Category Archives: Nationhood

The wages of Scottish independence – immigration

The Scots Numpty Party (SNP) fondly  imagines that  an independent Scotland would continue to have free access to England. They recklessly  assume Scotland’s position would be akin to that of the Republic of Ireland. However, that assumption rests on   a number of dubious presumptions: (1) that an independent Scotland would be in the EU; (2) that  the remainder  of the UK (henceforth the UK) will remain in the EU; (3) that the EU will survive in its present form ;  (4) that the  UK will continue to have such generous welfare provision and (5) that the UK will  play by the formal EU rules.

If either Scotland or the remainder of the UK  was outside the  EU,   the rules relating to free movement of peoples across EU borders would not apply and the UK could restrict movement from Scotland to England at will.    If Scotland was not in the EU (and the EU
might not welcome  the idea of another potential  Greece or Republic of Ireland or the Westminster government might veto their application to join ) but the  UK remained in the EU, the Scots would be at a disadvantage in comparison with the  continental EU states,  because the remainder of the UK would be required to accept labour from other EU countries but not from Scotland.   But what if both Scotland and the UK remained within the EU? That would mean there would be free movement between the countries. However, that presumes the EU will remain as it is. This is very uncertain.  Should the Euro collapse that might cause such financial distress that the EU ceased to exist as each of  the member states looked in desperation for their own salvation.  That could leave an independent Scotland out on a limb, bankrupt and unable to export its unemployed.

Even if the EU did not break up, a  the collapse of the Euro would could  produce a  lasting depression along the lines of that of the 1930s. This would reduce both the opportunities for employment within the EU and the ability of member states to meet their welfare obligations, which would dissuade people from moving  to countries where the welfare benefits are highest.

As all EU law requires is that the same benefits that are offered to the citizens of an EU member are offered to any other EU members’ citizens, this produces widely varying provision in the various  EU states with corresponding differences in their attraction to immigrants.

Welfare is particularly significant in the UK’s case because when everything is taken into account – unemployment pay, sick pay, working tax credits,  housing benefit, council tax
benefit, free school education and (still) subsidised  university education and the NHS (which is by far the most generous healthcare system in the EU –  the UK has arguably the most attractive welfare package in the EU and one moreover which is   very readily accessed.

If UK benefits were considerably reduced there would be far less incentive for foreigners to come. That would apply to an independent Scotland. In fact,  Scotland could find itself in a situation where the welfare benefits they offered were more substantial  than those of the UK and produced migration from the UK to Scotland to  claim the higher benefits.  As things stand with EU law, they would have to pay the higher benefits to all EU citizens who claimed them. The only way the Scots could prevent paying higher benefits would be to
reduce the provision s to their own people.

There is also the possibility that the UK could reduce their level of welfare provision even without a further great economic disaster. This is certainly the intent of the Tory Party and if they achieve a strong majority at the next general election this may well happen.

Another possibility is that the EU could re-invent itself in a number of ways. It could reduce its members to a core of stable, productive members. That would not include Scotland. A multiple layered EU with members having a different status is another with differing rules relating to free movement, the right to work and access to welfare. In reality this already exists with countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) such as Norway  and Switzerland having free trade and free movement of peoples but not obligations such as welfare provision for EU state citizens (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/if-we-leave-the-eu-we-mustnt-be-another-norway/).   It is improbable that an independent Scotland and the UK would be in the same layer because of the great difference in size and wealth between the two.

As for free movement within the EU itself, it is noticeable how readily the Schengen Agreement  was overthrown in May 2011  by subscribing  states declaring they were suspending free movement because of the pressure of refugees from North Africa caused by the so-called “Arab Spring”. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/europe-to-end-passport-free-travel).  The Schengen Agreement provides for the twenty five signatories (all EU members except for the UK and the Republic of Ireland) to operate a  no borders regime for the subscribing members. This covers approximately 400 million people.  Not  only is free movement within the EU one of the four EU “freedoms”, but the Schengen Treaty conditions and the  law evolving from them are now  part of the EU’s  acquis communautaire (literally that which has been acquired by the community) . This means that jurisdiction over the Schengen Area  and any amendment to the Treaty provisions is now subject  to the legislative process of the EU (the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament) rather than a negotiating free-for-all by the political heads of
each member state.  Yet the decision of EU countries large and small –  Italy, France, Denmark – to act unilaterally passed without any real opposition or action. The lesson here is that when shove comes to push national interests will predominate.  Other  examples are the flouting of EU rules on such things as competition and state subsidies. Often no action is taken and even where it is, the larger countries such as France simply ignore any fines or judgements from the European Court of Justice  with impunity.  Even if Scotland and the UK remained within the EU,  the UK as one of the larger EU states could impose border controls against Scotland without anything dramatic happening. The same would apply  with greater force if an independent Scotland became a member of the EEA or the UK left the EU and signed up to the EEA.

Scotland could in principle join the Schengen Area, although its fragility has been clearly demonstrated this year.  But that would do them little good because neither the UK nor the Republic of Ireland are members. Thus Scotland would have no shared border with the treaty members.

If the UK left the EU, an independent Scotland would be utterly in the hands of the UK,  which could not only stop human traffic over the border but legally prevent any goods traffic between the UK and Scotland.  The same would apply if Scotland was not in the EU and the UK was.

Why would  the UK not want to have an open border with Scotland? The Westminster government might wish to prevent  free Scottish immigration for a number of reasons. The most obvious would be if Scotland was used as a conduit for  immigrants from outside the British Isles to enter England in large numbers. (I say England not the UK because experience shows that immigrants to the UK overwhelming head for England).

Then there would be the risk that the resident population of Scotland would  want to come to England in large numbers if the Scottish economy turned turtle.  That could have considerable costs for England both in terms of competition for jobs, housing, public services  and benefits paid to the unemployed.

There is also the strong  risk for Scotland that a future Westminster government could be faced by an electorate, especially of those in England,  which was hostile to Scotland because of their decision to leave the union and wished them to be denied any suggestion of special treatment such as continued  free movement across borders.

If Scotland  became independent that  England’s already great predominance within  the UK would become even greater with over 90% of the UK’s population and much more of its wealth.  That would make the  UK government  give more attention to English interests.  This natural tendency would be enhanced by the loss of the 59 House of Commons seats which are returned by Scotland. That would make a future Labour or even a Labour/LibDem government  improbable because  Labour and the LibDems hold all but one of the 59 seats. The  likelihood would be  a Tory Government at Westminster for the quite some time after Scottish independence.

There would also be the question of nationality at the time of Scottish independence.  Alex
Salmond  has the quaint idea that the Scots would have both Scots and British nationality. This is a very rash assumption.  British nationality might not continue once Scotland was gone. The UK might opt for a confederal system  with different nationalities for England,
Wales and Northern Ireland.  England might decide to go for independence herself. More broadly, a Westminster Parliament dominated by English MPs and concentrated on English interests might refuse to share a nationality with an independent Scotland. An independent  Scotland which did not have free movement between herself and the UK would be in a very perilous position,  because she would be a small country on the very
periphery of Europe with no border with any country other than England.  Scots should reflect on that inescapable fact.

The English in North America – Locating the Hidden Diaspora

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

In search of the English

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

Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered and defined in opposition to other competing groups
St George's flag facepaint
The team, led by Professor Don MacRaild, Dr Tanja Bueltmann and Dr David Gleeson, argue that the existence of English cultural communities in North America has been largely ignored by traditional historians who see the English as assimilating into Anglo-American culture without any need to overtly express a separate English ethnicity.
Their initial research has found that from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, North American towns and cities boasted organisations such as the Sons of St George, where traditional English food and folk culture were maintained. The evidence suggests that the English were distinctly aware of being an ethnic group within the emerging settlements at the time, exhibiting and maintaining their ethnicity in similar ways to the Irish, Scottish and German colonists. Yet this does not appear to be recognised in history.
The three-year project entitled ‘Locating the Hidden Diaspora: The English in North America in Transatlantic Perspective, 1760-1950’, has received £286,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It aims to take a fresh look at English ethnicity using thousands of untapped sources, including manuscripts and newspaper articles from this period. The team believes that their research will have wider reaching implications in shedding light on current debates in UK identity politics and Englishness.
Professor MacRaild said: “It struck us as highly surprising that, though the English in North America formed an array of ethnic clubs and societies, such as the St George’s Society, no one has shown much interest in these associations, their activities and English cultural legacies.
“The English were one of the largest European groups of immigrants in the US yet, while they settled alongside the other migrants who powerfully exerted ethnic awareness, the English are not ascribed the attributes of ethnicity associated with other immigrants.
“The Irish, Scots, Germans, and many other European ethnic groups have been subjected to dozens if not hundreds of studies, but not so the English. The standard historian’s answer has been that the English assimilated more easily to Anglo-American culture so removing the need for ethnic expression. However, far from being an invisible group within a world of noticeably ethnicised European immigrants, the English consciously ethnicised themselves in an active way. ”
Evident expressions of Englishness are found in English immigrants to America celebrating St George’s Day, toasting Queen Victoria, marking Shakespeare’s birthday, and Morris dancing. Benevolence was also of great importance, with many English associations being involved in providing charity – from meal tickets to ‘Christmas cheer’ – towards English immigrants experiencing hardships.
The team believe that Englishness has been overlooked by historians because, as the founding colonists, the English were the benchmark against which all other ethnic groups measured themselves.
Ironically, England’s relatively recent decline in global influence and the cultural changes produced by mass immigration and regional devolution has sparked increasing attempts to rediscover and define Englishness – seen in calls to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday and the rise in the English Defence League (EDL).
“At present,” Professor MacRaild argues, “Englishness in England is bedevilled with fears about right-wing extremists, football hooligans, and the uses and abuses of the now prevalent St George’s flag. We hope a project which will demonstrate the vibrancy of Englishness beyond England’s shores will contribute to debates about how Englishness fits into today’s multi-ethnic and increasingly federal political culture.”
Dr Tanja Bueltmann, an expert in the history of ethnic associations in the Scottish and English diasporas, added: “The growing movement for an independent Scotland has raised the issue of “Britishness” and “Englishness” in the wider society and influenced national debate about identity.
“Englishness as an ethnicity is now being rediscovered as a result of a crisis of confidence, partly influenced by the increasing fluidity of national borders and migration. Englishness is again being defined in opposition to other competing groups.”
Dr David Gleeson, historian of nineteenth-century America, said: “The project also has implications for the other side of the Atlantic. Recognising the English as a distinct diaspora gives us a clearer picture of the development of an American identity in that it complicates the idea of a coherent ‘Anglo’ cultural mainstream and indicates the fluid and adaptable nature of what it meant and means to be an American or Canadian.”
The research project will produce books, articles, an exhibition, and a series of public lectures to expatriate community groups throughout North America. The team will also work with local folk groups, including the Hexham Morris Men, and Folkworks at the Sage, Gateshead, to disseminate their findings to the wider public. International partners also working on the project are based in Guelph and Kansas Universities and from the College of Charleston.
Dr Gleeson added: “Perhaps English-Americans and Canadians will make a ‘Homecoming’, similar to the one organised by the Scottish government in 2009 for those of Scottish background, to re-establish connections with the land of their ancestors.”
Date posted: May 24, 2011

