Category Archives: Nationhood

The Olympics: England and the Celtic Fringe

Robert Henderson

The final Great Britain tally of medals at the 2012 Olympics was 65  comprised of 29 Gold, 16 Silver, 19 Bronze.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  managed a grand total of  six medals comprised of 3 gold, two silver and one bronze in individual events.

In group events,  the tally of Celtic Fringe medals was 16 comprised of  7 gold,  6 silver and 3 bronze.   There was no case of an all Celt team  winning.  There were always English competitors with them.

Scotland

Individual medals  (2)

Chris Hoy, Gold, Cycling, Keirin

Andy Murray, Gold, Tennis, Mens’ Singles

Michael Jamieson, Silver, Swimming, 200m Breaststroke

Medals as part of a group  (11)

Chris Hoy, Gold, Cycling, Team Sprint.

Heather Stanning, Gold, Rowing, Coxless Pair

Katherine Grainger, Gold, Rowing, Double Sculls

Scott Brash, Gold, Equestrian, Team Jumping

Timothy Baillie, Gold, Canoeing Slalom, C-2 team

David Florence, Silver, Canoeing Slalom, C-2 team

Luke Patience, Silver, Sailing, Mens  470

Andy Murray, Silver, Tennis, Mixed Doubles

Daniel Purvis, Bronze, Gymnastics, Team All-round

Laura Bartlett, Bronze, Field Hockey,

Emily Maguire, Bronze, Field Hockey

Wales

Individual medals (2)

Jade Jones, Gold, Women’s taekwondo under-57kg

Fred Evans, Silver, Men’s welterweight boxing

Medals as part of a group  (5)

Geraint Thomas,  Gold, Men’s cycling team pursuit

Tom James,  Gold, Men’s coxless four

Chris Bartley,  Silver, Men’s lightweight four rowing

Hannah Mills, Silver,  Women’s sailing 470 class

Sarah Thomas, Bronze, Women’s hockey

Northern Ireland

Individual medals  (1)

Alan Campbell,  bronze ,  the men’s single sculls

Medals as part of a group  (1)

Peter and Richard Chambers   silver,  the men’s lightweight four

How would the four home countries have fared as independent nations?

If the Celtic involvement in team medals had not existed it is probable that England would have been able to fill the places with competitors of equal quality.

If the Celtic nations had to compete as separate nations they would not be able to produce teams from their much smaller populations  to produce  an equivalent number of team medals.  In fact, it is probable that there would have  been  no team medals for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland if they competed as individual nations in 2012.

The other  problem for separate  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  Olympic teams would be funding and facilities.  The vast majority of money provided for athletes (using the word broadly to include all sports and games involving physical abilities) under the British or UK banner is English.  Independent Celtic nations would not be able to fund Celtic athletes at anything like the same level as Britain currently does.

On top of the immediate funding of  athletes, the Celts would have the problem of facilities. Most of the major facilities are in England and many of the Celtic athletes train and live in England.  Those facilities would not be available without charge or all to athletes from independent Celtic nations. This would not necessarily simply be a matter of England wishing to deny Celtic athletes opportunities to train. It could also be that the facilities would not have the capacity to host more than one team.

How would an independent England fare at the Olympics?  England would probably have come fourth rather than third in the present Olympics if they had competed as an independent nation.  In the longer term it is likely there would be little if any difference because the population  of England is large enough to find talented replacements for the Celts  who would no longer compete under the Great Britain banner.

Appearing simply as England  could t improve English performances. As England provide the large majority of the funding for  British athletes and has almost all of the main training facilities,  the removal of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from the scene  could benefit English athletes as they received more funding and greater training opportunities.

There is a further consideration. Athletes who  say they  are Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland as things stand , might well claim they were English if the Celtic nations were independent to get access to  English funding and facilities.  This is especially true of those  athletes  who are English in culture and upbringing, but who claim to be Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish on tenuous grounds such as a grandparent who was or is Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish.  They would probably have little difficulty in saying they were English.   The lure of English funding and facilities has the potential to significantly reduce the pool of talent available to the Celtic nations.

The picture is clear: England would suffer no disadvantage and might well gain by appearing as an independent team: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would  be reduced, at best,  to the status of a Norway or Slovenia.

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

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

Multiculturalist from the word go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny Boyle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A political opening ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

No irony intended

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

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

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

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

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

The relentless political correctness

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

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

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

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

The British media and politicians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blind alley of Britishness

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

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

An appropriate show

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

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

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

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

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

What does the opening ceremony tell us?

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

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

Emma West has her trial delayed yet again

The trial of Emma West on two racially aggravated public order offences has been put back to 5 September to allow further medical reports ( http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Trial-alleged-YouTube-tram-racist-Emma-West-moved/story-16543355-detail/story.html).  Her trial was meant to take place on 17th July but a request for a further adjournment was granted on 13 July.

I have been unable to discover whether the prosecution or the defence asked for the further adjournment, but whichever it is  the delay is extraordinary . Ms West pleaded Not Guilty on 17 February and her trial was originally scheduled for 11 June (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-17073198).

The 11 June date was missed when the first adjournment was granted because of  a wish  for extra medical reports. That was surprising enough ,  because there had been four months between Ms West’s plea of Not Guilty and the request for the adjournment, ample time to get any medical reports.  If the 5 September date is kept six months will have passed since the Not Guilty plea.

The further delay suggests the authorities  or her own lawyers are trying to wear Emma West down by extending the wait so that she will eventually plead guilty out of fear or exhaustion. The authorities are always  terrified of a full trial on such charges  because it reveals the naked repression of the British elite  and  gives a public voice for dissent from the politically correct narrative of multiculturalism. As for the defence,  English lawyers  these days  are  almost always loth to put up any defence which challenges such  charges on the grounds of the right to free expression or offers a justification for dissent from the politically correct narrative.

The only other reason for such a delay I can think of is that the authorities hope to force her to plead guilty by preparing social service reports which say she is not a fit mother and these take rather a long time to acquire . If so, they could get the reports and then either give her a choice of  keeping her children by pleading guilty (and  by admitting her crime proving she is a fit mother who will not hand on racist attitudes because she has “seen the pc light”)  or continue to plead Not  Guilty and lose  her children. 

There has been very little on the web about this further delay and the only media report I could find is the Croydon Advertiser one quoted in the opening paragraph.

