP officials, something the judge found could intimidate non-white applicants – the other spells out core beliefs.

This is a requirement for members to believe in the “continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration.

The BNP last month voted to remove a direct bar on non-white members after a legal challenge from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The government equalities watchdog then challenged the revised constitution on the grounds that ethnic minority Britons could still not subscribe to the party’s beliefs without “denying themselves”.

Collins ruled in favour of the commission, ordering the BNP to remove the offending clauses by Monday afternoon or face potential legal penalties.

The EHRC head of legal enforcement, Susie Uppal, said: “Political parties, like any organisation, are obliged to respect the law and not discriminate against people who wish to become members.”

The BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, said the decision “opens a very dangerous door. It’s a huge change to the unwritten constitution of Britain. The judgment has given a government-appointed, taxpayer-funded quango the rights to change the aims and objectives of political parties.” The costs award would “have some effect” on the BNP’s election campaigning, but it would not be significant, he added.

Griffin said he had already amended the constitution so the clauses were removed from membership criteria. He insisted, however, that the beliefs about immigration and race would remain, even if members did not have to officially sign up to them. “It won’t make any practical difference to us. But it’s hugely symbolic,” he said.

A spokesman for the anti-fascist campaign group Searchlight said: “This judgment is a personal humiliation for Nick Griffin. The BNP has been proven in court to be as racist and extremist as ever.”

The millionaire Asian businessman Mo Chaudry, who had said he would apply to join the party to “fight them from the inside”, welcomed the ruling. He said: “This was the only decision that could have been made today. There was no alternative.”

The decision follows weeks of wrangling over the legality of the far-right party’s membership criteria. After the EHRC challenge last year, BNP members voted at an extraordinary general meeting a month ago to scrap the whites-only clause. BNP critics argue the party has no genuine interest in recruiting non-white members and is doing the minimum to avoid legal action and court costs.

An internal BNP memo seen by the Guardian this week told members that the party had not “gone soft”. It continued: “We don’t expect any more than a handful of people of ethnic minority origin to apply to join the party nationally, and we will not let this deflect us from our political objectives of saving Britain and restoring the primacy of the indigenous British people.”

The Archers – An everyday story of disabled folk

Robert Henderson

Archers characters, especially the men, have long been the subject of  a remarkable number of disabilities.  Mike Tucker lost an eye in an accident, Jazzer  McCreary suffered brain damage after taking the veterinary drug  Ketamine,  Brian Aldridge developed epilepsy after being kicked in  the head, Jack Woolley fell prey to Alzheimer’s while   Pat Archer and  Mike Tucker and Greg Turner  suffered from clinical depression. In addition, Alistair Lloyd the vet has had gambling addiction and  the now deceased Julia Pargetter was an alcoholic, both of these behaviours  being treated in best pc fashion as illnesses rather than character traits.

But accident prone and genetically unfortunate as the characters may have been in the past,  bar the gamekeeper Greg Turner who understandably topped himself whilst  lumbered with a whining neurotic of extraordinary incapacity in Helen Archer,  they have all recovered and  seemingly been left with no marked incapacity even where the disability is of a nature to be  permanent and severe.  As for the non-physical ailments, the storylines concerned with depression, gambling and alcoholism    gave ample opportunity for a great deal of politically correct angst and the shift of the Archers to be an ever closer ideological  soul-mate of Woman’s Hour, but curiously,  once such storylines had  run their course the sufferers  never suffered a relapse.  Truly Ambridge is a miraculous place.

All this was well and good in normal times, but the tremendous politically correct propaganda exercise of the Paralympics demands so much more.   As it is now part of received pc wisdom that the disabled are no different from anyone else apart from being “differently abled”,   it simply wasn’t good enough for Ambridge not have a single character who was missing limbs, blind,  afflicted with cystic fibrosis and so on.  Nor was there  a wheelchair insight. Even worse, the one disabled  character who could not recover because of the nature of the damage , Jack Woolley with his Alzheimer’s, had been hidden away  never to have a speaking part again and to be referred to with ever declining  frequency. Why, some unkind people might think that characters whose disabilities  are “difficult” have been deliberately hidden away.

The shame of it all was terrible. How on earth would the writers and producers of the programme be able to face their friends at right-on dinner parties? They would seem so behind the ideological times in much the same way that Party members in the USSR had to live in perpetual fear of not being up with the latest ideological development.  What to do?  At one point it seemed that the Archers powers-that-be  were going to place Nigel Pargetter’s son Freddie  in a wheelchair at best and on a life support machine at worst when he rode his father’s  horse Topper which was too powerful for him.  In their hilariously clanking  agitprop  fashion the crazed pc worshippers  of the programme heavily signalled that Freddie was going to be thrown.  All that remained to be discovered were the  injuries he would sustain. Would he have his neck broken leaving him unable to move anything but his eyelids or could he end up no more than  paraplegic leaving him free to come first in the wheelchair racing in Rio? The thought even crossed the minds of seasoned Archer watchers that the boy might be killed by the fall as he is one of the very few remaining posh characters, thus following  in his  father Nigel’s footsteps, or should that be following in his headfirst plunge,    who plummeted to his death as he slipped from  the roof of Lower Loxley.

As it turned out Freddie got away with nothing more than a busted collarbone and lives to die another day when it is thought safe to  further socially cleanse the programme of another posh character.  Instead Archers listeners are due to be  treated to a different sort of disability and one which will last for as long as they want. Mike and Vicky Tucker have conceived a child despite  Mike being in his sixties and Vicky in her mid-forties.  Cue for a great deal of worry for Mike. Then they are told that the child has Down’s syndrome.  Cue for Mike to see the rest of his life sabotaged which drives him into a state of shocked gloom as he stares into a future in which he works till he drops  to support a perpetually dependent child.

True to the Archers’ tradition of treating adult male characters as  chauvinist monsters, arrested development children  or terminally inadequate wimps,  Mike is portrayed as being unreasonable in not greeting the idea of a Downs Syndrome child with unalloyed joy while Vicky, normally a less than universally liked character,  is supported universally by all the female characters and, as is required by up-to-date political correctness, the men apart from Mike also offer various degrees of support.  Also  in regulation Archers fashion, the younger the character  the more accepting they are of the pc  position. Not  one  character advocates an abortion.   Even  Mike is not allowed to do this directly.

The storyline has reached the point where Mike has suddenly had a conversion which would make St Paul’s Damascene revelation seem probable. Instead of seeing the future as a life sentence , Mike in the course of a single episode sees the pc light and becomes converted to the idea that a Downs child is a joy not an insupportable burden.  He does so after Vicky, honouring another Archers’ tradition of women characters getting their own way, announces that whatever Mike thinks she is having the baby.

How will the story develop? The BBC put up a poll on the Archers site asking tastefully whether Vicky should have the baby or abort it.  There is of course a third option and that is a miscarriage. Or indeed, a fourth and a fifth possibility, namely,   Vicky dying in childbirth with or without the survival of the child.  If the child is born how “differently abled”  will it be? Will Mike have a relapse into depression and do the decent thing and top himself? Exciting times indeed lie ahead.

But whatever the outcome of the Downs baby pregnancy,  a cloud still lies heavy on the post-Paralympic Archers’ production staff’s collective heart.  What are they to do about the shameful lack of wheelchairs and missing limbs in the village?  Will this be remedied by Will Grundy being attacked by the beast of Ambridge and having his legs chewed off? Watch this space…..

Emma West trial delayed for the third time

Robert Henderson

The trial of Emma West on racially aggravated public order offences has been delayed for the third time ( http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Emma-West-trial-adjourned-time/story-16820636-detail/story.html ).  No further date has been set.   The trial was originally scheduled for June, then July and finally September 5th.  The ostensible reason for the latest delay is the same as it was previously, further psychiatric reports are being sought by the prosecution.

It is true that cases can be delayed several times for reasons which are entirely legitimate. Further evidence directly relating to the immediate  facts of the case, that is, what happened rather than why it happened,  may be  being sought with a reasonable chance of success. Examples  would be where witnesses have not been  interviewed because they are not in the country,  but are believed to be returning in the foreseeable future or documents are being withheld by a body such as a bank and their release or otherwise is the subject of ongoing court action.  But there is nothing like that here, for the delay is simply down to further psychiatric reports being wanted.  That is something largely within the control of those commissioning them.  The fact that it is the prosecution which is asking for more reports is highly significant because it suggests that the ones they have already commissioned are not to their liking, that is, they are detrimental to the prosecution.

The case is not that complex. The prosecution have the recording.  They have had ample time to test it to see if it has been tampered with.  As the delay in trying the case is ascribed solely to the need for psychiatric reports, presumably the prosecution either have witness statements from  the person who filmed the incident and possibly others amongst the people present  or have decided that their evidence is not required for a prosecution.