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Locating the Hidden Diaspora

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

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

Project Context


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


Aims & Objectives


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

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

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

Project Team


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

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

Where are the English-Americans?

There are Irish-Americans, Scots-Americans, Scotch-Irish-Americans, Welsh-Americans, Polish-Americans, German-Americans ,  Italian-Americans, Korean-Americans, Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, Colombian Americans, Dominican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Spanish Americans, and Salvadoran Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Iranian-Americans,   and a host of other hyphenated  citizens  in the USA. Sometimes the hyphenation is based not on nationality but religion, for example, Muslim-American or Jewish-American.  Sometimes it is based on race as in African-American or Asian-American.

There is one seemingly glaring omission from the catalogue of the culturally undecided: English-Americans.   I say seemingly because there is a most  obvious explanation for their absence: England was the cultural founder of the USA. Englishness is the default culture of the USA. Consequently, when the English have emigrated to the USA over the centuries they have not come to a land they felt was wholly alien or with a sense of victimhood or paranoia about their new home.

The English were the numerically dominant settlers from the Jamestown settlement in 1607 until the Revolution. Moreover, and this is the vital matter, they were overwhelmingly the dominant settlers for the first one hundred years.  At the time of the first US census English descended settlers formed, according to the historical section of the American Bureau of Census,  sixty per cent of the white population (http://tinyurl.com/67faop70 )and the majority of the rest of the white population was from the non-English parts of Britain ( In 1790 the population of the USA was  3,929,214 of which 3,172,006 were white and  757,208 black. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab01.pdf).
It is possible that  English ancestry was downplayed in the 1790 census and for much of the 19th century because of the anti-British feeling caused by the American Revolution and various disputes afterwards such as the war of 1812. If so, the under recording of English ancestry would  be amplified as the population expanded as time went on as the descendants of those wrongly classified continued the incorrect classification.   However, whichever figures are taken one thing is certain, by 1790 the template for American society was cut and most importantly English was the dominant language, a fact which alone shows who were the dominant group for no minority could force a language on a majority.

In the House of Commons on 22 March 1775 Edmund Burke made a plea for understanding of the American colonists’ demands  which was firmly based on their Englishness:

“…the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen…. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants… a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it…. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once
understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect
will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you…”(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15198/15198-h/15198-h.htm#CONCILIATION_WITH_THE_COLONIES).

The  colonists for their part more often than not themselves as English. Even the rebels placed their rebellion on the ground that they were defending true English liberty, a liberty that had been usurped by the king.  The Declaration of independence is a catalogue of breaches of what the colonists considered were their rights as Englishmen. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/american-declaration-of-independence/)

The early  English predominance may not seem important at first glance because of the heavy non-Anglo-Saxon immigration which occurred from the eighteenth century onwards. Would not, a reasonable man might ask, would not the later immigration swamp
the earlier simply because of its greater scale? The answer is no  because the numbers of non-Anglo Saxons coming into America were always very small compared with the existing population of the USA. At any time in the development of the USA the bulk of the population were practisers of a general culture which strongly reflected that of the
original colonisers, namely the English.

A distinction needs to be made between settlers  and immigrants. Those colonising a land do not come with the intent to assimilate into an existing culture but to transplant their own ways onto fresh territory. The Greeks in the ancient world  are a prime historical  example.

The English who came to America in the 17th century  were intent on creating a world in  their own cultural  image, albeit with certain variations most notably different religious regimes.  This they did in ways which remain to this day.

When immigrants enter a country their descendants will generally in time adopt at least some of  the social and cultural colouring of the native population. Where there is no barrier such as racial difference or membership of an ethnic group with a very strong sense of identity such as the Jews,  assimilation will often be complete within a generation or two.  Even in a situation of deliberate conquest,  the invader if fewer  in number  than the conquered – as  is normally  the case  – will become integrated through intermarriage
and the general pressure of the culture of the majority population working through the generations. The demographic working out of the Norman Conquest  over several centuries as the French invaders became English  is a good example.

In the creation of a society, the further the distance from the founding culture the greater the need to maintain a sense of separateness.  It is interesting that other missing hyphenated Americans are Canadian-American, Australian-American and New Zealand-American.  That is plausibly  because they are coming from societies which derive ultimately from England and which were founded by predominantely English settlers.   That does raise the question of why the non-English Britons who went to the USA  have self-consciously maintained their hyphenated status, most notably the Scots and the Irish.  The answer most probably lies in the fact that they felt themselves to be peoples who were subject to England.  In short, they were people who bore a grudge against England. It is worth adding that Americans who call themselves Scots-American or Irish-American today are indistinguishable from American-Americans in everything except for a sentimental attachment to their Celtic ancestry and a residual polishing of an historical victimhood.

The  demographic significance of the English in the USA remains to this day.  It is true that the percentage of those formally  identifying themselves as of English origin has diminished.  The 1980 US Census showed 26.34%  of the US population (49, 598,035) claiming English ancestry (http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/pc80-s1-10/tab02.pdf).   There is no up to date census information, but the US Census Office’s  2008 American Community Survey shows only 9% of  respondents claiming English ancestry, although that still makes them the third most numerous national group after the Germans and the Irish (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ADPTable?_bm=y&-qr_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_DP2&-geo_id=01000US&-ds_name=ACS_2008_1YR_G00_&-_lang=en&-redoLog=false&-format=).

This strong diminution in 28 years makes no sense if it is taken as a literal reduction. Common sense says that millions of English descended people have not suddenly vanished from the USA.  Nor, in view of their early predominance and continuing substantial emigration of the English to the USA after independence, does it make any sense for there to be more Americans with Irish or German ancestry than English ancestry.

The explanation for the fall is plausibly threefold: as the founding culture of the USA those with English simply think of themselves as Americans;  as the oldest group in the USA, English ancestry on average is probably far more distant than other  ethnic groups and lastly many of those with English ancestry  will have  mixed that ancestry with other groups especially more recent arrivals and will have claimed that allegiance instead of English.  There is also the temptation in an age of group politics for people to claim an ancestry which they feel will be most advantageous to them. As the English in the USA do not make a song and dance about being English, other groups which do are likely to attract
those with a divided ancestry.  The prime example of this is the way American presidents claim Irish ancestry no matter how tenuous whilst often ignoring much more substantial English ancestry. (http://presidentsparents.com/ancestry.html).  There is also the general pressure of political correctness which casts WASPs (into which category English-Americans would  generally fall) as an abusive and dislikeable elite ethnicity.  That may
add to a general propensity to not identify as English.

A strong pointer to the continuing English connection with the USA are surnames. In 2000 the   US Census Office  released statistics showing that of the top ten most frequently occurring surnames in the USA, eight were of English/British origin.  http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/data/2000surnames/index.html

Because of her origins and history Englishness is   spread throughout US  society. Her law is founded on English common law. The most famous of  American law officers is the English office of sheriff. Congress imitates the eighteenth century British Constitution
(President = King; Senate = Lords; House of Representatives = The House of Commons) with, of course, the difference of a codified constitution. (It would incidentally be truer to describe the British Constitution as uncodified rather than unwritten). It is an irony that their system of government has retained a large degree of the   monarchical and aristocratic principles whilst that of Britain has removed power remorselessly from King and aristocracy and placed it resolutely in the hands of elected representatives who have no formal mandate beyond the  representation of their constituents.

The prime political texts of the American revolution were those of the Englishmen John Locke and Tom Paine. The American Constitution is  designed to alleviate faults in the
British Constitution not to abrogate it utterly. The first ten amendments which form  the American Bill of Rights draw their inspiration from the English Bill of Rights granted by William of Orange.

The  American Revolution was conducted by men whose whole thought was in the English political tradition. English influence is written deeply into the American  landscape. Take a map of the States and see how many of the place names are English, even outside the original thirteen colonies which formed the USA. Note that they are divided into parishes and counties.

Above all other cultural influences stands the English language. Bismarck thought that the fact that America spoke  English was the most significant political fact of his time. I am inclined to agree with him. But at a more fundamental level, the simple fact that English is spoken by Americans as their first language means that their thought processes will be broadly similar to that of the English. Language is the ultimate colonisation of a people.

Moreover, the English spoken by the majority of Americans is still very much the English of their forebears. It is, for  example, far less mutated than the English spoken in India. The English have little difficulty in understanding USA-born white Americans whatever their regional origin.  Americans often affect not to understand English accents other than received pronunciation, but it is amazing how well they understand them when they need something. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that “America and England are two countries divided by a common language” was witty but, as with so much of what he said, utterly at variance with reality.

There is a special relationship between England and America but it is not the one beloved of politicians. The special  relationship is one of history and culture. American culture is an evolved Englishness, much added to superficially, but  which is  still remarkably and recognisably English. English-American would be a tautology.

The importance of the continuing influence of the English for the USA can be seen by imagining what the situation would be  were no  unhyphenated Americans, if there was no group within the population which was devoid of a sense of victimhood, of being ill-at-ease with the society in which its members were born and raised. All that would be left would
be a society in which every racial or ethnic group competed,. There would be no stability or sense of social cohesion.  At worst, it could be a recipe for incessant civil war.  The English descended and English assimilated part of the population which sees itself as simply American provides the ballast which holds US society upright.

 

 

Ire in Babylon

UK Cinema Release Date: Friday 20th May 2011

Official Site: www.fireinbabylon.com

Written and Directed by: Stevan Riley

Starring:  Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge, Michael Holding, Ian Botham, Jeffery Dujon, Colin Croft

Genre: Documentary

Runtime: 1 hour 27 minutes (approx.)

Between 1980 and 1995 the West Indies cricket team never lost a series, a most remarkable thing. They did this through discovering a discipline they had never consistently shown before and the development of a bowling attack consisting of three or four genuinely fast bowlers,  a fast bowling  lineage which began in the mid 1970s with Holding, Roberts and Daniel and ended in the mid 1990s with Walsh, Ambrose and Bishop.    Their dominance was aided by the failure of umpires to implement the  cricket law banning persistent short-pitched bowling –  arguably because of a fear of being called
racist – but  in truth they were formidable  even without bowling four or five short-pitched balls an over.  The runs scored against the West Indies in their period of dominance were almost certainly the hardest earned in the history of Test cricket (the first Test was played in 1877).

Those with no knowledge of cricket  will have read that paragraph and said, no, not interested.  Let them bear with me for a moment.  It is a film about a sporting side but it is far more than that.  Primarily it is  a masterclass in black victimhood and insecurities in which  cricket takes a distant second place. That explains  why  the film has been greeted with such rapture by British  film critics who are  signed up to the “ol’ whitey bad, black good “ liberal agenda  (for a wide range of quotes  see http://www.fireinbabylon.com/press.html).
The Daily Telegraph’s review is typical: “Director Stevan Riley’s joyous and uplifting film is a celebration of a sporting triumph and all its implications for black politics and culture.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8524438/Fire-in-Babylon-review.html)

The director  Stevan Riley made no bones about the purpose of the film: “a story of freedom, independence and black pride through bat and ball”. (http://www.channel4.com/news/fire-in-babylon-what-lessons-for-west-indies-cricket-now).   The result is a film which is an unrestrained act of pro-black  propaganda,   with whites and England  painted as the colonial oppressors and the Asian populations of the West Indies relegated to the role of non-persons.  Within this context,  the West Indies team of the late 1970s to the mid 1990s is portrayed as a vehicle for the political consciousness of the newly independent West Indian countries; a means by which the black West Indian population  (but not the white or Asian West Indians) could assert  themselves and show themselves to be able to compete with and dominate  their  old colonial masters.

Those not familiar with cricket in general or West Indies cricket in particular will require some background.  The West Indies is not a nation state. Rather it is a collection of British ex-colonies in the Caribbean  (Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados being the main islands) plus one on the South American continent (Guyana).  Cricket is the only thing which brings them formally together.

The history of West Indies cricket is a mirror of the racial and ethnic tensions  in the
ex-colonies.  The team until the 1970s  was a mix of whites, blacks and Asians (mainly those who had ancestors who came from the Sub-continent).   Until 1960 the West Indies cricket team (known as the Windies) was always captained by a white man, apart from the odd match where injury or other absence of resulted in no  suitable white player  being available.

Throughout the period of white captains there was a growing restlessness amongst black West Indians for a black captain. After the appointment of the first  black man ,  Frank
Worrell,  to the (regular)  captaincy in  1960,   the  participation  of  white and   Asian  players  steadily  diminished  – in the case of whites it might be truer to  say effectively  ended.  Geoffrey  Greenidge was  the last  white   player to represent the West Indies (in 1972) before Brendon Nash appeared in  2008 (and he was a white Australian who qualified for the West Indies through his mother), while   no Asians were chosen between  Larry Gomes’  final appearance   in 1986 and Shivnarine Chanderpaul’s debut in 1994.  This left a side entirely composed of black West Indians.   In the late 1980s the
Windies Captain Viv Richards  proudly described his side as “a team of Africans”.

There is no mention in the film of this exclusion of whites and Asians from the Windies side during their period of dominance, nor Viv Richard’s celebration of the fact that he was leading  an all  black side.   This is scarcely surprising because those interviewed in the film are all black and the interviewer did not ask awkward  questions.   Famous white cricketers and commentators such as Geoff Boycott , Ian Botham and Jeff Thompson who had
played against the Windies during their period of dominance   were interviewed by the director,  but strangely not a single interview of a white man conducted for the film  appeared in the film. Tellingly, white faces were almost  absent from the film  except for the action shots. Ditto Asians.   Instead the film was packed with interviews with
West Indian cricketers and  commentators who had either played in or seen the Windies at their height , and film or commentary of black West Indian   celebrities uch as Bob Marley,  Bunny Wailer, Lord Short Shirt, Burning Spear  (no, I  am not making the names up) and Gregory Isaacs who happily mixed with players such as Viv Richards.

A  deep-rooted black paranoia shows itself in the interpretation as patronising of white attitudes and responses which are at worst neutral and at best complimentary.  The
description “Calypso cricket” by whites  is interpreted  as  meaning that West Indian sides play in an attractive but brittle and unthinking way. In reality it was simply a bit of lazy labelling by journalists and broadcasters  without any intent to patronise or insult.

Australians turning out in  great numbers to applaud the West Indies touring party as they toured the streets of Melbourne at the end of the 1960/61 series against Australia was dismissed as Australians being happy to applaud losers (they lost the series 2-1).
In fact, they were being applauded because the series was (1)  thoroughly exciting with the first tied Test in history and (2)  Test cricket was going through a period when it was feared that slow, defensive play was killing the public’s appetitive for the game and the series was seen as a  renaissance of attractive cricket.

The only instance in the film of a white man suggesting that the Windies were chokers was made by  the England captain in the 1976 series between the Windies and England. This was the South African Tony Greig (playing  for England after qualifying residentially) predicting  before the series that the Windies “would grovel”.  Had he made the comment about Australia or an Australian made it about England it would have just been treated for what it was, a bit of “pre-fight” banter. In the film it is treated with an immense  earnestness as if it was the deadliest of insults.

This outrage is very odd because the central  thesis of the film is that until the late 1970s the Windies were a team  which often contained great individuals,  but hich was all too prone to not playing as a team, whether that be because of racial strife (especially under white captains) ,  the difficulties of bring people together from different countries in a representative team or the lingering effects of colonialism which led to an unconscious lack of belief in themselves.  (The alleged weaknesses  were supposedly only cured after Clive Lloyd became captain and  eventually moulded the Windies into a relentless machine for winning. )

This  story is some way adrift from reality. It is untrue that the Windies were a consistently brittle side  before Clive Lloyd became captain. They always had great players and in the space of four years in the  1960s they won two series in England and beat the Australians in the West Indies.  By 1965 they had good claims to be the strongest side in the world.  That they  declined towards the end of the 1960s and early 1970s was simply the natural consequence of a great side growing old and losing important players.  In short, it was simply  what any top cricketing  Test side experiences,  peaks and troughs of performance.

One of the most intriguing passages is the series between  Australia and the Windies in 1975/76 when the Australian fast bowlers Lillie and Thompson physically knocked the Windies about so badly that the series was lost 6-1.  That was time when the Windies captain Clive Lloyd decided on playing a three or four man fast bowling attack. In fact, what appears to have been the real turning point was the rebel Packer matches of a
few years later. Kerry Packer was an Australian media mogul who signed up (to
the horror of the national cricket boards who banned the players from playing
Test cricket) many of the best  cricketers in the world, including most of the Australian and West Indies players.

The Packer series began badly for the Windies who folded weakly in an early match. According to the film,  Packer came into Windies dressing room and gave them a tongue-lashing along the lines of improve or you will be on a plane home.  Packer also arranged for then to use a  physiotherapist and fitness trainer by the name of Denis Waite because he was doubtful about their fitness. (http://www.catholicnews-tt.net/joomla/index.php?view=article&catid=49:sports&id=174:sports010209&option=com_content&Itemid=82).  Waite, a white Australian, got them fit and psychologically prepared.  By the end of Packer’s rebel games (they lasted two years) the Windies had started to win relentlessly.  It could be argued that the Windies built their later success on a platform constructed by two white men, Packer and Waite.

The other great  hand-up from ol’ whitey was the decision of the English cricket authorities in 1969 to relax the qualification rules for county cricket, the English domestic first class teams.  This meant that foreign players, including most of the major West Indian cricketers of the period 1970-1995, were able to play regular professional cricket in England. This both gave the Windies players a regular source of income from cricket (something which had never  been readily available before)  and a great deal of experience both of playing and English conditions and culture.

After 1995 the great days were over, although they were still competing for another five years or so as the great old players held the team together. After 2000, the Windies team declined rapidly until it became a pathetic shadow of what it had been only a few years before.  Why did this happen? Perhaps it was this:

“The things that had driven us in the past were no longer important to the newer generation. Black pride and its militancy, the shrugging off of our colonial legacy, Frank Worrell completing the West Indian version of the Jackie Robinson journey, these things have been historically severed” Calypsonian David Rudder on the difference between the 80s and today (http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/483624.html)

If Rudder is correct, that paints a bleak picture of the future of the West Indies not only as cricketers but generally.  What he is saying is that only the mixture of anger and fear left by colonialism is sufficient to energise West Indians.

From a purely cricketing point of view the film offers  many examples of great fast bowlers in action.  Those too young to have watched cricket in the 1970s and 1980s should watch the film and see the  difference between genuine fast bowling and what passes for it  now.  In particularly I was reminded of what a nightmare Jeff Thompson was at his best , not merely one of the fastest  of bowlers, but one with an uncanny knack of getting a ball to rear into a batsman’s face from barely short of a length. Most of the action shots are of batsmen being hit or nearly hit, which is a little unedifying,  but they  do  give  a
graphic idea of exactly how much courage and skill is required to face great fast bowling.  The most poignant shots are  those of a 45-year-old Brian Close batting against Holding and Roberts in 1976 before the era of helmets and being repeatedly hit on the body, an assault he met with a remarkable stoicism.

Those wanting  a flavour of the film can click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n57LPYiragE

The wages of Scottish independence – Public Debt

One thing is certain about an independent Scotland: it would begin life with a massive national debt. Exactly how much is problematic because  the Scottish referendum on
independence will probably not be held until 201. If there is a YES vote, it will probably be another couple of years before agreement is reached between Scotland and Westminster on the terms of independence because the Scots Numpty Party (SNP) has not proposed
that the terms on which independence is to be granted  are reached before the referendum.  In addition, some revenue streams, such as those from the oil and gas in English waters have never been formally agreed and calculated and public sector debts are not always clear-cut, for example, the cost of building a high-speed rail link to Scotland.  All this means that that the best that can be done for the official UK National debt  at the time of  likely independence are official  projections with unofficial estimates used for  items such as oil and gas in English waters .

The official UK national debt as it stands now is:

“Public sector net debt (excluding financial interventions) was £910.1 billion (equivalent to 60.1 per cent of GDP) at the end of April 2011. This compares to £765.5 billion (53.0 per cent of GDP) as at the end of April 2010.

“The unadjusted measure of public sector net debt expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), was 148.9 per cent at the end of April 2011 compared with 150.9 per cent at end of April 2010. Net debt was £2252.9 billion at the end of April compared with £2180.0 billion a year earlier.”  (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=206)

The unadjusted measure includes the financial subventions such as those to RBS and Lloyds.  Those wishing for a fuller description of the treatment of public sector debt should
go to http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/mfsd/iadb/notesIADB/debt.htm

The simplest and fairest way of apportioning the UK national debt is by allocating a share to Scotland proportionate to their share of the UK population. The estimated population of Scotland was 5,222,100 in mid-2010 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2011/04/27095112).
The estimated population of the UK in mid 2009 was  61,792,000 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=6 . Hence, Scotland has approximately 8% of the UK population. Eight per cent of £910 billion is £73 billion;  eight per cent of £2253 billion is  £180 billion.
By 2015/16 the net debt figure will have increased substantially.  Here is Bill Jamieson of the Scotsman  spelling out what the net debt share would mean for Scotland :

“What of deficit and debt apportionment? Both in the immediate term and in the final settlement, the SNP has called for more borrowing powers. But how much more borrowing will be sought on top of Scotland’s share of UK debt? To give a proximate idea of what we face, let’s assume Scotland’s debt share is similar to that of her share of UK GDP – circa  10 per cent. By 2015-16, when a referendum vote may be held, UK net debt is projected at £1,359 billion (69 per cent of GDP) and the annual interest charge would have risen to £67bn. Scotland’s share would be £136bn, and £6.8bn respectively.”  (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/holyroodelections/Bill-Jamieson-The-burning-independence.6766635.jp?articlepage=2).

Of course, Scotland might have another year or two before independence,  which even on the Coalition’s planned spending deficit reduction plans would add a few billions more – the projected spending deficit in 2015/16 is one per cent which would mean £15 billion plus added to the national debt  each year past 2015/16
(http://www.soas.ac.uk/cdpr/publications/dv/file67880.pdf).  However, the signs for a strong  economic recovery are poor – stagflation looks increasingly on the cards with rising prices and falling projections of growth – and the deficit in 2015 and the years immediately following  may well  be considerably higher than the projections.  It also assumes that no other non-financial  disaster strikes. This could well happen with the Coalition’s plans to privatise more and more of public provision. The major  problem with this, apart from introducing the profit motive,  is that private businesses can fail.
If they are providing essential public services they cannot be allowed to fail which means the taxpayer will have to step in. At the moment there is a potential disaster just round the corner with the care home provider Southern Cross in deep financial trouble. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/25/southern-cross-care-homes-in-balance). The company caters for 31,000 of the old and vulnerable.  There is no way other private providers could take up the slack. That would mean the taxpayer stepping in either with preferential loans to the company, which would almost certainly be challenged under EU competition law, or taking over the business wholesale.

That is just the net public  debt.  What the unadjusted national debt would be in 2015 can be no better than a guestimate.   If the publicly owned shares in  the banks are sold that would reduce the unadjusted figure,  but  there is no guarantee that the money put in
when the banks were on the verge of failing will be recovered in full.   Even if they are sold for enough to cover the money put in directly by the taxpayer this would only be a small part of the overall costs of the banks’ rescue: .

“The Government has pumped around £45 billion into RBS and £20 billion into Lloyds – holding stakes of 84% and 41% respectively – although the taxpayer is currently sitting on almost £20 billion in paper losses on the holdings.”  (http://money.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152384309)

If the shares are not sold, assuming no other financial disaster then the unadjusted debt  will  probably be in real terms  similar to that between adjusted and unadjusted debt in 2011).  However, that is a very big assumption because the UK may not be out of this financial crisis by a long chalk.  UK financial institutions, especially those providing mortgages, still have a good deal of potentially toxic debt.  Those struggling with
mortgages have been switched to easier terms, especially interest only repayments http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8548745/Banks-accused-of-using-mortgage-debt-leniency-to-flatter-numbers.html) . In addition, in the past six months UK banks have been going much more heavily in UK Government gilts  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/gilts/8550716/Banks-buy-bulk-of-39.8bn-of-new-gilts.html). This has the effect of another spate of quantitative easing. That will feed through into ever greater inflation (inflation is already high) which will eventually  lead to much higher interest rates.  That will drive many mortgage holders over the edge. If the UK property market collapses, that will seriously undermine the UK banking system and could well lead to other taxpayer bail-outs.

Even if things go well (well in the context of what the coalition is aiming for) the unadjusted debt would  probably be in £,2500- 3,000 billion in 2016/17. That would leave Scotland with a starting national debt of £200 – 240 billion.  An independent Scotland would find borrowing money would be rather expensive  because of the weakness and small of the economy  would make it a far riskier  bet than lending to the UK,  but suppose
five per cent interest  was paid, that would be £10-14 billion a year to service the Scottish debt.

That would not be the full debt  Scotland would have to take on. There would
also be a proportionate  Scottish share of (1)  UK’s PPP and PFI  obligations at the time of independence, (2) the funding of UK public sector and EU pensions  earned up to the advent of independence and (3)  other UK  debt taken on up to the time of independence.
There would also be the need to fund council debt which is not related to PPP/PFI/or local authority pensions, although that  could be a mix of  national Scottish funding and local authority taxation.

PPP and PFI present a problem because  the cost is spread over 20-30 years and  there are renegotiation clauses at various points in the contract; contracts are sold on so the reliability of the contractor can change and when shove comes to push the taxpayer is a faced with a choice between  paying the contractor more or seeing the project collapse. (see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/ppp-and-pfi-buy-now-pay-later/). Because of this it is impossible to give an accurate figure for the cost of a contract and the payments being spread over a long period have persuaded government statisticians not to include the full cost in the UK national debt.  The complications can be seen here. (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/psfnewsrelease_aug06.pdf).  To give an idea of scale of allowances made by the statisticians,  in 2006 they  added £4.95 billion  to the net debt.

Estimates of  the amount to be repaid  under PPP and PFI are around the £200-230 billion mark. For example, “Figures obtained by this newspaper [Daily Telegraph] through Freedom of Information requests reveal the full, mind-boggling cost of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) upon which the last government relied to fund its public sector infrastructure projects. More than 900 schemes have been completed with a total capital value of £56 billion – yet the amount the taxpayer will have to repay currently stands at £229 billion.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/8279753/Gordon-Browns-poisoned-PFI-legacy.html24 Jan 2011). Eight per cent of £229 billion  would be £18 billion.

Public sector pensions  for those working for the UK also do not have to paid for immediately. Here are the National Audit figures for 2009:

“•Total payments to more than 2 million pensioners in the UK’s four largest pay-as-you-go pension schemes (also known as unfunded schemes – where current employee and employer contributions are used to pay current pensions) were £19.3 billion in 2008-09,
a real terms increase of 38 per cent since 1999-2000. This is driven by more employees retiring each year, which is a substantially more significant factor than longer lifespans.

“ •Employee contributions of £4.4 billion reduced the taxpayer’s share of costs to £14.9 billion in 2008-09. The employee element grew by 56 per cent in real terms since 1999-2000 because staff numbers and contribution rates have increased.”  (http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0910/public_service_pensions.aspx).  Eight per cent of (15 billion is £1.2 billion.

The individual costs of Eurocrats’ pensions are high but not massive in in the context of national budgets:  “Contributions by UK taxpayers to the pension pots of EU  civil servants will jump to £350m a year by 2040, the report showed. “European taxpayers will have to stump up a total of £85bn in the next 50 years to pay for the comfortable retirements for officials.

“The total contribution from Britain in that time could be an astonishing £8.5bn. “http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/pensions/article.html?in_article_id=515300&in_page_id=6#ixzz1O27PaX00). Scotland would have a liability of around £1 billion spread over 30 years.

There is also the question of past transfers of English money to Scotland.  The SNP’s claim that the oil and gas tax revenue has exceeded the money received from the UK treasury is wildly wrong.  In 2009  a  Scotland Office paper  “Scotland and Oil” dealing with the tax
income from oil  and gas  fields around the UK painted a rather different picture. It concluded that:

“• If all North Sea oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland there would only have been 9 years out of  the last 27 when Scotland’s finances would have  been in surplus.

• Including all North Sea oil revenues the last year  of surplus was in 1988-89 and since then there has been 18 years of annual deficits with Scotland’s spending being greater than the tax raised in Scotland.

• Even if all oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland the total deficit would have outweighed the total surplus by £20bn since 1980-81. “ (http://www.scotlandoffice.gov.uk/scotlandoffice/files/Scotland%20and%20Oil%20-%20Background%20paper.pdf)

So there you have it, the official view is that even if all the oil and gas revenues were   allocated to Scotland they still would not pay their way. Of course, a substantial part
of the oil and gas  tax revenue would not go to Scotland because of the fields in  English waters.  Exactly how much is debatable, but  most of the remaining gas  is in English waters, viz:

“The SNP claims that Scotland would receive 95 per cent of oil revenue, but its calculation is based on the total revenue from oil and gas. Its opponents say that they do not take into account the large number of gas fields in English waters.

“THE EXPERT SAYS: Prof Haszeldine says: “The vast majority of the oil is in Scottish waters. With practically all of the gas in  the UK in the southern North Sea, that is in ‘English’ territory.” He says it is hard to separate the revenue from oil and gas. “(http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/politics/Can-oil-and-gas-fuel.2834598.jp)

It would not be unreasonable to add £30-40 billion to the Scottish national debt to cover the discrepancy between what Scotland has paid in to the UK Treasury and what they have taken out since 1980.

There is also the question of a disproportionate  public sector employment being deliberately created in Scotland to boost the economy at the expense of England. This includes such things as the Faslane nuclear submarine base and the administration of much of England’s benefits system.  Around 60% of current Scottish  GDP is derived
from  public expenditure and this is projected to rise to nearly 70% by 2012 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/knews/scotland/4217793/Scotlands-dependence-on-state-increasing.html).   I would not care to put a figure on what this has been worth to Scotland but  it must be billions.

Finally, in  the 273 years prior to 1980 when there was no major oil and gas tax revenue. During much of that time Scotland had favourable treatment both in terms of taxes raised in Scotland and money sent there from the UK  Treasury. This imbalance was built into the Act  of Union:

“Clause IX. THAT whenever the sum of One million nine hundred ninety seven thousand seven hundred and sixty three pounds eight shillings and four pence half penny, shall be enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain to be raised in that part of the United Kingdom now called England, on Land and other Things usually charged in Acts of Parliament there, for granting an Aid to the Crown by a Land Tax; that part of the United Kingdom now called Scotland, shall be charged by the same Act, with a further Sum of forty-eight  thousand Pounds, free of all Charges, as the Quota of Scotland, to such Tax, and to proportionably for any greater or lesser Sum raised in England by any Tax on Land, and other Things usually charged together with the Land; and that such Quota for Scotland, in the Cases aforesaid, be raised and collected in the same Manner as the Cess now is in Scotland, but subject to such Regulations in the manner of collecting, as shall be made by
the Parliament of Great Britain.” Act of Union (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/the-act-of-union-1707/)

The population of England was five times that of Scotland in 1707. Had Scotland  paid the  tax listed in Clause IX at the same rate as England  they would have paid £400,000. Instead they were required to pay only  £48,000, roughly a ninth of the pro rata sum.
For much of the time between 1707 and 1980 Scotland was poor (which meant less tax being collected) and from the time of welfare payments   being instituted  for the UK as a whole in the early years of the last century , Scotland  has had a higher take up than England.

The accumulated sum (including compound interest) resulting from this favourable treatment would be colossal, far beyond what Scotland could afford,. However, it  is a useful  political mallet with which  to thump the SNP if they start claiming all the oil and tax revenue and demanding compensation for defence equipment and installations,  embassies and such forth.

All those obligations and difficulties  have to be set against the small size of the Scottish economy. No official GDP measure is produced but the ONS 2009  figure for Scottish Gross  Value Added  (GAV),  which is GDP  without  taxes (less subsides) on products,
was  £102,552 billion  (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/gva1210.pdf).  The GDP today is in the region of £130-140 billion, with around  60% being from public spending.  In 2010 total public spending in Scotland was £52 billion (that is devolved  -health, education and so forth-  and non-devolved expenditure such as benefits)http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/Scotland_country_spending.html.

It is rather difficult to see how an independent Scotland could service a national debt which could be £300 billion or more. At five per cent that would be £15 billion a year. There is also the risk that  an independent Scotland might have to pay more than five per cent because they are a small economy with little private enterprise.  If they join the Euro or retain the pound they will be subject to the decisions of Westminster or Brussels which may not be in Scotland’s interest.  It is a less than encouraging picture.

The wages of Scottish independence – the currency problem

The most problematic  decision for an independent Scotland is the currency.  There are three choices: to keep using the pound, join the Euro or create their own currency.   If they choose the pound or Euro they will not be truly independent because they will have to relinquish control over   a large slice of Scotland’s fiscal policy.  True independence
would require the creation of a new currency.

If Scotland chooses to stay with the pound, as things stand  they would l be subject to the
decisions  about interest rates made by the Bank of England  (BoE). It is improbable that the Westminster  Government  would change the present regime to suit an independent Scotland, and any change, for example, returning control  of monetary policy to the Government from the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) or the alteration of the MPC’s remit,  would be made to suit the UK Government not Scotland.

The MPC’s  present remit is to keep inflation under control around a 2% target:

“ The Bank’s monetary policy objective is to deliver price stability – low inflation – and, subject to that, to support the Government’s economic objectives including those for growth and employment. Price stability is defined by the Government’s inflation target of 2%. The remit recognises the role of price stability in achieving economic stability more generally, and in providing the right conditions for sustainable growth in output and employment. The Government’s inflation target is announced each year by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the annual Budget statement.”

(http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetarypolicy/framework.htm)

The  MPC  has ignored that remit since the recession began in earnest in  2008, leaving
inflation to look after itself by first reducing Bank Rate  to an all-time low of half a per cent and then keeping it there.   Ostensibly this has been done because of fears of a severe shrinkage in the UK  money supply. In addition, to boost the money supply the BoE has engaged in what is politely known as Quantitative Easing (QE)  and impolitely known as printing (virtual) money.   A cynic might say that the reason the MPC and the BoE have behaved in this fashion is to covertly do the Government’s bidding, namely,  (1) preventing
a  wholesale collapse of house prices through massive defaults caused by keeping  Bank
Rate at a sensible, much higher, level and (2) reducing  public and private debt by inflating it away.  Whatever the truth, the management of the economy since 2008 illustrates an important truth: whoever controls the currency to a very great extent controls the politics of a country.

If  an independent  Scotland opted to keep the pound, when shove comes to push they would have to accept whatever Westminster decided, not only  from the direct
management of the economy through MPC  decisions and strategies such as QE, but also
the effects of the general fiscal regime decided by Westminster which would affect the value of the currency.   This would include the tax regime in the UK and Westminster’s  attitude towards debt, especially private debt. It is not inconceivable that credit controls such as those which existed before Thatcher removed them in the 1980s could be re-imposed,  for example restrictions on bank loans and mortgages.

There are also dangers  for the rest of the UK if an independent Scotland is  tied to the pound. One of two arrangements would exist:  either no Scots  say in how the Westminster Government acts  (probable)  or  some arrangement by which  Scotland would have
a formal say in the setting  of interest rates (improbable). Whichever it was you can bet the  Scots Numpty Party (SNP) would complain  that interest rates are set to benefit England.
That would create a danger  that  politicians in Westminster would give some
ground to them even if there was no reason to do so.  If you doubt this reflect on the fact that David Cameron has  not laid down any conditions for Scottish independence merely said that he would campaign against it. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/scottish-independence-yes-but-only-on-these-terms/).  If the Scots do  vote for independence , it is not probable  that negotiations  between the SNP and Westminster would  result in the Coalition Government giving a great deal away to the SNP in the vain hope they can cobble together a deal which  allows them to pretend the UK as presently territorially  constituted still exists in some form. This is an issue which needs to be aired in public as often as posssible.

More fundamentally,  the division of a currency between two supposedly sovereign states would create uncertainty in the  money markets  because it would not be clear who was pulling the strings or  what would happen if  Scotland got into the sort of economic trouble
Greece is currently experiencing.  The danger for the UK would be that Scotland would get into such a financial mess that the rest of the UK (in reality England as both Wales and Northern Ireland are economic basket-cases)  would come under immense pressure to bail Scotland out, exactly the predicament the richer  EU countries have found themselves in over the Euro turmoil. Even if  Scotland did not suffer a Greek-style economic collapse;
if it turned out to be church-mouse poor http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/scottish-independence-yes-but-only-on-these-terms/)  rather than the  oil-tax El Dorado  which fills the dreams of SNP members,  that would have a serious  effect on the behaviour of the currency,  because the money markets would  look at the combined economic performance of the UK and Scotland.  That would mean UK Government borrowing would cost more.  It would also probably mean higher Bank Rate than would otherwise be the case or higher inflation in the BoE kept rates low despite what the economic indicators were saying.

The Euro poses the same problems as the retention of the pound writ large.  Whether  the Euro will survive in its present form or even at all is uncertain. But even if it does manage to overcome the present difficulties which besiege the currency, it is dubious whether the richer Euro members, especially Germany, would welcome into the Euro fold another small country with a dangerously high dependence on public spending, much of which
would vanish at independence.  However,  if  Scotland did gain membership of the
Euro,  its government would have absolutely no effect on  how the currency was managed  and would be much more likely, because of the number and diversity of the Euro members,   to find itself trapped by interest rates and the value of a currency which was not suited to Scotland’s  needs than they would have been  if they kept the pound ,
a stable, important currency which has been shared between  Scotland and the rest of the UK for 300 years.  The present mess that Ireland, Portugal and Greece find themselves in should be warning enough of these dangers.

The other problem with being in the Euro is the likelihood of ever more invasive powers over  economic decisions such as oversight of banks being  given to the  Eurozone members .  Even as things stand, in theory at least there are severe restrictions on the amount of public debt a Eurozone member may run up.  The current Euro crisis is bringing ever louder calls for much more stringent controls over what Euro members can
do and meaningful enforcement of Euro regulations.  Scotland would have far less fiscal freedom if they joined the Euro than if they retained the pound.

That leaves the creation of an entirely new currency.  This would give Scotland fiscal freedom, but would come with its own  vast problems.  Getting international credibility for a currency is difficult for a large country with vast  natural resources (think of Russia after the dismemberment of the Soviet Union); it is much more difficult for a small country (Scotland has a population of around 5 million) even one with still substantial oil reserves.

An Independent Scotland  would not seem an attractive economic proposition to foreigners.  Around 60% of current Scottish  GDP is derived from  public expenditure and this is projected to rise to nearly 70% by 2012 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/4217793/Scotlands-dependence-on-state-increasing.html).  Much of the public expenditure is dependent on a subsidy from England (the difference in per capita Treasury funding alone means  Scotland takes  around £8,000 billion from England  each year – (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/scottish-independence-yes-but-only-on-these-terms/) and the likely tax revenues from oil and gas  in Scottish waters  (some of the oil and most of the gas is in English waters)  are likely over a the medium term to be considerably less than the subsidy  received from England.  (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/the-truth-about-uk-oil-and-gas/).
Moreover,  the amount of oil extracted  in the future will depend on the price and likely tax regime and the amount of oil will decline steadily even if the price remains high.

Foreigners would also be concerned at the very  narrow economic base of Scotland’s economy.  Of the forty odd percent of  the economy which is not publicly funded, a substantial  part  derives from  the oil and whisky industries (http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=1827).   Moreover, much of  Scotland’s private enterprise, especially the oil firms and  rather humiliatingly the whiskey producers, is foreign owned so that the profits  emigrate .

There is also a lack of  entrepreneurism in Scotland so the private sector is unlikely to swell:

“Scotland has the lowest ratio of businesses per head of population in the UK, according to figures published by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS). At the  outset of 2010, Scotland had 672 private sector enterprises per 10,000 adults, while England had 922, Northern Ireland 860 and Wales 783.” (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/6983/Scotland39s-private-sector-lags-UK.6773823.jp)

An independent Scotland would also start with a massive national debt.  Here is Bill Jamieson of the Scotsman dealing with the UK national debt:

“What of deficit and debt apportionment? Both in the immediate term and in the final settlement, the SNP has called for more borrowing powers. But how much more borrowing will be sought on top of Scotland’s share of UK debt? To give a proximate idea of what we face, let’s assume Scotland’s debt share is similar to that of her share of UK GDP – circa
10 per cent. By 2015-16, when a referendum vote may be held, UK net debt is projected at £1,359 billion (69 per cent of GDP) and the annual interest charge would have risen to £67bn. Scotland’s share would be £136bn, and £6.8bn respectively.” (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/holyroodelections/Bill-Jamieson-The-burning-independence.6766635.jp?articlepage=2)

That would not be the full debt  Scotland would have to take on. There would also be a proportionate  Scottish share of the funding of UK public sector pensions up to the advent of  independence;  either a proportionate share of the UK’s PPP and PFI  obligations at the time of independence or full responsibility for all PPP and PFI contracts in Scotland plus any other debt accrued for  Scottish projects,  both at local and national level,  and other UK  debt  up to the time of independence.  It is dubious whether foreign investors or the money markets would see an independent Scottish currency as a safe bet with those massive starting obligations.

More generally,  companies operating in Scotland now have the assurance that they are operating within a country  which is controlled by   a much larger and richer national entity namely England.  That is particularly important for the oil industry who need safe  seas to operate in. They would have no such assurance if Scotland was independent.

Finally, there is the thorny question of the Scottish banking system.   It is not merely that the British taxpayer (in reality the English tax payer because the Celtic Fringe take vastly  more out of the UK tax pot than they put in) has put  directly “The Government has pumped around £45 billion into RBS and £20 billion into Lloyds – holding stakes of 84% and 41% respectively – although the taxpayer is currently sitting on almost £20 billion in paper losses on the holdings.” (http://money.uk.msn.com/news/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=152384309).  Those are horrific figures for an economy the size of Scotland (£140  billion approx – see below) . However, that is only the tip of the taxpayer cost iceberg.   Part at least of the ongoing costs of  the recession and the burgeoning UK national debt  is down to the reckless behaviour of  financial institutions and the two Scottish banks RBS and HBOS were by far the greatest contributors to the  need  for taxpayer support and the ravaging of value by  feeding inflation through QE.

The size of the damage done can be seen from the Jamieson quote above: if the UK national debt reaches £1.4 trillion by 2015 that will mean the national debt will have nearly trebled (excluding inflation) since 2008 when it was around £500 billion (http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart_10_G.html).  Even worse, the official national debt figure does not include the costs of bailing out the banks or  the full cost of PPP and PFI expenditure, debt which  was kept off the official national
debt by Gordon Brown’s off-the-books Enron style accounting.  The official national debt figure with all identifiable  costs included (the unadjusted measure of public sector net debt ) was £2252.9 billion  or 148.9 per cent as at May 2011. (http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/uk-economy/uk-national-debt/).

Exactly how Scotland would be able to sustain an independent currency  against the background of  the loss of English subsidy, the narrowness of the Scottish economy, the over-dependence on the  public sector, the huge national debt  Scotland would start with and the  awful mess of their banking system is to put it mildly difficult to see.  That economic  background also  makes the idea of Scotland using either the pound or Euro  very unattractive, because not only would it drag down the credibility of the currency (especially in the pound’s case),  but the likelihood of a either England or the Eurozone having to bail-out Scotland with vast amounts of money looms very large.

All those obligations and difficulties  have to be set against the small size of the
Scottish economy. No official GDP measure is produced but the ONS 2009  figure for Scottish Gross  Value Added  (GAV),  which is GDP  without  taxes (less subsides) on products,  was  £102,552 billion  (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/gva1210.pdf).
The GDP today is in the region of £130-140 billion.

Whatever currency choice Scotland made one thing is certain:  borrowing  by Scotland’s government, both central and local,  and any other  public body in Scotland would become much more expensive.   The UK can borrow at a  rate which is moderate: an independent Scotland would, because of its precarious economic situation, have to borrow at considerably  more than the UK rate, if things go really wrong  at the extortionate  rates the Greek Government is having to pay despite being part of the Euro.

The wages of Scottish independence – the loss of the military

One of the most complex aspects  of disentangling Scotland from the rest of the UK should  Scotland become independent is defence.   It is complex because of  (1) the siting of the Trident submarines and other major ships at Faslane; (2) the  awarding of MOD research contracts to Scotland  and (3) the fact that the armed forces which  now exist in Scotland would not be suited to Scotland’s defence needs, they being designed to fit into a UK defence strategy not a Scottish one.

Back in 2002 the Scotch Numpty Party (SNP)  had these rather grandiose plans:

“Colin Campbell, the party’s defence spokesman, gave details of a Scottish Defence Service (SDS) which would operate in a nuclear-free Scotland following the removal of Trident.

“Mr Campbell said current estimates showed that a defence programme would cost £600 million a year with an extra £300 million for works.

“The total defence budget of £1.8 billion would be about the same figure as the Ministry of Defence currently spends in Scotland.

“He told the delegates: “We are looking at a maximum establishment of 20,000 regular personnel in Scotland … that is 5,000 extra people being paid in Scotland and spending their money in Scotland. That’s worth about £150 million a year.”

“He reckoned there would be 7,000 more indirect jobs as a result of the SNP’s defence policy.

Apart from 20,000 full-time regular troops, Scotland would also have 20,000 regular reservists and 8,000 part-time  reservists.  (http://news.scotsman.com/snpconference2002/SNP-proposes-nuclearfree-Scottish-Defence.2364594.jp)

A more realistic  idea of the armed forces and independent  Scotland could afford  can be gained from those of the Republic of Ireland RoI) which has an estimated  population of  around 4.5 million http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/population/current/popmig.pdf)  to Scotland’s estimated five million.

The RoI  has an army of approximately 8,500, a navy of 1,100 and an airforce of 1,000. (http://www.military.ie/home).  Total defence expenditure for 2011/12 is EUR725 million (£632 million – (http://articles.janes.com/articles/Janes-Sentinel-Security-Assessment-Western-Europe/Armed-forces-Ireland.html).  To put that in context the UK’s defence
expenditure for the same year is £ £33.8bn, or around 53 times that of the RoI. (http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/DefencePolicyAndBusiness/DefenceBudgetCutByEightPerCent.htm).
The RoI  armed forces could offer little meaningful opposition to an invasion by any serious invader. Their armed forces can  perform a domestic  quasi-police function at best .

An independent Scotland would have  substantial  revenues from oil which the RoI
does not have, although these are very susceptible to violent  fluctuations in the oil price,  something  which  would make planning for the future especially difficult as the oil tax receipts  would form a substantial part of the anticipated revenue an independent Scotland would need.  The oil is also a diminishing resource. (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/the-truth-about-uk-oil-and-gas/).
In addition an  independent Scotland would lose the subsidy they receive from England each year (around £8 billion at present –  http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/celtic-hands-deep-in-english-taxpayers%e2%80%99-pockets/)
and begin their independent life with a large national debt as their share of
the UK national debt. That share would be at least £100 billion  with the UK National Debt as it is now  at around  £1.1 trillion (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=277)
, but by  the time a referendum is held on the proposed SNP timetable in 2015 it will probably have grown to £1.5 trillion. This would make Scotland’s proportionate share (based on her proportion of the UK  population)  around £140 billion. In addition there would be large sums of   additional  debt for Scotland arising from the rescue of the Scottish banks RBS and HBOS, PFI projects and the funding of public service pensions.  Scotland would also have to fund a great deal of initial extra expenditure resulting from the setting up their separate public administration.

Taking these financial constraints into account, it is most unlikely that an independent Scotland would be able to support armed forces  substantially  greater than those of the RoI.  If that were  the case,  Scotland would lose out in terms of  the numbers of  servicemen in Scotland,  the number of MOD civilian workers and  the lucrative contracts  (with the jobs attached) for defence which they now receive from the UK Treasury. The MOD website gives a snapshot of  the material benefits which belonging to the UK currently brings  to Scotland via the defence budget:

“Scotland makes a very important contribution to UK Defence. Scottish military links and heritage remain strong and all three Armed Forces continue to have a significant presence at 381 sites across the country.

“There are 5,000 Armed Forces Volunteer Reservists and 10,000 Cadets throughout Scotland, plus ten University Squadrons and Corps. The Army alone has 58 Territorial Army centres, 17 Combined Cadet Force units, four University Officer Training Corps, and 228 Cadet detachments, which are supported by 1,000 adult volunteers.

“The MOD and the Armed Forces employ 20,000 people throughout the country. Each year the MOD spends an average of £600 million in Scotland, and awards over 500 direct contracts, sustaining additional jobs in Defence manufacturing. Scottish industry produces cutting-edge, hi-tech ships and equipment to enable our forces to carry out their operations.

“About 130 Royal Navy and NATO ships visit ports in Scotland every year, bringing money to the local economy.”

“An estimated 11,000 Scottish jobs are directly dependent on Defence contracts, with thousands more jobs supported in Scotland through the presence of the MOD and its spend in local areas. Defence industry varies greatly, from specialists in chemical protective clothing to shipyards that have produced Type 45 destroyers. The new royal Navy Aircraft Carriers will be built at Clyde shipyards in Glasgow and assembled as Rosyth Dockyard in Fife.”

(http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/FactSheets/DefenceInScotland.htm)

Much of that would go because of the financial constraints described above.    In the case of research and manufacturing , all of it would be removed as soon as alternative arrangements could be made and existing contracts expired.  Without the patronage of the UK Treasury there would be  greatly reduced  opportunities for Scottish defence manufacturers and Scotland would, like most  countries of her size,  buy the bulk of her military equipment from foreign suppliers.

The heaviest  loss would be the submarine base at Faslane which is scheduled to get even  more work than it presently has because during Gordon Brown’s premiership (in 2009) the decision was taken to base all the UK’s  new submarines – including those on which the UK’s nuclear deterrent Trident  is now entirely based – at  Faslane by 2016. It is a substantial facility to say the least viz:

“In May 2009 the then Minister for the Armed Forces announced that three Trafalgar Class submarines will transfer to Clyde by 2017, joining the Vanguard Class submarines and the Royal Navy’s new Astute Class vessels.

The announcement confirmed HM Naval Base Clyde’s future as the home of the UK Submarine Service and paved the way for Faslane to become the country’s submarine centre of specialisation.” (Once the transfer of work to Faslane has happened it will contain: “Four nuclear powered Vanguard Class SSBN submarines – HMS Vanguard, HMS Victorious, HMS Vigilant and HMS Vengeance – which between them maintain a continuous at sea presence of the UK’s Independent Strategic Nuclear Deterrent.

“Eight Sandown Class Single Role Mine Hunters (SRMH)….

“HM Naval Base Clyde can be thought of as a garage for all these vessels – keeping them ready to go to sea – and the hotel for the ship’s crews.  Indeed, with over 2,000 beds, the base is one of the largest hotels in Scotland!…

“In March 2010, the MOD signed a long-term partnering agreement with Babcock, consolidating the company’s relationship with the base until 2025, guaranteeing cash savings for the MOD of at least £1.5 Billion.  The agreement also helped to protect the long-term future of the maritime industry, hlping to preserve capabilities and vital skills neded to carry out future work.

“The Naval Base is the largest single site employer in Scotland, currently employing around 2,500 service and civilian personnel, of whom around 1,500 work for Babcock.  When Fleet staff and other Lodger Units are taken into account, the total number of
people based at HM Naval Base Clyde rises to around 6,500.” http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/operations-and-support/establishments/naval-bases-and-air-stations/hmnb-clyde/what-is-hmnbc/

That  gives some idea of the potential  scale of the losses of jobs and expertise  and the complications caused by contracts already completed.

Since the 2011 elections in Scotland which unexpectedly delivered  the SNP a majority in the Scottish parliament, the SNP leader Alec Salmond  has attempted to push an “independence lite” agenda  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/alancochrane/8516142/Dont-believe-SNP-on-Diet-nationalism.html)
which includes  the suggestion that Scotland would “share” defence facilities with the UK. This would be impractical because of (1) the gross imbalance in the size of the defence resources of  an independent Scotland and the UK and (2) the potential for conflicting foreign policies meaning the UK would want one thing and Scotland another. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/8515034/Sir-Mike-Jackson-tells-Alex-Salmond-British-soldiers-have-only-one-master.html).
In addition, in the case of the nuclear submarines and deterrent,  the SNP has as a policy of  the removal of these from Scotland. (http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/politics/SNP-call-to-scrap-nuclear.4666024.jp).   The submarines and the deterrent could be  transferred to the facility at Devonport, Plymouth.

A taste of what the re-shaping of the military in Scotland would mean can be gained from the response to the cuts proposed by the Coalition Government in Westminster:

“There are specific parts of Scotland where defence-related employment makes up a  significant proportion of local employment, including Moray which is home to two RAF
bases  (Kinloss and Lossiemouth) and Fife, which is home to RAF Leuchars. Cuts in the defence  budget (made in Westminster) will profoundly affect localities such as these. The UK  Government has confirmed that RAF Kinloss will cease to operate after 31 July 2011 and the  futures of RAF Lossiemouth and RAF Leuchars are still uncertain (an announcement will be  made after the Scottish elections). In response, Moray Council and local businesses and  communities have launched an action plan to stimulate the local economy in response to  fears about the impact of the RAF job cuts and subsequent reductions in local economy  activity and spending (BBC News 18th March 2011)”. (http://www.sac.ac.uk/mainrep/pdfs/publicsectorbudgets.pdf).

But even if an independent Scotland was wealthy,   it would not simply be a question of  taking over the Scottish military facilities which presently exist. These exist within the context of  a UK defence strategy.   It is improbable  that an independent Scotland
would wish to get involved in overseas escapades such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
Her  military  needs would  be to defend Scottish territory and patrol her
territorial waters.  That alone would mean that much of the military establishment in Scotland would be scrapped and new equipment and training provided., another considerable expense.

The idea that Scotland could  defend its  land and territorial seas  against a determined and  large enemy is in truth nonsensical. Scotland is a relatively  large country  (30,000 sq miles) with a small population (5 million) , most of which is crammed into the lowland stretch from Glasgow to Edinburgh.   Compare that with England, 50,000 sq miles and
a population of 54 million.  Scotland has neither the bodies on the ground or the wealth to present a serious threat to an invader.

Because of  Scotland’s inevitable military weakness,  the rest of the UK (in reality England)  would have to come to her aid if she was invaded by an enemy who was using Scotland as a backdoor to invading England.  Scotland would also shelter under the UK
nuclear deterrent and her general military and diplomatic strength.   Those two things cannot be avoided. However, it would be reasonable to make it a condition of independence that Scotland paid the remainder of the UK for that protection.

The wages of Scottish independence – public sector employment

One of the many major issues which an independent Scotland would have to address is the extent to which the Scottish economy is  dependent on public spending and in particular the number of public sector jobs which would be  moved from Scotland to England  for strategic reasons (for example,  nuclear submarines),  because Scotland could not afford to fund them (for example, troops) or  the repatriation of public sector jobs which service England but which were moved to Scotland to provide employment there (for example, the administration of much of English social security).

In the first quarter of  2010 Scottish Government employment figures were:

2,427,000 Total employment  in Scotland

1,816,800 in Private sector employment   comprising 74.9% of employment

610,200 Public sector employment  comprising  25.1% of employment

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/06/15171937/8
This compares with 20.1% of English GDP being public sector.

http://www.parliament.uk/briefingpapers/commons/lib/research/briefings/snep-05625.pdf

A quarter of employment in the public sector is  daunting enough,  but  the distinction between public and private is increasingly blurred.  If the directly employed public employees and private employers largely or wholly dependent on public funding are included the numbers  rise substantially, viz:

“Research by Manchester University shows the total figure climbed from 603,773 in 1998 to 772,048 in 2007.

The sharp growth can be explained by the researchers combining the number of people directly employed in the public sector with the number indirectly employed in the “para state” sector where private employers depend on state support.

The “para state” includes everything from consultants working for private companies to people involved in rubbish collection, healthcare and nursery education and other jobs
where the funding is dependent on the Government.

The report claims the UK has an “undisclosed business model of using publicly supported employment to cover the continuing failure of the private sector to generate welfare through job creation”. http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/one-third-of-scots-work-in-public-sector-1.1003448

However the 2007 figure does not include the banking jobs which became public after the bail-out of RBS and HBOS another 36,000 can be added taking the total to over 800,000 the Scottish dependent on public funding . That constitutes 30% of total Scottish employment.

The independent  Scottish Item Club (http://www.ey.com/UK/en/Issues/Business-environment/Financial-markets-and-economy/Economic-Outlook—What-is-ITEM-Club)
2010 report highlighted the dangerous reliance of the Scottish economy on
public funding:  “

‘ Scotland‘s second major hurdle is its dependency on the public sector. The public sector has contributed to over 30% of Scotland’s GDP growth over the last 10 years, compared to just 20% in the rest of the UK.
Scottish ITEM Club says that the impending squeeze on public sector spending
will have a disproportionate impact on Scotland’s economic recovery.

Dougie Adams[ senior economic advisor to the Ernst & Young Scottish ITEM Club] comments: “Although there is scope for productivity and efficiency improvements to be made to Scotland’s public sector, which may help to mitigate some of the impact of future spending cuts, a decline or slow down in public sector output will significantly hamper Scotland’s economic performance over the next few years.”

While the extent of any budgetary cuts remains unclear, recent forecasts suggest that Scotland won’t see a return to 2009 levels of public sector spending before 2020, such is the scale of the retrenchment. This will inevitably have a knock on impact on jobs; Scottish ITEM Club predicts that public sector employment in Scotland will decline by around 30,000 over the next four years.’ (http://www.ey.com/UK/en/Newsroom/News-releases/Item—10-06-06—Scottish-ITEM-Club-summer-2010-forecast).

Scottish public sector employment is divided between the devolved (that which is  the responsibility of Scotland) and the reserved (that which arises from the powers
which have not been devolved).  The breakdown of the two is as follows:

Chart 4: Breakdown of devolved public sector employment by sector, Headcount, Q1 2010 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/06/15171937/5

Chart 4: Breakdown of devolved public sector employment by sector, Headcount, Q1 2010

Chart 5: Breakdown of reserved public sector employment by sector, Headcount, Q1 2010 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/06/15171937/6

Chart 5: Breakdown of reserved public sector employment by sector, Headcount, Q1 2010
Chart 6: Breakdown of devolved civil service employment, Scotland, Headcount, Q1 2010 http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/06/15171937/7

Chart 6: Breakdown of devolved civil service employment, Scotland, Headcount, Q1 2010
Chart 7: Breakdown of reserved civil service employment, Scotland, Headcount, Q1 2010

Chart 7: Breakdown of reserved civil service employment, Scotland, Headcount, Q1 2010
How much of Scotland’s public sector employment would  vanish if independence occurred?  This is impossible to exactly quantify because the unknown factor is what Scotland would be willing and able to fund.  Nonetheless,  Scotland would definitely lose the jobs which serviced England and items such as the nuclear submarine facility at Faslane and would have to substantially reduce the number of jobs serving
Scotland.

The complete Joy of Diversity columns

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

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

——————————————————————————

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

January 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth about UK oil and gas

The Scots Numpty Party (SNP) bases its case for the viability of Scotland’s independence  on the idea that wicked England has been “stealin’ ouir oil” and that  if only they had control of the tax revenues from UK oil and gas Scotland would become a Caledonian El Doraldo.  Sadly for such people a 2009  a  Scotland Office paper  “Scotland and Oil” dealing with the tax income from oil  and gas  fields around the UK painted a rather different picture. It concluded that:

“• If all North Sea oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland there would only have been 9 years out of  the last 27 when Scotland’s finances would have  been in surplus.

• Including all North Sea oil revenues the last year  of surplus was in 1988-89 and since then there has been 18 years of annual deficits with Scotland’s spending being greater than the tax raised in Scotland.

• Even if all oil revenues had been allocated to Scotland the total deficit would have outweighed the total surplus by £20bn since 1980-81. “ (see page 1 – all references below to pages without a url  refer to this url – http://www.scotlandoffice.gov.uk/scotlandoffice/files/Scotland%20and%20Oil%20-%20Background%20paper.pdf)

So there you have it, the official view is that even if all the oil and gas revenues were   allocated to Scotland they still would not pay their way. Of course, a substantial part
of the oil and gas  tax revenue would not go to Scotland because of the fields  in
English waters.  Exactly how much is debatable, but  most of the remaining gas
is in English waters, viz:

“The SNP claims that Scotland would receive 95 per cent of oil revenue, but its calculation is based on the total revenue from oil and gas. Its opponents say that they do not take into account the large number of gas fields in English waters.

“THE EXPERT SAYS: Prof Haszeldine says: “The vast majority of the oil is in Scottish waters. With practically all of the gas in  the UK in the southern North Sea, that is in ‘English’ territory.” He says it is hard to separate the revenue from oil and gas. “(http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/politics/Can-oil-and-gas-fuel.2834598.jp)

There is also the intriguing prospect of  the outer Islands, the Orkneys and Shetlands,  not wanting to leave the UK or seeking independence.  That would take more oil and gas
revenue out of Scottish hands.

The fact that even  the total  oil and gas tax revenues did not bridge the gap between what Scotland received in money from the Treasury and what she contributed to the Treasury is unsurprising. The price of oil is high now but this is an abnormal. In the period 1980-2003, the price was always below $20 a barrel  apart for two years in the mid 1990s when it was a couple of dollars a barrel  higher.   (see page 3 “Scotland and Oil”) . The price did not rise above $50 dollars a barrel until 2007.

There has also been great volatility in the tax take in recent   years:

“In July last year [2008-9] sitting with the price of oil breaking new highs at $147 a barrel and  projected revenues for the current year [2008-09] at £13.2bn, finances were looking  incredibly good. However, sitting today with oil prices at $70 per barrel and projected  revenues for the current year [2009-10]  of £6.9bn the finances would be looking  substantially different and spending plans would have had to have changed.” (see page 10 “Scotland and Oil”).

At present the Scottish Parliament is in a very fortunate situation. It knows, more or less,  what revenue it will have to spend  for the coming financial year because its funding comes from the UK Treasury. Thus it is spared the  responsibility of raising money from its electors . It is in the same position as, for example, the BBC.

If Scotland were independent it would have to raise the money to be spent by central government.  That would bring a very different relationship between the politicians
and the Scottish electorate.   If  a very large slice of  Scottish government revenue was dependent on oil  and gas revenues , massively swings in the tax collected from year to year, as happened in the years 2008/9 and 2009/10 , it  would  make  forward planning very difficult indeed.  To understand just how volatile tax revenue from oil and gas  has been since production began see http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/corporate_tax/table11-11.pdf.
No electorate is going to be cheering if politicians are constantly having to change spending plans.  The worse case scenario  would be that the oil and gas revenues would be so low that  a Scottish government would simply not be able to fund  the ordinary business of government.  That is not so far-fetched because of the great difference between revenue and expenditure when oil and gas revenue is ignored.   For  2007/8 the Scotland Office estimated that  without including any revenue from oil and tax,  Scotland paid £45,191 billion  into the UK exchequer and received £56,285 billion back, a deficit of £11, 094 billion. (http://www.scotlandoffice.gov.uk/scotlandoffice/files/Time%20Series%20Analysis%20of%20Government%20Expenditures%20and%20Revenues%20in%20Scotland.pdf).

Apart from the volatility of the oil and gas price, there is also the rapidly depleting reserves of oil and gas around  the UK.   Production has already fallen from just under  3 million barrels a day in 1999 to  about 1,25 million barrels in 2014. ( see page 5 “Scotland and Oil”).  The amount of oil and gas will continue to fall over the medium term and the quantuity  oil and gas extracted will be strongly influenced by the oil and gas price. The
lower it is, the less exploitation of the smaller marginal fields.  In the medium term Scotland can look forward to diminishing tax returns whatever happens.

There is a further fly in the Caledonian water.  As the price of oil and gas has risen and the
political volatility of  many of the major oil and gas producers has increased, increased interest has been shown in extracting gas and oil from shales. Most of the likely sites in the UK are in England or English waters.  http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/energy/shalegas.html.
If this source of hydrocarbons proves to be as abundant  as its advocates claim, the demand for oil and gas from the ever more marginal fields around the UK will diminish.

There are many other economic dragons which an independent Scotland would need to slay, including dealing with their over-reliance on taxpayer funded jobs and how they would fund their share of the UK’s public financial obligations at the point of independence, but the volatility and shrinking of the UK’s oil and gas tax receipts  would be arguably their greatest challenge simply because of the heavy dependence the
advocates of independence have placed upon their continuation at a high rate.