Category Archives: freedom

Is Boris Johnson walking into an EU trap?

Robert Henderson

The Daily Telegraph reports (3oth July) that Boris Johnson has said that the UK could stay in the customs union and single market for another two years. This is potentially fatal for a true Brexit.

Consider what Johnson is suggesting.:

He wants the UK to be to all intents and purposes a part of the EU for another two years.

He has a tiny majority which is unlikely to sustain his government for two years.

He is likely to have to call a general election before the two year period is over either because his small majority makes government impossible or as the consequence of a vote of No Confidence being passed which is not overturned by a vote of confidence within 14 days.

The Fixed Term Parliaments Act muddies the waters because it either requires two thirds of MPs to vote (that is two thirds of the 651 seats not just sitting MPs) . Labour , SNP and other smaller parties may not want have been demanding a General Election they would, both collectively or individually, find it difficult to vote against an election being called.

In any event the Fixed Term Parliaments Act means the next General Election has to be held on 5 May 2022 regardless of the wishes of the House of Commons.

If a General Election is held there is no guarantee that it will return a House of Commons which gives the Tories a clear majority. We might find ourselves with a remainder majority for Labour or a coalition of remainer parties. such governments would be able to stitch the UK firmly back into the EU without much difficulty for two reasons, (1) operationally we would still effectively be in the EU (albeit but with a loss of privileges) and (2) the at least one senior EU officer has suggested that reinstating the UK’s membership could be done without too much bother.

The recently departed European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker said this in January 2018:

“Once the British have left under Article 50 there is still Article 49 which allows a return to membership and I would like that. ”

“His suggestion came a day after European Council President Donald Tusk suggested he was open to a “change of heart” from the U.K. on Brexit.

‘Juncker backed him up later Tuesday, saying, “I hope that will be heard clearly in London,” according to the Independent.’

Article 49

Article 49 says this:

Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The

European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application. The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the consent of the

European Parliament, which shall act by a majority of its component members. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.

The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded which such admission entails shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State. This agreement shall be submitted for ratification by all the contracting States in accordance with their respective constitutional requirements.

On the face of it Article 49 does not look las though reapplying for EU membership would be a shoo-in , but the fact that someone as powerful as Junker raised the possibility and was backed up by another powerful EU apparatchik in Donald Tusk suggests that re-joining it would be more or a less a formality . To that reasonable conclusion can added the facts that both economically and politically the EU gains from the UK being within the EU.

Economically the EU gains from both the annual net Dangeld (around £9 billion) taken from the UK by Brussels), continental EU ‘s massive balance of trade advantage with the UK (£64billion) and the general advantage of having the fifth largest economy in the world (the UK) as part of the EU.

Politically the great advantage of keeping the UK in the EU (probably with worse terms than we have at present) would be the disincentive it would create for any other EU member thinking of leaving to leave.

The UK remaining in the EU would have other advantages. For example, having not one but two permanent members of the UN Security Council (the UK and France) would be a loss of prestige for the EU and would scupper for the foreseeable future the EU’s desire to have a permanent Security Council seat for itself. The UK also has some still very handy armed forces and much of UK foreign development Aid is channelled through EU not allocated directly by the UK. The EU has much to lose and nothing to gain if the UK leaves with no deal.

The reality is that No Deal is really the only certain way of getting out of the clutches of the EU. Embrace it not as an unfortunate way of leaving the EU but the only certain way of leaving the EU because anything short of it will allow the remainer rats to keep on gnawing away at our regained freedom.

Is Boris Johnson walking into an EU trap?

Robert Henderson

The Daily Telegraph reports (3oth July) that Boris Johnson has said that the UK could stay in the customs union and single market for another two years. This is potentially fatal for a true Brexit.

Consider what Johnson is suggesting.:

He wants the UK to be to all intents and purposes a part of the EU for another two years.

He has a tiny majority which is unlikely to sustain his government for two years.

In any event the Fixed Term Parliaments Act means the next General Election has to be held on 5 May 2022 regardless of the wishes of the House of Commons.