 

Ed Miliband and the Left’s attempted sabotage of England and Englishness

Robert Henderson

The leader of the Labour Party Ed Milband has cynically climbed onto the bandwagon which  Labour politicians like  John Crudas, Harriett Harman and John Denham  tentatively started rolling before the last election  as they began to fret over losing the votes of the British white working class, the vast majority of whom live in England.  The bandwagon is England, the English and Englishness.  Miliband’s  boarding point was a speech in the Festival Hall on 7th June (http://www.labour.org.uk/ed-miliband-speech-defending-the-union-in-england,2012-06-07).

Miliband decided to break the habit of a generation of Labour politicians  by referring to the English in terms which did not suggest that  they were the brutish enemy of all that is right and good and dangerous to boot , viz:

“I believe we can all be proud of our country, the United Kingdom.

And of the nations that comprise it.

Second, that means England too. [RH: Damned decent of the fellow]

And those on the left have not been clear enough about this in the recent past.

We must be in the future.

We should embrace a positive, outward looking version of English identity.

Finally, we should also proudly talk the language of patriotism. “

How dramatic  a shift of opinion and language  this was can be gleaned from the  things which Labour ministers and backbenchers  were saying about the English only a few years before. Here is  Jack Straw (a Jew as it happens) when Home Secretary in the Blair Government :

“The English are potentially very aggressive, very violent. We have used this propensity to violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Then we used it in Europe and with our empire, so I think what you have within the UK is three small nations…who’ve been over the centuries under the cosh of the English. Those small nations have inevitably sought expression by a very explicit idea of nationhood. You have this very dominant other nation, England, 10 times bigger than the others, which is self-confident and therefore has not needed to be so explicit about its expression. I think as we move into this new century, people’s sense of Englishness will become more articulated and that’s partly because of the mirror that devolution provides us with and because we are becoming more European at the same” (BBC Radio Four’s Brits  10 January 2000 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/596703.stm )

And here is  a Labour backbencher ,  the German Gisela Stuart. From 2005:

“Yet it has only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me, “I am not British – I am English”. That worries me. British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood. But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.  (15 11 2005 http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-opening/trust_3030.jsp).  (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/dont-laugh-labour-are-flying-the-english-flag/).)

This is the type of mentality Miliband  coyly and disingenuously referred to when he said  in his speech

“ We in the Labour Party have been too reluctant to talk about England in recent years.

We’ve concentrated on shaping a new politics for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

And this was one of the greatest achievements of the last government.

We have rightly applauded the expression of Scottish identity within the United Kingdom.

But for too long people have believed that to express English identity is to undermine the United Kingdom.

This does not make sense.

You can be proudly Scottish and British.

And you can be proudly English and British.

As I am.

Somehow while there is romanticism in parts of the left about Welsh identity, Scottish identity, English identity has tended to be a closed book of late.

Something was holding us back from celebrating England too.

We have been too nervous to talk of English pride and English character.

For some it was connected to the kind of nationalism that left us ill at ease.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Union flag was reclaimed from the National Front.

Since Euro 96, English football fans have helped to reclaim the flag of St George from the BNP.

Now more than ever, as we make the case for the United Kingdom throughout the United Kingdom, we must talk about England.

Because people are talking about it and we cannot be silent.

And because if we stay silent, the case for the United Kingdom in England will go by default.

There are people like Jeremy Clarkson who shrug their shoulders at the prospect of the break-up of the Union.

Others will conjure a view of Englishness which does not represent the best of our nation.

Offering a mirror image of the worst aspects of Scottish nationalism.

Anti-Scottish.

Hostile to outsiders.

England somehow cut off from the rest of Britain, cut off from the outside world.

Fearful what is beyond our borders.

Convinced our best days behind us.

I don’t think like that.”

Miliband’s  England is not England at all and his patriotism is no love of country  but love of  the inchoate multicultural mishmash which the politically correct  promote as the most desirable of all  societies and,  increasingly, as the only legitimate society.  Their wish, implied or in a few cases stated overtly, is  to radically change the nature of England (the vast majority of immigrants  to the UK settle in England)  by allowing and covertly encouraging massive immigration of those who are radically different in race and/or ethnicity.

The passage above  from  Miliband’s  speech sets the ground for England to be  left defenceless against  further immigration and  the placing beyond the politically correct Pale any desire to maintain and celebrate Englishness simply by ensuring that England remains English in people and culture as well as name.   You can only be English on Miliband’s terms and those terms are that the English will not only be prevented from resisting the destruction of England as their  national homeland, but be forced at least overtly to embrace their own destruction as an independent people as if it were the most marvellous and desirable of  social transformations in a manner reminiscent of North Koreans cheering their  Dear Leader et al.

One of those willing to come clean publicly about the deliberate destruction of England and the English as a nation within their own territory,  is Andrew Neather, a special adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.  Neather  let the cat out of the bag in 2009 in the London Evening Standard.  Writing about the attitude of the Blair Government towards immigration at the end of its  first term, he disclosed:

“I wrote the landmark speech given by then immigration minister Barbara Roche in September 2000, calling for a loosening of controls. It marked a major shift from the policy of previous governments: from 1971 onwards, only foreigners joining relatives already in the UK had been permitted to settle here.

That speech was based largely on a report by the Performance and Innovation Unit, Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office think-tank.

The PIU’s reports were legendarily tedious within Whitehall but their big immigration report was surrounded by an unusual air of both anticipation and secrecy.

Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67″, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.” (http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html)

The inevitable eventual  result  of this strategy would be  to dissolve the English in a sea of competing ethnicities, to make the English but one of many people in their own homeland , a people bereft of  any special claim to the land.   On the way to that calamity and  while they remain the large majority in their own land,  the English  are  wilfully discriminated against by their own elite which promotes the interests of existing ethnic minorities above those of the English whilst suppressing English dissent in ever more ruthless fashion,  including the increasing  use of jail for anyone daring to publicly speak out against  what is the most fundamental  act of treason, namely, the permitting of  the de facto colonisation of  parts of England.

Miliband reduces Englishness to nothing by embracing the tactics that  the Left  have used for the past decade . They  have moved from pretending either that the English did not exist as a meaningful nation or claiming  that any  attempt by the English to promote their own interests and culture is  racist to the concept of “progressive patriotism”.