There is a further consideration.  Because of the extensive mainstream  media  publicity given to the case,  and the fact that it deals  with the most politically toxic subject in modern Britain, namely, race,  this is a high-profile prosecution. The case was given further potency in the public’s mind  because  Ms West was put in a high security prison “for her own safety” .

Compare the time taken in Ms West’s case compared with  that of the England footballer  John Terry’s case for racially abusing the black QPR player Anton Ferdinand.  The two cases are similar. Terry pleaded not guilty and the evidence against him were recordings of  the game in which he was alleged to have made the remarks.   If Terry’s  trial had gone ahead  when it was first scheduled rather than being delayed by his defence asking for a delay,   the case would probably have been tried in April or May (the delay of the trial was granted on 2 February).  That would have been only six or seven months after the alleged offence  – the alleged offence took place on 31 October 2011. (Terry was found not guilty when the case was tried).

Ms West  first appeared in court was charged on 28th November 2011  (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/29/woman-court-racist-abuse-tram). Thus more than nine months have passed since charges were brought against her. Because no future trial date has been set it is probable that a year or more will have elapsed before she is brought to court, if indeed, she ever is tried.

Why is there this ever more unreasonable delay? It could be that the CPS are simply hoping that if they request enough psychiatric reports , sooner or later one will meet their purposes.  But I doubt that is the reason,  because psychiatric reports not favourable to the prosecution could become strong defence evidence. More  probable reasons for the delay are that the CPS  is hoping the stress of the delay will cause Ms West to change her plea to guilty or they are simply paralysed by her intended plea of Not Guilty and simply do not know what to do.

The CPS’ difficulties have been made more difficult with the appearance on YouTube of a  black woman engaging in violently anti-white rant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcZ1D2LCsao). She was arrested and questioned by the police in late August (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2191075/Racist-rant-London-bus-Police-investigate-outburst-passenger-posted-YouTube.html).    This rant is crudely abusive of white people:

‘I’m so glad. I’m born black and I’ll die black. I was born African and I’ll f****** die African.’

‘The only reason I was born in this country is because you f****** people brought my people here.’

‘My parents are f****** African, born in Jamaica. And I’m f****** African, born in England and I can’t stand you white people, I tell you.’

‘I don’t care what none of you lot got to say because at the end of the day if you lot would have had a choice you will f****** go with your people and I’ll go with mine.

‘Free speech. I hate white people. I can’t stand none of you.’

Unlike the Emma West case the mainstream media coverage of this anti-white racism has been minimal. I have been unable to find any details of whether the woman has been charged or who she is. If anyone has such information please let me know.

If this case is not prosecuted or if Ms West is prosecuted first and is given a prison sentence, it would be difficult for the woman in the video quoted from above not to receive similar treatment if not more severe treatment as her comments were vulgarly racist while Ms West is simply complaining about the fact that her country has been invaded through mass immigration.

The problem for the CPS (and the British elite generally) is that while it may suit their politically correct purposes to have the occasional prosecution of a native white Briton for alleged racism for the purposes of intimidation of the native British population as a whole,  such prosecutions carry  three great dangers for the elite.  The first is that the occasional Briton who is charged will fail to play ball and plead guilty accompanied by a Maoist-style confession of abject horror at their behaviour.  Even a few trials where the defendant pleads not guilty is potentially very damaging, especially if  the defence is based on the grounds of free expression and the right  to dissent from the liberal internationalist credo on multiculturalism, mass immigration and the joy of diversity.  This could be a fear in the prosecution’s mind in Ms West’s case.

The second danger is that the British  elite  cannot afford to have too many prosecutions of native Britons because that just looks too much like a police state.  What the elite prefer, at least  for the present,  are the police “investigating” alleged racist crimes with absolutely no intention of bringing charges. The idea here  is that the police can  rely  on the media to give such cases wide publicity,  which publicity serves the purposes of intimidating the native British population without the need for trials.

The third danger stems from the fact that  ethnic and racial minorities in Britain are, as anyone who lives in a racially and ethnically mixed area knows (I have done so  for over 40 years) ,  generally much more likely to engage in outright , vulgar and unambiguous racism, both directed at native Britons and by one minority against another, than native Britons.  This is rarely if ever admitted or even raised as a possibility in  the mainstream media , but the rise of photophones and websites such as YouTube probably means  that quite a few racist rants by those ethnic and racial minorities will reach public attention.  That presents the authorities with a dilemma: either they stop prosecuting native white Britons who are recorded being racist (or what passes for racist in the Brave New World of politically correct Britain) or they have to prosecute racial and ethnic minorities for the same thing.  An even handed approach would probably lead to an embarrassingly large number of prosecutions of racial and ethnic minorities. This would be anathema to the politically correct British elite because  their  view of race is that only white people can be racist.

More pressingly for the elite, large numbers of prosecutions  of ethnic and racial minorities would undermine the politically correct propaganda that racial and ethnic diversity is an unalloyed joy good for any society.  This is of fundamental importance, because any elite which is in the grip of an ideology can sustain that ideology only while they control the media . Let free debate into the public fold and the ideology is done for.  Milton had it correctly: ‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth, so  truth  be  in  the  field [and] we  do  injuriously  by  licensing  and prohibiting  to misdoubt her strength. Let her and  falsehood  grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse,  in a free and open encounter…’ [Milton – Areogapitica].

 

Read more at:

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/07/27/emma-west-has-her-trial-delayed-yet-again/

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/07/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-2/

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state-part-3/

http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/courage-is-the-best-defence-against-charges-of-racism/

George Orwell, left politics, modern liberals and the BBC

Robert Henderson

The “wrong” type of left wingery

The BBC has refused (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/22/bbc-george-orwell-statue-left-wing) to  accept a statue of their one-time employee George Orwell because  the outgoing director-general Mark Thompson thinks the great political novelist and essayist is “too left wing for the BBC”. Do stop sniggering at the back.

Orwell was indubitably left-wing , being in favour of  widespread state intervention both socially and economically.  Here is some of what  he thought needed to be done  to remedy the ills of English society  from  his long essay The Lion and the Unicorn  which was  published in 1941:

“I. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

II. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to on

 III. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines….. there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability… “(Part III  section II http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/)

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State….

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. …(ibid Part II section )

These policies and concepts  would be considered hard left  and risibly impractical  by the modern liberal left,   but there was nothing outlandish or extreme  about such views in 1941.  They were mainstream  politics for the 1940s’ counterparts of those who are today part of the liberal left.   Much of what Orwell saw as necessary to rescue Britain was enacted a few years later when the Labour Party  campaigned in 1945 on a platform of nationalisation and received a massive popular vote by way of endorsement.  The Party  also kept its word with knobs on when in power between 1945 to 1951 when Clem Attlee’s government   carried through what was arguably  the most extensive nationalisation programme ever in an industrialised country with an elected government.  (The major nationalisations were coal, railways, inland waterways,  some  road haulage and passenger transport,  iron and steel,  electricity, local authority  gas providers , Cable and Wireless, Thomas Cook and Son and  the Bank of England.  It also made the large majority of health provision public through the creation of the taxpayer-funded NHS, greatly expanded publicly funded secondary education and put welfare benefits on a modern footing with the sweeping away of the remnants of the old Poor Law regime and its replacement with a system of universal insurance. )

The ideas which the mainstream left embraced in the 1940s survived long after wards.  Large scale nationalisation and state control of much of public life was not considered beyond the Pale until the Labour Party  had lost four  elections and allowed itself to be seduced into accepting globalisation hook, line and sinker  by  Tony Blair in the 1990s. Anyone doubting this should read the 1983 Labour Election manifesto (http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1983/1983-labour-manifesto.shtml),   a document which was memorably but incorrectly described as the longest suicide note in history by the  Labour MP Gerald Kaufman.

This manifesto,  apart from laying out considerable further state involvement in industry and areas such as education and training, had two other  very interesting policies: withdrawal from what was then the European Economic Area (now the EU) and protectionist measures to safeguard British industry and commerce.

Withdrawal from Europe was justified by the manifesto because “The next Labour government, committed to radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy, is bound to find continued membership a most serious obstacle to the fulfilment of those policies. In particular the rules of the Treaty of Rome are bound to conflict with our strategy for economic growth and full employment, our proposals on industrial policy and for increasing trade, and our need to restore exchange controls and to regulate direct overseas investment. Moreover, by preventing us from buying food from the best sources of world supply, they would run counter to our plans to control prices and inflation.” (Ibid Section Britain and the Common Market)

Protection of the British economy was necessary because it was  essential that “ we keep our exports and imports in balance. We must therefore be ready to act on imports directly: first, in order to safeguard key industries that have been seriously put at risk by Tory policy; and second, so as to check the growth of imports should they threaten to outstrip our exports and thus our plan for expansion.” (Ibid Section  A policy for imports).