The recently departed European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker said this in January 2018:

“Once the British have left under Article 50 there is still Article 49 which allows a return to membership and I would like that. ”

“His suggestion came a day after European Council President Donald Tusk suggested he was open to a “change of heart” from the U.K. on Brexit.

‘Juncker backed him up later Tuesday, saying, “I hope that will be heard clearly in London,” according to the Independent.’

Article 49

Article 49 says this:

Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union. The

European Parliament, which shall act by a majority of its component members. The conditions of eligibility agreed upon by the European Council shall be taken into account.

The EU Was Not Responsible for Creating our Rights – We Were!

Civil liberty and freedoms, democratic representative government and the right to innocence unless proven guilty were either invented, or adopted and improved, in England over the 1200 or so years from their starting point in Anglo-Saxon England to the present … Continue reading →

Roger Scruton on the injustice done to England by devolution

Robert Henderson

Below are extracts from a talk by the philosopher Roger Scruton on the position of England within the UK since devolution . They were made one BBC Radio 4 (21 Feb 14) in their Point of View series.

I have omitted the parts of Scruton’s talk which concern the historical and economic background because they are superficial , frequently wrong and often embarrassingly sentimental – the final quote I offer gives a good idea of what has been omitted.

Where Scruton is on solid ground is his description of the situation England finds itself in now. That is what the quotes I offer deal with. It is also very useful to have someone like Scruton with something of a media profile speaking out on the subject of England’s current disadvantaged position.

Roger Scruton: United We Fall: Point of View http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/pov extracts

In all the complex changes leading to the Scottish bid for independence the English have never been consulted. The process has been conducted as though we had no right to an opinion in the matter. It was all about Scotland and how to respond to Scottish nationalism

“As an Englishman I naturally ask why my interests in the matter have never been taken into account. When the Czechs and Slovaks achieved their amicable divorce it was by mutual agreement between elected politicians. What is so different about Scotland that it decides everything for itself?”

The English tend to blame the migration which threatens to overwhelm them on a succession of Labour Governments. By allowing mass immigration into England and refusing to confront the European Union’s commitment to free movement of peoples the Governments of Blair and Brown seriously undermined the English sense of identity . At the same time through the creation of the Scottish parliament gave a new identity to the Scots.

The effect of the Scottish Parliament, however, was not only to ensure the Scots governed themselves, but also to make it more likely that they would continue to govern the English. The Labour Party did not want to lose those Scottish MPs since it was thanks to them and the Scottish vote that the Labour Party had achieved such a large majority at Westminster. Scots were disproportionately represented in the cabinets of both Blair and Brown. Tony Blair owed his position in the Labour hierarchy in part to the networks which had grown in that country.

Elections to the Scottish Parliament show that the Scots have shifted their allegiance from the Labour Party to the SNP, but they still want the English to be governed by the Labour Party. Hence, they vote to place Labour politicians, whom they don’t particularly want at home, in Westminster . As a result of this the English, who have voted Conservative more often than Labour in all post-war Elections, have to accept a block vote of Labour Members of Parliaments sent to Westminster by the Scots. The process that brought this about was one in which the Scots themselves were given the final say in a referendum from which the English were excluded. In other words the process of devolution has an air of gerrymandering, the effect of which has been to secure a Labour bias in the Westminster Parliament while allowing the Scots to govern themselves in whatever way they choose.

And the process continues. In response to Alec Salmond’s bid for Independence the people of Scotland have been granted another referendum but again the people of England have been deprived of a say. Why is this, are we part of the union or not? Or are the politicians afraid that we would vote the wrong way? And what is the wrong way? What way should we English vote given that present arrangement gives two votes to the Scots for every vote given to the English? Should we not vote for our independence given that we risk being governed from a country that already regulates its own affairs and has no clear commitment to ours?

Suppose then we English were finally allowed a say in the matter? Which way would I vote? I have no doubt about it. I would vote for English independence as a step towards strengthening the friendship between our two countries. It was thanks to independence that Americans were able at last to confess to their attachment to the Old Country and to come to our aid in two world wars. Independence is what real friendship requires and the same is true for those like the Scots and the English who live side by side.

Full text of Scruton’s talk at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26173128

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.