“Progressive patriotism is  a slogan fit to stand with Orwell’s Freedom is Slavery  or Ignorance is Strength because it is the very reverse of patriotism.  Rather,  it is an ideological fig-leaf designed to cover the disastrous effects of the  fundamental act of treason which in post-war mass immigration to England. This “progressive patriotism” requires  the people of England (and any other true national group) to  disown the idea of the nation as  the tribe write large,  created not by deliberate design but organically grown, for a  self-consciously created idea of the nation as being no more than the people occupying the same territory.  Miliband unashamedly embraces this “ progressive patriotism” which, in another piece of Orwellian oxymoronic doublespeak    he describes    nonsensically as “Celebrating our differences but drawing us together.”

The England Miliband refers to is one in which no one is expected to think of themselves simply as English. Instead, they must have “multiple identities”  which muddy the waters of natural  (cultural) nationality and allow the overarching faux nationality of British to cover all and sundry regardless of origin. The attack is from below as well as above with local or regional feeling used to corrode  and dilute  Englishness viz:

 

“..we are stronger together as a United Kingdom and that essential strength comes from our ability to embrace multiple identities…

To me, Britain is a country where it is always possible to have more than one identity.

More than one place in mind when you talk of home.

A Welshman living in London regards himself as Welsh and British.

Someone born in London living in Glasgow remains a Londoner still.

This is the reality of modern day Britain.”

What I remember when I think about English identity.

What I love is the spirit of quiet determination in the face of adversity and the sense of common decency that goes with it….

Celebrating national characteristics does not mean claiming they’re unique.

Or that we’re necessarily the best.

Celebrating our differences but drawing us together.

Remembering our history.

But building a shared future.

Honouring our people.

And learning from their stories.

This is what I have learned from my own story.

This is what I am learning from our summer of national celebration.

And this is what I believe we all need to learn by reflecting on our country. “

Miliband details  his own divided self which reveals more of his mentality than perhaps he imagines:

 “I am proud to represent the people of Doncaster North.

I am proud to lead the Labour Party.

I am proud to be Jewish.

I am proud to be English.

And I am proud to be British too. “

Very revealing that   English comes last but one on his list.   He also emphasises  several times in his speech his Jewishness and his status as the son of immigrants:

“Neither my Mum nor my Dad came from Britain.

As I have said on other occasions, they arrived here as refugees from the Nazis.

My Dad was 16 when he caught one of the last boats from Ostend to Britain.

He was a Jew.”

And

“This is who I am.

The son of a Jewish refugee and Marxist academic.”

The obvious point to make is that the multiple identity nation concept  is very convenient for someone with Miliband’s background. A much deeper observation  would be to ask what Englishness can mean  to someone like Miliband, a man who must have been  set apart to some degree from English society by his second generation immigrant status and membership of an ethnic minority?  His distinct oddity of physical appearance would have made him a target for bullying anyway and the things which set him apart for other children – his immigrant origins and Jewishness – would have been obvious tools for bullies to latch onto.

The primary objection to this salami slicing of  identity is that it takes no account of what each claimed source of identity can provide. Thinking of yourself as a Londoner or a Yorkshireman  before anything else ignores the fact that such localised loyalties cannot offer protection against enemies , the building of infrastructure which extends over a wider area than the local allegiance or the other 101 things that a nation state can provide.  The age of the city state is over and small states exist at the will of large ones. The same objections  apply to those minorities  who see their first allegiance as religious, ethnic or  racial. In fact their position is even weaker than those with a local territorial allegiance,  because the latter are dominant in their area and consequently at least have the possibility of raising taxes and running some important matters within their locality. The nation has to be the source of first allegiance both because it is the only group which can provide meaningful protection and because a territory with many competing national or ethnic groups will be unable to provide that protection. #

Miliband also uses the other two ploys commonly adopted by  “progressive patriots” The first is the claim that England is and always has been a nation of immigrants

“We must always debate the right approach on immigration.

And never run away from the issues it throws up.

Our villages and towns have always been mixtures of locals and newcomers.

At their best, these are places where people come together to make something new.

A common good.

Learning to live together, not separately, in new ways that serve us all.”

That is a claim which is pedantically true in the sense that foreigners have come, either by force or invitation, to England throughout history. What is howlingly  untrue is that England has always welcomed or tolerated foreigners or vast numbers of immigrants have been absorbed before 1945 . In fact, very little immigration took place from the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290 until the eighteenth century with the reintroduction of the Jews and the Huguenots from France.  But even this  and the Jewish immigration of the 19th and early 20th Centuries was  small in comparison with tidal wave of post-1945 immigration.  Compared with much of continental Europe, England was a country remarkably  little touched by immigration before WW2.

The other ploy is the reducing of nationhood to values such as respect for the law and  material  considerations such as wealth and poverty:

 “I have talked about the need to secure our poorest a living wage.

Because that recognises the dignity of work.

It’s an idea that came from working people.

I have spent much of my leadership talking about the need for a ‘responsible capitalism.’

An economy that works for working people.

That preserves the sense of justice and fairness that people value against an unregulated market.

And I have talked too about the need to restore hope among people that politics can bring the change they so desperately want to see.

All of this speaks precisely to the English Labour traditions I have described:

A politics that starts with people.

That builds a sense that we really are all in it together.”

That is a political ideology not part of what constitutes a nation which is something which evolves without conscious planning or design.

The denial of an English Parliament

Miliband completely gives the game away about his feelings towards England when it comes to the question of giving England a political voice.  In  Miliband  World  England alone of the four home countries is to be denied a Parliament and consequently a political voice:

“There are some people who say that this English identity should be reflected in new institutions.

But I don’t detect a longing for more politicians.

For me, it’s not about an English Parliament or an English Assembly.

The English people don’t yearn for simplistic constitutional symmetry.

Our minds don’t work in spreadsheets, just like our streets don’t follow grids.

But there is a real argument here which does unite England, Scotland and Wales:

And that is about the centralisation of power in London.

This resentment is felt in many parts of England.

A sense that our politics is too distant.

Too detached.”