The interesting thing about the  1983 Labour manifesto is that the Party was still thinking in terms of British politics. They were rejecting the internationalism represented by the EEC;  wanting  British laws to protect British industries and devising purely national economic policies.  They had not yet foresworn  all that the Party had ever stood for by embracing globalism.

Despite the massive Labour Election defeat in 1983 (which, contrary to Kaufman’s gibe,  was largely accounted for by the victory in the Falklands rather than anything in the Labour manifesto),  the Labour Party continued for the better part of  ten years with their view of politics being national not supranational.   Tony Blair, the man  who eventually sold the Labour Party down the ideological river into the chaotic political jungle of globalism,  had rather different ideas in the 1980s. Here are a few choice quotes from the young Blair:

“A massive reconstruction of industry is needed…the resources required to reconstruct manufacturing industry call for enormous state guidance and intervention…”  (The Blair Necessities  p39 1982)

“We will protect British industry against unfair foreign competition.” (The Blair Necessities p39 Blair’s 1983 Election Address)

 “There is nothing odd about subsidizing an industry”. (The Blair Necessities p40 Hansard 1983)

“Political utilities like Telecom and Gas and essential industries such as British airways and Rolls Royce were sold off  by the Tories in the closest thing, post-war, to legalised political corruption. What we all owned was taken a away from us, flogged off at a cheap price to win votes and the proceeds used to fund tax cuts. In fact, it was a unique for of corruption, since we were bribed by  our own money. “ (The Blair Necessities p51 from the News on Sunday, 1 November 1987)

It is difficult  for anyone born after 1980 to understand how different  was  the mainstream received opinion on how politics generally and  the economy in particular should  be organised  before the arrival of Thatcher and her successors.  British politics from 1945 until Thatcher took office in 1979 had been leftist regardless of who was in power. The  appetite for nationalising industries may have waned after the fall of the Attlee government in 1951,  but all British governments after Attlee and before Thatcher accepted, grudgingly or not, the situation created by Attlee. British politics in those years was essentially social democratic.

The idea that the state should take the lead in many areas of economic  life was built into British political life.  Tories as well as Labourites  often saw it as an entirely natural and laudable thing,  for example, a Tory Minister, Harold MacMillan,  was delighted to announce in the mid-fifties that 300,000 council homes had been built in a year and it was taken for granted in the 1950s that Britain would produce  through taxpayer financing  its own military technology  from the most sophisticated fighters to small arms.  There was also a form of political correctness in those years, for the native British working class  fulfilled much the same role in British politics as politically correct protected minorities – ethnic minorities, gays and women – do today, namely , as a  group virtually  beyond criticism by politicians ( see  http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/the-white-working-class-and-the-british-elite-from-the-salt-of-the-earth-to-the-scum-of-the-earth/).  However, this political correctness had one great difference from that of today:  it was  to do with the large majority of the native population of Britain and a domestic matter untainted  by foreign considerations.  Moreover, there was only one politically correct group vying for attention, not the multifarious sectional interests we have today.

I shall indulge myself with a short personal anecdote to illustrate how different  the political goods of the mainstream left were before the 1990s.  I went up to university in the late 1960s to take a history and politics degree.  The default position for students and staff  (in the university generally, but especially in the politics department) was to be Marxist or at least a strongly attached fellow traveller.  I sat in tutorials and seminars where tutors would describe ideas which deviated from the leftist norm of the  time as fascist crap or some such cheery expletive adorned abuse.  (Just as racist is the left liberal buzz word  of buzz words  today , so was fascist then).  It truly was a different world.

Nationalist not Internationalist

Left wing Orwell  may have been when acting in the social and economic sphere, but he also had an immensely strong sense of nation and valued patriotism as an essential glue for a society:

“Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.” (part 1section I http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/)

“One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.  (ibid part 1 section I)  

“There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.” (Ibid  part 1 section 3 )

“Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.” (Ibid part 3 section III)

Again, his views were reflected in the  Attlee Government  whose members,  with a few exceptions such as the  Marxist  Strafford Cripps, were people  who naturally thought in terms of the British national interest  and for policies which were purely British.  It would never have occurred to the likes of Attlee and Ernest Bevin (both deeply patriotic men in their different ways)  to embrace the idea of free trade with its inevitable diminution  of native British industry and agriculture or to conceive of domestic British politics as a matter for anyone other than the British.

Orwell’s  Englishness

Orwell was very English and admired his country and his countrymen despite their shortcomings as he saw them.  He also placed his thought  consciously on an English base. Throughout his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, his  choice of noun for the United Kingdom is England.    All his novels apart from the first Burmese Days are set in England and very English in tone, even his two great political novels Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farm is set on what is obviously an English farm and  in 1984 the part of Oceana  which is England, a strange transmuted England  but still a very English land underneath the oddities.

Much of the Lion and the Unicorn is taken up with defining Englishness, for example:

“…there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person. 

“And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.  (Ibid Part 1 section  I)

Even where there was an aspect of England which he quarrelled with such as  the English class system or the Empire,  Orwell would recognise the ameliorating qualities of Englishness (or occasionally Britishness) in those  aspects . Here he is on the ruling class and the Empire:

“It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them [the rest of the population] well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside.” (Ibid Part 1 section  IV)

“One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what-not were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.” ( ibid part 1 section IV)

Orwell also had a touching belief that a socialist revolution in England would be a most unusual and English affair:

“An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over it the unmistakable marks of our own civilization, the peculiar civilization which I discussed earlier in this book…

 It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself round the old Labour Party and its mass following will be in the Trade Unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand, and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England as “a Christian country”. The Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.” (ibid part 3 section II)

Orwell’s contempt for the English Left Intelligentsia

Orwell had no illusions about the mentality of many of the English left of the nineteen-thirties:

“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God save the King” than of stealing from a poor box”   Ibid Part 1 section V)

“During the past twenty years the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In an age of Führers and bombing planes it was a disaster. However little we may like it, toughness is the price of survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and whose chief national industry is war. English Socialists of nearly all colours have wanted to make a stand against Fascism, but at the same time they have aimed at making their own countrymen unwarlike. They have failed, because in England traditional loyalties are stronger than new ones. But in spite of all the “anti-Fascist” heroics of the left-wing press, what chance should we have stood when the real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman had been the kind of creature that the New Statesman, the Daily Worker or even the News Chronicle wished to make him? “(Ibid part 3 section III

Why today’s liberal left are wary of  Orwell

The real BBC objection to Orwell is not that he is too left-wing but rather he is left-wing in a way which does not fit with being left wing in Britain today.  The modern mainstream British  left  are committed to just about everything Orwell opposed. They have unreservedly bought into the idea of globalism at the level of both economics and politics; they loathe the idea of self-determining national states; ideas of patriotism and national identity they see as at best obsolete and at worst vicious; they purport to believe that a  racially and ethnically mixed society is morally and culturally superior to a society which is homogeneous and  they have a particular hatred and fear of England which drives them to the doublethink of simultaneously claiming  that there is no such nation as the English whilst saying the English are dangerously nationalistic.  As for  public control and ownership of virtually anything,  they have largely adopted  the Thatcherite   idea that the market is always the answer and private enterprise is invariably superior to public ownership.  Even where they have doubts about the continuing  mania to privatise everything and  lament much of what has been privatised or are privately dismayed  by the export of jobs to the developing world, they shrug their shoulders and say such things are inevitable in a globalised world.

There is a further reason why Orwell cannot sit easily with the modern liberal. He encapsulated so much of what is  wrong with them  in his later writings.  In Animal Farm he describes just the sort of corruption of purpose which has taken place in the Labour Party since the 1990s with the likes of Tony  Blair and Peter Mandelson  celebrating the “filthy rich” as they desperately sought to join them.  It would be difficult to find  a better example of Robert Michels’  iron law of oligarchy whereby organisations set up to help the working class become vehicles to advance the fortunes of  those who head them  rather than those who they are ostensibly meant to aid.

1984 is even more telling because Orwell describes a situation we know only too well in modern England: the usurpation of language by the political elite and its use as a tool of social control. This is precisely what the imposition of political correctness represents.

There is also in 1984 an emptiness of purpose  because,  as the interrogator O’Brien  points out, power becomes a recognised and desirable (for party members) end in itself.  This echoes the ideological shallowness of the politically correct for whom the mechanical policing of  what is deemed politically correct  and the punishment of the politically incorrect becomes a ritual rather than a political policy leading to a desired outcome.

The reality is that modern mainstream left  are not “left wing” in any sense recognisable to previous generations. They are simply people who have a set of ideas, ideas  which are no more than assertions, of how people should behave.  There is no questioning of whether the ideas have a beneficial effect or not.  Rather, the ideas  are simply treated as self-evident goods and imposed regardless of their effects.