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.”

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 English origins and value of the USA’s Second Amendment

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” (American Constitution Second Amendment)

American liberals have a problem. They wish to remove the constitutional right to bear arms from the American people. Their problem is the Second Amendment. To honestly achieve their aim they would have to amend the Constitution. But such amendments are difficult going on impossible.

To initiate amendments, either two thirds of both houses of Congress must vote for them or two thirds of the State legislatures must call for a convention for proposing amendments. That is just the proposal process. This is followed by acceptance by the individual States. In the former case, three quarters of the States must ratify the amendment individually: in the latter three quarters of the convention must vote for the amendment.

Those are stringent terms to meet in any political system, but particularly so in a state as vast and diverse as the USA and with such a strong tradition of regional government. Add to those structural difficulties the existence of widespread gun ownership and powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association and the mountain becomes practically insurmountable by honest means. So what does the liberal do? What he always does when he wants to ban something which is permitted by the Constitution: he pretends that the Constitution does not mean what it manifestly says.

In the case of the Second Amendment the attack takes the form of pretending that the Amendment was merely meant to provide for a militia rather than affirming and protecting the right of people to arm themselves individually. Happily, there is plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down this claim: in the Constitution itself, in the historical circumstances in which the Constitution and Amendment were drafted, in the very logic of a militia.

The claim that the amendment is simply to safeguard the right of America’s military forces to keep and bear arms is self-evidently absurd. If true all the amendment would mean is that the federal government could not disarm the militia soldiers who represented the majority of its armed forces. It would be practically a redundant clause.

The fact that the Amendment states that the right is not merely to bear but to keep arms might be thought by most honest folk to be a pretty clear indication that the private
ownership of weapons was what the framers of the Amendment had in mind. Moreover, what would be the point of the Amendment if it was not to confer such a right to the
individual? Any other permission to keep and bear arms must of necessity be dependent upon permission from those with political power and authority. It would thus again be a futile and redundant clause. It is noteworthy that nowhere in the Constitution, amended or otherwise, is any instruction on the exercise of such state power given or hinted at.

When judging the intent of the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (which contains the Second Amendment) it is necessary to know the general social and intellectual backcloth against which they worked. They were heir to the English tradition of liberty and government by consent rather than pure tyranny. The Americans who rose against the England of King George 111 did so because they considered themselves part of the tradition of English liberty. In seeking independence, they were not repudiating that tradition but in their own minds returning to what they imagined was the true path of English liberty which had become corrupted in England. It is against this ancient English tradition that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights must be set.

What does the unamended Constitution of 1787 say about the protection of the newly formed United States? Section 8 of Article 1 grants to Congress the right:

To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation of Money for that Use shall be for a longer term than two years.

“To provide and maintain a Navy.

“To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.

“To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.

“To provide for organising, arming and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.

The first point to note is that the Army and the militias are clearly distinguished as separate entities. The second is the time limit on the power to raise money for armies. This is highly significant. There was a very long tradition in England of professional standing armies being heartily mistrusted as the tool of despots. It was the attempt to
institute a standing army of thirty thousand men which was one of the main reasons why King James 11 was overthrown in 1688. Armies were raised for wars, but in peacetime militias were the order of the day. Indeed, until the first world war England never had a great standing army. (The English tradition is also echoed in the absence of any time restriction placed on the funding of a navy by the Founding Fathers. The English never feared a strong navy as such because it could not be used against them).

With this English mistrust of standing armies and reliance on militias went a tradition of not merely allowing weapons to be generally held, but of such a practice being positively encouraged to ensure the defence of the country. Feudal military obligation was in fact built on the private provision not merely of men but of arms and equipment. In late medieval times statutes were enacted to encourage long bow practice. The Spanish Armada which attempted to invade England in 1588 was repulsed by a mixed English fleet of private and Royal ships.

Perhaps the strongest single circumstantial reason for dismissing the liberal’s interpretation of the Second Amendment are the well attested motives for those promoting
the Bill of Rights. Those who pushed for the first ten Amendments did so because they believed that the rights and liberties of the individual were not guarded explicitly
enough by the original Constitution. Thus ,if we are to believe the liberal, we must accept the truly fantastic explanation that in the case of the Second Amendment the
protection of individual liberty was utterly cast aside without reason, public acknowledgement or, most compellingly, any contemporary comment, adverse or otherwise.