When Miliband says the he doesn’t “detect a longing for an English Parliament” he is being grossly disingenuous. He must know that polls on the question of an English Parliament have regularly  shown  majority support for it. In 2007 a  BBC poll showed 61% of the English in favour (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6264823.stm) and in 2011 a Mori poll showed 51% of all Britons (not just the English) in favour of an English Parliament (http://robintilbrook.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/poll-most-english-want-english.html).   Compare that healthy support with the votes for  Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997.  The turnout in Scotland was  a mere 60.4% and the voting although not close (Yes 74.3% to No 25.7%)  showed a substantial minority voting against (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/devolution/scotland/live/index.shtml),  while Wales only engaged  50.1%  the Welsh electorate and the referendum was won by a minute 6,721 votes  – Yes 559,419 (50.3%) No 552,698 (49.7%).  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_devolution_referendum,_1997).

The referenda  figures tell their own story: the Scots and Welsh as peoples  were far from fervently seeking a parliament or assembly .  This lukewarm response came  despite the fact that  there were established Westminster Parliamentary nationalist parties  as well as the Labour and LibDems supporting the proposals and much of the mainstream media in favour.   Conversely, the English have now and never have had,  a Westminster  Parliamentary Party – nationalist or  Tory, LibDem or Labour – advocating an English parliament.  In addition, precious little time and space has been given to the question  in the British mainstream media and when the subject  does occasionally get an airing,  it is almost always to deride the idea of the English needing a parliament or devolved powers.    Despite these immense disadvantages, the English desire for a Parliament and control of much of their own affairs is arguably stronger than that of the three home countries who have  devolved powers and a parliament or assembly.

Miliband  has a venal reason for denying England a voice and political power to look to its own interests:  an English Parliament would in effect be the UK Parliament because so much of the population is in England  and the large majority of the UK’s  tax revenue  is raised from English taxpayers. An English Parliament as the de facto UK Parliament would mean the end of Labour as a serious force in UK politics because so much of their support comes from the non-English parts of the UK.  But  he may have another more visceral reason:  the type of active dislike of English society displayed in Neather’s piece quoted above. After all, he was if not an elected politician at the time Neather  let the cat out of the bag , a NuLabour insider as special adviser to Gordon Brown.  Nor has he repudiated or denied Neather’s startling claims.

The Lion and the Unicorn

As so often with the left Miliband engages in serious and  unashamed  misrepresentation. In his speech he  quoted from  George Orwell’s 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn: “Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different?… How can one make pattern out of this…”

Miliband takes this at its edited face value.   Whether he is simply ignorant of  what follows or he  is deliberately misrepresenting Orwell  I will leave readers to judge.    Far from believing that England and Englishness could not be defined – as Miliband’sedited  quote suggests – Orwell merely used his questions as a platform for rebutting  the idea that England is just an atomistic  collection of cultures and peoples,  viz:

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

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

Orwell understands, as Miliband does not, that nations are organic growths which are not delineated neatly by self-conscious moral imperatives,  but arise and sustain themselves through an  unconscious process  of  behaviours  becoming the norm for a group and those behaviours collecting to form a distinctive culture.   No one can create a nation consciously, although many have tried. The best  such would-be social engineers  can achieve is the temporary subordination of a people to an ideology  through fear.  Once the fear and control is removed the old and natural feelings which belong to the group, whether it be tribe, clan or nation, re-emerge.

Orwell also understands that although national cultures inevitably change,  they are not universally plastic and  can only develop in ways determined by existing structure of a culture:

” Meanwhile England, together with the rest of the world, is changing. And like everything else it can change only in certain directions, which up to a point can be foreseen. That is not to say that the future is fixed, merely that certain alternatives are possible and others not. A seed may grow or not grow, but at any rate a turnip seed never grows into a parsnip. It is therefore of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.”

This misrepresentation of Orwell is akin to the frequent false attribution to Churchill of a desire that the UK should be part of what has become the EU when Churchill explicitly said that he wanted  Britain to remain outside any such European supra-national organisation. In both cases the exact opposite of what Orwell and Churchill actually wrote or said is represented as their true opinion.

Britishness is dead letter

Throughout his speech Miliband frequently confuses or equates Englishness with Britishness. This is no surprise because  British as a national label is used by the politically correct to act as a camouflage for the effects of mass post-war immigration.

Britishness has always been a manufactured  national feeling,  because the idea of Britain as a nation since  its  inception  after the Act of Union in 1707  has been  a political device not a nation wrought by Nature.  Nonetheless, although it is a political rather than natural nation something of the feelings of patriotism and a true sense of nation  relating to Britain did emerge  over the centuries. This was partly because of the experience of being under one government  and partly  from Britain’s   ever swelling imperial  role which provided both a shared enterprise for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to coalesce around  and new broadly Anglo-Saxon countries such as Australia and New Zealand still searching for an identity often spoke of their Englishness or Britishness.  The experience of two world wars added to this melding of the peoples of Britain and the white dominions  and by 1945  there was probably a greater sense of the British  as an emotional rather than a manufactured nation  than ever before. Yet  it never obliterated the natural sense of belonging to the four natural  nations which formed Britain.

This sense of British unity was rapidly  thrown away by the mass immigration which began in the late 1940s.  With mass immigration came a problem of identity: what were the hordes of blacks and Asians and their descendants to call themselves?  The early immigrants from the West Indies might call themselves British because that was what their schools had taught West Indians to believe they were, but this was soon swept away by the rush to independence of  British  colonies in the 1960s. As for the Asians who came from the Indian subcontinent, they did not think of themselves as British because an independent India and Pakistan already existed.  The children of these immigrants were placed in a toxic  situation where they had neither the full ancestral culture imprinted nor an unequivocal acceptance of being English even if they were born  brought up in England.  They had no sense of certain place and retreated into a paranoid world in which they saw themselves as victims of the English.

Today, blacks and Asians in Britain cling to the idea of Britishness, often  moderated by a qualifier such as British-Asian,  Indian-British or  black-British but very rarely do they  describe themselves as English, even with a hyphen such English-Asian or Black-English.  In more than 50 years of living in London I have never heard a black or an Asian describe themselves as simply English unless they are in a situation which prompts them to do so, for example, a black or Asian representing England at some sport.  I routinely hear blacks and Asians raised in this country referring to themselves as Indian, Pakistani, Chinese  or African.

The blacks and Asians  raised in Scotland or Wales are more likely to describe themselves as Scottish or Welsh but that is probably because there are far fewer blacks and Asians in Wales and Scotland than in England.  (Northern Ireland has such a small non-white population that the nationality question does not really arise and in any case the sectarian divide in the province renders the  nationality question meaningless because the Protestants see themselves as British and the Catholics as Irish).  But even in Wales and Scotland blacks and Asians are more likely than not to qualify their Scottishness or Welshness along the lines of  Asian-Scots or Black-Welsh.