But although Orwell’s ideas are anathema to them because  they clash so violently  with their own, there is something more to the modern  liberal left’s  disregard for Orwell than ideological differences.  His honest socialism reminds at least some of them of the betrayal of the Labour Party’s history and principles which has left the less well off in Britain with no mainstream party to act or speak for them.   That may even induce a sense of guilt.  For those liberals who do not feel remorse,  there is baser motive of fear that in difficult times such as these the old socialism may seem attractive to large numbers of people and,  if it does,  those people may start asking the modern leftists exactly why they are  to be considered to be on the political left.

Orwell represents danger to the modern liberal left. He both challenges everything they stand for and provides a heady  left alternative, namely socialism wrapped in a patriotic cultural blanket.  That is why the likes of Mark Thompson think he is “too left wing”.

George Orwell, left politics, modern liberals and the BBC

Robert Henderson

The “wrong” type of left wingery

The BBC has refused (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/22/bbc-george-orwell-statue-left-wing) to  accept a statue of their one-time employee George Orwell because  the outgoing director-general Mark Thompson thinks the great political novelist and essayist is “too left wing for the BBC”. Do stop sniggering at the back.

Orwell was indubitably left-wing , being in favour of  widespread state intervention both socially and economically.  Here is some of what  he thought needed to be done  to remedy the ills of English society  from  his long essay The Lion and the Unicorn  which was  published in 1941:

“I. Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

II. Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to on

 III. Reform of the educational system along democratic lines….. there are certain immediate steps that we could take towards a democratic educational system. We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability… “(Part III  section II http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/)

Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State….

However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. …(ibid Part II section )

These policies and concepts  would be considered hard left  and risibly impractical  by the modern liberal left,   but there was nothing outlandish or extreme  about such views in 1941.  They were mainstream  politics for the 1940s’ counterparts of those who are today part of the liberal left.   Much of what Orwell saw as necessary to rescue Britain was enacted a few years later when the Labour Party  campaigned in 1945 on a platform of nationalisation and received a massive popular vote by way of endorsement.  The Party  also kept its word with knobs on when in power between 1945 to 1951 when Clem Attlee’s government   carried through what was arguably  the most extensive nationalisation programme ever in an industrialised country with an elected government.  (The major nationalisations were coal, railways, inland waterways,  some  road haulage and passenger transport,  iron and steel,  electricity, local authority  gas providers , Cable and Wireless, Thomas Cook and Son and  the Bank of England.  It also made the large majority of health provision public through the creation of the taxpayer-funded NHS, greatly expanded publicly funded secondary education and put welfare benefits on a modern footing with the sweeping away of the remnants of the old Poor Law regime and its replacement with a system of universal insurance. )

The ideas which the mainstream left embraced in the 1940s survived long after wards.  Large scale nationalisation and state control of much of public life was not considered beyond the Pale until the Labour Party  had lost four  elections and allowed itself to be seduced into accepting globalisation hook, line and sinker  by  Tony Blair in the 1990s. Anyone doubting this should read the 1983 Labour Election manifesto (http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1983/1983-labour-manifesto.shtml),   a document which was memorably but incorrectly described as the longest suicide note in history by the  Labour MP Gerald Kaufman.

This manifesto,  apart from laying out considerable further state involvement in industry and areas such as education and training, had two other  very interesting policies: withdrawal from what was then the European Economic Area (now the EU) and protectionist measures to safeguard British industry and commerce.

Withdrawal from Europe was justified by the manifesto because “The next Labour government, committed to radical, socialist policies for reviving the British economy, is bound to find continued membership a most serious obstacle to the fulfilment of those policies. In particular the rules of the Treaty of Rome are bound to conflict with our strategy for economic growth and full employment, our proposals on industrial policy and for increasing trade, and our need to restore exchange controls and to regulate direct overseas investment. Moreover, by preventing us from buying food from the best sources of world supply, they would run counter to our plans to control prices and inflation.” (Ibid Section Britain and the Common Market)

Protection of the British economy was necessary because it was  essential that “ we keep our exports and imports in balance. We must therefore be ready to act on imports directly: first, in order to safeguard key industries that have been seriously put at risk by Tory policy; and second, so as to check the growth of imports should they threaten to outstrip our exports and thus our plan for expansion.” (Ibid Section  A policy for imports).

The interesting thing about the  1983 Labour manifesto is that the Party was still thinking in terms of British politics. They were rejecting the internationalism represented by the EEC;  wanting  British laws to protect British industries and devising purely national economic policies.  They had not yet foresworn  all that the Party had ever stood for by embracing globalism.

Despite the massive Labour Election defeat in 1983 (which, contrary to Kaufman’s gibe,  was largely accounted for by the victory in the Falklands rather than anything in the Labour manifesto),  the Labour Party continued for the better part of  ten years with their view of politics being national not supranational.   Tony Blair, the man  who eventually sold the Labour Party down the ideological river into the chaotic political jungle of globalism,  had rather different ideas in the 1980s. Here are a few choice quotes from the young Blair:

“A massive reconstruction of industry is needed…the resources required to reconstruct manufacturing industry call for enormous state guidance and intervention…”  (The Blair Necessities  p39 1982)

“We will protect British industry against unfair foreign competition.” (The Blair Necessities p39 Blair’s 1983 Election Address)

 “There is nothing odd about subsidizing an industry”. (The Blair Necessities p40 Hansard 1983)

“Political utilities like Telecom and Gas and essential industries such as British airways and Rolls Royce were sold off  by the Tories in the closest thing, post-war, to legalised political corruption. What we all owned was taken a away from us, flogged off at a cheap price to win votes and the proceeds used to fund tax cuts. In fact, it was a unique for of corruption, since we were bribed by  our own money. “ (The Blair Necessities p51 from the News on Sunday, 1 November 1987)

It is difficult  for anyone born after 1980 to understand how different  was  the mainstream received opinion on how politics generally and  the economy in particular should  be organised  before the arrival of Thatcher and her successors.  British politics from 1945 until Thatcher took office in 1979 had been leftist regardless of who was in power. The  appetite for nationalising industries may have waned after the fall of the Attlee government in 1951,  but all British governments after Attlee and before Thatcher accepted, grudgingly or not, the situation created by Attlee. British politics in those years was essentially social democratic.

The idea that the state should take the lead in many areas of economic  life was built into British political life.  Tories as well as Labourites  often saw it as an entirely natural and laudable thing,  for example, a Tory Minister, Harold MacMillan,  was delighted to announce in the mid-fifties that 300,000 council homes had been built in a year and it was taken for granted in the 1950s that Britain would produce  through taxpayer financing  its own military technology  from the most sophisticated fighters to small arms.  There was also a form of political correctness in those years, for the native British working class  fulfilled much the same role in British politics as politically correct protected minorities – ethnic minorities, gays and women – do today, namely , as a  group virtually  beyond criticism by politicians ( see  http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/the-white-working-class-and-the-british-elite-from-the-salt-of-the-earth-to-the-scum-of-the-earth/).  However, this political correctness had one great difference from that of today:  it was  to do with the large majority of the native population of Britain and a domestic matter untainted  by foreign considerations.  Moreover, there was only one politically correct group vying for attention, not the multifarious sectional interests we have today.

I shall indulge myself with a short personal anecdote to illustrate how different  the political goods of the mainstream left were before the 1990s.  I went up to university in the late 1960s to take a history and politics degree.  The default position for students and staff  (in the university generally, but especially in the politics department) was to be Marxist or at least a strongly attached fellow traveller.  I sat in tutorials and seminars where tutors would describe ideas which deviated from the leftist norm of the  time as fascist crap or some such cheery expletive adorned abuse.  (Just as racist is the left liberal buzz word  of buzz words  today , so was fascist then).  It truly was a different world.

Nationalist not Internationalist

Left wing Orwell  may have been when acting in the social and economic sphere, but he also had an immensely strong sense of nation and valued patriotism as an essential glue for a society:

“Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country.” (part 1section I http://theorwellprize.co.uk/george-orwell/by-orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-lion-and-the-unicorn-socialism-and-the-english-genius/)

“One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.  (ibid part 1 section I)  

“There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations, if not three or four. But at the same time the vast majority of the people feel themselves to be a single nation and are conscious of resembling one another more than they resemble foreigners. Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.” (Ibid  part 1 section 3 )

“Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.” (Ibid part 3 section III)

Again, his views were reflected in the  Attlee Government  whose members,  with a few exceptions such as the  Marxist  Strafford Cripps, were people  who naturally thought in terms of the British national interest  and for policies which were purely British.  It would never have occurred to the likes of Attlee and Ernest Bevin (both deeply patriotic men in their different ways)  to embrace the idea of free trade with its inevitable diminution  of native British industry and agriculture or to conceive of domestic British politics as a matter for anyone other than the British.