There is also a question of simple practicality. When the Amendment was passed (December 1791), the infant federal government simply did not have the means to finance the arming of militias. Thus, they can only have envisaged private arms being put to the service of the state, a tradition which as previously mentioned had a long history in
both England and the Thirteen Colonies. Moreover, subsequent history bore this out, for the greater number of troops employed by the American Union in its wars against Britain and Mexico in the first half of the 19th century came from militias. In an age of minimal government, the Second Amendment underpinned the whole scheme of national defence.

Does the Second Amendment allow for any government abridgement of the right to keep and bear arms? It might just be possible to sustain an argument that a register of guns would not breach the Second Amendment provided there was no restriction on the right to own and bear weapons, that is no person could be denied the right either to appear on the register or bear arms. But even here it could be argued with some force that the registration of weapons – particularly if it required complicated bureaucratic procedures – was an interference with the general right to bear arms. Moreover, if a right is general and absolute, it is by no means clear how any procedure initiated by and insisted upon by the state could be legitimate because by definition there can be no legitimate restriction of the right.

Americans produce a multitude of reasons for retaining their guns. They argue on the grounds of personal liberty. They argue on the grounds of deterring crime. They argue on the grounds of personal protection. They argue on a dozen and one grounds. This to my mind is a mistake. Good causes do not need to be bolstered by a battery of arguments. Good causes need but one argument. The only necessary argument for private gun ownership is in the Second Amendment: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.” The key words here are “a free state”. That phrase cannot mean solely to maintain the state in its independence from other states, because that could as well apply to a dictatorship as well as a democracy. In the context of the reasons for the American War of Independence ”a free state” must also mean the maintenance of the freedom of the citizens from the oppressive power of the state. That after all was what the whole breach with England was about. Moreover, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are written in a manner which actively extols the individual over the state, viz: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (preamble to the Constitution).

The general motivation for demanding gun control is not the saving of lives. (Its only effect in England has been to leave guns predominately in the hands of criminals and the state). Liberals wish to remove the general right of gun ownership in America for the same reason that they wish to interfere with peoples’ lives generally: they are natural authoritarians. They know that their philosophy (such as it is) conflicts utterly with human nature and are thus driven to suppress any resistance or dissent through the intimidation of political correctness and the practical control of public life. The disarming of the American people is part of this oppressive strategy.

The desire to restrict the holding of arms has always come from those who wished to not only monopolise power but to do so on their own terms. When the crossbow was invented, the medieval nobility attempted to ban it because it reduced the effectiveness of the armoured and mounted knight. Failing in that, they attempted to restrict, with some success, its ownership to people they could control. The Samurai in Japan enforced ruthlessly their rule that only Samurai should carry swords. When the demobbed conscripts of British Army returned to Britain after the First World War, the British government passed the first serious laws regulating gun ownership not because they feared that the British would begin to murder one another in great numbers but because they feared Red revolution.

If Americans wish to retain what is left of their freedom, they will do well to keep the Second Amendment intact. This means not merely retaining the status quo, but the mounting of legal challenges to every restriction on the holding and bearing of arms in the United States. The plain and hideously inescapable fact is that every attempt to restrict both gun ownership (or indeed any other weapon) and the bearing of arms made since the inauguration of the United States has been illegal. That applies whether or not the interference with the Constitutional right was undertaken at the federal or the state level. I suggest that legal action should consist not merely of Constitutional challenges, but civil actions for damages against the federal and appropriate state governments by those actively and personally denied the right to bear arms.

Not as white as they are painted

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

The response of white liberals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The emasculation of the police

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘RACISM

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

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

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

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

DEFINITION OF RACIST INCIDENT

12. That the definition should be:

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

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

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

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

Macpherson continued:

‘REPORTING AND RECORDING OF RACIST INCIDENTS AND CRIMES

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

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

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

– the ability to report 24 hours a day.