As blacks and Asians (and some white immigration groups) have embraced the word British, whether hyphenated or not, the white native population of England have largely  rejected the idea that they are British and embraced  the idea that they are English.   This trend has been  enhanced  by the effects of devolution which has left England greatly disadvantaged as the one home country which has been denied a Parliament and power over much of its own territory and people.   The word British has been marginalised to the point where its main purpose within the UK  is to designate someone who is not or does not think of themselves as English.  In terms of binding the UK together the idea  busted flush.

A Miliband government would simply see more of  the deliberate suppressing of English interests , the encouragement of continued mass immigration and the privileging of ethnic minorities over the English which has been a feature of the past  fifty years at least.

Elizabeth I’s speech at Tilbury before the defeat of the Armada

Delivered by Elizabeth to the land forces assembled at Tilbury
(Essex) to repel the anticipated invasion of the Spanish Armada, 1588.

“My loving people, we have been persuaded by some that we are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes for fear of treachery; but, I do assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people.

Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects; and, therefore, I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust.

I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King – and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which, rather than any dishonour should grow by me, I myself will take up arms – I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. For the meantime, my Lieutenant-General Leicester shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my General, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom and of my people.“

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/tilbury.htm



The gratuitous denigration of things English – the reign of Elizabeth I

Robert Henderson

Allan Massie, a Scot be it noted, decided to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II  with a deprecating piece on her great predecessor and namesake, Elizabeth I designed to pour  cold water on the idea that hers was a glorious reign. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9307110/Lets-not-overlook-the-gory-details-of-Gloriana.html). He complains of the general treatment of Catholics, the use of torture on Catholic priests and those who harboured them,  nudges the reader to consider the likes of Francis Drake to be hovering on or going over edge of piracy and in best liberal bigot fashion invokes the ultimate condemnation of English adventurers of the time by dwelling on Sir John Hawkins’ involvement in the slave trade. In addition, Massie belittles the defeat of the Armada and Elizabethan military exploits on the continent, bemoans English involvement in Ireland and stands aghast as he considers the Earl of Essex’s execution of one in ten of his army after they failed to press hard enough in battle.  As for the great intellectual glory of the reign, the  sudden flowering of literature symbolised by Shakespeare,  this is dismissed as being a mere tailpiece to the Elizabethan age.

Massie, a professional historian so he has no excuse, has committed  the cardinal sin of historians by projecting the moral values and customs of his own time into the past. For a meaningful judgement Elizabeth’s reign has to be judged against the general behaviour of European powers of the time and that comparison , ironically, shows   Gloriana’s England’s   to be considerably nearer to what Massie would doubtless consider civilised values than any other state in Europe.

There were no terrible wars of religion as there were in France ; no Inquisition as there was in Spain.; no burning of those deemed heretics as there was under Mary Tudor.  Torture was used  in Elizabeth’s England, and in the reigns which immediately followed,  but sparingly and  only for cases which had national importance,  normally involving treason,  such as those involved in the Gunpowder Plot which took place only two years after Elizabeth’s death .  On the continent it was a commonplace of judicial process.  English law, by the standards of the time, was generally remarkably fair, not least because of the widespread use of juries. Those who gasp with horror at Essex’s execution of his troops should bear in mind that in the First World War several hundred British soldiers were shot for behaviour such as desertion and failing to go forward when ordered  over the top.

In Elizabeth’s reign the first national legislation anywhere in the world to provide help to the needy was passed, a legislative series which began in 1563 and culminated in  the Poor Law of 1601. This legislation put a duty on every parish to levy money to support the poor and made it a requirement to provide work for those needing to call on the subsistence provided by the Poor Law.   Educational opportunities, whilst far from universal, increased substantially.  Despite , by pre-industrial  standards,  very high inflation and the inevitable bad harvests, which included a  series of poor years in the late 1590s,  the population grew  substantially, possibly  by as much as a third from 3 to 4 million (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/poverty_01.shtml). London expanded  to be the largest city in Europe by the end of the  Elizabeth’s reign with an estimated  population of  200,000 by 1600 (http://www.londononline.co.uk/factfile/historical/ ).

It was also in Elizabeth’s reign that Parliament began to take on aspects of modernity as opposition to Royal practices and policies were made unambiguously not on the sole ground  that the monarch was ill-advised, the traditional ground of complaint,  but simply because of what we would now call ideological differences between the growing Puritan group and  the  still newly minted Anglicanism.  This laid the foundations for the evolution of Parliament from being little more than a petitioning and tax raising assembly to what eventually became parliamentary government with the monarch at the will of Parliament not Parliament at the will of the monarch, an evolution which was to take several centuries more to be complete.  That Parliament was already seen as being central to the process of government by the end of Elizabeth’s reign is shown by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. That the conspirators thought  blowing up Parliament was a necessary act  or even just the most effective way of reducing England to a state of headless misrule speaks volumes.

The importance of the English Parliament  under Elizabeth cannot be overstated because it is from the English Parliament that all modern assemblies take their inspiration.  There were many mediaeval assemblies in Europe,  but by the end of the  16th Century most of them had been  rendered obsolete through disuse and the few  meaningful assemblies  which remained had not moved nor ever did move to Parliamentary government.  It was only in the English Parliament that the step to placing executive power within Parliament and away from the monarch  occurred.  Had the English Parliament been suppressed  by, for example,  the conquest of England by Phillip II or the early Stuarts’ adherence to the doctrine of the Divine Right of kings,  it is difficult to see how representative government could have arisen because the seventeenth century was the century of absolute monarchs, or as near absolute as it was possible to get.  These were rulers who were utterly opposed  to the idea of sharing power. Consequently, if England had not  made the jump  to representative government  it is  most improbable any other country would have done so. Monarchies would have probably been overthrown in time,  but they would have been almost certainly  been replaced by dictatorships not elected governments.

Elizabeth’s  reign was also a time of great artistic and considerable intellectual achievement.  The development of the theatre and poetry may have come in the last 12 years or so of  her time, but  their legacy was seen in the 35 years running up to the Civil War.  Music, particularly in the form of the madrigal, flourished.  William Gilbert  examined magnetism in a manner which was essentially scientific in the modern sense,  arguably the first example of  such research.  Francis Bacon, the progenitor of the scientific method,   spent most of his life as an Elizabethan  having been born in 1561.