Orwell’s  Englishness

Orwell was very English and admired his country and his countrymen despite their shortcomings as he saw them.  He also placed his thought  consciously on an English base. Throughout his writings, both fiction and non-fiction, his  choice of noun for the United Kingdom is England.    All his novels apart from the first Burmese Days are set in England and very English in tone, even his two great political novels Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farm is set on what is obviously an English farm and  in 1984 the part of Oceana  which is England, a strange transmuted England  but still a very English land underneath the oddities.

Much of the Lion and the Unicorn is taken up with defining Englishness, for example:

“…there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person. 

“And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.  (Ibid Part 1 section  I)

Even where there was an aspect of England which he quarrelled with such as  the English class system or the Empire,  Orwell would recognise the ameliorating qualities of Englishness (or occasionally Britishness) in those  aspects . Here he is on the ruling class and the Empire:

“It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling class served them [the rest of the population] well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and looking at them merely from a liberal, negative standpoint, the British ruling class had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists. But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from the outside.” (Ibid Part 1 section  IV)

“One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what-not were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.” ( ibid part 1 section IV)

Orwell also had a touching belief that a socialist revolution in England would be a most unusual and English affair:

“An English Socialist government will transform the nation from top to bottom, but it will still bear all over it the unmistakable marks of our own civilization, the peculiar civilization which I discussed earlier in this book…

 It will not be doctrinaire, nor even logical. It will abolish the House of Lords, but quite probably will not abolish the Monarchy. It will leave anachronisms and loose ends everywhere, the judge in his ridiculous horsehair wig and the lion and the unicorn on the soldier’s cap-buttons. It will not set up any explicit class dictatorship. It will group itself round the old Labour Party and its mass following will be in the Trade Unions, but it will draw into it most of the middle class and many of the younger sons of the bourgeoisie. Most of its directing brains will come from the new indeterminate class of skilled workers, technical experts, airmen, scientists, architects and journalists, the people who feel at home in the radio and ferro-concrete age. But it will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand, and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word. Political parties with different names will still exist, revolutionary sects will still be publishing their newspapers and making as little impression as ever. It will disestablish the Church, but will not persecute religion. It will retain a vague reverence for the Christian moral code, and from time to time will refer to England as “a Christian country”. The Catholic Church will war against it, but the Nonconformist sects and the bulk of the Anglican Church will be able to come to terms with it. It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened.” (ibid part 3 section II)

Orwell’s contempt for the English Left Intelligentsia

Orwell had no illusions about the mentality of many of the English left of the nineteen-thirties:

“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God save the King” than of stealing from a poor box”   Ibid Part 1 section V)

“During the past twenty years the negative, fainéant outlook which has been fashionable among English left-wingers, the sniggering of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical courage, the persistent effort to chip away English morale and spread a hedonistic, what-do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done nothing but harm. It would have been harmful even if we had been living in the squashy League of Nations universe that these people imagined. In an age of Führers and bombing planes it was a disaster. However little we may like it, toughness is the price of survival. A nation trained to think hedonistically cannot survive amid peoples who work like slaves and breed like rabbits, and whose chief national industry is war. English Socialists of nearly all colours have wanted to make a stand against Fascism, but at the same time they have aimed at making their own countrymen unwarlike. They have failed, because in England traditional loyalties are stronger than new ones. But in spite of all the “anti-Fascist” heroics of the left-wing press, what chance should we have stood when the real struggle with Fascism came, if the average Englishman had been the kind of creature that the New Statesman, the Daily Worker or even the News Chronicle wished to make him? “(Ibid part 3 section III

Why today’s liberal left are wary of  Orwell

The real BBC objection to Orwell is not that he is too left-wing but rather he is left-wing in a way which does not fit with being left wing in Britain today.  The modern mainstream British  left  are committed to just about everything Orwell opposed. They have unreservedly bought into the idea of globalism at the level of both economics and politics; they loathe the idea of self-determining national states; ideas of patriotism and national identity they see as at best obsolete and at worst vicious; they purport to believe that a  racially and ethnically mixed society is morally and culturally superior to a society which is homogeneous and  they have a particular hatred and fear of England which drives them to the doublethink of simultaneously claiming  that there is no such nation as the English whilst saying the English are dangerously nationalistic.  As for  public control and ownership of virtually anything,  they have largely adopted  the Thatcherite   idea that the market is always the answer and private enterprise is invariably superior to public ownership.  Even where they have doubts about the continuing  mania to privatise everything and  lament much of what has been privatised or are privately dismayed  by the export of jobs to the developing world, they shrug their shoulders and say such things are inevitable in a globalised world.

There is a further reason why Orwell cannot sit easily with the modern liberal. He encapsulated so much of what is  wrong with them  in his later writings.  In Animal Farm he describes just the sort of corruption of purpose which has taken place in the Labour Party since the 1990s with the likes of Tony  Blair and Peter Mandelson  celebrating the “filthy rich” as they desperately sought to join them.  It would be difficult to find  a better example of Robert Michels’  iron law of oligarchy whereby organisations set up to help the working class become vehicles to advance the fortunes of  those who head them  rather than those who they are ostensibly meant to aid.

1984 is even more telling because Orwell describes a situation we know only too well in modern England: the usurpation of language by the political elite and its use as a tool of social control. This is precisely what the imposition of political correctness represents.

There is also in 1984 an emptiness of purpose  because,  as the interrogator O’Brien  points out, power becomes a recognised and desirable (for party members) end in itself.  This echoes the ideological shallowness of the politically correct for whom the mechanical policing of  what is deemed politically correct  and the punishment of the politically incorrect becomes a ritual rather than a political policy leading to a desired outcome.

The reality is that modern mainstream left  are not “left wing” in any sense recognisable to previous generations. They are simply people who have a set of ideas, ideas  which are no more than assertions, of how people should behave.  There is no questioning of whether the ideas have a beneficial effect or not.  Rather, the ideas  are simply treated as self-evident goods and imposed regardless of their effects.

But although Orwell’s ideas are anathema to them because  they clash so violently  with their own, there is something more to the modern  liberal left’s  disregard for Orwell than ideological differences.  His honest socialism reminds at least some of them of the betrayal of the Labour Party’s history and principles which has left the less well off in Britain with no mainstream party to act or speak for them.   That may even induce a sense of guilt.  For those liberals who do not feel remorse,  there is baser motive of fear that in difficult times such as these the old socialism may seem attractive to large numbers of people and,  if it does,  those people may start asking the modern leftists exactly why they are  to be considered to be on the political left.

Orwell represents danger to the modern liberal left. He both challenges everything they stand for and provides a heady  left alternative, namely socialism wrapped in a patriotic cultural blanket.  That is why the likes of Mark Thompson think he is “too left wing”.

England: the mother of modern sport

Contents

1. Sport is stitched into the English social DNA

2. The organisation of sport

3. International  Sport

4. Cricket – the first modern game

5. Football – the world game

6. The amateur and the professional

7. The importance of sport

8. Why was England in the sporting  vanguard?

9. English sport is a mirror of English society

10. The political dimension

Robert Henderson

1. Sport is stitched into the English social DNA

“We [the Coca Cola Championship] are the fourth best supported division in  Europe  with  nearly  10  million  fans  last  season,   after  the Premiership  [12.88 million],  Bundesliga [11.57 million] and  La  Liga [10.92].  We are ahead of Seria A.”   Lord Mahwinny,  Chairman  of  the Football League – Daily Telegraph 28 7 2005.

The English have  a most tremendous sporting culture.  By that I do not mean that England is always winning everything at the national level  – although  they  do far better than is generally realised –  but  rather that the interest in sport is exceptionally deep and wide. As the quote from Mahwinny shows,  not only is the top division of English  football(the Premiership)  the most watched in Europe,   the second    division (the  Coca Cola Championship) attracts  more spectators than   all  but two of the top divisions  in Europe,  beating even the top division  of that supposed bastion of football Italy.

The  colossal   support   for  football in  England  is  all  the  more extraordinary  because the country has so many other  sports  seriously competing  for  spectators,   arguably more  than   any  other  country because  England  competes at a serious level in almost all  the  major international   sports  – basketball, handball, volleyball and   and  alpine  sports   are    the exceptions.  This all round sporting participation resulted in  England in the early 1990s coming within touching distance of becoming    world champions in football,  rugby and cricket. In 1990 England  lost in the semi-finals  on  penalties   to Germany in the football World  Cup;  in 1991 they lost the final of the Rugby World Cup and in 1992  they  lost in  the  final  the  Cricket World Cup.  No  other  country,  not  even Australia, could have shown as strongly in all three sports. The  intense English interest in sport at club level is carried through to  the national sides.   England’s rugby,  cricket and football  teams have  immense  support wherever they go,  whether it be  the  amazingly loyal   England  football  supporters or  cricket’s   Barmy  Army,  the special quality of their support is  recognised by foreigners:  “German fans  want to be like the English fans.  They want to be 100  per  cent for  their team,  for their land.” (German supporter at World Cup  2006 – Daily Telegraph 6 7 2006)

This wonderful English  attachment to  sport  is not so strange when it is  remembered  that  most important international sports  were  either created by the English or the English  had a large hand in establishing them as international sports.   In addition,    other important  sports are  plausibly derived from English games,  most notably  American  and Australian  Rules  football from rugby,   baseball  from  rounders  and basketball  from netball.  In fact,  all the major team games in  their modern forms  originated in Anglo-Saxon countries:  cricket,  football, rugby  union,  rugby  league,  American  football,   Australian  rules, baseball,  basketball,  ice hockey,  hockey.   Even the modern  Olympic games  were  inspired  by the Englishman   Dr  William  Penny  Brookes’ “Olympic Games” at Much Wenlock in Shropshire which he founded in 1850.