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

And

‘PROSECUTION OF RACIST CRIMES

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

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

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

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

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

The future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No 10 Downing Street e-petitions dealing with Immigration, the EU and the ECHR

Robert Henderson

The Government scheme for e-petitions (http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/) which the public can initiate and/or vote on is now live. If a petition can garner 100,000 votes in a maximum of a year, Parliament will then consider whether to debate the subject of the petition. Although there is no guarantee of a debate, it would be politically difficult to refuse one because a failure to debate an issue would nakedly reveal the scheme as simply a piece of political elite PR.

There are already quite a few petitions, the large majority being serious. The most popular subjects are those which the British political class wish they could censor out of public debate: immigration, race, foreign aid, Islam, the EU, the corruption of the political class, warmongering, weakness in punishing criminals, the death penalty, the harassment of motorists, the cost of transport and the imbalance of the devolution settlement with England left high and dry without a political class to look after her interests.

There is a good deal of duplication, not least because the search function is poor and it is difficult to see exactly what has been put up by other people. Nonetheless, it gives a good idea of what the public is most interested in.

Below are links to the petitions which deal with immigration in all its forms, the European Union and the European Convention of Human Rights in all its manifestations which have already been sanctioned at this date. Where there are misspellings or typos, this is because those moderating the submissions are putting them up on the site without correction.

Immigration

End mass immigration View

Stop ALL immigration into the UK View

An immediate Ban on immigration from outside of the EEC View

No to Turkey joining the EU View

Abolish the residual categories of British nationality View

Emigration should be drastically reduced View

Asylum seekers should should be given temporary refuge and should return to their own country as soon as circumstances allow View

Benefits for immigrants View

Benefits for non-UK residents View

Resident Permits for Immigrants View

To opt out of the Human Rights legislation View

Abolish Islam in the UK View

English Law, Not Shariah Law View

European Union

European Law View

Leave the European Union View

We Want To Withdraw From The EU View

Repeal of the European Communities Act 1972 View

European Sovereignty Act View

Repatriation of Powers from the European Union View

Britain wants referendum to leave EU View

No to Turkey joining the EU View

Referendum on the Accession of Turkey to the EU View

Referendum on accession of Croatia to the EU View

Remove the EU flag from British number plates View

Reduction in payments to EU View

Cost/Benefit Analysis of EU Membership View

Human Rights (ECHR)

Repeal The European Courts Human Rights Act View

withdraw from the european human rights act View

Protect the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights View

Withdraw from the European Human Rights Commission View

Human Rights Act & the ECHR. View

Human Rights Act View

Ban the Human Rights Act View

Human Rights Act should be revoked. View

Ban the Human Rights Act View

Human right legislation View

Protect the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights View

The English in North America – Locating the Hidden Diaspora

http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/browse/ne/uninews/searchenglish

Locating the Hidden Diaspora

In search of the English

Historians at Northumbria University are embarking on a groundbreaking project to explore why “Englishness” has been overlooked in America, while other ethnic groups are celebrated and well-known.

Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered and defined in opposition to other competing groups

The team, led by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson, argue that the existence of English cultural communities in North America has been largely ignored by traditional historians who see the English as assimilating into Anglo-American culture without any need to overtly express a separate English ethnicity.

Their initial research has found that from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, North American towns and cities boasted organisations such as the Sons of St George, where traditional English food and folk culture were maintained. The evidence suggests that the English were distinctly aware of being an ethnic group within the emerging settlements at the time, exhibiting and maintaining their ethnicity in similar ways to the Irish, Scottish and German colonists. Yet this does not appear to be recognised in history.

The three-year project entitled ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950’, has received £286,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It aims to take a fresh look at English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts and newspaper articles from this period. The team believes that their research will have wider reaching implications in shedding light on current debates in UK identity politics and Englishness.

Professor MacRaild said: “It struck us as highly surprising that, though the English in North America formed an array of ethnic clubs and societies, such as the St George’s Society, no one has shown much interest in these associations, their activities and English cultural legacies.