Catholics were rightly seen to be a fifth column. Most English Catholics did not actively seek to commit treason,  but they had varying degrees of sympathy with those who did, whether it was the hiding of priests or a secret wish to see a foreign Catholic monarch on the throne.  Not only that, but all English Catholics had by definition  an allegiance to a foreign power  (the papacy) which was hostile to England under a Protestant monarch.  Throughout  Elizabeth’s reign popes  funded  and generally encouraged, both morally and materially,  Catholics in England to subvert the laws against Roman Catholicism and for much of  the reign   the papacy was actively working for her overthrow.   No pope was more enthusiastic in this behaviour than Pius V who in 1570 published   the papal bull Regnans in Excelsis which  declared Elizabeth I a heretic  and  a false Queen and  released Elizabeth’s  subjects from their allegiance to her.

Those who plotted to reintroduce Catholicism to England were unambiguous traitors. They  did not simply seek to overthrow the existing monarch, but to entice  a foreign Catholic king  to invade and seize the throne with the primary purpose, in their eyes, of  enforcing the return of Catholicism.

Elizabeth’s reign took place in the context of  a world in which England had to guard against many enemies from the counter-revolutionary forces on the continent to the threat of Scotland attacking England when she was distracted by continental matters  or still Catholic  Ireland being used  as a sidedoor  for the invasion of England by continental powers .   The most forbidding threat came from  Spain, the greatest power in Europe at the time.  Phillip II’s marriage to Mary I gave Phillip a permanent interest in  England – he tried to marry Elizabeth and considered a plan to use his departure from England for Spain in 1559 following Mary’s death as cover  to land troops as he sailed down the Channel (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/tudors/adams_armada_01.shtml )-  and , quite reasonably, placed in English minds  the  idea of a constant threat of Spanish invasion of England and its enforced reconversion to Catholicism – in 1584 Philip II of Spain  signed the Treaty of Joinville with the French Catholic League, with the aim of eradicating Protestantism.  Attacks on Spanish treasure ships can reasonably be seen not as simple piracy but as acts of war engendered by the  Spanish threat.  In addition, the claim of Spanish and Portuguese ownership of the New World  was really no more than a self-arrogated exclusion zone created by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 and the  English attacks on Spanish ships and New World settlements were in response to this exclusion.  (It is important to understand that the scramble for overseas colonies by European powers was driven as much by the fear that  monarchies such as Spain and France would become too powerful in relation to the monarchies which did not have colonies as by a desire to simply conquer new territory or personal gain).

Massie’s dismissal of the defeat of the Armada as a victory for the elements rather than the Elizabethan navy is distinctly odd. He overlooks the fact that before the Spanish were sunk by the weather the English navy had prevented the Spanish  from clearing the Channel  of English warships in readiness for the embarkation of the Spanish invasion troops who were waiting at Dunkirk.  Massie also makes no mention of the raid on Cadiz in 1587  by Drake which probably delayed the Armada for a year giving the English time to prepare against the intended invasion.

As for English military continental adventures, there  were  failures, but the  most important contributions of England to the battle between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation was her financing of Protestant powers  on the continent, most notably the United Provinces,   and the very fact of England remaining unconquered, the latter being of immense importance because the Protestant states  on the continent were weak and  fragmented and England was by far the most important Protestant power of  the time.  If England had fallen to Spain, it is doubtful whether Protestantism could have survived, if it had survived at all,   as more than a family  of persecuted sects.

The casting of John Hawkins as beyond the Pale  because he was a slave trader clankingly  misunderstands the mentality of the age.  Forms of legal unfreedom, ranging from full blown chattel slavery to indentured labour  (which could be for years particularly in the case of apprenticeships), were common throughout  Europe.  Moreover,  the poor who were not formally legally restrained in their freedom were under severe economic restraints to do what they were told and take what work they could get.  Slavery was not seen as an unmitigated , unforgivable evil.  It is also worth bearing in mind that  although serfdom was never formally abolished in England, by Elizabethan times it had practically vanished through  a  process of  conversion of the   land worked for themselves by serfs  to land held by copyhold tenancies.  The reverse took place in central and Eastern Europe where feudal burdens became more stringent and widespread  in the sixteenth century  and even France retained serfdom in some places, most notably, Burgundy and Franche-Comté, until the Revolution in 1789 and seigneurial privileges  which required  freemen holding land of the seigneur  to have a relationship which  in practice was not so different from that of the serf.

The great triumph of Elizabeth’s reign was that both she and Protestantism survived. This meant that  England was never again in thrall to a foreign power until Edward Heath and his fellow conspirators signed away Britain’s sovereignty by accepting  the Treaty of Rome in 1972 and entangling Britain within the coils of what is now the EU.  It was not that Protestantism was in itself superior to Catholicism, rather that in embracing Protestantism the question of divided loyalties between monarch and papacy was removed.

It is true that the idea of Gloriana was propaganda both during the reign itself  and in the Victorian period most notably in the hands of the historian J A Froude painted too sunlit a picture.   But the reign was of immense importance in creating the England that became writ so large on the history of the next four centuries.  If it had not been Elizabeth who came to the throne in 1558 the odds are that Phillip II would have conquered England. Had she not reigned for so long Protestantism would not have become the irrevocable religion of England.  If  she had not called  Parliament regularly it would not have laid the ground for eventual Parliamentary government and any other monarch would almost certainly have emasculated  the Commons.    The existence of behaviour which offends Mr Massie’s twenty-first liberal bigot sensitivities is irrelevant.

Courage is the best defence against charges of racism

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——————————————————————-

My correspondence with Nick Griffin  

To:                      Philip@anywhere.demon.co.uk

Subject:              a crack at Blair?

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:     19 June 2005 21:24:02

 

Dear Mr Henderson

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

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

Yours sincerely

 

Nick Griffin

British National Party

————————————————————-

To:                      BNP Chairman

Subject:              Re: a crack at Blair?

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

Date:     21 June 2005 13:45:35

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

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

RH

———————————————–

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

Subject:              Re: a crack at Blair?