A visit to the Wenlock gave the founder of the modern Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin,  his idea for reviving the Olympic Games  in Athens.  Brookes was a tireless advocate of such a revival  himself and only  died in 1894 shortly before  the first modern Olympic  games  was held  in  1896.   On  the 100th anniversary  of  his  death,  the  then president  of  the  International  Olympic  Committee,   Juan   Antonio Samaranch   laid a wreath on Brookes’  grave with the words “I come  to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brooks, who really was the founder of  the modern Olympic games.” (Bridgnorth Information).    It would not be too much  of  an  exaggeration  to say that  the  English  invented  modern spectator sport.

Of  the  games directly created,   to the one game which  deserves  the title of a world sport – football – the English may add  cricket, rugby (both codes),  snooker, hockey, lawn tennis, badminton,  squash,  table tennis   and  snooker,  Those who  yawn  at the likes of hockey,  table tennis  and squash should reflect on the fact  that sports vary greatly in   popularity  from  country  to  country.   Hockey  is  the   Indian Subcontinent’s second game:  squash,  badminton and table tennis are to the  fore  throughout  Asia,   while  snooker  is  rapidly  growing  in popularity in the Far East.

2. The organisation of sport

The difference between sports  before the modern era  and those  in the modern  era   is  that the pre-modern sports   were  not  organised  or standardised. In  pre-modern times sports lacked both a standard set of rules  and  governing bodies to enforce the common rules.  The  English changed all that and they began the process  very early,  most  notably in  cricket where a governing body, the MCC,  and a generally  accepted set  of  rules (known as laws) were established before the end  of  the 18th  century.   Some  of major sports  where England  had  the  first national association and  established the first generally accepted  set of  rules are:

Association  Football   –  Football Association  formed  in   1863,  FA established the laws of the game

Cricket – First published Laws 1744, MCC formed 1787

Hockey  –  1883  standard set of rules  published  by  Wimbledon  Club,

Hockey Association founded 1886

Lawn  Tennis – Wimbledon championships established 1877 with first  set of rules resembling the game as it is now

Rugby Union – 1871 The Rugby Union formed and the  first laws published

The  dominance  of  England as a creator and  organiser  of  sports  is further illustrated by  the existence of  iconic  sporting   venues such as Lords (cricket),  Wembley (football),  Twickenham (Rugby Union) and Wimbledon (tennis),  all of which have a resonance that   stretches far beyond  England.

3. International  Sport

Anyone who wonders why the four home nations  (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland),  are allowed to play as separate teams  in major sports  such  as  football  and   rugby   even  though  they  are   not independent  countries need wonder no longer.  The answer is  that  the four home nations were the four original international players in these sports.

The  Rugby Union arranged the first international rugby  match  between England  and Scotland in 1871, while the  first football  international between England and Scotland kicked off in  1872.

Further afield  cricket led the way.   The first international  cricket tour  was   in  1859 when a team of Englishmen  toured  North  America. Further tours took place to Australia in the 1860s and 1870s.  What was later  recognised  as the first cricket Test match was  played  between England an Australia in Australia 1877. The first Test match in England was played between England and Australia in 1880 at the Oval.

Of  course it was not only formal efforts which spread English  sports. Everywhere  the  English went they took their games with them.  In  the time  of  the  Empire  and  Britain’s  dominance  as  an  economic  and political power this meant almost the entire world.  Most of the  world was eager to adopt at  least some English sports.  Indeed,  of the many cultural  things  England have exported,  sports  have a good claim  to be the most eagerly received.  The games which England invented did not need to be forced upon others. The opposite was often the case.  Within the   Empire  complaints  were  not  frequently  made  by  the   native populations that they were excluded from participation in games such as football and cricket.

4. Cricket – the first modern game

Cricket  was the first team game to be a great spectator sport,  indeed one might argue that it was the first great spectator game of any  sort as  opposed to a sport such as horse-racing,  running,  boxing  or  the more  disreputable pursuits of cock and dog fighting and bear  baiting.

Cricket  might also reasonably claim  to have inaugurated the  idea  of international  sport with the first cricket tour to  North  America  in 1859 – see above.

The game is very old.  It can be dated certainly  from the 16th century, but as a pursuit it is reasonable to assume it was much older –  before the  age of printing little was recorded about any subject.  There  are some  intriguing  references  in old manuscripts  which  may  refer  to cricket,  for example, an entry in the wardrobe accounts of Edward I in 1300 which records a payment for the Kings sons playing  at “Creag”  (H S Altham p20 A History of Cricket Vol I).

The  game probably became more than simply  a rustic or boys’   pursuit towards  the end of the 17th  century. The gentry took it up  –  George III’s father,  Frederick, was a very keen player and actually died from an  abscess  caused  by being hit by a cricket ball –  and  teams  were raised  by   great  aristocrats such as the Duke of  Dorset,  Such  men effectively created the first cricketing professionals by employing the best  players  on  their estates,  ostensibly to  do  other  jobs,  but primarily  to ensure they played cricket for a particular team.  Partly because  of  this  and partly because the game grew  out  of  a   still overwhelmingly rural England with its much closer relationship  between the classes than later existed,  English  cricket was always a socially inclusive    game,   with  dukes  literally   rubbing  shoulders   with ploughmen.

The game was early organised. Sides representing counties such as Kent, Hampshire and Sussex were competing with each other by  the first  half of the 18th century.   Teams  called All-England, England or the Rest of England were also  got up to play either a strong county or,  in the second half  of the  century,  the Hambledon Club,  a club based in  a  tiny  Hampshire village.   Hambledon were surprising modern in their  thinking,  having built  the  18th  century  equivalent of the  team  coach  –   a  great pantechnicon  –  to   transport  the team and  its  followers  to  away matches.

During  its  first  century  or so as a  spectator  sport  cricket  was bedevilled by betting.  Important matches  were played  for very  large purses,  sometimes more than a thousand pounds,   a fortune in the 18th century.  Even more insidious was individual betting on results or  the performances  of  individual players within the game –  the  nature  of cricket absolutely lends itself to the latter.   But although the  game was always under suspicion of foul play, much as horse racing is today, betting must have increased interest in the game.

With  the  coming  of  the  railways  cricket  moved  into  the  modern professional  era with the formation of the All-England Eleven and  its imitators  such as the United South of England Eleven.   These  touring professional   sides   took  cricket  around   England  and  laid   the foundation  for  the modern county game.   During the same  period  the county  clubs as we know them today began to be  formally  established, with Surrey dating from 1845.   By the 1870s the work of the travelling professional sides was done and county  cricket became the mainstay  of English cricket.

H.S.Altham  entitled  a  chapter in his  History  of  Cricket  somewhat blasphemously  as the Coming of W.G.Grace.  This was not hyperbole.  In the  high  Victorian age two people were known as the  GOM  (Grand  Old Man). The first was Gladstone, the second was Grace. It is a moot point who  was  the better known.  It is no moot point who  was  the  greater celebrity: W.G. won hands down.

Grace was the first great popular games playing  hero.  His first class career lasted an amazing 43 years (1865-1908).  He made his first class debut at the age of 15.   His Test career began in 1880 with a score of 152.  He played his last Test at the age of 50 in 1899.   At the age of 47  (1995)  he scored a thousand runs in May,  the first man to  do  so (only five other men have ever managed it).

About  the  only two organisational  things seen in modern  team  sport which  cricket did not invent are  cup competitions and leagues  –  the honour for doing so rests with football,  although an unofficial county championship existed before the formation of the Football League.

5. Football – the world game

Football  is  the  nearest there is to  a world game.  There  are  easy reasons for this. At its most basic football  is a game  which requires the  most  rudimentary  of equipment,  a ball.  Its  rules  are  simple compared with those of other  games such as rugby or cricket.   But  it is  more  than  that.  Football is also the game  which  arguably  best combines  pure  athleticism  with the felicity  of  human  thought  and movement to which we give too often the bone-achingly dull  description “hand/eye coordination.”