“The English were one of the largest European groups of immigrants in the US yet, while they settled alongside the other migrants who powerfully exerted ethnic awareness, the English are not ascribed the attributes of ethnicity associated with other immigrants.

“The Irish, Scots, Germans, and many other European ethnic groups have been subjected to dozens if not hundreds of studies, but not so the English. The standard historian’s answer has been that the English assimilated more easily to Anglo-American culture so removing the need for ethnic expression. However, far from being an invisible group within a world of noticeably ethnicised European immigrants, the English consciously ethnicised themselves in an active way. ”

Evident expressions of Englishness are found in English immigrants to America celebrating St George’s Day, toasting Queen Victoria, marking Shakespeare’s birthday, and Morris dancing. Benevolence was also of great importance, with many English associations being involved in providing charity – from meal tickets to ‘Christmas cheer’ – towards English immigrants experiencing hardships.

The team believe that Englishness has been overlooked by historians because, as the founding colonists, the English were the benchmark against which all other ethnic groups measured themselves.

Ironically, England’s relatively recent decline in global influence and the cultural changes produced by mass immigration and regional devolution has sparked increasing attempts to rediscover and define Englishness – seen in calls to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday and the rise in the English Defence League (EDL).

“At present,” Professor MacRaild argues, “Englishness in England is bedevilled with fears about right-wing extremists, football hooligans, and the uses and abuses of the now prevalent St George’s flag. We hope a project which will demonstrate the vibrancy of Englishness beyond England’s shores will contribute to debates about how Englishness fits into today’s multi-ethnic and increasingly federal political culture.”

Dr Tanja Bueltmann, an expert in the history of ethnic associations in the Scottish and English diasporas, added: “The growing movement for an independent Scotland has raised the issue of “Britishness” and “Englishness” in the wider society and influenced national debate about identity.

“Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered as a result of a crisis of confidence, partly influenced by the increasing fluidity of national borders and migration. Englishness is again being defined in opposition to other competing groups.”

Dr David Gleeson, historian of nineteenth-century America, said: “The project also has implications for the other side of the Atlantic. Recognising the English as a distinct diaspora gives us a clearer picture of the development of an American identity in that it complicates the idea of a coherent ‘Anglo’ cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be an American or Canadian.”

The research project will produce books, articles, an exhibition, and a series of public lectures to expatriate community groups throughout North America. The team will also work with local folk groups, including the Hexham Morris Men, and Folkworks at the Sage, Gateshead, to disseminate their findings to the wider public. International partners also working on the project are based in Guelph and Kansas Universities and from the College of Charleston.

Dr Gleeson added: “Perhaps English-Americans and Canadians will make a ‘Homecoming’, similar to the one organised by the Scottish government in 2009 for those of Scottish background, to re-establish connections with the land of their ancestors.”

Date posted: May 24, 2011

———————————-

Locating the Hidden Diaspora

The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950

Starting in 2011, the project will be funded by the AHRC for three years (Standard Route Research Grant).

Project Context

Emigration from the British Isles became one of Europe’s most significant population movements after 1600. Yet compared to what has been written about the migration of Scots and Irish, relatively little energy has been expended on the numerically more significant English flows. In fact, the Scottish and Irish Diasporas in North America, together with those of the German, Italian, Jewish and Black Diasporas, are well known and studied, but there is virtual silence on the English. Why, then, is there no English Diaspora? Why has little been said about the English other than to map their main emigration flows? Did the English simply disappear into the host population? Or were they so fundamental, and foundational, to the Anglo-phone, Protestant cultures of the evolving British World that they could not be distinguished in the way Catholic Irish or continental Europeans were? Given the recent vogue for these other diasporas, our project seeks to uncover the hidden English Diaspora in North America.

Aims & Objectives

The project’s overall objective is to offer a knowledge-shaping new reading of English ethnicity abroad, particularly in North America, by exploding enduring historical mythologies about the absence of a strong ethnic identity among emigre English between the 17th and 20th centuries. Some of the key issues of concern are:

English ethnic associationism: examining aspects of English clubs, societies and sociability around the Diaspora.