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:                   21 June 2005 15:58:02

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

N

—————————————————————-

To:                      BNP Chairman

Subject:              Suggested action you should take

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

Date:     04 July 2005 17:11:57

 

Dear Mr Griffin,

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

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

Your tactics

 

I suggest the following:

1. Call the Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling people as witnesses

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

Your legal representation

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

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

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

Representing yourself

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

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

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

Secondary questions.

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

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

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

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

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

My involvement with the Blairs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours sincerely,

 

 

Robert Henderson 4 7 2005

——————————————————————

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

Subject:              Re: Suggested action you should take

From:                  BNP Chairman

Date:                   05 July 2005 13:31:35

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

N

The utilitarian case for the monarchy

Robert Henderson

The utilitarian case for the monarchy is not about pageantry, deference  or the vulgar belief that it is worth keeping because it acts as a tourist magnet. It is not about the cost of the monarchy compared with a president. It is not about whether the individual members of the Royal family are worthy beings or if its very  existence is an insult to ideas of politically correct equality. The utilitarian case is purely political: our monarchy underpins Parliamentary government.

In resisting the abuse of the many by the few, Britain begins with the great advantages of a parliamentary system and an in practice non-executive head of state chosen by a means utterly outside political manipulation short of the outright  criminality of murder,  blackmail,  illicit threats and bribery, namely birth. These provide a massive barricade against a Prime Minister who would be a despot. He cannot act without the support of an elected parliamentary majority. His cabinet in practice must be overwhelmingly drawn from elected politicians. He may change his cabinet but he cannot do so without regard to a cabinet member’s status and popularity within the party on whose support he depends.

Most importantly, the prime minister (or any other politician) cannot become head of  state.  This is of central importance, because whether the powers of a president be executive or ceremonial, the mere   existence of the office of president provides an avenue for those who would subvert parliamentary control of the  executive. The example of De Gaulle in France
in the early years of the Fifth Republic demonstrates how easily a President’s powers may be extended by the overtly democratic means of a referendum against the wishes of a Parliament.  As things stand, a would be British dictator would have to do one of two things. The constitutionally legitimate path would  require him to first persuade Parliament to
adopt the idea  of an executive  presidential system and  then win the  backing of the electorate for a change to a presidential  system either through a referendum or an electoral mandate.  His illegitimate path would consist of either a referendum  put to the country against the wishes of Parliament or an outright coup backed by the military and police.

This is not to say that a prime minister equipped with a large majority cannot have a great deal of freedom  and personal power.  Both Thatcher and Blair achieved this. But however big their majority or great their personal authority they could not routinely make policy without some regard to the wishes of their ministers, backbenchers and the electorate. Whatever dark thoughts Thatcher may have had about  mass immigration or membership of the EU, she was in practice hamstrung in doing anything about it  by the opposition of powerful ministers  such as Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe.  Tony Blair’s desire to severely reduce the welfare state was thwarted over many years by his Chancellor Gordon Brown.   To those leashes on their dictatorial desires can be added the fact that both Thatcher and Blair left office before they wanted to as a result of dissent amongst their parliamentary parties.   Had either been an elected president  operating outside parliament,  neither would have been removed before the end of their term of office.

A parliamentary system such as that of Britain has other restraints on abuses of power. First-past-the-post elections based on constituencies means that  MPs are not solely beholden to their party elite s as is the case with a party list system, and general elections, at least  since 1945, have normally produced a single party with a majority in the House of Commons.
This latter fact  means that the vast majority of modern British government have not been able to fail to honour their manifestos on the grounds that they  were part of a coalition.

If a demand for a president arose in  Britain  there would be an opportunity for those pressing for such a change to seek an executive president  with the executive removed from Parliament on the grounds that it was “more democratic” and provided a check on the power of the executive. . Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should look at the American experience where the powers of the president are constrained by a division of powers outlined in a written constitution administered by a supreme court. The President appoints his cabinet subject only to the agreement of the Senate, the President’s nominees being normally accepted.  Supreme Court judges are also nominated by serving presidents and vetted by the Senate.  These nominations   meet more Senate opposition, but most of those nominated are passed and if one is rejected, the President still gets to nominate an alternative.  That means a president  will broadly speaking get a judge into the court who is sympathetic to the president’s political views. As Supreme Court judges are elected for life,  a president
who is able to get even two new judges onto the court may affect its political bias for decades.

Even if a supposedly non-executive president was adopted with the executive remaining in Parliament,   the relationship between the prime minster  and head of state would be different. If the president was elected, there would be a second font of democratic authority regardless of the president’s powers. This would mean that there would be a constant temptation for a powerful politician to get themselves or a stooge elected to the presidency and then use their control  of Parliament to increase the president’s powers. If the president was simply appointed by politicians  a prime minster with a large majority could either take the presidency themselves and use his parliamentary control to increase his powers or place a stooge in as president, use Parliament to increase the presidential powers then control the stooge.

None of this is to pretend that the British system of government is perfect for the executive  has  found many ways of thwarting proper parliamentary oversight and control . The way it does this is fivefold (1) the entanglement  of  Britain in treaties, most devastatingly those related to the EU,  which remove sovereign power from not only Parliament but Britain; (2)  the increasing grip of party elites on the selection of candidates for Westminster seats, something of particular importance with the rise of the career politician who has never done
a job outside of politics; (3) an ever swelling use of secondary legislation, particularly statutory instruments,  which provide  much less opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny than primary legislation; (4)  the increasing appointment  of peers as ministers and non-politicians as “Tsars” for particular policy areas and   (5) the use of the Royal Prerogative by prime ministers.

There are ready cures for these ills. Treaties could be repudiated to regain sovereignty; the power of selection of Parliamentary candidates invested  solely  in local constituency parties would greatly reduce the power of  party elites;  a requirement that a Parliamentary candidate should have ten years  work experience unconnected with politics before being able to stand for Parliament would end the career politician; withdrawal from the EU would greatly reduce the amount of secondary legislation and increased time to scrutinise what was left and the use of peers and non-politicians banned.