Football  was  in a state of flux until the middle  of  the  nineteenth century.   Various  forms  existed.  Some codes allowed  kicking  only, others handling.   There were disputes over whether hacking and gouging were allowed.  In 1863 the Football Association was created and stopped the confusion. It was the first national sporting association which was purely  that.  The MCC in practice directed  English  cricket  and  was responsible for the laws of the game, but they were first and foremost, a private club,  as was the Jockey Club. The FA was  the first formally constituted   sporting body created to explicitly to direct  an  entire sport.

No sport has had such a rapid rise to popularity.  In the last  quarter of  the  nineteenth century  it went from a poorly organised  game,  to something  which  was recognisable as the game we  know  today.  Famous clubs  of  today were formed by Public School Old  Boys,  vicars,  boys clubs,  public  houses,  in the work place and  by cricket  clubs.  The first  international  game took place between England and  Scotland  in 1872.  The world’s first cup competition, the FA Cup, was born in 1872.

In  1888 the world’s first  sporting  league was formed,  the  Football League.    International matches involving countries other than England were being played well before the First World War and   football was an Olympic  sport  from  early on in the modern  Olympiad’s  history.  Not least,  football’s  world governing body, FIFA, was founded as early as 1904 (with no encouragement from England it has to be said).

By  1900 the top teams had become overwhelmingly professional and  club owners were often drawn from the ranks of local businessmen.  The  game had become  much more of a business than any other sport.

6. The amateur and the professional

Top  class   sport is now so tied to money that it may seem  quaint  to his  generation  that for all  of the nineteenth century and  much  of twentieth century the  amateur played a major  role in many of the more popular sports.  This was due to the fact that most major sports originated in England, where the spirit of amateurism was very strong, and these became spread across the globe when Britain had the only world empire worthy of the name and was also the most industrial advanced and economically powerful state in the world.  Other nations who took up the games had a natural inclination to imitate the English way in sport, because of where the games originated and because of England’s prominent position in the world.

There was also a strong class element. This was a time when class and status was still very much an issue throughout Europe and those parts of the world which were within the British Empire. Nor was the United States immune to the lure of class. As the amateur was associated with being a gentleman and a professional classed as a working man, it suited the better-off to support the distinction.  It also provided in some games, especially cricket, the means by which, in even a very socially stratified society, people of very different social status could play together.

But there was more to it than that. The English elite of the 19th century was in thrall to an idealised version of the ancient world and from this came the prime amateur ideals of doing something praiseworthy for its own sake and behaving honourably in the observance of  not only the laws but the spirit of a game.

Football,  cricket and golf  had professionals from their early days as public spectacles, but even within  games those  the amateur had a long run.  Other  major sports such as athletics,  tennis  and  rugby  union remained in  theory at least amateur until well into the latter half of the twentieth century,  although shamateurism,  the paying of  amateurs illicitly  through devices such  as inflated expenses or  salaries  for non-sporting  jobs  which were never actually performed,  tainted  most major sports.  But even though this dishonesty went on there were still many   genuine amateurs in top  class sport until quite  recent  times.

It is also true that the shamateurs were paid minute sums compared with the vast amounts many openly professional sportsmen get today. The  amateur  had  a prominent playing role partly because it  was  the upper and middle classes  who developed and ran modern sport.  Even the archetypal  working  class  game,  Association  football,  had  at  its foundations the public schools and innumerable worthies from the gentry and  mercantile  classes who founded many of the clubs  which  are  now household  names.  The true amateur was also cheap because at worst  he drew  only expenses (shamateurs were a different kettle of fish,  often being considerably more expensive to employ than an official pro).

But there was more to amateurism in top class sport  than simple  class dominance  and  cheapness.  The middle and upper classes  brought  with them a rather noble ethos.  Being an amateur  was more than just  being a person who played without being paid.  Games were seen having a moral purpose  in  the  building  of  character.  Team  sports    taught  the individual  to  subordinate  their own interests to that of the  group, while  individual competition forced a boy  to confront their  personal responsibility.  Playing for its own sake was something pure, untainted by the crudity of commercialism.

That  the amateur ethos was always battling with the vagaries of  human nature, which in many people invariably seeks to gain advantage unfairly,  is neither here nor there.  The important thing is the existence of the ideal.  Like  most  noble ideals it was followed to  some  degree   and behaviour during play   was as a general rule rather more sporting than it  is in a purely professional game.   Moreover,  even where  a  sport became  at   a fairly early stage  overwhelmingly professional  on  the playing side,  as  was the case of football,   the existence of  people with  the amateur spirit administering and controlling the  game  meant their mentality  was reflected in the way professionals behaved – a pro who did otherwise would risk the end of his career.  This was important because   the  behaviour of everyone who plays or watches  a  sport  is influenced by the behaviour of those at the top.

The true amateur was also thought to bring a spirt of adventure to  top class  sport  because he  was not weighed down by the thought  that  he must perform if his employment in the sport was to continue.  This  was one  of  the most powerful arguments cited in support  of  the  amateur captain in county cricket. It had a certain force to it.

I  regret  the virtual extinction  of the amateur in  the  popular  top level sports.  In my ideal world all sport would be amateur.   There is something constricting about all-professional sport. Players do have to consider the next contract.  They do have to consider their performance if  they wish to move to a  bigger club or take part in   international sport.   The  talented sportsman who is not a  professional  is  simply excluded.   Such a person may simply not be able to gain a professional opportunity   or he may simply not want to be a full time  professional sportsman. Either way he is lost to the top level of his sport. Cricket in    particular   has   suffered   from   the   abolition    of    the amateur/professional distinction,  with few if any players who are  not contracted  to a county club having any chance to play for the  county.

Professional  sport  has  too much of the closed shop about  it  to  be healthy. Attached  to  amateur  ideal was that of  the   “allrounder”.  For  the gentleman the ideal was the  scholar athlete,  an ideal approached most famously   by the Victorian Charles Burgess Fry,  who  won  a  classics scholarship  to Oxford,  set the world long jump record  whilst  there, obtained Blues  for cricket,  football, rugby and athletics and went on to play cricket and football for England. But there was also a professional niche as a sporting  allrounder. Many famous  footballers  played  cricket  professionally  and  many  famous cricketers,  football,  perhaps most notably Denis Comptom  who  played cricket  for  Middlesex  and England while spending  his  winters  from cricket  tours  speeding down the left wing for  Arsenal.   Sadly,  the extension  of the football season to ten months of the year has  killed the  professional  footballer/cricketer.   Phil  Neal  who  batted  for Worcestershire  and played left back for Lincoln City in the 1970s  and 1980s was the last of the breed.

7. The importance of sport

Those  who say “it’s only sport”  should stand back and reflect on  the amount of time, effort and money which is spent throughout the world on sport. Women may be generally less enthusiastic,  but sports  obviously speak to a deep seated desire within men.

Man  is  a  tribal animal.  If he were not it would matter  not  a  jot whether  one team won or another,  unless money was on the result.  But manifestly men do care and care passionately when no material advantage is  to  be  gained or lost by the result.  In  fact,  the  relationship between  a football fan and his club is probably the most  enduring  of his life, for it commonly begins in childhood and ends only with death.

The  outpouring  of joy when a goal is scored dwarfs any  other  public expression  of  positive  feeling  today.  Those  who  imagine  that  a football  club  is merely a business and that selling  football  is  no different from selling baked beans fail to understand the game and  the fan.

Team sports are war games, a war game in fact as well where men meet in a  form  of  direct  physical confrontation  which  is  a  pretty  good substitute  for  tribal war,  war fought hand to hand  with  sword  and shield  and  spear.  Sport is  war without the  weapons.  That  is  its primary  glamour, that is its excitement.

Sporting heroes are heroes in the literal sense.  Watch even a powerful man  in  the presence of his sporting hero and the  powerful  man  will almost certainly be unconsciously  deferring to the sportsman.

But  sport has much more to it than tribalism.  It is a constant  in  a changing world.  It is a source of aesthetic delight.  It speaks to the whole range of human emotions.

8. Why was England in the sporting  vanguard?

Why did England invent so many games and show such an appetite for them as players,   spectators  and administrators  that modern  sport became possible?

Industrialisation  undoubtedly  provided  the  opportunity  for  modern spectator sports by  moving England early from a predominantly rural to a predominantly  urban  society. Large agglomerations of people provide the  audience  for  sport.  The growing  wealth  of  the  country  from industrialisation provided the money to support professional sport. But that  does  not explain why it happened in England when it did  not  in occur in  other non-Anglo-Saxon industrialising nations,  which  either showed  less interest in sport  or adopted and followed English  sports rather  than  making  their own indigenous  sports  serious   spectator sports.    There had to be something special in the  English  character and society which provided the impetus to take the opportunity when  it was offered.

The  answer I suspect is that the English  have always been a  sporting people,  whether  it  be  pre-modern games  of  football  and  cricket, archery,  dog fighting and so on. The love of the chase remains to this day in  fox hunting.  Athletic pursuits were widely admired before  the modern  era,  especially by the educated Englishman brought up  on  the classics  with  their frequent descriptions of physical  prowess.  Long before the  much Wenlock “Olympic Games”,   Robert Dover of    Chipping Camden  in  Gloucestershire  held his “Cotswold Olimpick Games”  –  the games  were first held in 1612 – which included sledgehammer  throwing, horse racing and wrestling.

But the fact the English have always had an abnormal love of sport begs the question of why. It is probably simply an expression of the general English love of liberty and the practical realisation of that love in a society which until recent times has not oppressed the English man  and woman  with  much  state intrusion into  their  lives.  (Sadly,  recent governments,  most notably that of Blair,  have seriously  changed  the traditional  free nature of English society).   Over the centuries  the English became habituated to the idea that the individual counts,  that a free-born Englishman,  however humble, had a dignity and worth simply as an individual.

This  mentality is important because participation in a sport  requires freedom  from  oppressive elite who frown upon public  gatherings   and societies with  a dominant  ideology which considers the ordinary   man as  next  to  nothing at best and a threat to public  order  at  worst. English  society   has  not been free of such  qualities   but  it  has probably suffered much less severely from them than any other nation.

As  for why England has been so successful in exporting its sports,  it cannot  simply be the consequence of the British Empire and   Britain’s economic  and political dominance.  Sports are demonstrably not  easily transferrable from one society and another.  Other European nations had empires  and their colonies did not take up French sports.  The  United States  for  all  their economic and  cultural  dominance  have  failed largely  to export their two most important native sports, baseball and American  football.   Basketball  and  ice  hockey  have  enjoyed  more popularity   but  nothing  approaching  the  popularity  of   football. Australian  Rules football,  wildly popular  in Australia,  remains  an essentially domestic pursuit.  Ditto  Gaelic games such as hurling   in Ireland.  Cricket and football gained a hold abroad  and maintained  it because  they  are  inherently good and satisfying  games,  the  former immensely  technical to play yet simple in its basic idea,  the  latter the  simplest  and cheapest  game to play – two sweaters  down  on  the ground for a goal and a ball and you have a game.

9. English sport is a mirror of English society

Sport  holds up a mirror to any society.  Sadly,  much of English  sport  today shares  the ills of English society at large. Due to the actions of the British  elite  professional  team sport in England  has  been  heavily infiltrated  by   foreign players just as the country has a  whole  has been left open to de facto foreign colonisation.

Cricket  was  the  first  to fall prey to  the  disease.  In  1969  the qualification  rules  for foreign players appearing in  county  cricket were effectively thrown away.  Before 1969 any foreign player  had   to qualify by two years residence in the county:  after 1969 they could be specially registered without any qualifying period.

Since 1969 there have been various attempts to stem the number  foreign players.   Official overseas players – those not qualified to play  for England by any route  –  have been at various times  restricted to  two per   county side,  then one per side before reverting back to two  per side. As of 2012 its is back to one per side in County Championship matches.

In the past few years  the number of  foreign players in county cricket has   been greatly expanded by  a  ruling  that any EU  state  national must be allowed to play in county cricket whether  England qualified or not – this has resulted in many Australians and South Africans claiming EU  state passports of one sort or another.   The final breach  in  the sporting  emigration  wall has been  the granting of  the  same  rights possessed  by   EU state  passport holders to  people   from  countries which  have  treaties  with the EU that   allow  them  certain  trading rights.

This   loosening  of immigration rules  applies  to all  other  sports, many  of  which   are even more vulnerable  to  invasion  than  cricket because cricket is not played seriously on the continent.  Football and rugby  are  played within the EU and both games in  England  have  been substantially  colonised by continentals.  The situation with  football has  become  especially  serious  with well over  half  the  places  in Premiership  sides being filled by players not qualified  for  England.

Following England’s exit from the 2006 World Cup the ex-England manager Graham  Taylor  voiced his fears that   England might never  again  win the World Cup simply because of the lack of opportunity being given  to English players (BBC R5 Victoria Derbyshire 7 7 2006).

The  other  side  of the foreign infiltration coin  is  the  widespread employment  of  those  who are not unequivocally  English  in   English national teams. These people fall into two camps: (1) those who came to England  as adults  and  (2) ethnic minority players  either  born  and raised in England or at least largely raised here.    Their  employment by  England  has  been generally a failure,  both  in  terms  of  their individual  performances  and in the performance  of  their  respective England teams.

Take  the  two major English team sports cricket and football.  Of  the players  who played any substantial amount of cricket for England  only one  (Robin Smith) has managed a Test batting average of 40 and only two   of the bowlers (Andy Caddick and Dean Headley)has ended witgh a Test bowling average of less than 30.

As  for  football,  the only players in the  immigrant/ethnic  minority category   to show themselves to be of true international standard  are probably Paul Ince and Des Walker.  It is difficult to see the sporting justification   for  the repeated and extensive selection  of   players such  as  Mark Ramprakash (lowest every batting  average – 27 –  for  a front  line England batsman who has played my than 40 Tests)   or  John Barnes  (79  England caps and a man who rarely if ever  reproduced  his club  form  for  England).   Perhaps  the  answer  lies  in   political correctness,  a  desire on the part of selectors  to  guard  themselves against  accusations of racism or simply an ideological  commitment  to multiculturalism.   Here is Stephen Wagg writing in Catalyst, the CRE’s new   propaganda magazine funded by the taxpayer:  “…it is  important that  this  team [the England cricket side] speaks for  a  multi-ethnic England.” (Racism and the English cricket party – Catalyst June 2006).

There is also the attitude of the players  to consider. Some  of those who have  played for England have been blunt about  their attitude  towards turning out for the side.   Here  is  ex-England captain Nasser Hussain interviewed by Rob Steen:

‘If anyone asks about my nationality, I’m proud  to say ‘Indian’,  but I’ve never given any thought  to  playing  for  India.   In  cricketing terms I’m  English.’ Daily Telegraph 11 8 1989

Or  take the black Jamaican England footballer John Barnes in his autobiography:

“I    am  fortunate my England career is now  complete  so   I   don’t have to sound patriotic  any  more.” (P69)

“I     feel    more   Jamaican    than     English     because      I’m black.    A  lot  of black  people born    in    England    feel   more Jamaican  than English because  they  are   not  accepted     in    the land of  their  birth  on account of their  colour, (P 71)

Clearly such mentalities exclude any emotional commitment to doing well for  the sake of English pride.  The most they could have been  playing for was their own ambition.  As the editor of Wisden Matthew Engel  put it:

“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.” (Editor’s notes 1995 Wisden).

In  the  1990s an England cricket eleven was  routinely   comprised  of something  like  five white Englishmen, two Southern Africans,   a  New Zealander  and three West Indians.  The idea that their  captain  could appeal to their patriotism as a team of Englishmen is risible.  Nor  is it  clear  how  any English man or woman could have seen  it  as  their national side.

10. The political dimension

Because of their  function as lightening rods of national feeling  that the  existence of England sides are so hated and feared by  our  elite. The  erstwhile  and now deceased Labour Sports minister,   Tony  Banks, persistently  puffed  the idea of a British football  team,   something that is indubitably not wanted by any of the four home FAs or the  vastmajority of fans.

The  political  dimension  goes beyond  the  English  national   sides. Sporting  crowds  generally  and football crowds in  particular  are  a source  of concern to our  liberal elite because they provide  the  one opportunity  where large numbers of the white working class can  gather together  with any regularity without having to gain the permission  of the police.

In  these politically correct times sporting crowds in England for  the major sports are also disturbingly white for the liberal  bigot  elite. Vast amounts of time and money have been devoted to making crowds “more representative”, happily with precious little  success.

Finally,  there  is the general contempt which the British  elite  have developed for the white working class.  In English sport this  contempt tends  to be focused on the football fan.  Margaret Thatcher more  than any  other  individual  fostered  the  contempt    when  she  routinely painted  English football supporters as hooligans and  enthusiastically promoted  the  exclusion  of English football clubs  after  the  Heysel stadium  tragedy at the 1985 European Cup final between  Liverpool  and Juventus.

Sport  has  a  particular  importance to  England  at  present  because sporting sides are the only source of national focus the English  have. The  English  are  denied a parliament,  they  are  betrayed  by  their political  elite who shudder at the idea of English  nationalism,  they are constantly insulted by the national media,   but the national sides continue. These sporting institutions  permit the English to articulate their  feelings as a tribe.  Even  English men  and women  without  any interest in sport should support them for that reason if no other.