English folk traditions in the Diaspora: locating the popular culture of celebrating particular forms of Englishness.
English sporting traditions: examining the export around the world of sports from cricket, rugby and association football to Cumberland wrestling.
English literary and dramatic cultures: exploring the cultural transfer of key literary figures around the Diaspora.

Project Team

The English Diaspora team is led by Prof Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson. Researchers associated with the project are Dr James McConnel (History), as well as Dr Monika Smialkowska(English), Visiting Fellow Dr Mike Sutton and Dr Dean Allen (Stellenbosch). Dr Joe Hardwick from History also works on related themes.

You can contact us using our project email address: az.englishdiaspora@northumbria.ac.uk

The right to own and carry weapons in England

The desire to restrict the possession of weapons has always come from those who wished to not only monopolise power but to do so on their own terms. When the crossbow was
invented, the medieval nobility attempted to ban it because it reduced the effectiveness of the armoured and mounted knight. Failing in that, they attempted to restrict, with some success, its ownership to people they could control. The Samurai in Japan enforced ruthlessly their rule that only Samurai should carry swords. When the demobbed conscripts of British Army returned to Britain after the First World War, the British government passed the first serious laws regulating gun ownership not because they feared that the British would begin to murder one another in great numbers but because they feared Red revolution.

As things stand in Britain, legal gun ownership has become so onerous, that many long-time licence holders have given up. The effort in obtaining a licence and in maintaining it is considerable, because of both the draconian storage conditions required by the police
and their eagerness to engineer the revocation and denial of licences. Even if you legally own a gun, woe betide you if you are spotted openly carrying it in a public place. Assuming you are not gunned down by over-excited policemen, you will not merely have your licence revoked but probably end up in court as well. As for other weapons, if the police want to pick you up for possessing an offensive weapon there is a fair chance they can do so even if you do not mean to carry one.

Forget about knives or coshes, which are complete no, nos, you are conceivably
committing an offence if you have an aerosol of hairspray about your person or
a hammer, for the 1953 Prevention of Crime Act creates a general offence of
possessing an offensive weapon in a public place, an offensive weapon being
anything from a gun to a piece of wood or stone or a kitchen knife which is made,
adapted or intended to cause physical injury to a person.

Is there an historical basis for private weapon ownership in England?

This is an impossible question to answer categorically. It is undeniably true that weapons were held widely by private individuals. Feudal military obligation was in fact built on the private provision not merely of men but of arms and equipment. In late medieval times statutes were enacted to encourage long bow practice. The Spanish Armada which attempted to invade England in 1588 was repulsed by a mixed English fleet of private and Royal ships. Yet although weapons were commonly held by private individuals for many centuries, the right of the individual to hold weapons, especially guns, was far from being absolute or accepted by authority. The Bill of Rights passed after William of Orange
came to the throne in 1689 stated:

By causing several good subjects, being Protestants, to be disarmed, at the same time when papists were both armed and employed, contrary to law. (Clause 6 of the Bill of
Rights 1690)

That the subjects which are Protestants, may have arms for their defence suitable to their
conditions, and as allowed by law. (Clause 7 of the Bill of Rights 1690)

There are four points to note. First, Catholics were not thought to have the right to have arms. Second, the clear implication is that Protestants were to be armed to defend themselves Catholics. Third, the very fact that such a clause was included means that the right to weapons was not so much of English life that it was taken for granted. Fourth, it uses the phrase ”suitable to their conditions”. This must mean that the right to weapons was limited and not limited merely in the sense that a private individual might not have a cannon but might have a musket. It is also illuminating that when the US Bill of Rights was created a century later it ran:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” (American Constitution Second Amendment)

The American Bill of Rights was based on firmly on English tradition, the founding fathers of the USA considering themselves to be preserving English liberty after it had fallen into corruption in England. Yet they did not say that a man has the right to bear
and keep arms full stop. They say he has it because of the need to maintain a militia.

Nonetheless the 1690 Bill of Rights does grant a right to bear arms of some sort. Leaving aside the question of what arms are permitted, does the Bill of Rights have any force
today? The problem for those who would say it has is that the Bill of Rights is simply an Act of Parliament. It has no special constitutional status, any more than does any other British law with constitutional implications. As such it is difficult to see how it can not have been amended by the subsequent passing of laws restricting the ownership of weapons. It is true that none of those laws specifically nullifies the Bill of Rights, but it is a long established practice in English law that the passing of a new Act which contradicts a
previous law is treated as automatically nullifying the earlier law (the concept of implied repeal). Whether this practice is entirely sound in law is perhaps debatable, but I cannot
imagine any English court overturning the de facto principle retrospectively simply
because of the immense implications of doing so.

It is also argued by some people that a Common Law right to bear and own weapons exists because in the past men were permitted to own and bear arms and a Common Law right developed accordingly. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant. A Common Law right can
be removed by statute and indeed the vast majority of our law today is Statute law. Our present gun laws are all statute based.

What the position should be in a free society

In my perfect world a man would be able to purchase a gun and ammunition in England as easily as he might buy a pound of potatoes. Similarly, a man should be able to carry any
other weapon or implement he chooses. He should have the right to keep and carry weapons not merely for self-defence, but because otherwise arms are left in the hands of governments and criminals and denied to the ordinarily law-abiding citizen. Not only should a man be able to own a gun (or any other weapon) he should be able to do so without accounting for it to the police. What, you say, anyone able to own a gun and no licences to boot? Would not that result in Britain being turned into the Wild West? The answer is no. Consider this, at present there are plenty of guns in private hands in Britain, whether held illegally or legally, yet gun crime remains rare in – 39 in England and Wales in 2009 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/21/murders-drop-home-office-figures). Much more of a problem were knife and other sharp instrument (for example, broken bottle) murders which totalled 255 for the same year.

Even if all guns were made illegal, there would still be a large and by all accounts increasing number of illegally held guns in private hands. Now comes the clincher. The
vast majority of gun crime is committed with illegally held guns. In other words
the present wearisome system of licensing and the penal conditions of security under
which guns must be stored on private premises have next to no effect on solving
gun crime.

If guns were allowed to everyone without restriction, the situation would be essentially the
same as it is today. Gun crime would be committed with weapons which were registered. But would not more guns mean more gun crime? That presumes there would be a massive increase in gun ownership. This is far from being certain. Before serious legal restrictions on gun ownership in Britain were enacted, gun ownership was not the norm. Nor does the ownership of a gun mean the owner will habitually carry it any more than the near universal ownership of lethal knives has meant that most people carry such knives. It is also worth reflecting on the fact that even criminals in Britain rarely use guns, despite their widespread availability in our larger cities. If criminals do not routinely use them to kill and wound, why should we believe the law abiding citizen will?

Generally, it does not matter if people are not policed because, Man being a social animal, will not normally act in a fatally harmful way to others. Moreover, in a very law abiding society such as ours, there is less chance of seriously socially disruptive behaviour than in most, perhaps all, other societies. The English have a remarkably low murder rate generally (about 800 a year in a population of 60 million) and always have done. Some years ago, the Canadian criminologist Elliott Leyton published a study of murder in England entitled Men of Blood. This analysed English murders from mediaeval times to the present. Leyton found that the murder rate at any time was abnormally low. The paucity of English murder is not the result of a careful control of weapons through the ages, especially guns, for as mentioned above for much of our history weapons were available. The only rational explanation for it is that there is something in the English
character and society, that has made extreme personal violence rare. If any people
can be trusted to own weapons the English can.

That guns do not equal mass homicide can also be seen from the example of Canada where seven million guns are owned legally in a population of 30 million. They have a higher rate of gun killing than England, but it is still very low. Switzerland with its citizen army with all males of military age having a gun at home is another example of widespread ownership with a low gun crime rate. If you want a lethal weapon you can always get one quite legitimately because there are so many things which will do. The Government bans commando style knives? No problem, you just go to your local hardware store and buy a decent 6″ blade cook’s knife. Or why not make yourself an old-fashioned cheese cutter out of cheesewire with a couple of pieces of wood to act as grips and Bob’s your uncle once you have the wire wound around someone’s neck. The state trying to outlaw lethal weapons is like the state trying to outlaw pornography in the age of the internet.

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The right to own and carry weapons in England