That leaves the Royal Prerogative which represents  a particularly danger to democratic control because the powers exercisable under it are large. This is because of the long, organic
development of the relationship between Parliament and the Crown, the powers and rights of the Crown are little circumscribed by law, although most, and all the important ones, are now invested in practice in the office of PM. The dissolution or proroguing of Parliament and the calling of elections are by the prerogative. The PM and his ministers are appointed by
the Crown.  In principle, the monarch could appoint a Government in which none of its members sat in Parliament. No Bill can become a law without the monarch’s signature. Treaties and the making of war and peace can and are made without the assent of Parliament. All foreign relations are in principle within the monarch’s remit.  Justice is the monarch’s. The Monarch can do no wrong. Many senior state appointments such as appointments to the higher judiciary and bishoprics are one by the prerogative.  The monarch is head of the armed forces. There is prerogative power which allows the Crown to expropriate or requisition private property (with proper compensation) in time of war or apprehension of war. The Crown has limited powers of legislation under the prerogative, principally as respects the civil service and UK dependent territories.  This legislation is made by  Orders in Council, ordinance, letters patent and royal warrant. A ragbag of other rights such as treasure trove  and bona vacantia (the reversion to the Crown of property where there is no inheritor) and arcane rights such as the monarch’s right to (most) swans also exists.

The simplest thing would be  to cancel all prerogative rights which have a serious political dimension. This would reduce greatly the power of the PM and consequently  pass power to Parliament.  Such powers as are left to the monarch  should be laid down clearly in law. That would do a great deal to increase the power of Parliament and the ordinary member.
However,  more could be done without producing a situation which would leave a Parliament with an executive unable to act.  I would ban the whipping of MPs,  restrict the size of government to reduce the government “payroll vote” ( modern governments draw in more than 100 MPs) and make  the justice system truly independent by removing the political officers – Lord Chancellor, Attorney-General and Solicitor-General  – from the process of justice.

The banning of whips would not mean a government with a working  majority was constantly defeated because most party members will vote for their party programme. Governments would have to get used to accepting the odd defeat on even important policies as a fact of life not a cause to call a motion of confidence.  The reduction of the “payroll vote” would lead
to more independent minded backbenchers who would see  being a backbencher as an honourable and worthwhile end it itself.  The removal of the politicians from the process of justice is necessary to observe natural justice.

Two other things would be s desirable as a check on the executive: a written constitution designed not to promote a political agenda but to protect democratic control and prevent governments from undertaking anti-democratic policies or reckless behaviour which self-evidently will be damaging to the country.  If there is a Supreme Court to administer it, judges should be selected for a fixed period of five years and chosen by a free vote of the Commons. Alternatively, the administration could be done by a reformed second chamber (see below).

The second thing is electoral reform.  To address the problem of parties with even  less than 40% of the popular vote ending up with large majorities,  for the Commons  I would suggest double member constituencies  with each elector having a single vote. The two candidates  receiving the most votes in each constituency  would be  elected. This would probably  both reduce the size of majorities whilst giving any elector a choice of two MPs to go to rather than one.

As for the Lords, if you want a house which will not engage in a democratic mandate war with the Commons or simply replicate the party dominance of the Commons, I suggest selecting a house by lot from all those who put themselves forward to serve a single term of ten years, sufficient time for them to become proficient as a revising chamber.

Liberals in a multicultural denialfest

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

The tactics of liberal denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the report actually says is this:

“Ethnicity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crimes were objectively racist

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

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

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

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

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

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

“January 11, 2011

Poush Shukla Saptami, Kaliyug Varsha 5112

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nature of Islam

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

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

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

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

2.  Explicitly saying women are subordinate to men:

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

3. Sanctioning the corporal punishment of wives by husbands:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How ideologies fail   

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

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

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

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

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

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

The really radical thing for the Tory Party to do – appeal to the English

The one-time Deputy Chairman and leader paymaster of the Tory Party Lord Ashcroft was pushing the pc bandwagon merrily along at a great rate of knots  in the Sunday Telegraph  of 29 April. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/9234157/Lord-Ashcroft-Conservative-party-must-disprove-fears-that-it-only-looks-after-its-own.html). In it he urged the Tories to “reach out to ethnic minorities”. Here is a sample:

“…the Tories’ unpopularity among black and Asian voters is not simply a matter of class and geography. For many, though by no means all, there is an extra barrier directly related to ethnic background. If Labour helped their families to establish themselves in Britain and passed laws to help ensure they were treated equally, the Conservatives, they felt, had been none too keen on their presence in the first place.

Enoch Powell was often mentioned in evidence. The failure, on the Conservatives’ watch, properly to investigate the murder of Stephen Lawrence was also cited, as were other incidents.

Most thought the Conservatives had changed in recent years. But many – particularly people from a black Caribbean background – felt the Tories were still indifferent or even hostile towards them. Some felt the Tories, and David Cameron in particular, had unfairly blamed minorities for last summer’s riots. Many thought Conservative policies hit minority communities especially hard, and the Tories seemed unaware or unconcerned about their impact.

Ethnic-minority voters (perhaps uniquely) think the Conservatives have kept their promise to toughen immigration laws. Some saw this as a good thing. But they saw that since the Government could not restrict migration from within the EU, greater controls were being placed on immigration from outside Europe, most of which originated from Africa or South Asia. This made the distinction between EU and non-EU immigration look like different treatment of white and non-white immigration.”

Why did Ashcroft want the Tory Party to “reach out”.  Simply because it was costing  the Party seats  –  I did search for a moral as well as this  venal motive in the article but was unable to find one. But even at the venal level Ashcroft is baring up a very misleading  tree. The most the Tories could gain from persuading ethnic minorities to vote for them in large numbers – a most improbable eventuality – would be a small number of seats,  not least because ethnic minorities are overwhelmingly seats which are naturally labour regardless of the ethnic minority share of the electorate.

The really radical thing for the Tories to do would be to appeal to the majority, namely, the English.  I have sent the Sunday Telegraph this letter:

Sir,

Lord Ashcroft (29 April) urges  the Tory Party  to appeal to ethnic minorities – a small proportion of the country – to gain a few extra seats. I suggest that the Tories appeal to the large majority whose interests are neglected, namely, the English, to gain many extra seats.

The Tories should stand on a platform of an English parliament; an end to the massive subsidies to the Celtic Fringe; the recovery of our sovereignty through leaving the EU; the end of mass immigration; the maintenance of strong defence forces designed to defend Britain  not the New World Order; a pledge to get involved in no new foreign escapades driven by the USA or the EU; the cessation of foreign Aid; an end to the green agenda which is costing billions a year; sensible policies to promote food and energy security and the stripping of every vestige of political correctness out of British life.

That should do the trick.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson